Page 7 of Crash Landed with My Weredragon

A roar split the air.

Marina watched through the camera as a shape dropped from the sky like a meteor. Rose-gold scales caught the twin suns' light as Toren slammed into the lead Drog at full speed. The impact was staggering. The Drog went sideways, its legs scrambling for a place to perch on the red rock. Toren was already airborne again, banking hard to come around for a second pass.

A second shape that was gray and slightly smaller, hit the second Drog from the flank. Auren. He didn't have Toren's precision, but he made up for it with enthusiasm. He latched onto the Drog's back and breathed fire directly into the gap between its head plates. The creature screamed. It was a sound Marina hoped she'd never hear again, and it thrashed wildly.

The third Drog veered toward the ship. It was fifty yards out and closing.

"Athena, third one's coming in…"

"On it."

Through the camera, Marina watched her sister step out of the airlock with her sidearm in one hand and a welding torch from Rowan's repair kit in the other. Peter was right behind her with two more security officers.

"Aim for the joints!" Athena yelled, repeating Toren's advice from the day before. "Between the plates!"

The security team opened fire. The bullets bounced off the chitin with sparks and metallic pings. The Drog didn't even slow down. It was thirty yards away, twenty, its mandibles opening wide enough to bite a person in half.

A wall of fire hit it from the left.

Khrelan. The navy-blue dragon came in low and fast, breathing a sustained stream of flame that engulfed the Drog's entire left side. The creature staggered. The chitin plates along its flank glowed red, then cracked. The heat found the joints, the gaps, the vulnerable places underneath. The Drog collapsed ten yards from the airlock, its legs folding beneath it, smoke pouring from every seam in its armor.

Athena stood her ground the entire time. She hadn't moved. Marina wasn't sure if that was bravery or stubbornness, but either way, it was very Athena.

* * *

The fight was over in under three minutes. Four Drogs, all dead or dying. Toren landed near the ship and shifted back to his near-human form, breathing hard. There was a shallow gash across his left shoulder where a Drog mandible had caught him.

Marina was outside before she'd made the conscious decision to leave the ship. She crossed the rocky ground to where Toren stood and stopped about a yard away.

"You're hurt," she said.

He glanced at the wound like he'd forgotten it was there. "It's nothing. It’s just a scratch."

"That's not a scratch. That's a laceration. Let me get Dr. Vasquez."

"It will heal in a few hours. Weredragon physiology is different from yours." He smiled, and the smile did something inconvenient to her chest. "But thank you for the concern."

"I'm not concerned," she lied. "I'm protecting my alliance. If you die, I'm back to fighting those things with a welding torch."

"Your sister seemed willing to try."

"My sister would fight a volcano with a butter knife if you gave her a reason." Marina looked past him to where Auren was poking at one of the dead Drogs with undisguised fascination, and where Khrelan was standing apart from everyone with his arms crossed and his expression suggesting he'd rather be anywhere else. "All three of you came."

"We heard the Drogs. They aren't subtle."

"Khrelan came," she clarified. "I didn't think he would."

Toren followed her gaze to the navy-scaled Weredragon. "Khrelan doesn't like humans. He doesn't trust this arrangement. But he won't stand by while people die. He's not cruel, Marina. He's cautious. There's a difference, though it's hard to see from the outside."

It was the first time he'd used her first name without the formality of an introduction, and Marina noticed. She filed it alongside the growing list of things she was noticing about Toren that had nothing to do with interspecies diplomacy.

"The trial period is over," she said. "The truce is permanent. As long as you want it."

"We want it."

"Good." She looked at the dead Drogs, at the scorch marks on the rock, at the welding-torch burns on the third Drog's carcass where Athena had apparently decided to fight it hand-to-hand while waiting for dragon backup. "Because I think we're going to need each other."

* * *