He starts toward me. Unhurried and certain. The other four have pulled back to the edges of the clearing to watch, and there is nowhere to run and nothing to fight with. I take one step back, and another, and my shoulders hit a curtain of vines, and he keeps coming.
Something explodes out of the tree line, moving almost faster than my eyes can track, and then the male in front of me simply isn’t in front of me anymore. He’s on the ground ten feet away with Magma over him, and Magma’s arm rises and falls once, claws first, and there’s a sound like wet cloth tearing. The male doesn’t get up. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t anything.
I give a sob of both fear and relief.
Magma turns.
He’s half-shifted. There are green scales all over him, between patches of skin. His hands have gone long and clawed. He’s bigger and more muscled.
“Magma!” I scream as the other four go for him, all at once.
There’s no circling, no posturing, nothing like the theater they performed for each other. They come from four directions in the same second, and the clearing turns into a blur of bodies and claws and screeches that don’t belong in a human throat. I press myself back into the vines, and I can’t look away.
I should run while I have the chance, but I can’t bring myself to leave him.
In his new form, Magma is both beautiful and terrible.
One of the males charges. Magma uses the male’s own speed to drive him headfirst into a nearby tree trunk. The crack of it echoes. The male drops, his neck at an angle, his eyes staring. He’s dead.
There is no time to celebrate because the other three are already on him. A set of claws opens his back, shoulder to hip. Magma roars, and the sound is so enormous that the canopy shakes. He gets a hand around the throat of the one behind him and drags him overhead, into the path of the third male’s strike, and the third male’s claws punch into his friend instead. Magma finishes what the strike started; one sharp twist and he’s gone too.
Blood is running down him now, his and theirs. The two left have stopped rushing him and started working him instead, one in front, one behind, in and out, hitting him with sickening thuds.
“No!” I choke out.
They get him with a slash across the ribs. His right arm takes a hit that spins him halfway around. He’s slowing. This is terrible.
“Magma!” I scream.
The male in front of him turns his head toward me for half a second, and Magma takes his throat out.
Yes!
The last one is the big one with the bushy beard.
“Leave now!” he snarls at Magma. “And I’ll let you live.”
“Not happening,” Magma tells him in a calm voice that is deep and rough.
Bushy Beard drives Magma back with a flurry of strikes, and Magma gives ground, and gives some more. His right arm hangs at his side and his chest heaves; and the blood – there’s so much blood – pours down his ribs and drips from his hanging fingers. The big male sees all of it and presses harder.
Suddenly, Magma stops giving ground. He plants himself and takes a strike across the shoulder that makes me cry out.
In the next breath, I realize that it was on purpose, because taking the hit puts the big male’s arm exactly where Magma needs it. He locks the arm with his good hand, pivots, and brings the male down under him with all his weight behind one final strike to the back of the neck. There is a sickening crack and the clearing goes quiet.
Magma stands over the last body, swaying, and then the scales drain away, and the claws recede, and his eyes lose the dragon slits, and he’s just a man, naked and shaking and bleeding.
Holy shit, there’s so much blood.
I run to him.
“You’re bleeding.” My hands hover over him, afraid to touch anything in case I make it worse. “Oh shit. Magma. Where’s the worst of it? Show me the worst of it. What can I do to help you?”
“Fuck! My ribs.” He gets it out through his teeth. Up close, it’s so much worse. Three slashes rake across his right side, deep, gaping at their edges, and blood wells out of them with every breath he takes and runs down his hip and thigh. “Carla. Listen to me.”
“I’m listening. Sit down. Can you sit?”
“No. Listen.” He grips my shoulder with his left hand, and it isn’t steady. “That fight made noise. The blood, mine, theirs, it’s carrying on the air right now, and every male within miles is going to come looking. Do you understand? In this state, I can’t protect you. I can’t even protect myself.”
