That stung. A little.
Kendra drifted into frame. “I’m guessing since you, Jax, Flint, and Adalinda can go through, that only dragons can enter that realm.”
I glanced at Adalinda for confirmation. She nodded but didn’t say anything. Then I looked back at Kendra and the others. “She thinks so, too.” I turned to the dragons here with me and echoed Luci’s earlier words. “Welcome to the other side.”
Behind me, Jax was pacing. Adalinda stood with arms folded, eyes fixed on the swirling haze. Luci had vanished. Surprise, surprise. Flint was getting a bit braver, peeking around and looking everywhere he could without fully removing his face from Jax’s neck.
I ran my finger along the edge of the portal. I pressed harder, half-expecting to be shocked. Instead, the surface bowed under my touch, then snapped back. I glanced at Jax. “Should I try it?”
He didn’t answer. Or rather, he answered by going rigid, eyes locked on the portal. I took that as a yes.
“Here goes nothing,” I said, and put my palm flat against the surface.
It yielded. The whole world stretched and then inverted, and for a fraction of a second, I was everywhere at once, the yard, the rocks, the blue of the sky, the damp scent of mowed grass, the metallic tang of the portal itself. Then gravity remembered its job and yanked me down, straight through the center of the glass.
I fell. Not far, just enough for my stomach to plummet and for the wind to snatch a curse from my lips. My feet hit the ground hard, but I landed on my toes, arms outstretched. The world righted itself, and I was back in my yard, standing on the trampled lawn, with every set of eyes locked on me in shock.
The reaction was immediate. Kendra, hands still sparking with the last of her failed magic, ran over and enveloped me in a hug so fierce it cracked my spine.
When she let go, I flexed my fingers, then reached up toward the surface again. “Watch this,” I said. I crouched low and, with a single motion, jumped up and through.
For an instant, the world split in two. I was both in the yard and on the other side, suspended in the glassy matrix of the threshold. Then I landed with my knees bent.
Jax was already moving toward me, hands out. “You made it back,” he said, and he didn’t bother hiding the relief.
“At least we aren’t stuck here. That’s something, I guess.”
3
HAILEY
We turnedour backs on the portal and looked around. The first thing was the sky. It was everywhere, deeper and wider than Earth’s, banded in blue and pale honey, lit by not one but two suns. One was fat and blood-orange, and the other was a pale-yellow disc hanging further off. Below the suns were mountains, their ridges crowned with thick clouds edged with gold. The valleys were lusher than I expected, but not green, nothing here was simply green. More like a teal-color.
We stood on a boulder overlooking all of it, no sign of a road or path. Adalinda tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply through her nose. Jax scanned the horizon, taking in every possible threat. Flint hopped up on the edge of the boulder and squinted into the sunlight. I was the only one gawping with my mouth open, but someone had to play the tourist.
There was a moment, a single, yawning second, when everything felt almost weightless. Then the gravity of the place hit. I don’t mean metaphorical gravity. I mean the physics here were different. My body tingled at every edge, rewiring my internal logic.
I looked at Jax. “You feel that?” I asked, my voice oddly thin.
He nodded. “It’s like a pressure change, but deeper. Like it’s in the bones.”
“Lovely,” I said, and tried to ignore the uneasy itching behind my ears.
Adalinda snapped her eyes open. “The boundary here is adaptable. The realm is responding to our presence.”
Well, that was comforting. What the heck did she even mean?
Oh. Oh, no. Without warning, it started. The shift. I had shifted dozens of times before, on purpose, in emergencies, in training, but I always had a choice. This time, it seized me like I had no control over my inner dragon.
My hands went numb first. I looked down and saw my skin crawling, shifting under itself, the blue veins darkening and flattening into ridged patterns. The shift had never been painful, but this was a bit. Maybe because I was resisting. The logical part of my brain said not to fight it, but my panic at losing control made it hard to focus. The scales on my arms shimmered, overlaying my skin, but my hands still had fingers, ending in black-tipped claws. My canines slid into sabers, but my lips couldn’t hide them.
Closing my eyes, I took deep breaths in and exhaled until the panic building inside me lessened. Then I gave in to the shift, allowing my dragon to fully take control. Bright light flashed out of my body as I shifted into my dragon form.
Adalinda and Jax were also in the middle of shifting. Jax’s eyes had gone entirely emerald, glowing so bright they cast green shadows on the rock. His hair blew back even though therewas no wind, and scales were breaking through his skin in neat, patterned lines, each scale gleaming the color of tarnished copper in this light. When Jax looked up at me, he frowned, then released all control to his dragon.
Adalinda’s shift was eerily graceful and a lot quicker than ours. Her skin took on an iridescent shimmer. Her pupils elongated to vertical slits, and when she blinked, it was with a nictitating membrane like a lizard’s. She unfurled her wings and smiled, unbothered by the new arrangement of her face.
I turned to see where Flint had gone and found him a few feet away with his face scrunched in pain. My heart squeezed. I wanted to pull him in my arms, which wasn’t really possible in my dragon form. He made a noise that was halfway between a mewl and a bark, but his eyes were twinkling. I didn’t know what to expect since he was already a dragon.
