The voice is male and low and comes from the trees to my left.
I drop Carla to her feet and push her behind me.
She gasps and starts pulling her underwear back on.
Something happens inside me. My dragon slams forward from the inside, and I let him, because the three things going off in my head right now are very simple and they don’t need examining.
Protect.
Mine.
Now!
The Red steps out from between two thick palms, and he is not fully shifted. He’s somewhere in between, the way the worst of them fight. Scales pushing up through the skin of his forearms, his fingers thickened and clawed at the tips, his eyes gone fully amber, no white left. He’s big, a little shorter than me but built wide across the shoulders. He’s got a grin on his face that I want to remove.
My muscles are already burning. I can feel the scales pushing at the surface of my own skin, feel them ridging up along my shoulders and forearms. The dark markings on them go hot. My fists are enormous.
“What is a Draiger doing on Red soil?” he asks. “Did you bring me a present? How nice of you.”
The Red’s grin spreads.
He starts to say something else.
I don’t let him.
I hit him before he can finish the thought. My fist connects with the side of his jaw, and the crack of it fills the whole clearing. He comes back at me immediately and catches me across the cheek, and it rocks me sideways. I don’t go down. I roll with it and come back in low.
He’s fast, but I’m faster, and angrier, which matters. My dragon wants me to shift and to tear him apart, but I resist the urge.
He gets his hands on me twice, and his nails rake my shoulder before I get an arm around his throat from behind and wrench, hard, to the left.
The snap is clean.
I hold him upright for a single beat, then let him drop.
He hits the ground at my feet.
I stand over him, chest heaving, the scales still up on my arms. I look at them, and I breathe, and slowly, one by one, they retract. My hands come back to themselves.
I turn.
Carla is standing a few feet from the riverbank, her arms wrapped around herself now. Her eyes are on me. They are very wide, but she’s not shaking, and her chin is up, and she doesn’t look away when I look at her.
I start toward her.
The space between us closes with every step I take, and I can feel every one of them. I can feel her eyes on me the whole way. The water is dripping off my skin. My pulse is still up, the adrenaline still hot in my blood, and the part of me that has been fighting since the moment she stood in that river is not done.
I stop in front of her.
“Tell me you don’t want this.” My voice is barely mine. The dragon is still too close to the surface. I can hear him in my words.
Her eyes don’t leave mine.
I pray to god she tells me that she doesn’t want me, but there’s a bigger part of me that needs to be inside her and right fucking now.
Whatever she chooses will be the wrong answer.
This is so fucked up.
