She was a lovely creature in this form. Trim and slender, but with a raw innate magnetism that made it hard for him to look away, wondering what she thought when she saw him in his natural form.
Taking her time, she wasn’t nearly as clumsy as she made her way down the steep side of the mountain. Maintaining a steady speed, they made it into the valley in no time.
The moment she stepped onto the sand, she stopped, nose scenting the air and ears shifting as she listened.
“Can you hear it?” he whispered, floating before her.
Her eyes narrowed and then the amber light engulfed her once again. The cloak she’d worn before the shift was back on her when she returned to human form. It must have been spelled; most shifters couldn’t turn with the clothes still on.
“Yes. I heard a slinking about forty klicks due west. If we stay to the east we should be—”
Suddenly the ground pitched, tossing them both in separate directions. Giles reached out for Lilith, who was scrambling to her feet as a heat wave blanketed the area. Sharp, rocky spires ripped out of the ground, one of them shoving between his legs. He had just enough time to shift to shadow before the next one tore through his middle.
A killing blow if he’d been in physical form.
Breathing hard and disoriented by the chaos, he screamed Lilith’s name. Her fingers were clawing at the loose rock, scrabbling for purchase as her section of earth suddenly punched an easy sixty feet into the sky. Sending her flying upwards as she dangled by little more than a toehold. Her black hair whipped like charmed cobras behind her as a blast of heated air ripped through the canyon.
“I’m coming, Lilith, hold on!” he cried, rushing to her side.
He wasn’t sure if she heard him or not, but she was shaking her head and kicking her foot over the cliff’s edge toward more solid ground.
He was no more than ten feet into the air when his shadowed form felt like it’d suddenly been sucked into something gelatinous, and he was unable to push forward even another inch.
Heart racing, he reached out for Lilith, who was now standing. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she screamed, “You can’t come get me. I’ll come get you. Stay out of the water!”
He shook his head, still attempting to push beyond the boundary of whatever invisible barrier had him netted. But she was no longer looking at him, and turning on her heels she raced for a reddish-colored cave behind her.
Giles had heard of dragons. In fact, the land of the demone had been rife with the fire-breathing variety. Dragons were a nasty, hot-tempered bunch of creatures. Of all the tales in fairy, the dragon legend was the most accurate.
Obsessed with jewels and all things beautiful, they’d kill anything stupid enough to venture too far into their territory. Scanning the modified landscape, he noted that where it had been dry before there now seemed to be miles and miles of water spread out to either side.
Lilith seemed somewhat familiar with this place and the dragon, though it bothered Giles that they’d been separated. He’d meant what he’d said when he’d promised to keep her safe, and he could only hope that the water serpent had a network of tunnels dug through the cave system and that somehow she knew how to find her way out.
As a shadow he should be able to move freely through any object, but whatever spell the dragon had activated prevented him from sailing beyond the ten-foot mark. The canyon looked no wider than half a mile, if that. If he couldn’t go up, then he’d float across the open expanse to the other side and hopefully meet up with Lilith there. He’d just have to keep above the water as best he could.
Decided, he turned and headed north. He was almost to the halfway point when the calm waters suddenly began to froth and churn, whipping into violent rolling waves. Giles sailed higher into the sky to try and avoid it touching him, but whatever barrier had been in place when he’d been closer to land was still in effect. He’d move up and the waves would seem to grow exponentially until finally he had nowhere else he could move.
Zigging and zagging through breaks in the water, he was now less than a hundred yards from shore. But pressed against the gelatinous wall, the waves grew and grew until finally one single, solitary drop brushed against his cheek.
Eyes wide, he brushed it off. Pulse thundering in his ears as he waited with bated breath for the dragon to somehow magically manifest. After a minute of hearing nothing but the sound of his breathing, he assumed he’d somehow managed a fortunate stroke of luck, but just as he was about to sail the last few feet to land, the waters erupted in a geyser of heat and thick, cloying white smoke.
A creature unlike any he’d ever seen cut through the waters with the power of a graceful predator. Rows of glinting blue and green scales winked in the heat of the sun. Giles tried to move, but he was trapped. The barrier that’d only been above him was now a box all around him.
He tried moving to the sides, but he couldn’t. When he tried to go down, into the water itself, he couldn’t even do that. He was trapped and staring wide-eyed at a creature that seemed to have no end lift its broad, serpentine heads up from the waters.
It was both terrifying and breathtaking.
There were three heads, each unique. The left most head had a thin, oval-shaped face that hissed with a black forked tongue out at him, its glowing, gold-colored eyes never swerving from his face. The center most head was broad and had a round-faced inset with mother of pearl scales that gleamed from refracted rays of sunlight bouncing off them. That head glared at him with aquamarine eyes that seemed to him to be full of fury and brimstone, and on its head were two horns that curved delicately upward like a crown of ebony.
The right head gave him a lazy, sensual smirk.
The third head was no creature, but a woman’s head. A beautiful, bronze-skinned woman with one eye as blue as the deep ocean and the other eye as pale and green as a shallow lagoon. Her hair wasn’t hair at all, but a wriggling mass of black and teal banded sea snakes that hissed and snapped in his direction.
The woman spoke with a mouth full of shark teeth, “What have we here, sisters?”
Her voice was melodious and enchanting. Unnerving to hear.
She slinked slowly forward in the waters, a gargantuan beast of muscle and scales. The other two heads were no longer paying attention to him, but appeared to be scanning the horizon.
She smiled. “Hm. A man. A beautiful, dark-skinned man. I think we should keep you.”
As she drew closer, something inside of Giles reacted. Something visceral and soul-deep. His ability to hang on to his shadowy form weakened and he felt himself slowly return to his corporeal body against his will. Gritting his teeth, he stared at the now-laughing woman.
“What is your name?” In his home world of Delerium, to learn the name of a dragon was the key to possessing its power and harnessing it for your own.
Giles did not know whether those same rules applied to Kingdom; in fact, this creature was his first encounter with a dragon in several millennia. But he needed to free himself and get to Lilith—goddess only knew what was happening to her.
Power slammed into him, a resonant wave of it that made him growl and forcibly change. The creature was somehow controlling him.
She snorted. “I am no demon. You can do nothing to me by learning my name. I shall oblige you, male.”
Finally she was upon him and he didn’t know whether she planned to eat him or mate him. Reaching up a long, delicate woman’s hand, she caressed the side of his jaw with nimble fingers.
Up close she was terrifyingly beautiful. Part woman, part animal, both blended so perfectly that the mix wasn’t macabre. Rather than the long, reptilian neck of her sisters, the woman had a delicate one that led into femininely curved breasts and a slender waist, but below the waist she had no legs.
That was where her body and those of her sisters merged into a massive frame much larger than a whale’s. Her tail wasn’t split like a fish fin, but instead it was a writhing mass of bright pink and purple octopi tentacles.
The gills in the side of the center most head flapped with a sudden rush of water as the heads inhaled.
“I am Sonora. She,” she pointed to the left head, “is Leeta, and she,” she pointed to the center, “is Ankh.”
She moistened her lips and cocked her head in a serpentine bobbing and weaving motion.
“Where is your companion, male?” Sonora’s smile grew wider.
He swallowed, shoving at the box he was still trapped inside of. How had she reached into it to touch him and yet he could not move out of it?
“I have no companion,” he grunted, still trying to push through the barrier.
She hissed and lifted her hand as if to slap him. “Do not lie to us! We saw you, both of you. You thought to come into our home and steal our jewels.” She snarled, curling her lip, exposing the sharp array of fangs.
Shaking his head, he snapped, “We do not care a whit about jewels, we seek only to cross this canyon.”
Tipping her head back, she laughed. The snakes of her hair waved wildly about, many of them looking at him with a flat, black, merciless gaze.
“Man.” Her two-toned eyes caressed his body. “I will treat you as a prized jewel if you give me what I want. Where is the girl?” she growled and a jet of scorching steam bellowed from Ankh’s nostrils, spraying him.
Bellowing as the heat of it singed his flesh, Giles pounded on the box.
“Hey, snake face!” a familiar female voice growled. “Looking for me?”
Giles turned around just in time to see Lilith’s long red hood flap behind her as she jackknifed her body off the edge of the cliff, shifting in midflight into the form of her wolf.
The brilliant flash of fire soon gave way to the silky red pelt of her beast, and clutched in her mouth was a creamy white stone that sparkled as she ran.
“The opal!” Sonora cried and pointed, and soon the dragon was swimming off, charging toward the direction of Lilith who wasn’t running away, but was headed toward the shore.
The box that’d held him suddenly dissolved. Giles crashed into the water, slipping beneath its turbulent waves. Shifting quickly to shadow, he bolted out of the liquid cocoon and flew to Lilith’s side.
The chit was standing on the beach, shifted back to female form and smirking as she clutched the stone in her palm.
Sonora and her sisters were screaming, slapping the waters with their tentacles as Ankh continued to shoot jets of steam from her nostrils. As a shade, Giles could not help in the fight.
So he shifted quickly to physical form and dropped onto the back of Leeta, yanking a steel dirk from his boot and in one smooth motion grabbing the back of the dragon’s skull while placing the dirk against its throat.
The serpentine head hissed, flicking its black tongue in and out as Sonora screeched.
“This steel is strong enough to cut through dragon scales. Give us safe passage or I’ll kill her!” he growled, shoving the blade in just a tiny bit deeper, almost to the point of puncturing the neck.
“No!” It wasn’t the dragon who yelled it, but Lilith.
She was staring at him, wide-eyed, and visibly grinding her molars. “They will not harm us while I carry their precious water stone. Come to me.”
Grimacing, he moved his blade, this time actually penetrating the tough hide into the tender flesh beneath. A drop of blood welled on his blade before falling to the water beneath. The moment it landed the water turned a frothy, bloody red around the dragon and began to snap and jump with razor sharp fins that appeared as though from nothing.
His nostrils flared. “If I release it they will kill us, Lilith. That is what a dragon does. Use the wish!”
How could she not understand that? He’d thought them safe when they crossed into the canyon earlier in the day because he’d spotted no water, but now that they’d intruded on the sanctity of a dragon’s nest there would be no mercy from this violent creature.
“Give us our stone and we shall let you live,” Sonora begged with tears glimmering in her eyes as she reached helplessly toward the shore.
Lilith chuckled. “You think me a fool, don’t you? I’ll tell you what happens if I give you this stone now.” Her smile turned to a snarl. “You’ll slay us where we stand and pick your teeth with our bones. No. I will keep this stone—”
“You would condemn us to death!” Sonora’s voice boomed with thunder and the world around them heaved. Thick slabs of rock broke away from the mountain’s side, sliding into the water with hard smacks.
The fins below began to leap out of the waters. And the creatures attached to them were not fish at all, but green-skinned men with webbed feet and hands and smushed faces that had little more than black slits for mouths and eyes.
Lip curling in revulsion, Giles shifted just enough to give him leverage to decapitate the beast. But again Lilith held out her hand.
“You do that and there will only be more. She is part dragon, part hydra. You cannot kill her that way, Giles!”
Her words stayed his hand. “What?” He glanced up.
There was a freneticism to her eyes that told him she did not lie. A hydra was an ancient, mythological creature. One of fancy and folly, told as bedtime stories to scare little children. A serpent-headed monster that always had at least two heads, but most times three, and cutting off one head would only cause three more to take its place. Meaning the situation could go from dire to nightmarish in a heartbeat.
“Dragon, I seek to barter,” Lilith turned to Sonora.
“You’d dare.” She flashed her fangs. “You’ve nothing to barter, you’ve stolen our stone. I will fillet you both, starting with the man.”
Twisting, she reached out for Giles, clawed hands within inches when she let out a blood-curdling scream. Grabbing hold of her head, she cried out, “Stop. Stop.”
The other two heads were similarly screeching, wailing, and undulating their long, sinuous necks back and forth, their tentacles slapping the waters violently.
Lilith was breathing heavily, clawing at the stone with her nails. “You will not kill us. You will give us safe harbor. Once through, I shall drop the stone in your waiting hand. Do we have a deal?”