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Colter let out a roar that wasn’t possible from a human throat, and he lunged forward with lightning speed. He slashed the demon’s arm around my neck with his claws. The demon’s arm split open in three long cuts where the dragon claw had sliced him, and pure darkness spilled out.
The demon let out a banshee shriek and tossed me across the room. I flew through the air and hit the wall above my bed with a cry before I fell to the mattress. My head spun, my vision blurred, and my ears rang. My body shut down for a minute, and I couldn’t see or hear anything.
Slowly, the ringing in my ears stopped, and when I blinked my eyes open, the demon and Colter were fighting. Colter moved with a fluid grace that I hadn’t ever seen before. His fighting was incredible, his movement as if he had muscles in places humans didn’t. He stepped forward and slashed at the demon and backed down again to avoid a blow, only to step forward again.
It was a thing of pure poetry. His face was twisted into a snarl, and the demon’s red eyes looked like never-ending flames as it sneered and snarled and snapped big jaws at Colter.
The demon’s mouth opened on the smooth head almost all the way to the ears, the jaw unhinging, and it looked like he could swallow a human whole with the size of his mouth. He had long, sharp teeth dripping with menace.
Twice, he managed to get Colter. Colter cried out, and blood poured from his cheek and neck where the demon had managed to hurt him in quick succession.
I hadn’t been able to see how he’d inflicted the wound, only that he’d moved in Colter’s direction. And then there was blood.
Magic filled the room, filling it up like a hosepipe had been pushed through the window, and water poured through the nozzle. It was thick and cloying and hot, scalding my skin, and the taste of it metallic. It was almost like blood, but then it was nothing like blood at all. It came from outside and inside all at once, surrounded me, suffocating me, drowning me. I gasped for air and found it easy to breathe. It was everything and nothing at the same time. I knew it was magic—it couldn’t be anything else.
Fear wrapped large hands around my throat, and I grabbed onto my mom’s pendant, holding it in a fist, as if it was a lifeline that could pull me through.
The demon attacked with a series of rapid blows. It looked like Colter was going down, forced to the ground.
“No!” I shouted.
Before my eyes, Colter changed. His body shifted, his bones cracking and popping, moving under his skin, which became increasingly more scaley.
The body grew and shifted and changed, growing in size, and his clothes started to rip—at first the black button-up shirt, and then the black jeans as the body of a dragon grew and replaced the body of the man.
Colter was a large dragon with black and purple scales, the color of an oil spill, filling up a lot of the room with a writhing lizard-like body. He had to be the size of a pickup, and there was barely room for him to move. If my apartment hadn’t had the high, Victorian ceilings, he might have smashed his head through the roof. His face had elongated, the snout pointy, and sharp teeth snapped at the demon.
The bed creaked as it was squashed against the wall, and Colter’s scales scraped harsh lines in the paint on my closet door. He barely had any space to move in my room.
I’d always thought I was lucky to have landed an old apartment with big rooms.
Now, the room looked tiny, bursting at the seams with the dragon and its magic. It had never been built to hold a creature like this.
The demon tried once or twice to fight back, but its attempts to slash and claw at Colter failed now that Colter had thick, leathery skin.
Colter pinned the demon to the ground, his big muzzle wrapped around the demon’s neck and shoulder. The demon screamed, a sound so shrill and awful, the windows in my room shattered. Flying pieces of glass cut me on my cheeks, my arms, and my hands as I tried to shield myself against it, and the wind tugged and whipped my curtains into the daylight outside.
The demon turned its head to me, those red eyes yanking me toward him. I didn’t move physically, but it felt like the monster had somehow grabbed hold of my soul, and it was trying to drag me along with it to wherever it was that demons went.
Colter let out a roar and scratched the demon’s face with his claws so that the demon screamed shrilly again.
Where the eyes had been was nothing more than a gash of darkness now.
A moment later, the demon disappeared as if it had never been.
I fell onto the mattress. It felt like my insides had been cut up, and everything hurt.
Colter’s dragon turned to me. My vision blurred and darkened around the edges, and I only saw a dim image of Colter shifting back into human form. The large, scaled body shrunk and took on the familiar human shape again.
“Liv?” Colter asked, and his voice was filled with concern. He took a step closer to me.
Just before my vision went black, I realized he was completely naked. Right, his clothes had torn off his body when he’d shifted. If I hadn’t felt like I was going to pass out, I would have stared at the perfectly chiseled chest and abs, the inverted triangle of a torso on his narrow waist, power pistons for legs, and the enormous cock that hung in between those legs.
Before I had a chance to really appreciate what was probably already a hallucination or dream, I slipped away into darkness.
“You’re going to be okay,” Colter’s voice pushed through the darkness. I tried to follow the sound, to hold on to it, but it kept slipping through my fingers. “Liv, just hold on.”
I wanted to answer him, but Colter was so far away, and there was so much darkness.
