by Ann Gimpel
Konstantin narrowed his eyes. “My point, my friend”—he stressed the word, friend—“is times are changing around us. Nothing remains the same, and we must be nimble enough to adjust as the need arises. Shifters have a long history of sticking with their own kind, to the exclusion of all else. My sense is that era is coming to a rather rocky close.”
“What are you basing your conclusion on?” Braid-man leaned a bit closer.
“I can talk with the land,” Konstantin replied. “Doesn’t matter which land. Most of them respond to me, given enough time and effort. I am why dragon shifters escaped Mu before it burst into fragments and scattered through the universe. The land came to me. Warned me.”
Katya took a few steps forward and inclined her head. When she straightened, she addressed the dinosaurs. “I, too, offer my thanks for your assistance. Once I was a seer for my people, but I have been remiss in scrying the future. I will pick up the banner soon and will share anything the god chooses to show me.”
Kon sent a pointed look winging her way. If she read it right, it was a rebuke for not doing more. She stared right back. “I already said I’m sorry. While we were moldering away beneath Antarctica, I didn’t see the need to push it when so many of my attempts to bring our future into focus failed.”
The silver-haired dinosaur trotted forward. “You say you used to possess seer magic, but that it has weakened?”
Katya closed her teeth over her lower lip. “Not exactly. Without spending a whole lot of time on this, my dragon left for years. I had a difficult time caring about much of anything during her absence, and my few efforts to look into my glass weren’t fruitful. I haven’t attempted to scry anything since my beast returned.”
“Your dragon left?” Shock lined braid-man’s question.
“It’s a long story,” Katya said. “One I’m not going to discuss.”
“I am shaman for our tribe,” the man with silvery hair cut in smoothly. “Yle is my name. I use water to call up my visions, but they have been unclear for many years. When first the serpents and then you showed up on our world, I tried harder to see the path before us but with the same paltry results.”
“Do you suppose this has something to do with worlds failing?” Katya asked her twin.
“Probably, Sister, but we will worry about it once we have the serpents on the run.” He directed his next words at the group of dinosaurs. “Send your selected warriors to the sixth world as soon as possible. Once everyone is acquainted and we’ve determined how to maximize all the different magics, we will leave for Earth.”
“Thank you for not turning us away,” Nikolai said. Boris murmured much the same.
The dinosaurs were savvy enough not to mention Konstantin hadn’t given them much of a choice.
Katya glommed onto her twin’s transport spell, and in a trice everyone was back on the sixth world. Melara and Gustaf ran forward. “Trouble on the ninth world,” Gustaf shouted. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back.”
“If you hadn’t shown up when you did, we were on the verge of going after you,” Melara cut in.
“Serpents?” Nikolai spat the word like the poison it was.
“No, but they were using that world as a storage dump for abominations like the insect-bird hybrids.” He shook his head. “We didn’t do a thorough tally, but we saw over a thousand…oddities.”
“Hungry bastards.” Melara made a sour face. “And smart. I kept changing up my ward, but they’d find a way to drill through it.”
“We counted poison, brute force, and rather weak magic among their arsenal,” Gustaf muttered.
“Are you certain serpents weren’t present watching over their pets?” Katya asked. Killing hybrids was simple, but not if a serpent or two crawled out of a cave with blood in their eyes.
“We scanned with magic, probably more than we should have used,” Melara replied. “Neither of us sensed serpents, but if they were hiding their essence as thoroughly as the one that nearly nabbed Katya, we might have missed something.”
“Is anything else living on the ninth world?” Nikolai asked.
“We don’t think so,” Gustaf said.
Katya wondered what had happened to them. None of the habitable worlds in this system had been empty. Before she could pose a question, her brother said, “This will provide a splendid opportunity for us to learn to work together. A select group of dinosaurs will—”
“Dinosaurs?” Gustaf thundered. “How in Thoth’s name did you get them to agree?”
Konstantin made a noise midway between a snort and a grunt. “Guilt. Works almost every time. Once they show up, we’ll split into battalions and head for the ninth world.”
“We already started herding folk into groups that would maximize their magic,” Melara told him.
“Good!” Konstantin took off running as he angled toward bands of shifters blending their power into synergistic volleys.
“What did the hybrids look like?” Nikolai asked Gustaf.
The big, dark-haired man rolled his green eyes. “If you combined all the nightmares that ever were into one and plopped them onto the ninth world, you wouldn’t come close to capturing how bad it was.”
“The worst were the winged ones, though,” Melara said. “They’d attack out of nowhere. And all the ones I saw had teeth. Long, sharp teeth. Not birdlike at all. Different kinds of wings. Bird wings. Bat wings. Webbed wings like dinosaurs have. Not so many with feathers. Mostly scaly hides or patchy fur.”
“Don’t forget the smell.” Gustaf made a face as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “Melara and I changed clothes as soon as we returned.”
“The others are soaking,” Melara agreed, “but I’m not adverse to burning them if we can’t get the stink out. It was like hundreds of decomposing scraps of garbage raised to the twentieth power. My stomach is still complaining.”
“Beyond winged hybrids, what else?” Johan asked.
“The whole thing was such an affront to nature, it’s hard to drag my mind back there,” Gustaf muttered. “Wolf bodies with reptile heads. Horses, but with sharp hoofs and short necks. Furred monsters that stood upright on two legs with enormous heads. Trolls.” He blew out a tired breath. “You’ll see them soon enough.”
“Did you kill any?” Katya wanted to know how easy it would be to mow through them. If they died as obligingly as the mantis-bird horrors had, this shouldn’t take all that long.
“We did,” Melara said. “In self-defense. They seem to be able to communicate telepathically. We showed up in a clearing with a handful of skunk-like animals, except they were as big as lions. It didn’t take long before animals were streaming toward us from every direction imaginable. Including above.”
“We had to fight our way out of there,” Gustaf added. “It’s why our scans for serpents were perfunctory.”
“They didn’t penetrate your warding, did they?” Boris ran his sharp gaze over the two shifters.
“No.” Melara sounded fierce. “But if we’d been there much longer, they would have. It might be their intelligence is additive in some way, but they seemed to learn something from failure. Like I said, I had to alter the weave of my warding a couple of times before we finally teleported back here. I had hell’s own time keeping my dragon from breaking through. Her bloodlust was kindled.”
“They did not follow you,” Johan noted, “so perhaps that type of magic is beyond them.”
“It isn’t beyond the serpents’ ability,” Katya growled.
Thumps shook the ground, followed by shouts of, “Welcome.”
She turned, not surprised to see dinosaurs. Damn they took up a lot of space in their animal forms with their huge, scaled bulks. They were beautiful, though, in their own right. Some had long, majestic soaring necks, not unlike her own in her beast’s body. Others were solid with interlocking plated scales covering them from stem to stern. The birds had incredible wingspans and wicked looking beaks.
“We should join the others,” she s
aid and hurried to center field, threading her way around the newcomers.
Johan flanked her. “I could have done without this delay, yet perhaps it is a necessary evil.”
“What do you mean?” She glanced his way.
“Armies need to practice working together. Dealing with the hybrids will provide a timely opportunity.” He lowered his voice. “Has your brother ever led troops into battle before?”
She had to think about it. “Not exactly. Dragons don’t have wars like humankind. And most magical creatures live forever. Not much point in waging war.”
“Until now. Something has happened. It prodded the serpents into secretly crafting magic to build up their forces.”
She thought about it. If Johan was correct, and the serpents knew something that had galvanized them into action, she needed to get moving with her scrying tool.
“You and Johan go with Nikolai’s group,” Kon yelled, followed by still more deployments until everyone was part of a mixed company of various types of shifters. Their troop contained three dragon shifters, two dinosaurs, four birds, two wolves, and a deer.
Depending on how well each troop worked together, Kon would make needed adjustments. Johan had asked about her twin’s experience in a military leadership role. She’d hedged. The bare truth was her brother had never commanded more than a couple of dragons.
Until now.
She said a hasty prayer to Y Ddraigh Goch that Kon’s quick temper, coupled with his lack of proficiency, didn’t create unanticipated issues. Like mini-rebellions within their ranks. He’d done a decent job finessing the dinosaur problem, so perhaps she was selling him short.
Dragons weren’t the most diplomatic creatures. Much like their bondmates, they expected immediate cooperation once they made their will known.
Nikolai herded them into a rough circle. Other than the dinosaurs, everyone was in their human body. “We teleport as a group. From the sound of things, we will take our animal forms before we leave. We’ve been assigned two types of hybrid.”
He knelt and sketched in the dirt. Something lion-like took shape along with a weasel-esque creature. “Both of these are quite large,” he warned. “We kill any that cross our path.”
“What if other types attack us?” a wolf asked. Red-gold hair fell straight as a stick to her shoulders, and her eyes were a brilliant blue.
“I say we kill anything that comes within range,” Johan snarled.
Nikolai nodded agreement. “Our other task while we’re there is to see if we can locate the breeding farms. Kon’s orders are to blow them sky high so they can never be used again.”
“I wonder whom they leached magic from when dragons weren’t available?” Katya set her mouth in a harsh line. Within, her dragon tugged hard at its invisible leash. It wanted to shift and be gone. Yesterday.
“Leave as you will.” Kon’s voice rose over everyone else’s.
“Before we shift and leave,” Nikolai said, “we’re a team. We have each other’s backs. Part of our job is killing hybrids. The other part is ensuring our own safety. It includes protecting ourselves and each other from dark power jumping ship and taking over our bodies.
“You may deem such an event unlikely, but it happens in the blink of an eye. One moment, things are as they always were. The next, you’re trapped beneath sea-serpent sorcery.”
Nods ran around the group. Clothing hit the ground as shifters reached for their bondmates’ bodies. Katya’s dragon was more than ready. It adored killing. To be on the leading edge of a mission where it could kill as much and as many as it wished was second only to Nirvana.
Johan’s green beast took shape next to her. Eyes whirling, nostrils flaring, he looked as excited as her bondmate. Nikolai’s copper-gold dragon formed next. As soon as they were ready, he wove a transport spell that linked them all together.
She hadn’t thought to ask what this world looked like. Maybe because of what it had been turned into, she assumed it would be an ice-shrouded hellhole, but when it bloomed around them, it was beautiful.
Above her, a violet sky showcased twin suns. Pastel shades spread in every direction from blue and green dirt to orange rocks. Scrubby grass was a charming seashell pink. The temperature was mild, and a bubbling brook cascaded down multihued rocks and over a small cliff not far from where they emerged. Who had lived here before the serpents polluted it? More importantly, were they still here, or had the hybrids killed them all?
Why hadn’t the land reacted to whatever transpired here? It should be layered in snow and ice.
Nikolai bugled. The dinosaurs roared. Her dragon spread its wings, flapping to gain altitude fast. Kon had planned for each constellation of troops to come out in vastly different locations. That way, they wouldn’t have to worry about inadvertently hitting one another.
It made sense in some respects, but it also forced each group to rely on themselves. So far, the foul odors Melara had described weren’t present, but neither were any hybrids. She and Johan overflew the area, but all she saw was more bucolic scenery. She wouldn’t have been surprised by a herd of goats or cows, but the hybrids had probably eaten them.
“See anything?” Nikolai asked.
“No.”
“Return to me. We’ll employ magic to draw them out.”
Johan’s dragon bugled and took off at top speed for goddess only knew where.
“Come back!” she shouted after him. A similar command from Nikolai came a split second after hers.
Johan kept right on flying. What in the unholy hell? Katya hovered, unsure what to do. She should obey Nikolai, but someone needed to go after Johan. What if he was in the clutches of magic she couldn’t sense?
He bugled again and wheeled sharply, beating a path back to her. She angled her gaze downward and understood. Johan’s dragon must have sensed evil. Hybrid horrors were streaming out of holes in the perfect ground. Out of cliff faces. Out of places she couldn’t make out.
“They’re coming,” she shouted in dragonspeak. Fire streamed from her mouth, obliterating her next words.
Johan blasted them with fire and ash. A few burst into flaming pyres, but more abominations formed from thin air as best she could judge. Assigning each group specific hybrids had been stupid. They’d kill what was in front of them.
The birds from their group leapt skyward, fanning the air with their wings. On the ground, the dinosaurs mowed through clumps of hybrids. Insect combinations seemed primary, but the insects were a hundred times normal size. A spider body glued to four legs was particularly loathsome. She could smell the acrid stench of its poison from her aerial perch.
There were more of the mantis-bird things, but so far, they’d been easy to shoot out of the air. The variety of twisted genetic experiments was dizzying. It was as if a serpent mad-scientist had taken bins of DNA and cobbled them together in as many permutations and variations as he could. Some of the fuckers could barely walk. Others tried to fly but fell out of the air.
She wasted a few moments feeling sorry for the misshapen ones who had no chance at all, but then she got her priorities straight. Just because the wolf limping below her had a tentacle where it should have had a leg didn’t make it any less her enemy.
A dinosaur stomped a path through a hundred hybrids, crushing the life out of them as it went. Another dinosaur joined the group in the air. It wasn’t overly efficient, but the birds worked as a team chivvying a small batch of hybrids away from the others. Once they had them separated, they drove their sharp beaks into eyes and carotids and jugulars.
The smell of blood grew thick and cloying. Between her and Johan, they had so many fires burning, the others drove hybrids into them. One of the wolves first barked, and then howled.
Katya peered through the smoke below trying to see what had happened. The wolf howled again, mournful and desperate. Katya said to hell with it and dove toward the sound determined to pulverize whatever had hurt the wolf.
Johan swooped below her and let out a bellow.
Katya narrowed her eyes to slits. She was finally low enough to make out not a wolf, but the deer. A troll-like hybrid held the deer suspended high in the air. It kicked with sharp hoofs, but couldn’t reach the troll’s body.
Not that it would have done it any good. Last she checked, trolls were made of stone. One of the few substances impervious to fire. The troll had taken a chunk out of the deer’s shoulder. Blood sluiced across its pale fur, sheeting downward.
“Shift!” Katya screamed at it.
“I can’t.”
No time to ask why. She aimed to fly close and put out the thing’s eyes with her talons, but Johan beat her to it. He charged in front of her and drove the spiked ends of his fingers into the troll’s eyes.
It was slow to react. Trolls are stupid, and it had to process the fact it couldn’t clap its hands over its eyes while still holding the deer. She flapped closer, shooting a stream of fire at his ruined eye sockets, but Katya had another goal in mind.
Catching the deer once he dropped it.
Johan trumpeted. This pass, he grabbed handfuls of the mossy crap that passed for troll hair and dragged it out by the roots. Between this latest indignity, her fire, and being blind, the troll bellowed. The deer piece he’d been chewing shot from his mouth.
He let go of the deer.
Finally.
Katya grabbed onto it, knowing she was hurting its injured shoulder, but it would hurt a whole lot worse if it hit the ground from three meters up. Behind her, the troll fell into a jumbled heap that disintegrated into a pile of dusty rocks.
Interesting. Very interesting. It meant something, but Katya couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Sorry,” she told her passenger as she ferried her to the ground.
“It’s all right. At least I have my magic back. That thing. It blocked me from my power. No matter what I did, I couldn’t break through.”
The wolves formed a protective circle around the deer. One had retrieved the chunk of shoulder. Good. It could be reattached with magic. Quicker and easier than the deer using her power to grow a whole new body part.
