Page 55 of Dragon 7

Is that. . ?

My hands stilled in the dirt. The burning stopped reaching for my arms and my legs. It gathered. All of it, drawing into one place, beneath the bone, white-hot, and I could only lie there and feel my beast climb—so vast, fierce, and impatient, lifting up out of the center of my chest.

There. . .my dragon-shadow lifted free of me for the first time in my life.

Oh. My. Fucking God! That’s. . .

This gigantic mystical beast poured up out of my chest in churning, shimmering ribbons of black smoke, and it kept rising, unfurling wider and wider, smoke breaking loose off its body and drifting up to pool against the sky.

Oh fuck! It’s massive!

I had carried this beast my whole life and never once seen it, and now it hovered over me, filling the entire clearing.

T-this is happening! Fuck!!

My mother said it was real and told me stories.

My Tiger said it was real and claimed she saw him.

But oh my fucking God for me to see it myself. . .

Its long serpentine body coiled up into the dark, scaled in shifting black that turned over itself like a storm cloud, ridges running its spine, two horns sweeping back from a huge skull. Wings stretched outward from its sides, wispy, trailing smoke, and blotting out the moon.

My dragon-shadow looked down at me, and its eyes opened.

FUCK! It’s terrifying. . .good. . .

His eyes were two points of fire in all that black, deep gold at the edges and white at the center, the same fire that had just burned through me.

As the beast rose higher, his molten gaze found me on the ground, and those eyes knew me, better than I knew myself.

It worked. Whatever my Tiger did. . .it fucking worked. I can see it.

I stared at the shadow-beast in utter shock. “Y-you’re there. . .I see you.”

The beast blinked and reared back its smoking head, and its jaw split wide, and fire poured out of it—but not real fire. Gold shadow. Wisps of it, curling, weightless, and the same drifting smoke its whole body was made of. Beautiful and soundless, the gold fire spilled across the clearing.

And even though it was probably invisible to anyone who watched, the trees cracked from that unseen fire.

FUCK!

My lips parted.

My beast washed the shadow-fire over another tree line, and the trunks split where it touched them, splintering, groaning. Whole branches tore loose and crashed down into the dark.

The wisps could not be more than smoke, weightless, unreal—and they broke the forest apart anyway, snapping wood like the hand of something that did not care what was solid and what was not.

Can we do that to people?

The beast snapped his gaze back to me and then. . .he nodded its massive head. . .

It hears my thoughts. . .of course it does. . .

My heart slammed in my chest.

O-kay. . .

Gunfire rose on the island.