by Chant, Zoe
Something happened.
The sky around them turned a pale green. It was like the color of a newly sprouted leaf. It was the color that meant a storm was coming.
Something new. Something powerful.
Their ribbons of magic melted, the light running through the veins of the Unchangeable, lighting up their skin from the inside out. They shrieked, a sound that made Lindsay think her ears were going to start bleeding. But she could see why they were panicking.
They were changing.
Their bodies were mutating, fast and uncontrollably. They were turning into winged jaguars, centaurs, wolves, horses, and even dragons. They were turning into creatures Lindsay couldn’t recognize, animals she didn’t think had ever existed before.
What had they done?
We changed them. We changed the Unchangeable.
We rewrote the world.
The power of that—the overwhelming responsibility of it—made her start to tremble.
She instinctively reached for Boone with her mind, needing the feeling of his thoughts curling up around hers. I think we just made things a hell of a lot more complicated.
Maybe, he said, still watching in awe. But life’s complicated. It’s time they joined in on that.
But not all of them were joining in. They had all been hit by Lindsay and Boone’s magic, and none of them had gone back to being themselves, gray-green and monstrous—but plenty of them were finding the loss of their constant, ceaseless existence impossible to live with. Right before Lindsay’s eyes, they turned into ashes, like they had activated some kind of internal self-destruct. The air around them was now full of drifting soot that made it hard to see what was going on.
They were choosing death over change. Whole waves of them were being wiped out before her eyes.
Even through the darkness created by the dying Unchangeable, though, Lindsay could see that not all of their enemies were giving up. Some of them were stabilizing, settling into bodies they were grimly holding onto for more than a minute. Lindsay beat her wings hard and rose higher, trying to look over the smoke to see what all they had become.
But she didn’t get there in time. Exhaustion was overtaking her, making every effort to stay aloft into an incredible, soul-sapping strain. She faltered, and then she fell.
Boone swooped down to catch her, sliding his slightly larger body underneath hers. She relaxed back into her human shape and clung tightly to his neck as he set them both down on the ground. In another instant, he was human too, and he had his arms wrapped around her. She felt him shaking, his muscles jumpy with exhaustion and adrenaline and relief.
Lindsay looked around him. The Unchangeable were retreating through the dark cloud. Those ones would come down somewhere, too, and put on their human disguises again—if they still could.
But out there in the distance, one of them broke away from the horde. It was already far enough away that it looked very small to her. Very small and very alone.
Was it going off to send some sort of message? If they could summon any more Unchangeable to them, she and Boone wouldn’t live through the day after all. No matter what kind of magic they’d briefly had at their disposal, she knew they didn’t have it now. All the fight had drained out of her.
No—a few others briefly surged after it before falling back in line. It hadn’t been sent out, not if they had made an attempt to chase it.
It had just left. Gone rogue.
“We changed them,” Lindsay said hoarsely.
“Yeah. I’ll say.”
But he was looking the wrong way. She turned them both around, like they were dancing on some kind of rocky battleground ballroom. She pointed his gaze at the lone speck of the rogue Unchangeable.
“Messenger?” Boone said. He sounded grim.
Lindsay shook her head. “They tried to make it come back. I think it... Boone, I think it escaped. I think it decided to leave. It didn’t want to die—and it didn’t want to stay with the rest of them, either.”
“It wanted to change,” he said. His embrace tightened around her. “Good luck to it, then.”
“Maybe.” She was a little in awe of the speck, which looked so brave on its own, but she had to admit that it was hard to know what its future would hold. “We don’t know what it wants to become.”
Boone was more pragmatic: “I think anything would be better than being in a monster cult devoted to destroying the world.”
“Good point.”
She rested her forehead against his chest and then moved her head so that she could lay her ear against his heartbeat and feel the reassurance of it. Change was necessary—but it was dangerous, too. There was no way of knowing what they’d unleashed into the world, not really. But as long as a few things were still the same—as long as they were together—she thought she could handle it. They could handle it.
“Listen,” Boone said softly. “The other dragons are coming. I can hear their wings.”
But other wings reached them first.
Mullen.
Lindsay could recognize their first enemy even though its body was still being forced through a series of contorted shapes, some of them grotesque and some of them mind-bogglingly beautiful. Unlike its fellow soldiers, it hadn’t stabilized. It had been the center of their attention and the center of the Change they had blasted into the world, and Change lived inside it now. It was wild, its skin completely different from one moment to the next. It was a rippling canvas.
It lurched towards them, a bear’s jaw yawning open to take a bite even as it shrank to a rat and even as it loomed up into an enormous sea serpent. Acid fell from its constantly changing body to burn into the ground. Lindsay flung herself into her dragon form, trying to summon up a last burst of wildfire, but in her heart, she felt that this had to be the end.
They had survived everything else, but Mullen had gotten them after all. They’d even given the creature new and exciting powers.
Then there was a series of loud, ringing shots as Boone stepped in front of her, striding closer to Mullen as he kept firing and firing, emptying his gun into the monster’s changing body.
The Unchangeable might have been nearly invulnerable, but the Changeable weren’t. Not after everything they’d been through.
The creature fell back. It bared its teeth in one last dripping snarl.
Then, like all of its brethren, it collapsed into ashes.
It couldn’t even stand to leave a body behind to gradually, slowly change into the earth. With another gust of wind, Eleanor’s killer was gone, swept out to sea.
*
The cavalry did come. Ursula, Henry, and so many others. More dragons than they had ever spoken to in the club. More dragons than they had even seen there. It was as if every dragon in California had turned up to fight for them, even though they must have known they could lose.
Lindsay swallowed down her emotions as best she could, but as soon as Ursula was human again, Lindsay rushed forward and embraced the startled older woman.
“Thank you for coming for us,” Lindsay said. “It looks like you brought the whole neighborhood.”
“We had to,” Ursula said against her ear. She patted Lindsay’s back, very awkwardly, like she had never hugged anyone before. “Although it seems we’ve arrived either too early or too late. What happened here?”
“What didn’t?” Boone said dryly. He shook hands with Ursula and then with Henry.
Lindsay, not under any masculine obligation to pretend to be super-tough, hugged Henry too and kissed him on the cheek. To her surprise, he blushed, which she thought was adorable.
“Boone’s right. Everything happened.”
They recapped it as best they could, and in all the rush of explaining—or trying to explain—the magical fire, Lindsay realized that they’d forgotten something very important.
“Octavian,” she said.
Boone’s face hardened instantly. It was the look she’d seen on him before, the one that must have been terrifying
to be on the wrong side of; he looked focused and ferocious. “Where is he? Let me guess: the sniveling son of a bitch didn’t show up.”
“He didn’t,” Henry said, looking back and forth between Boone and Lindsay, “and it’s true he’s never been a particularly brave man, but I have to strongly object—”
“He’s been selling you out,” Lindsay said bluntly. “He gave Eleanor away to the Unchangeable. He’s probably been doing it for years. He was feeding names and locations to Mullen. He asked the other night who we were—and this morning Mullen was on Boone’s doorstep.”
“But how do you know—”
“I guessed,” Lindsay said, “and the Unchangeable confirmed it. And Mullen was a lot of things, but I don’t think it had the imagination to lie.”
“If all of you were dying, Octavian wanted to die last,” Boone said. “Even if that meant throwing everyone else onto the fire and letting them burn.” He looked around. “Mullen sensed that we were following her, and it lured us out here on purpose—Eleanor saw that coming and tried to warn us about it, even. This must have been the local Unchangeable club, more or less. Mullen led us into an ambush. My best guess is that Octavian knew that was going to happen.”
“Yes,” Ursula said. Her voice had gone very bleak now. “We talked last night after you left, all of us, and we decided that if you needed our help, we would all try to offer it. We believed in Eleanor’s vision of you two as our last, best hope. We decided to act together if we possibly could—even if it wound up revealing us to the whole world. The war has gone on for so long... We didn’t know what else to do. Octavian would have known that even the fiercest Unchangeable couldn’t withstand all of us joining together. So he evened the odds, to continue pleasing his masters. He would have wiped us out...”
“But you destroyed them,” Henry said, still disbelieving. “All of them?”
Lindsay shook her head. “We changed them. The way Eleanor changed us. We made them shifters. Some of them couldn’t handle it, and they just self-destructed. A lot of them retreated. They’ll regroup, probably. We won the battle, Henry, but the war’s still going on.”
But she thought of the one stray Unchangeable—the Changed—winging its way apart from the others, finding a different path through the universe. What would it become? Maybe it was their new hope, the way they had been Eleanor’s. Maybe hope bred hope, just like change had bred change. Lindsay wondered if they’d ever see each other again.
“But today is a ceasefire,” Boone said. “They’ll need some time to recuperate and figure out what they’re going to do next. Their own people will probably turn on them now. It could be that all we’ve done is make enemies who hate us even more.”
“I doubt that,” Ursula said. “Their hatred was already going to lead to our destruction. Whatever else you’ve done, you two have complicated that. We’ve been living with the same threat for so long, and we were losing. Now the playing field’s changed.” She smiled. “And change, for us, is always good.”
“Yes,” Henry said. “It’s nice to have some good news on the day of finding out we have a traitor in our midst.” He looked grim. He was like Boone, Lindsay thought: no matter how kind he was at heart, you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side. He hadn’t helped lead a clan of dragons for this many years without being formidable.
“What are you going to do to him?” Lindsay asked. “Can you send a dragon to prison?”
“You can’t send a dragon to a human prison,” Henry said. “But we have dungeons of our own. They are used only very rarely, for the worst of crimes, but they are very... secure. If our traitor so craves security and safety, I suggest we give it to him in abundance.”
He rubbed his hand over his face. No matter how much good news they’d given him, learning the truth about Octavian had left him looking older than ever.
“I raised Eleanor,” he said. “From when she was four years old.”
“I’m so sorry,” Lindsay said, knowing as she said it that the words could never be enough.
“Octavian knew she had visions,” Henry said. “Everyone did. I told you the Unchangeable had started to pick off our best and brightest, our leaders... Eleanor must have been quite a prize for him. I wonder how many months of safety and life they had to offer to get him to give up a woman he’d known since birth. I wonder if I even want to know. He should have named me instead.”
“Or me,” Ursula said.
Henry shook his head. “I would not forgive him that either, sister.”
Ursula squeezed his hand. There were tears in her eyes, but Lindsay could see that even this grief and betrayal couldn’t take the day’s hope away from her. “We will take great pleasure and pride in bringing Octavian to justice, I assure you. And you—will the two of you stay here? Join us?”
“Of course,” Lindsay said at once. She didn’t even need to think about it. “Our lives are here.”
“Always have been, always will be,” Boone agreed. “We’re with you. This is our home and our fight. But...”
Lindsay hadn’t expected the but, and she turned to him with honest confusion.
But the bond between them was there even when they were human again, and although she couldn’t hear his thoughts anymore, she could feel a kind of humor, like a smile he was suppressing.
“But?” she said.
“But I’d like to go ahead and make this week a vacation week,” Boone said. “I have a girl I have to sweep off her feet, if she’ll let me.”
“I’m already swept,” Lindsay informed him.
“Then I’d like to take you on vacation. An actual vacation, with no one trying to kill us.”
“You should take whatever time you need,” Henry said, smiling at them now with a kind of amused benevolence. “We’ll still be here. Thanks to the two of you, I think we’ll be here forever.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
At this point, Boone couldn’t even be surprised that their vacation had to be put on hold.
“You’re too conscientious,” he said to Lindsay.
She paused, her phone in one hand and Zeke’s black and silver business card in the other, her mouth open in an O of exaggerated horror. “I thought you admired my devotion to duty.”
“I do when it makes you clean beaches and meet me. I get a little more selfish when it means—”
He stopped, realizing that selfish was exactly what he was being. Zeke had gone out of her way to be nice to them and tell them all she knew; they owed this to her. In the end, if Lindsay hadn’t brought it up, he would have. They were going to spend the rest of their lives getting interrupted by responsibilities, weren’t they?
Well, as long as they were still together. They were strong enough to withstand some scheduling conflicts.
“You’re right,” he said sheepishly. “We do need to do this.”
“We need to get your car back, too.”
Boone winced, picturing how long it must have sat there in the middle of the highway, provoking a chorus of outraged honks. He had no confidence at all in getting it back unscathed. There was no way someone hadn’t keyed the hell out of it while they were waiting on the tow truck—and that was even assuming it hadn’t just vanished into some lucky car thief’s hands. At least nobody but Lindsay knew. If the word ever got out, for the rest of his life, he’d be the asshole who abandoned his car in the middle of a traffic jam. And it wasn’t like he could ever explain that a monster had been coming after his girlfriend.
“I don’t want to think about my car,” Boone said.
“That way lies madness, huh?” She kissed him. “For the record, I’m still touched that you did that for me.”
“And it turned out you didn’t even need me to. Sexy William Tell girl.”
“I went for William Tell first too,” Lindsay said. “Instead of The Hunger Games. Are we old?”
“Probably.” He gently nudged the hand with the phone in it up to her ear. “Call Zeke. I want to take you home.” He thought of invent
orying the chaos Mullen had no doubt left there and decided that was another thing he didn’t want to deal with right now. He revised. “I want to take you to a hotel suite. And not come up for air for days.”
Her smile reverberated through him like an endless echo, like something he’d be feeling in his heart until the day he died.
“Works for me,” Lindsay said.
*
Zeke paced back and forth. “Are you sure this will work?”
Boone didn’t think anything good would come out of exaggerating their chances. The last thing he wanted was to give her false hope. “I don’t know, but this is magic we’re talking about. We don’t know much at all about how it works. And you have to know that it looked painful and... unreliable. I don’t even know that any of those Unchangeable settled down into a single shifter form. I’m worried you’re going to get stuck as a hundred different animals.”
“There’s no way this isn’t a risk,” Lindsay said.
Her usually perfect complexion had gone a little grayish as they had gotten closer to the main event; Boone figured she was having second thoughts. It was one thing to want to do a favor for a new friend. It was another thing entirely to risk hurting them.
He couldn’t stand the thought of turning Zeke into a carousel of constantly revolving animal forms. She had to know what she was getting into.
He was hoping she would show a last-minute cautious streak and turn them down.
But he hadn’t forgotten the soft awe in her eyes as she’d cradled the mirrored dragon scale in her hands. He wasn’t surprised when she lifted her chin and said to try it anyway.
“I’m willing to take my chances,” Zeke said.
A little more color faded out of Lindsay’s face at those words.
“I’ll do it.” Boone stroked his hand up and down Lindsay’s arm. “I don’t want it on your conscience if... if it goes wrong.”
“I don’t want it on yours either,” Lindsay said. She swallowed. “Maybe we should do it together. We might need to, anyway. It needed both of us before.”