Page 48 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
Then with a flick of its wing, the dragon sent Lu sailing into the air once again. She flew over its back and landed on the opposite wing with an audible oof!
Panting, she looked up to find the dragon staring at her over its shoulder, its long neck craned back, an expression in its reptilian eyes that was . . . smug.
It was toying with her.
Something inside of her just snapped.
Lu didn’t know exactly how it happened, but one minute she was screaming in impotent rage, pounding her fists on the unyielding hide of the dragon wing so hard her wrist popped, the next she was fifty feet in the air, looking down on the creature from above.
In an instant, everything was different. She was different. She inhaled, and felt the suck of air into massive lungs, smelled mice and voles and rabbits deep beneath the earth, tasted the sweet, ripe bite of an apple from some faraway, unseen tree on her tongue. She exhaled and from her mouth came a plume of smoke intermingled with an orange blaze of fire, and it was then that she realized what she’d done.
She’d Shifted. To dragon.
Holy. Shit!
And the most astonishing thing—aside from the sensation of wind beneath her wings, and the expressions on the faces of the group of people staring up at her wide-eyed and frozen from below—was that it was effortless. She knew she must be pumping her wings, but it felt as if she were standing still, floating, not flying. It felt as if feet and hands were things she’d learned how to use, cumbersome things in another cumbersome body, but wings and talons and smoke and fire were the way she was really meant to be.
As if she was, finally, wearing the right skin.
She banked and flew away with no more effort than a thought: left. Another, higher, and she’d punched through the damp, clinging density of the cloud cover. She bared her fangs, exulting in the sting of cold wind on her muzzle, the moisture beading mirrored drops along her mane, the wind a roaring hiss in her ears, and kept going.
Then she sliced through the top of the clouds like a scythe, and all was silent and still, the sky an endless sheer curtain of sapphire above.
Honor appeared a heartbeat later, winging around her in a loose spiral, grinning that beastly grin. Like I told Magnus, came the voice inside Lu’s mind, demonstrations are always more effective than conversations.
With that, Lu understood.
Are you always going to be this much of a pain in my ass? she answered back, flipping over to fly upside down, staring in awe at the vast nothingness of the atmosphere, stretching vapor thin and crystalline above. She noticed her wings were vermilion, the barbs along her tail and her talons a gleaming, beautiful gold.
That’s what older sisters are for, came the wry retort as Honor executed a breathtaking rolling dive, sunlight shining off her scales in blinding winks of silver. Lu righted herself and chased after Honor, finding a cold gust of wind that carried her closer.
Older? We’re twins!
I’m older by three minutes, baby sister. And a whole lot wiser. By the way, you hit like a girl. We’ll work on that.
Lu was momentarily too busy admiring how lean and strong Honor was as she flew to be angry. Her shape wasn’t the bulky, monstrous one she’d seen dragons depicted as having in old fairy tales. She was lithe and elegant, every movement a poem of economy, every stroke of her wings filled with grace. Up here in the heavens her sister was as luminous as a star, and, for the first time since meeting her, Lu felt a swelling rush of affection for this alabaster doppelganger with whom she shared nothing in common but her face.
Or so she’d thought. Watching Honor now, Lu had the distinct feeling there was so much more to her than that icy, aloof front she presented to the world.
I don’t know about wiser, but I’ll buy older, Lu thought. You really should think about investing in a good nighttime moisturizer, sister dear.
The tw
o dragons grinned at one another. Then in a move that to an observer would have looked perfectly coordinated, they pumped their wings and glided higher into the glimmering solitude of the morning sky.
“So she is as Gifted as Honor,” breathed Dash, so named for his Gift. Even in a colony of creatures that were preternaturally fast, his ability to run from one place to another, unseen because he moved so quickly, was unusual.
Standing beside Dash, Beckett said with authority, “No.” Everyone looked at him, including Magnus. Their eyes met, and Beckett said, “Hope is more Gifted.”
Magnus knew it was true, but it was the proprietary tone that riled him. Was meant to rile him. “She likes to be called Lumina,” he growled, staring at Beckett without blinking long enough that the younger man flushed and looked away.
“What do you mean, more Gifted?” asked Oz, cracking his knuckles and straining his neck to catch a glimpse of the two dragons, high up in the sky. His real name was Liam, but his affinity for the ancient heavy metal band Black Sabbath and its dove-decapitating lead singer, Ozzy Osbourne, had earned him the moniker. Beckett had hacked into the database of a pre-Flash rock-and-roll station once and made the mistake of letting Liam browse the MP3 files. The rest was history. Magnus couldn’t count how many times the strains of “The Wizard” and “Paranoid” had blasted through the caves.
Now gazing into the heavens, Beckett said, “Just what I said. Hope is stronger. I can feel it.”
I’ll just bet you can, thought Magnus, and enjoyed a fleeting image of himself bashing Beckett’s perfect head into the large rock several feet behind him.
The group sensed his anger, and began to look nervous, which was wise; things tended to bleed when Magnus got angry. Though he was Alpha and they should have respected him simply for being more Gifted than the rest of the tribe—with the exception of Honor and now Lumina—it was his temper that really kept everyone in check. If only he could keep himself in check.
