by Faye, Amy
She crouched down, and with all four of her legs she pressed in a move that felt much, much more natural than it should have. She was halfway to the hole before she felt herself starting to slow in the slightest. She tried her wings, and they drove her the rest of the way up, tucked in close at the last moment to avoid catching the lip of the hole.
Alex followed behind her a moment later, and then they were flying, higher and higher. She followed him up. Up. Then they started to dive, and Diana sucked in her gut to brace for the twisting feeling in her gut as they fell. The earth moved closer and closer, closer and closer. And then, an instant before they hit the tops of trees, Alex's wings unfurled in a flash and he leveled out. It took a half-second for her to register and do the same, and then they were moving along, a few feet above the tree line, as fast as anything she'd ever felt before.
It felt oddly good. There was something inhuman about it. And there was something very inhuman about the sound that came from behind her. Melodic. Sonorous. And terrifying, because without needing to look she knew exactly what it was.
Even still, she followed the green in front of her. Alex was moving hard and fast and she kept up with him as best she could. Words formed themselves in her head. 'You alright back there?'
They defied language, just formed themselves into images as if she knew what he meant without knowing any of the constituent parts of the language.
She thought back as best as she could that she was keeping up. The sound came again. Closer. Much closer. And then Alex whirled and the words formed themselves in her head again. 'We're not going to make it. Do you know what that means?'
She knew exactly what it meant. She peeled off in the opposite direction, craning her neck as she flew to see which way the red followed. If it were her, she'd go for the most dangerous target.
And she wasn't wrong. The red peeled off the path he'd been on and turned for Alex, his heading at an oblique that would meet the green halfway through his arc.
Diana turned herself, putting herself on a path to intercept. She was above them both, flying down. Gravity gave her a little help in gaining speed and just as the red passed by Alex, she was only a dozen yards away.
An idea passed through her mind and she breathed in, both lungs at once, as deep as she could manage. Then she blew out, hard and pointed and it came out like a whistle, if that were possible with her beak-like mouth.
The fire came out like a lance, and shot into the red. He whirled in surprise and she screamed past him like a cavalryman on horseback, flanking and retreating. She whirled and arced and circled, and then looked back down on Alex. He'd regained the red's attention. There was a heavy gash in the bigger dragon's side, where claws had dug in and ripped out.
But he wasn't going to be winning for long, not the way that the big red dragon huffed in his lungs and held Alex tight. She saw it happening before it did, and moved without thinking. Her beak-like mouth opened and closed and an instant later she realized that she'd broken her promise.
The feeling of the red's claws tearing into her flank hurt, as bad as anything. As bad as the landing had felt. But she squeezed her jaw tighter, breathed in, and breathed out a gout of flame, tightening her jaw again until she couldn't tighten it any more.
She felt her jaw click all the way shut and then the pair of them slammed into the ground.
Diana forced herself to move quicker than she'd have liked, remembering what she'd seen before. The Red was slow, and he had trouble with harrying opponents. He was so much larger than both of them, and her in particular, like she was a sparrow facing off against a hawk. But she wouldn't let that scare her off, because no matter what happened she couldn't afford to let it.
They came in one at a time, first her and then him, and then her again. Flame spouted from his mouth and was met with meager flames of her own that left his hide scorched black on the red. She was careful, methodical, and slow.
And then, with a shudder, it fell down, and stopped moving, and the wound on its neck started to pool blood under him, rather than thrashing it all over the field around.
They'd finished it, she thought. And now they had to figure out what was next.
Epilogue
Dragons have an interesting curse. Interesting lives. Long lives. Long enough to find out how bad it can be to live a long life.
They're independent creatures, in their own way, and yet, the risk of pissing another one off is so high that none can quite afford to be truly alone. In many ways, each one is like a country, comparable to any human nation.
Diana looked down at her little pile of books. She should have gotten rid of them a long time ago. She should have gotten rid of them when she left for college. She should have gotten rid of them when she found herself in the unusual – for a dragon--position of living together with her lover, in a halfway-proper roost.
She ought to have gotten rid of them when she started her first real hoard, like a real live dragon. But she couldn't. These were hers, and she'd been around them so long that they gave her comfort.
So many things still felt foreign to her. The idea that she ought to have pride in it, that it represented her to other people. Such a meager little thing was more of an insult than anything else. And yet, she couldn't give it up. She wouldn't. She wanted it because it was hers, not because it looked good.
She leaned back into Alex's arms. He pressed another kiss against her neck, one for every one of the companies he'd started since he'd decided that he would be human, at least on the outside.
She turned and met those kisses with her own, and held her husband close. Nobody was going to take her away from him.
Not ever again.
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