by Ruby Ryan
And then... he changed.
The muscles of his back rippled through his shirt unnaturally. His arms bulged like he were flexing them, but then grew in size before my eyes. His shirt pressed tighter against his skin, then tore along the sleeve and collar. Ethan moaned, a low sound that began deep in his throat and escaped his lips like a siren. Finally he looked up at me, and his eyes were as bright and green as the emerald I'd touched.
He did something I didn't expect.
He leaped to his feet with incredible strength, sprinted across the small room, and jumped through the eleventh story window.
"No!" I screamed, finally finding my voice. The glass of the window didn't shatter, but the force of his jump broke the latch and threw it open. I watched helplessly as his body moved through the air, stayed still for an instant, and then plummeted.
I ran to the window, fearing what I would see.
It wasn't at all what I expected.
I stared, and tried to process it, and failing that, I fainted.
5
ETHAN
Pain.
I'd been in a NyQuil daze all night, barely aware of the cute temp leading me from the office and toward a car and then into my apartment. The only thing that registered were soft hands on my body, pushing me into place, wrapping blankets over me and around me and making me feel safe.
And then the pain began.
Every nerve in my body was lit on fire at the same time, then doused with lemon juice. I screamed in agony, a wordless cry for help, and in my daze I heard something scream back.
Something inside of me.
I felt my muscles expanding like balloons, stretching my skin painfully. My clothes tore as my body changed, a maelstrom of unnatural flesh.
And before I could stop myself, I was running for the sky.
I don't remember crashing through the window, except that suddenly I was in open air with beautiful sky above. Sky was safety, I somehow knew. Sky was where I belonged.
I plummeted from my apartment toward the hard ground below, but with a thought I spread my wings. Wings, yes fucking wings, I had wings on my back that spread wide like open arms, muscles being stretched after an eternity of sleep.
And somehow, I knew how to use them.
I beat them as easily as shaking someone's hand, and their strength slowed my fall and turned it into a glide. I soared toward the treetops, then above them, and soon I was beating my way back into the sky.
I tried to yell, holy shit, because that's how I felt, but nothing came out but a screech.
Adrenaline pulsed through my body, excitement at flying, because again, holy shit, I was flying through the air on feathered wings. I turned my head and examined my body; wings of pale green beat steadily, made of feathers as large as computer screens. My arms were paws, and I flexed the claws within my pads. Something hung around my neck, but it was tough to tell what. A collar, like a dog's? A worry for another time.
This was the craziest NyQuil dream I'd ever had.
I spun in a wide circle, admiring the view of downtown Dallas from here, the buildings that once seemed so high but now seemed so close, just right there, all I had to do was beat my wings and I could perch upon their roofs and gaze down on all that was mine! The power of my body, and whatever strange energy this was, almost overwhelmed me. It was like holding a gun for the first time, except the gun was me.
Something's wrong.
I sensed it rather than thought it. As I turned my flight in a wide arc, I saw that temp watching me from a window. My window, the one to my apartment. I didn't know why she was there, but she was looking up at me like I was the Mongol Army descending on Baghdad.
From a hundred feet away I saw her eyes roll back into her head, and she slumped toward the open air.
With animal speed, I pulled my wings close to my body and dove toward her. The rush of air through my hair--no, my feathers--was an ecstasy unlike any sexual encounter. And then she was falling out the window, toppling forward and head over heels and toward the deadly ground.
Faster, I thought, urging my new body on with willpower alone.
I aimed for where I thought she would be, perilously close to the ground, and dove as quickly as I could. It was more of a fall than a glide then, a heavy sack of flesh plummeting to its own death.
But all I could think about was her, and how she needed my protection.
At the last possible moment I opened my wings into a glide, and reached out with my paws to grab her body. I wouldn't have been able to if not for my claws tearing into her clothing, but I held on, and my glide carried me a mere two feet off the ground.
I pulled her close to my body as if she were precious prey.
The reality of everything began to crash into me. I was some sort of flying monster, and very slowly was I realizing it was not just a dream. Power aside, such realization was horrifying. In a flash of insight I remembered a book my high school English teacher had made us read, some French guy who woke up as a beetle. The character's horror had been funny at the time. A ridiculous thing deserving of, well, ridicule.
But now I knew that horror myself.
Focusing on the need to keep this woman safe, I turned and flew north away from the city. I didn't know where to go, but I knew I had to get there fast.
I was halfway to Oklahoma, flying over rolling hills of pasture land, when the voice returned.
EMERALD GRYPHON.
The voice boomed in my head like it had installed speakers and cranked them up to 11. It was the same voice that had screamed with me earlier, during my transformation. And it shocked me so much I almost dropped the cargo I was carrying.
I HAVE WAITED FOR YOU.
The voice was deep and rasping, and its words held the weight of eternity. I steadied my flying, careful beats that kept me moving toward the distant horizon.
Hello? I thought, testing.
WE KNEW THE GREAT ONE HID THE TOTEMS FOR THIS DAY, it boomed inside my brain. FOOLISH FOR US TO BELIEVE IT WOULD BE EASY.
I tried to bite my lip, realized I didn't have one, and then said, Dude, I think you've got the wrong number.
DO NOT MOCK ME, EMERALD.
This time the voice brought with it pain, on the same magnitude of my transformation, electricity searing my skin and muscle and bone. I screamed, which came out as a bird's screech, and I was temporarily blinded by the pain.
I regained sight, and control, just in time to see that I was crashing.
I beat my wings twice, but it wasn't enough, and at the last moment I extended my two back legs. They struck the grass and sent me forward in a tumble. I pulled the two most precious things close to my chest--my wings, and the woman in my arms--and did my best to protect them as I crashed along the ground.
Finally I came to a stop, dirt and dust floating through the air around me. When it settled I had a clear view of a brown cow, who watched me from ten feet away.
It made a noise that was half surprise, half boredom.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND NOW? the voice said, thankfully devoid of pain.
Dude, I don't understand shit right now, I thought.
The voice laughed, a deep chuckle that was like boulders rumbling down a mountain.
WE ARE THE FIRST OF OUR BROTHERS TO AWAKEN, EMERALD. FORTUNATE FOR ME. UNFORTUNATE FOR YOU.
Uhh, why is that unfortunate for me?
WE WILL JOIN TOGETHER IN BATTLE, AND SUCH WILL BE GLORIOUS FOR ALL TO BEHOLD. AND THEN, WHEN YOUR BONES HAVE WITHERED TO DUST ALONGSIDE THOSE OF YOUR BROTHERS, MY FELLOW DRAGONS AND I WILL SING THE NOTE THAT ENDS THIS WORLD.
What the fuck. I'd heard of people hearing voices in their head, but I'd never heard of anyone to be threatened by them.
And dragons?
Hey, buddy, I said as if this were some stupid bar dispute. How about we go to Happiest Hour, I buy you a beer, and we pretend that whatever I did to offend you is forgiven. Cause right now, I've sort of got my own issues. Yeah?
I WILL FIND YOU, EMERALD GRYP
HON, it echoed in response. WATCH FOR ME, FOR I WILL ONLY NEED TO COME ONCE.
And then, as quickly as it had arrived, the voice was gone.
I shivered when it was over, a sensation which felt strange while wearing feathers. While possessing feathers, long green feathers that felt like an itchy beard all over my body. I craned my neck around and used my beak to scratch an itch at my shoulder--which was now the place where the wing attached to my back.
My brain refused to accept most of this. It still felt like a dream, no matter how realistic it was. Because that was still more likely than the truth.
My wings ached from flying, like muscles that had not been worked in ages. I was famished, too.
I looked at the cow and thought, what am I going to do?
6
JESSICA
I woke on grass, soft and warm in the noon sun.
It was like waking into a dream, because things didn't make sense. The grass, for one, and the surrounding terrain: hills that rolled like a Chinese dragon, dotted with herds of cows.
And the nude man in front of me.
Ethan sat cross-legged on the ground a short distance away, his hands folded in his lap to cover his privates. He was even more muscular than I'd thought, arms bulging like boulders on either side of his pecs, and abs glistening in the sun. He smiled with embarrassment.
"Um, hi."
I flinched. "You're naked! Why are you naked?"
He moved one hand strategically, and then held up the other palm. "I can explain."
Something in the corner of my eye grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go: I swung my head to see the corpse of a brown cow, its gut slashed open and the inside an empty cavity. There were no flies, so it must have been killed recently.
"What the fuck!"
"That... is gunna be harder to explain," Ethan said.
Memory began to come back to me, dreams which weren't dreams at all. I'd helped Ethan up into his apartment, then made soup so I could give him medicine. And as I wrapped him in blankets I'd found a smooth stone figurine in his pocket, a gryphon with an emerald set in the back of its neck.
A gryphon. Which Ethan had transformed into, leaping from the window and then taking wing gracefully. I could feel his talons tearing into my clothes and skin, and when I looked down at my shirt I saw the tears in the fabric, and the scratches on my chest. I ran my hands over my body and felt more scratches along my back. Marks that matched the gash in the dead cow's belly.
It wasn't a dream. It was all real.
"You turned into a monster!" I blurted.
A wave of a relief fell over Ethan's face. "Oh, good. So I don't need to explain after all."
Frenzied with fear, I scrambled to my feet and grabbed the closest stick next to me. I held it out in front of me like a sword, hands trembling with shock.
"Stay back!"
"I'm not exactly in a position to fight," Ethan said, gesturing at his nude body.
"You're... you're gunna turn into that thing." I knew I was stammering, on the edge of collapsing into a puddle on the ground, but fear drove me on. "You're gunna change into that gryphon!"
Ethan's mouth tightened into an embarrassed line. "See, you say that, but it was just as much of a surprise to me as it was to you."
I wanted to run. To throw my stick at Ethan and sprint in the opposite direction, away from the cow and the monster he claimed he wouldn't transform into. But my fight or flight instinct short-circuited, and instead I sat back down, feeling foolish the entire time.
"Talk," I said, the only word I could get out.
He nodded. "Well. I don't know much, but I've been sitting here for about an hour and I think I've figured some of it out."
Ethan took a deep breath.
"I was in Belize with some old college friends. We graduated together ten years ago, and wanted to celebrate the anniversary. I haven't seen these guys in years; we've drifted apart, we live in different cities. You know how it is."
I didn't; most of my college friends were still in the DFW area. But I nodded anyways.
"We were in a cave. Spelunking. It was Andy's stupid idea, he was so damn insistent we do it, and even though we were hungover and dehydrated we all agreed, because that's easier than fighting Andy. You'd know if you met him. So we're in this cave, being led by a tour guide. And when we stopped to rest, he had us turn off all our lights. To experience how complete the darkness is. No light anywhere, not even faint starlight. Just black all around, thick and terrifying.
"Except, somehow, I didn't just see black. I began to see a glow of green, somewhere distant in the cave. Through the walls, as impossible as that sounds, but I did. And while everyone else was resting up or taking a piss, I crawled through a tunnel until I found it."
"Found what?"
"I'm... not entirely sure," he said. "It was underneath a rock, in a small chamber that looked like it had been carved out with a shovel. It was a stone sculpture, a totem, he called it, of a mythical beast with an emerald in its back."
"The gryphon," I said, suddenly remembering. "I found it in your pocket!"
"Gryphon," Ethan said, tasting the word. It meant something different to him than to me, but then he continued. "Well, I didn't tell anyone about the totem. It seems stupid not to--these were some of my best friends, right? But something stopped me. Forced me to keep it to myself. And so I did, carrying it in my pocket for the rest of the trip, and for the flight home. And that's when the weird stuff started happening."
Trying to make a joke, I said, "Like transforming into a goddamn bird?"
But he shook his head. "No, not yet. I meant the fever, and the trembling. My body ached for two days while it was in my pocket--you saw how I looked when you picked me up from the airport. I gulped down an entire bottle of NyQuil and crashed on my couch at work, but it didn't seem to help."
He blinked, and looked down at the ground.
"And that's all I remember. Until... it happened."
There was a long, pregnant pause while I chewed over all of that.
"I took the... totem?" I waited for him to nod, then said, "I took the totem from your pocket, and while running my fingers over it the gem... depressed."
"Depressed?"
"Yeah," I said, "like a button. It sunk into the stone and made a click sound."
A deep frown spread on Ethan's face. "That can't be right. I spent my entire three hour plane ride touching that thing, fingering the gem. It wouldn't push in, or come out, or do anything else noteworthy."
"I'm just telling you what happened," I insisted. "Believe whatever you want."
"I'm still not sure if I believe any of this. It's... I don't know." He shivered, which made his muscles spasm.
I gave him an apologetic smile. "I would lend you my blouse, but all I have on underneath is a bra."
"Being nude is the only thing I've gotten used to in the past hour," he grinned. "It's everything else I'm struggling with. So if you insist that pressing the emerald on the totem caused it, how about you toss it here and let me try again?"
I felt along my pants pockets. "I... don't think I have it."
"You don't?"
"Yeah, I don't," I snapped. "And no, I don't know where it is, because I was brought here against my will and only just woke up!"
Ethan shook his head and looked away.
But that wasn't entirely true. I could almost feel it in the distance, somewhere to my left. The south. Like a lighthouse flashing in the distance, I thought I could almost pick it out if I just squinted hard enough.
I remembered the totem in my hands, smooth and heavy. I'd held it in Ethan's apartment when he changed. I carried it to the window...
I gave a start.
The window. I remembered fainting, and then falling. Falling to my death, and being saved at the last moment.
I remembered the overpowering feeling of safety, that someone was watching over me. Protecting me.
Someone was keeping me safe.
And as I
considered Ethan, sitting nude on the ground in the middle of who-knows-where, I felt that same feeling return.
"You saved my life."
His head whipped back around. "Huh?"
"I was falling. You snatched me out of the air." I fingered the holes in my blouse, seeing them in new light. "You saved me."
Ethan looked embarrassed, which only made the lines of his face more gorgeous. A shy smile, his long eyelashes blinking above beautiful green eyes. "I mean, yeah. I couldn't just let you fall."
That sensation of protection was still there, a bubble of safety around us even now. I felt a tingle go up my spine as Ethan looked me up and down.
And then, before I could stop myself, I pounced on him.
The force knocked him back onto the soft grass. I pressed my body against his, feeling the warmth of his exposed skin. For a moment that lasted an eternity we stared at one another, our faces only inches apart.
He leaned up to kiss me with lips that were warm and soft. I felt strong arms wrap around me, holding me close, pulling me against his broad chest. I sighed against his body and kissed him harder, and the smell of his musk mixed wonderfully with the grass.
I felt him stiffen underneath me, and I sighed at the heat coming off his cock, my own sex pulsing with heat and desire.
His hands ran along my back, caressing me, learning what I felt like under his touch. Every curve of my spine, and lower back, and hip. And then his hands were sliding along my ass, squeezing the cheeks gently, and I sighed into his kiss.
"You taste so good," he said, and I shoved my tongue into his mouth to taste what he tasted, our tongues dancing together wonderfully.
It was different than any other time. It was as if we had some bond connecting us; I could almost feel what he felt, his cock rubbing against the inside of my thigh, the urge to thrust beginning to overwhelm him, his need for me.
And then he took over, rolling me sideways until I fell onto the ground, the soft grass pressing into my legs and back and neck. He covered me with his body, kissing the side of my neck and along my shoulder. I arched my back to press my body into his, my thighs against his hips, my wet sex so close to his belly, aching to feel his touch.
