Page 21 of The Alliance

He never even considered that he might not be allowed to touch Blaze, because he knew he wouldn’t harm him. Alfie didn’t know that, though.

Poor Ant hadn’t considered for a second that Alfie might hurt him. Which is why I was here. As always.

I’d always stand beside my brother and I didn’t care what kind of dragon Alfie was, if he hurt Ant again, I’d kill him.

Whether it was by accident or whether Dimpy had subtly steered it that way, I wasn’t sure, but Ant was studying Alfie now. I’d noticed that Dimpy never curbed Ant’s enthusiasm for learning new things but he did sometimes direct his fascination onto new things when Ant became interested in something that might bite him.

In this instance, it was probably better that Alfie was the centre of attention. I wasn’t a dragon myself, and I didn’t fully understand their instincts, but I did know that they were very possessive of their mates.

Meh, I guess I could understand that.

It meant that Alfie was the one shifting and the one who had Ant’s eyes all over him. Ant studied him with the same objectivity he did everything else, but it was best that focus was on the dragon and not his mate. Alfie might get snappy again if Ant looked at his mate with those fascinated eyes.

I watched and half-listened as Ant questioned Alfie about everything. About things I’d never even thought to ask.

“Can you feel your bones growing? Do you think you were born golden or were you born silver and changed at some point? Have you always been immune to fire?”

Ant was nodding away with each answer and seemed only to need to know more with every answer that Alfie gave.

I recognised the look on Alfie’s face. It was increasingly bemused.

Ant was like that. Talking to him was like being attacked by a really curious puppy, and Alfie was having to describe parts of his experience he’d never even thought about before. He looked visibly relieved when Ant asked him to shift. He probably thought that meant he’d get a reprieve from the questions for a while.

I admit that I wasn’t prepared for it when Alfie did shift.

Having been around dragons for so long, I’d got used to their power. They had magic inside them in a way that was finally getting familiar, but Alfie pulsed with a power I’d never felt before. When he shifted, he seemed to release his power and it engulfed me. I struggled to breathe, feeling like I was drowning.

“Matty, are you alright? Does it hurt?”

Ant was beside me in an instant. I hadn’t realised he was keeping an eye on me but I should have known better. Ant was always looking out for me. We looked out for each other.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

My eyes were watering and my voice scratched out of my throat, so they all knew Iwasn’tfine, but I wasn’t going to admit that in front of the golden dragon.I didn’t want him getting ideas about being able to squash me and hurt Ant again.

“If you’re sure…” said Ant.

“Yes, I am. He just released a lot of power suddenly, that’s all.”

I spoke without thinking. And it was a mistake.

Ant’s eyes lit up. “You can feel his power? And he released more of it?” He turned to Alfie. “Was that deliberate? Were you keeping some of your power back?”

Alfie, in his dragon form, shook his head. I was convinced he still had that bewildered look in his eyes, even though they were golden yellow now and hard to read.

Against my better judgement, I found myself looking at the golden dragon with curiosity. He was smaller than Dum and Dee, much smaller than some of the largercuraidh, but he was still a dragon. He towered over me, his huge body was long and sleek and his neck curved upwards. In form, he looked exactly like the other dragons.

The only difference was his colour. His scales and his eyes.

As I watched Alfie, I realised his eyes changed colour. That made me alert. It could be a warningsign that he was feeling anger or stress or something.

I gathered my power into my hands, ready to fling it out, and I built up more protections over Ant and his mate. They had loads on them by now but I was always adding more, just in case.

Every time I worked out how to perform a new protection spell, I put it on those two. I don’t think they even realised. Even Ant was so used to feeling the low hum of magic around him these days that he didn’t bother to try and identify where it was coming from.

The irony was that it was mostly Ant who taught me the spells. He was going through all the books in the library and it was going to take him hundreds of years but he’d read every single one of them. The ones with spells in, he read and then told me the relevant spells.

Ant could memorise them, their origin, their form, but he couldn’t perform them. I could.

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