Page 4 of Her Dragons

Now Lily was stunned.“Prison?”

“Oh yeah,” said Alex.“Assault and battery.He beat up some human kid who was hitting on his girlfriend, if you can believe it.”

Lily looked off, almost dizzily.“Oh my God…”

“I was one of the guys in the gang who pulled him off the kid,” Alex continued, “before the cops got him.He was pissed as hell at all of us for not backing him up and not helping him get away.And for testifying against him in court.Before they took him away at his sentencing, Mark swore he’d get even with the rest of us some day.But none of us ever saw him againafter that.Good riddance, we thought; we wanted to look tough and be tough, but none of us wanted a prison record.”

Lily looked into empty space and gulped, trying to match the Drake that she’d lived with, and the Drake that Alex once knew.“I can’t believe it,” she half-whispered.“I got away from him today, and who do I end up with?”She cast a sidelong look of amazement at Alex.

“Hell of a small world, ain’t it?” Alex said.

“Now,” I insisted, “you have to let us help you.”

She now sounded not just unbearably sad but unbearably tired.“He used my failure to make me feel like my life was hopeless without him.He made me feel like I needed him to take care of me, like I couldn’t make it without him.He acted so sweet at first — and he was such a monster.I just want to disappear.”

“As of right now,” I said, “you’ve officially disappeared.You’ve disappeared right here with us.And you don’t have to appear anywhere again ‘til you’ve got things sorted out better.You need some rest.Like I told you on the way over, we’ve got two spare bedrooms here.Alex is in one; you can take the other.”I got up and gestured out of the kitchen.“Let me show you.”

Once we had Lily in the other guest room with the door closed behind her, Alex and I lingered in the hall outside her door, our minds whirling over the way our little evening at the concert had turned out.

“Mark Reinhardt,” I said softly, rolling my eyes at what fate seemed to have done here.

“Yeah,” said Alex, frowning, gazing at the door behind which Lily was now climbing into bed.He repeated the name that he thought he’d never mention again.“Mark Reinhardt.”

CHAPTER 2

Alex

I was the first one up the next morning.When I rolled out of bed naked as usual, I sat yawning and stretching on the edge of the bed with a replay of last night rolling in my head.

Resting my arms, I grunted softly at the thought, We’ve got a houseguest, don’t we?And of all the people in the world to be putting up, it’d have to be somebody trying to get away from him.It had to be that guy.

My mind then conjured up a picture of Mark Reinhardt the way the rest of the Firewings and I saw him last: being hauled off from the courtroom to the prison where the State would be putting him up.And with that little mental video came his last words to us, spewed out with hate: “I’m gonna get you guys.None of you had my back, so I’m gonna have your ass, all of you.I’m gonna get you, just wait.Just wait…”

I smirked at the thought, that must have gone over well with the Judge.Bet that went on the record and counted against him when it came to time off for good behavior.Not that “good behavior” was something Mark Reinhardt was ever really good at.I mentally flashed on the kid he’d beaten up, the way he looked in bandages with his arm in a sling.He was there in the courtroom for the sentencing too, looking very satisfied when the Drake who would have killed him, if my buddies and I hadn’t pulled Mark off him, was led away.

How, I wondered, did my old gang mate go from being thrown behind bars to being a Junior Executive with a Big Pharmaceutical company?Mark was one of the older members of the Firewings, a few years older than I was.It’s possible hecould have gone to college like I did when he got out.The Drake community has grants and scholarships for members of our own kind needing a hand with education or a second chance after hard knocks; he could have gotten one of those.It had put me through school, where I met Jake, and it had helped me when I had a hard knock of my own, which we hadn’t brought up to Lily Turner last night.But what then?How could Mark have gotten that far, that fast?

Probably the same way he first rose up in the ranks of the Firewings back in the day.Mark was one of the most badass dragons on Flint Street.I could only guess that, in his time with Harbor Pharmaceuticals, he’d made himself the most badass Junior Executive in the boardroom, getting other people behind him with his “Alpha male” charisma and bullying his way up the corporate ladder.It would be a totally “Mark” thing to do.

I shook my head at something I’d learned in college.The whole “Alpha male” thing was really a crock.It didn’t exist in nature; it was an idea that some scientist came up with when studying captive wolves who weren’t even taken from the same pack; they were just thrown into a pen together.Human and Drake men had picked up on the “Alpha” thing because of the way it stroked the old male ego — just one of the things about men that responded to a good stroking.Some human men and men of my own kind had taken on a part of nature that wasn’t even real to make themselves more “manly” and powerful than others, to beat other males down and build themselves up.Also, to get females down on their backs.

And poor Lily Turner, this curvy, gorgeous human female we took in last night, had wound up with Mark Reinhardt and his artificially hopped-up ego.There was nothing surprising about the fact that Mark had spent two years giving this girl the back of his claws and the flat of his tail.The only surprise was that she’d come out of it as beautiful and not totally brokenas she was.There was something about her that no amount of cruelty from a bastard like Mark could crush.Good for Lily.

Now, though, she was sleeping in one of Jake’s uncle’s guest rooms and we were going to have to figure out what she’d do next.

Lily Turner didn’t need to be beaten and whipped.She needed to be touched, for sure — but not the way Mark did.Lily needed to be touched by someone who could show her how beautiful she was, someone who could make her feel the way a woman like her ought to be made to feel.A good Drake guy could do that for her.Too bad she had spent the last two years of her life with a Drake guy who was no damn good.

I went to the chest of drawers and pulled out a thong to wear.Lily should be used to Drakes having no body shame and Drake men in the morning going in just thongs, or even wearing nothing at all.If Jake and I had met Lily any other way, the two of us right now wouldn’t be wearing thongs with her.We’d be waking up with her from a night of sharing things without clothes.But that wasn’t the reason we’d brought Lily home with us last night.I wondered whether she’d ever be in any state of mind for those things with a Drake guy again.If she were, we’d make it good for her.Jake and I had always been with women who had a good shape on them, but were not as curvy.My word for them would be “sleek.”Lily’s body was more like a winding road where it’d be fun to take the curves.That wasn’t the reason she was with us now, though.We’d brought her home to keep her safe from a guy who’d taken those curves with screaming and screeching, when they were meant to be taken smoothly and gently.

Poor Lily.Maybe if this woman who’d been done so roughly and meanly could see her way to trusting us enough, we’d show her how good it could be with a Drake guy.But thatwas totally her call.I wasn’t about to make her feel like she was obligated to us, and neither was Jake.She’d had enough of that.

Wearing just my thong — which, like all thongs worn by guys like me, was stretchable in the back to allow for the change in our shape — I stepped out into the hall and walked down the way to the guest bedroom where we’d left Lily.Knowing she was in there, I paused just enough to try to picture the way she might look right now.I knew what the room and the bed looked like, but how did the sleeping Lily look?In my mind’s eye, she was curled up beneath the covers, maybe having the best sleep she’d had in a long time — because she was sleeping without him.Damn Mark Reinhardt, anyway.How many times had Lily gone to sleep next to him, wondering how he’d treat her the next day, or hurting from what he’d done to her in the day just ended?Someone like him had no business with someone like her.

You’re good and rid of him now, Lily, I thought, and walked on down the hall and out into the living room.I went to the terrace, slid open the big glass door, stepped out onto the terrace, and took a deep breath of morning air with the coolness of the ocean in it.Then, I raised my head, shut my eyes, and let my human body go.

My skin and my shape responded.The hair on my head, face, and body disappeared.Human flesh turned to green and blue skin in shiny scales.Hands and feet took on scaly claws and sharp talons.The rear strap of my thong stretched to let the long, flattened reptile tail come out from the small of my back.The front of my thong had some “give” to it as well, to hold a human reptile’s big, rough-scaled double penis — something not to be used with human females.The wide, leathery wings grew and stretched out on my back from between my shoulder blades.My neck grew longer and thicker and took on spines from the back of my head to my upper back; my head morphed from the shape of a man to the shape of a blunt-snouted male reptile withhorns growing from the skull and spines along the jawline.I was now my other self, my dragon self, and spread my wings and jumped from the terrace into the air.Strong beats of my wings caught the morning breeze and lifted me up over the roof, into the sky over Haventon.

The morning air above the city was filled with us, like it always was.From dawn to late morning, a lot of us started the day with a flight, a time to be just a dragon, free to soar, to catch the currents and the air pockets with our wings, to feel the rush of the air on our scales and lash tails and beat wings — to fly.Just fly and be dragons.It was a feeling of freedom that no human could ever know, even if they tried to be like us with their gliders and air sails.There’s nothing else in the world to compare with being a dragon.

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