by Seth Eden
The deed was done. It wouldn’t be long now...
13
Samantha could barely regain her breath when she felt a change come over her. It started off as a twisting of her insides, like they were trying to rearrange themselves. Next came a rippling across her skin that was ticklish and itchy at the same time. A loud thoom! echoed in her ears, like fireworks going off, except the sound wasn’t coming from her surroundings. She covered her ears and curled herself into a ball, afraid of what was happening to her.
Then, there was Zen. His large, warm hand pressed against the middle of her back, just like when he was giving her breathing lessons. It wasn’t the time to panic.
She picked out a single blade of grass and watched it flutter against her exhale. Its movement was fluid, like a single trickle of water.
“I’m going to get you out of your clothes, okay?” she heard him whisper in her ear. She didn’t have the strength or the energy to fight or debate with him. She only nodded, trying her best to keep her mind in check.
Cool wind greeted her skin but it didn’t take any of the crawling sensations away. It felt like it was trying to peel itself off of her. Her stomach swelled beneath her hand and a sick, acidic burp burst out. It tasted like how cigarette ashes smelled.
“Don’t fight it. Everyone fights it the first time and that only makes it worse. I need you to listen to my voice.” The pressure of his hand against her back intensified as he helped her to her feet. Only her feet didn’t feel like her feet anymore. Looking down, she could see that her ankles and knees were facing the wrong way, and her toes were tipped with long claws that curved into the grass. She almost screamed, save for Zen’s calming voice.
“You’re doing great so far. Focus on me and let it happen. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”
Samantha believed him too. There was nothing to fear unless she allowed it to claim a grip on her life. Whatever was happening hurt, it felt uncomfortable, but if it was all going wrong, he would have told her.
Little by little, she allowed each new sensation to take over, accepting each one in turn. Her neck elongated, her hair fell away, and she watched as the treeline grew closer and closer to her field of vision. The blurry stars above were sharp pinpricks now, and she could smell new things she hadn’t been able to before. Right where they stood, a family of some kind of animal had stopped here for a rest before moving on.
And Zen... if she thought the smell of the sewer was bad before, his sweaty and bloodied body was ten times worse.
He looked so small now too. How could someone so small smell so bad?
As she chuckled she saw thin whisps of smoke exiting her nostrils, which took her by surprise.
Short-lived, as her spine erupted with new pain. It felt like a million needles were being stabbed between her shoulders, as new wings sprouted from flesh and bone. Wider and wider they spread, the pain consuming her as she refrained from screaming. A long tail split from the base of her spin too, serpent-like and gleaming under the moonlight. The scales refracted with a rainbow-ish hue as the fresh skin started to dry.
She bit down on her lip with new canines that burst from sore gums, a snout forming from her nose and jaw until she was sure her face would fall off entirely.
Her body was exhausted by the time she’d finished changing into her new form, her skin still sensitive from all the pinpricks of pain. The large dragon slumped to the ground, glad for the coolness of the grass against her skin.
Zen watched all of this with new wonderment with his good eye, silently talking her through it despite knowing that she probably couldn’t hear him through the pain. When she was done, he hobbled closer to rest his good hand against her cheek.
“You did good. You did so good, I’m so proud of you.” He pressed his forehead against her eye ridge. They should be getting up and moving, but it felt wrong to rush her. He needed her to relish this moment so that she could be prepared for what was happening next.
Breathe, she told herself. Each exhale felt like a stoked fire, hot charcoals waxing and waning with their hot red glow. It made her sneeze and she felt Zen back away from her. A cackle came immediately after and she opened her large eyes to see what the matter was. There, along the ground, were twin scorch marks were grass once stood.
“Ha! You did it!” Zen pumped his fist into the air before his injuries claimed him once more and sent him sprawling to the ground. Samantha was too big and too slow to catch him, her body still reeling from the change.
“You need to rest, you big dummy.” She managed to pull herself up into a sitting position and nudged him gently with her large snout.
“And talking already too! That’s marvelous!”
“What are you talking about?” She gave him as quizzical a look as a dragon could give him.
Zen only smiled and pointed at his head.
... oh.
“It’s coming more naturally to you than most. I don’t think I need to teach you anything else.”
“I don’t know how to work these, for one thing.” She awkwardly waggled her wings across her back. They were pretty unwieldy, having never used those muscles before on her back.
“Oh, those are easy,” he managed between the coughs and pulled himself up to rest against the tree once more. “Think of... an itch between your shoulder blades, trying to get rid of it without the use of your hands.”
That sounded like a weird way of explaining it, but it was worth a try. She managed to get one wing to cooperate and then the next, but never the two at the exact same time. She looked like an overgrown chicken frantically trying to get off the ground with its useless wings.
“You’re overthinking-” Zen began. He was cut off by the sudden blare of sirens from the city. It was about time, he thought. If it took them this long to react to an escaped prisoner, he would have tried getting out a long time ago at the expense of his physical body. Those bars had been designed to keep shifters from being able to make the change, inflicting a lot of pain and irreparable damage that would keep them from getting out. They had also stopped his healing process, making it more difficult for his bones and muscles to knot back together. Out here, however, he could feel the bruises fading a little. It was just going to take a little time and some energy.
Samantha’s great head wheeled around in the direction of the noise, her wings curling around herself protectively.
“What do we do?”
“Not us. You. I’m not strong enough to help you in this fight. Ethan will likely be coming to... well, I don’t know what he has planned, exactly. But it can’t be anything good.”
“Me?! I can’t... I don’t know the first thing about...” The premise of fighting against Ethan in his shifted form put her on edge. Her knees felt weak and she was ready to flee at a moment’s notice.
“You’ve already learned how to breathe fire. It usually takes people a week or two to learn that.” He didn’t like the panic in her voice. He could tell she was ready to bolt and that wouldn’t help anyone.
“You said you’d keep me safe,” he reminded her.
Samantha's head whirled around to look at him, the edges of her sharp teeth exposed. She had said that, but it roused a pang of guilt that he would use her promise against her in such a way.
With the blaring of the alarms, a new sound rose above them. One loud and deep and billowing that Samantha felt in her bones. Looking back, she saw the silhouette of a dragon. It turned its large head back and forth until it stopped, looking right in her direction. It was hard to fight back the panic despite Zen’s words. To see something so large and towering, knowing that it wouldn’t take much for it to strike her down... It was easy to feel overwhelmed.
Yet she had to remind herself she was one of those things. She was just as powerful, just as big, equipped with the very same killing tools.
“You braved breaking into a prison to get me. Don’t make your efforts worth nothing.”
Zen was right. She had done so ma
ny brave things in the past few days on her own. Defying her survival instincts to get to the truth, defying Ethan despite... She shook her head.
The silhouette grew closer on its mighty wings. Samantha knew that if she didn’t meet it, Zen would be put at risk. She bellowed up at the sky with a voice that didn’t sound like her own and forced her wings to cooperate. Her takeoff was shaky at first and she took care with her tail, curling it close to herself to avoid accidentally smacking Zen over in his injured state.
One, then the other, then finally together, they were flapping in unison. Her stomach bottomed out beneath her as the ground grew farther and farther away until she soared towards the imposing figure, aiming to meet it head-on.
“Samantha! What are you doing!?”
It was Ethan. She’d never seen him in his dragon form before, and it was rather imposing. Horns stuck out in every direction from his smooth, sleek head and from what she could tell in the dim lighting, his scales were a dark green. The end of his tail was smooth, without any spikes like Zen’s. His wings were massive too as he came to a halt to hover before her.
She did the same, not wanting this to devolve into a fight.
“I want you to stop this nonsense, Ethan. We don’t have to do this?”
“Did he bribe you into this, then? Promised you wonderful things if you sired with him? That’s the only explanation for-”
“Ethan, stop it. I know... I know this hurts, but not everyone is out to get you. There isn’t some big conspiracy to ruin your life, I promise you that.”
“That’s so easy for you to say, Samantha! You’re not on the receiving end of all this! You don’t know what it’s like to take such careful steps with your own life so that no one would discover...”
“Discover what, Ethan? The truth? Why are you so adamant about burying it? Zen blames you... but I don’t.”
“You lie! You’re just trying to get in my head before you stab me in the back again!”
“Stab you in the... You think I’m like this to get to you?! Ethan, you put me in a chair and tortured me!”
“It was for your own good!”
“It wasn’t for anything else but your piece of mind!” She felt her anger growing and her patience wearing thin. A fire gurgled in her belly, a sign that this could get quickly out of hand if she didn’t keep a hold on her temper.
“I needed to... you were going to...”
“I wasn’t going to do anything. You forced me to leave because of your own insecurities. I was ready to come back to you and hear your side of the story, but you decided to be a stubborn idiot who didn’t want to listen to reason.”
Ethan’s head sagged a little. It was slowly dawning on him how much of a mistake he’d made, how he’d ruined his own chances at a happy life with her by being irrational.
“... then end me. End me here and now so that I don’t have to live with my pitiful life anymore.” His wings flapped less as he drifted towards the ground. He sounded so pathetic that it almost broke Samantha’s heart in half.
But he’d made his bed. She wasn’t going to bend her sympathy towards him for what he’d done to her. But she would in regards to taking his life. She wouldn’t feel right doing it nor was it her decision to make.
She drifted to the ground by his side, keeping a careful eye on him and interposing herself between him and Zen. A quick glance told her that he was still prone on the ground, but many of his bruises and scars had all but disappeared.
“What do I do now?”
“That’s not for me to decide, Ethan. We can go to Dominic and Jen, talk to them and see if we can come up with... something. You did go behind his back making a deal with Torfan and the others.”
“I was afraid! Don’t you get it!?”
“Maybe, but you still went against his word when he was a prince. ... or you can fly away from here and never come back. Maybe you can live on another side of the planet where they won’t find you.”
“... you mean like I did for my brother.”
“Better than what you did for your brother. You have an actual choice this time. And we won’t tell them where you went.” She nudged the side of her head against his, hoping that he would see the sense in her words.
“You’d... you’d lie for me.”
“I would. Because I still care for you, I can’t deny that. You gave me a wonderful life for the few months I’ve been here, it’s the least I can do to repay you, at least.” She bit back on her bitterness, her need to see him suffer for his choices. But there had been enough bloodshed and she wasn’t interested in shedding anymore.
“Go. Before they see you.” She nudged at his side.
He stared back at her with confused eyes.
“Go before I give you a reason to!” She stepped back and belched a great stream of fire into the sky. It was enough to scare some sense into him as he took off, skirting the tops of the trees and heading towards the mountains. Samantha didn’t watch where he went after that, nor did she want to know. The less she did, the safer he would be.
When the sounds of his flapping wings were gone, she lowered her head to Zen’s side and nudged his leg.
“You shouldn’t have done that. How do you know he’s not going to come back later and try to finish what he started?”
“I don’t. But at least I gave him a second chance to think things over.”
“It’s more than what he deserves.” He rested a hand on top of her large head, his expression pulled into a frown.
“No, it wasn’t. I gave you a second chance and look how that turned out.”
She shrank before his very eyes and lay across his lap, her ear against his chest. She listened to the repetitive beating of his heart, how steady and strong it was beneath his ribs.
They laid like that for a while, the sirens still sounding in the background.
“What are you going to tell your friend?”
“The truth.”
“But you said-”
“I told Ethan what he needed to hear. But I’m not going to rat him out. How can I, when I don’t know where he is?”
“And you think they’re going to buy that?”
“They’ll have to, for the time being. I’m sick of being in the middle of political nonsense. It’s not my problem anymore.”
He draped an arm across her waist, felt the rise and fall of her breathing against him.
“... I can see why my brother fell for a woman like you.”
“It just goes to show that you two have more in common than you realize...”
A swift breeze tugged at her hair as they watched the silhouettes of the guards and other council members approach from the city walls.
Ethan cursed at himself during his escape. Ethan the coward. That’s all they would remember him as. It was all he had really been during his life in Cendarth. Staying would have meant ending up in prison.
...?
A low buzzing sound came from overhead and before him. Over the crest of the mountains rose the familiar shapes of Torfan’s ships.
“You think you could escape that easily?” Torfan’s voice came over the external comms system, echoing off the surrounding rocky slopes.
“You haven’t finished paying us.”
Ethan swallowed hard at the sudden lump in his throat. He’d completely forgotten about their agreement.
“You promised you would have gotten us back in Dominic’s good graces. But it looks like your word isn’t worth much to them anymore.”
“Torfan, please, spare me, I can still-”
Torfan tsked. Ethan saw the guns on either side starting to spin up, the barrels warming with a glow.
“Enough talk. I was a fool to trust a coward like you.”
14
This was the most difficult thing Samantha had ever been through. The most painful too, that if anyone were to ask her about her escape from Earth, she would have preferred that to her current situation.
The pain built and built to the point that
she screamed out. Her hands clawed for a hand that wasn’t there, and she screamed at the ceiling for someone to make it stop.
“You can’t stop, Samantha. You have to keep going.”
She pulled her knees to her chest. Sweat covered her brow and she was sure she was going to burst at this point.
“Shut up! I hate you, I hate all of you with your dumb smiles on your faces!”
Jen sat in the far corner, rocking a bundle in her arms. Her first born, just as Samantha was delivering hers now.
Zen soon found her hand and held on tight. He looked just as worried as she felt, and just as sick too. She’d been in labor for over a day at this point, and it didn’t look like the baby was interested in coming out anytime soon.
“Someone just cut this damn thing out of me, please!”
Dominic stood by the doorway, his arms folded over his chest. He was only here because Jen asked him to be. Watching childbirth wasn’t exactly at the top of his list of ways to spend the day.
“I think what you need to do is relax,” Zen whispered in her ear. He kissed her cheek and pulled a chair closer.
“That’s easy for you to say, you asshole. You’re not going through this.”
“You’re right but what else do you want me to say, love? This kind of thing isn’t ever supposed to be easy.”
Samantha clenched his collar and dragged him closer.
“Wrong answer,” she hissed from between her teeth before another contraction took her.
Relief finally came a mere three or four hours later, when a screaming baby boy emerged, with the help from a few doctors. He had a full head of hair and was screaming himself red when Zen wrapped him up in the blankets they had. Samantha collapsed to the bed, exhausted and glad that everything was finally over with.