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In midair the strangest thing happened. I assumed that I was in shock, or I’d already passed out and started dreaming, or I was dead.
But my fall slowed. My back felt as if I’d been branded on both shoulders, but from out of that vicious burn, suddenly there was a cooling blast of wind.
I not only slowed, but started moving sideways ... Instead of falling straight down, I found I was gliding through the forest. Once I realized it was happening, I started to fall again.
Only to feel strong arms wrap around my chest. And then I was off again, gliding through the trees, gracefully avoiding branches and coming up in the air. We broke through the top of the tree line.
I say ‘we’ because I’d looked up to see the face of whatever had grabbed me. It had a long face, like a horse, except that I’d never seen a horse with razor sharp teeth like it had. And I’d never felt steam coming from a horse’s nostrils.
I opened my mouth to say something not very poetic, such as “What the hell is happening right now,” but when I opened my mouth, I saw my own nose (or snout). It was as if someone had slapped a mask on me.
My face was clearly as long – if not longer – than the face of the thing that was carrying me. My tongue felt about a foot longer than I was used to.
I had no idea how to speak with it. When I tried, all that happened was some high-pitched squealing. That seemed to amuse the horrific face of the massive creature carrying me.
A voice in my head said smoothly, “Horrific is a little rough, considering you look exactly like me.”
Back to high-pitched squealing. The thing holding me rolled its eyes.
I thought, as clearly as I could, “What the actual fuck? Are you reading my thoughts?”
He nodded. How did I know it was a ‘he’? The eyes.
Those beautiful, black-as-coal, yet vibrant-as-a-star eyes.
Whatever I was looking at, CC was in there.
The strange voice in my head said, “Telepathy. It’s a dragon thing. Nobody’s really figured out how to speak with mouths like these, and there’s not much point, when we can do the whole telepathy thing.”
I was glad we couldn’t talk with these mouths. Because I’m pretty sure I would’ve sounded moronic as I stuttered out, “D-d-d-d-d-dragon?”
CC was soaring, both physically and metaphorically. He was elated, and the voice in my head made me feel what he was feeling in this intense, empathy-plus-one-hundred-way.
In my head he said, “I knew you were like us. As soon as I saw your hands. Well, your hands, but also the way you looked at the shish kebab. I could tell you were my kind of monster, but I wasn’t sure. Now it’s official.”
I tried to say, “I’m not a monster,” but my mind only said, “I’m a monster.”
He looked bored. He said, “Man, just once, I’d like to meet someone who’s excited about this from the get-go. Here’s the thing, Kat. You can fly. You can literally fly. You were doing it before I caught you and helped you out a bit. Haven’t you always dreamed of flying?”
I only asked, “Am I stuck looking like this forever?”
He said, “Did I look like this when we met?”
I said, “No, you were hot as hell.” I winced. I was being honest, but I really wasn’t in the mood to hit on him right now.
He grinned. Then he winked and said, “Thank you. I’m hot this way, too. Just literally.”
I screamed and twisted out of the way of the fire that spouted out of his mouth in a quick poof. He said, “Stop squirming. You think you became the one dragon that’s not impervious to fire?”
Then he blew a big blast right over my shoulders. It felt... amazing. Like a hot water bath, or one of those hot stone treatments at a massage parlor.
I purred. Involuntarily, of course. A satisfied, soft grumble came out of my long throat and in return, CC purred, too.
He kept pouring fire over my body, and I kept making soft, happy noises.
We alighted on top of a tree. We were in the branches again. He let me find my own footing before he let go of me.
I saw the fullness of him. He was a dragon, from the top of his head to his toes – his talons.
A tail. I looked down at myself. He was right, we did look similar, except he was a ruby red and I was a forest green.
I said, “What the hell am I? If you say I’m a dragon, I’m going to murder you, because I already get that part.”
He held his dragon paws up in a ‘we cool; gesture and said, “It’s important to cover the basics. But more specifically, you’re what’s called a shifter. You can change, whenever you want, between your boring human form and your way cooler dragon form.”
I said, “Okay, fine. Let’s say I accept that bit of lunacy and don’t assume the rational thing, which is that you slipped hallucinogens in my drinks. I didn’t want to change into a dragon. So why did it happen?”
He said, “Okay, this is harder to explain to girls. But look at it like this. You know how when young boys get erections, they can’t control them? Or make them go away? The feeling happens and it’s happening. As they get older, they can ignore it, or make it happen by thinking about certain things? They get control over it.”
I sat for a moment. I said, incredulously, “You’re telling me becoming a dragon is like a weird erection for me? I don’t know how to control my dragon hard-on yet?”
He nodded happily.
I said, “Does anyone know you’re like this?”
He said, “My whole gang is made up of shifters. Well, shifters and, shall we say – to be delicate – dragon enthusiasts.”
I could’ve laughed, if I’d remembered how to do that. Enthusiasts?
I looked down at my hands. I didn’t have the urge to laugh anymore.
Then the voice in my head said so softly, it was like a lullaby, only it woke me up instead of drew me to sleep, “Do you want to learn how to fly? Like, really fly?”
No matter how much I hated myself in that moment, how in the hell do you say no to something like that?
