by Amy Faye
"So what do we do now?"
Alex looked at her like she'd grown a second head. And, to make matters worse, he didn't give her an answer, which was what she wanted.
"We have to figure out why this red's getting involved, for one thing."
"Okay. How do we do that?"
Alex thought about it. Hard. Then he rubbed at his eyes and let out a long breath. "Um. Without knowing their name, without knowing something at least, we don't have much to go on. So let's just... I don't know. Think."
"And what if there's no time for thinking?"
"Then we leave," Alex said. "We leave, we hurry the hell out of here, and we don't look back. Simple as that."
"And go where? We've already tried to run. Tried twice. I say we fight. You said it yourself, if two dragons work together, there's not much they can't take down, two on one."
"You've been a dragon for five seconds, and you're trying to tell me you want to go kill some big son of a bitch drake like that?"
That was exactly what she thought. There wasn't much alternative, whether it was crazy or not. They had to get away eventually, and they couldn't keep running.
"I've been human all my life, and now you're telling me I'm not. Now you're telling me, what, that I'm too human?"
"I'm telling you that you barely know how to fly. You looked out that twentieth-story window like it was personally going to jump out and attack you. And now you want to go get into an aerial battle with a dragon who's probably been in as many fights as you have years in your life. We'll lose."
She pulled him in tight and kissed him. Her body felt good against his, and she suddenly felt a fire light in her gut. She made an effort to ignore it. There wasn't going to be any time for anything like that today. They had more important things to worry about, besides.
"What was that for?"
"If we're going to get killed, I want you to know something," Diana breathed. "I think I love you."
He looked at her hard, and Diana shivered. He looked like he was about ready to eat her right up in that hallway. But he didn't.
"I love you too," he said. He looked almost surprised that the words came out of his mouth. "But right now we need to figure out a plan."
The last word was clipped off by the sound of something else moving outside. Something landed, hard, on the earth outside. Something big. It made a dull 'thud' as it landed, and Diana could feel the landing in the soil beneath her bare feet.
"Is that plan to run away?"
"Look. We'll run, okay? We'll get out there, transform back, and fly off. Stay right behind me, you'll be able to move a little faster that way. If it looks like he might catch us, we'll figure something else out. There's one thing I want to make very clear, though."
"What's that?"
"No matter what, I need you to stay away from all the pointy parts of him. No risks. I mean that. If you're going to do anything then it's going to be a diversion. No attacks. You understand me?"
"I understand," she said. There was no way that she was going to attack that thing. She would get herself killed, no question, and she wasn't exactly looking to get killed, no matter how much she loved him. If she could do something that wasn't going to put her in danger, she'd do that. If she could do something to help, she'd do that, too. But getting herself killed wasn't on the menu, not today.
He swung the door to the front room open in time to see a shape step through. A man's body. He wasn't as big as Jeremy had been, but he wore a thick scar across his face, the eye whitened out. He let out a primal yell that made Diana's head go white with a sort of evolutionary fear, and started to move.
She leapt back, and Alex followed, not far behind, pressing the door shut and wedging himself against it. There was a thump on the other side, accompanied by a yell. Alex motioned towards Jeremy's body, and waved for her to bring it to him. She did and he wedged it into the corner. It might hold for a moment. But that moment would at least earn them a few seconds, and that was going to have to be enough.
Then he grabbed her arm by the wrist, dragged her through the door on the far side of the hall, and pulled it shut. She heard him whispering softly. "Can you transform again?"
She nodded. It was easy, actually. Something in her felt like it had been knocked loose and it almost seemed harder to stay this way than it was to stay in the lizard's body. She changed back like flipping a switch in her head, and stared, waiting. He pointed at the hole in the ceiling.
Could she get through that? The size was small enough, sure, but it was so high up. There was no way that she could just jump, and get out, right?
She crouched down, and with all four of her legs she pressed in a move that felt much, much more natural than it should have. She was halfway to the hole before she felt herself starting to slow in the slightest. She tried her wings, and they drove her the rest of the way up, tucked in close at the last moment to avoid catching the lip of the hole.
Alex followed behind her a moment later, and then they were flying, higher and higher. She followed him up. Up. Then they started to dive, and Diana sucked in her gut to brace for the twisting feeling in her gut as they fell. The earth moved closer and closer, closer and closer. And then, an instant before they hit the tops of trees, Alex's wings unfurled in a flash and he leveled out. It took a half-second for her to register and do the same, and then they were moving along, a few feet above the tree line, as fast as anything she'd ever felt before.
It felt oddly good. There was something inhuman about it. And there was something very inhuman about the sound that came from behind her. Melodic. Sonorous. And terrifying, because without needing to look she knew exactly what it was.
Even still, she followed the green in front of her. Alex was moving hard and fast and she kept up with him as best she could. Words formed themselves in her head. 'You alright back there?'
They defied language, just formed themselves into images as if she knew what he meant without knowing any of the constituent parts of the language.
She thought back as best as she could that she was keeping up. The sound came again. Closer. Much closer. And then Alex whirled and the words formed themselves in her head again. 'We're not going to make it. Do you know what that means?'
She knew exactly what it meant. She peeled off in the opposite direction, craning her neck as she flew to see which way the red followed. If it were her, she'd go for the most dangerous target.
And she wasn't wrong. The red peeled off the path he'd been on and turned for Alex, his heading at an oblique that would meet the green halfway through his arc.
Diana turned herself, putting herself on a path to intercept. She was above them both, flying down. Gravity gave her a little help in gaining speed and just as the red passed by Alex, she was only a dozen yards away.
An idea passed through her mind and she breathed in, both lungs at once, as deep as she could manage. Then she blew out, hard and pointed and it came out like a whistle, if that were possible with her beak-like mouth.
The fire came out like a lance, and shot into the red. He whirled in surprise and she screamed past him like a cavalryman on horseback, flanking and retreating. She whirled and arced and circled, and then looked back down on Alex. He'd regained the red's attention. There was a heavy gash in the bigger dragon's side, where claws had dug in and ripped out.
But he wasn't going to be winning for long, not the way that the big red dragon huffed in his lungs and held Alex tight. She saw it happening before it did, and moved without thinking. Her beak-like mouth opened and closed and an instant later she realized that she'd broken her promise.
The feeling of the red's claws tearing into her flank hurt, as bad as anything. As bad as the landing had felt. But she squeezed her jaw tighter, breathed in, and breathed out a gout of flame, tightening her jaw again until she couldn't tighten it any more.
She felt her jaw click all the way shut and then the pair of them slammed into the ground.
Diana forced herself to move quick
er than she'd have liked, remembering what she'd seen before. The Red was slow, and he had trouble with harrying opponents. He was so much larger than both of them, and her in particular, like she was a sparrow facing off against a hawk. But she wouldn't let that scare her off, because no matter what happened she couldn't afford to let it.
They came in one at a time, first her and then him, and then her again. Flame spouted from his mouth and was met with meager flames of her own that left his hide scorched black on the red. She was careful, methodical, and slow.
And then, with a shudder, it fell down, and stopped moving, and the wound on its neck started to pool blood under him, rather than thrashing it all over the field around.
They'd finished it, she thought. And now they had to figure out what was next.
Epilogue
Dragons have an interesting curse. Interesting lives. Long lives. Long enough to find out how bad it can be to live a long life.
They're independent creatures, in their own way, and yet, the risk of pissing another one off is so high that none can quite afford to be truly alone. In many ways, each one is like a country, comparable to any human nation.
Diana looked down at her little pile of books. She should have gotten rid of them a long time ago. She should have gotten rid of them when she left for college. She should have gotten rid of them when she found herself in the unusual – for a dragon--position of living together with her lover, in a halfway-proper roost.
She ought to have gotten rid of them when she started her first real hoard, like a real live dragon. But she couldn't. These were hers, and she'd been around them so long that they gave her comfort.
So many things still felt foreign to her. The idea that she ought to have pride in it, that it represented her to other people. Such a meager little thing was more of an insult than anything else. And yet, she couldn't give it up. She wouldn't. She wanted it because it was hers, not because it looked good.
She leaned back into Alex's arms. He pressed another kiss against her neck, one for every one of the companies he'd started since he'd decided that he would be human, at least on the outside.
She turned and met those kisses with her own, and held her husband close. Nobody was going to take her away from him.
Not ever again.
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