“Dragons don’t like touch,” I said, because apparently my mouth had decided to join the list of compromised systems.
“No.”
“I forgot.”
He looked at me, level. “I did not.”
There were several ways to interpret that.
He turned before Icould answer. “Walk with me.”
The distance between us didn’t go back to what it was before. If anything, he walked half an inch closer.
* * *
The training grounds were on the seaward side of the compound, behind a set of doors that took two thumbprints and a retina to open.
“You do not have access to this section,” he said.
“Then why are you taking me through it?”
His weight shifted forward, sightline already on the doors. “I am not taking you through it. I am taking you past it.”
The doors opened as someone else exited. We walked past them. For the first time in my life, I saw a dragon mid-shift.
I had read every classified bulletin. I had watched every piece of grainy surveillance footage the agency had on file. I had thought I knew what the shift looked like. I had been wrong.
It wasn’t a transformation. It was acorrection. The body of the dragon was the true body and the body of the human was the lie, and what I was watching at the far end of the training yard was the moment a body remembered what it was.
The shift took four seconds.
Four seconds of the human form going long and wide and impossible. The bones doing things bones couldn’t do. The skin going scaled and gold and dark in the same wash. The wings unfolded with a crack, remembering their creases.
The dragon looked at me. A hundred yards away. Mid-shift completed, wings half-tucked, head ten feet off the ground at the lowest. It looked at me across the yard for one long second.
I didn’t move.
Beside me, Dominic did. Not much. A shift of one boot. A turn of his shoulder. Barely movement at all unless you had spent the morning memorizing every inch of him like a professional idiot.
Suddenly more of him was between me and the yard than had been there a second before.
The dragon across the stone lowered its head.
Dominic’s hand opened at his side.
The yard went quieter.
Three shifters near the far wall stopped talking. A woman carrying a coil of rope looked over and then very carefully looked away. The dragon watching me blinked once, slow and deliberate, and angled its head aside.
“Do not stare, Ms.Cordero,” Dominic said quietly.
“I’m not staring,” I said. “I’m observing politely.”
“You are staring.”
I made myself look away before the enormous black thing across the yard decided my manners were a personal insult. Or before Dominic decided for it.
“Who’s that?”
