Page 116 of Centaur Bolt

Scales? I stared down at them. They were definitely scales. A beautiful, intense yellow.

It wasn’t the first time I’d sprouted scales, but before, it had been connected to my earliest Jumps. Since changing into a Dire, I’d had more of a tendency to go fuzzy rather than scaly.

What the fuck was going on?

After a few minutes, both the flush of heat and the scales vanished, leaving me weaker than a newborn kitten and very glad I hadn’t insisted on trying to walk.

“Do we know where we are?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Dragon said.

“No,” Marcus grumbled over top of him.

Havoc snorted. “We are close,” he added.

Marcus sighed, a curiously defeated sound. “Close to what?” he asked.

When I glanced back, the Dragon’s eyes glowed. “To the Witch,” he said.

When Marcus said nothing, I clung to the saddle horn and closed my eyes.

Dragons. Centaurs. Unicorns. And now, a Witch.

Well, why the hell not?

* * *

Havoc caught us a rabbit.

Well, if rabbits were the size of a bear and covered in striped fur. It did have long ears, though.

I watched out of the corner of my eye as his Dragon self—a much smaller version than he’d been before—breathed fire over rocks he’d gathered, before shifting back to human. His thick fingers bound the meat in wet leaves and tucked them between the superheated stones.

Wet. Everything was wet—hair, my clothes, the leaves, the trees. But with the darkness, the rain had, at last, tapered off. I supposed if I weren’t so damn overheated, I might be cold. Instead, I burned as though I had a fever, but without the chills.

Havoc only had part of my attention as I washed Marcus’s shoulder wound with a bit of my tee shirt that I’d torn off. His transformation back to human had been far more involved than Havoc’s to Dragon, and it had taken the last of the strength from him. His arm muscles trembled as he leaned forward and wrapped them around his knees while watching the steaming in progress.

“Glad to see your cooking skills have evolved,” he told the Dragon.

Havoc’s copper eyes flashed at him. “A fire would be stupid.”

Marcus assessed him before asking. “How many did you kill?”

“Five,” Havoc replied.

“And Isobel?”

“No sign of her or her bitches,” the Dragon snarled. “I wouldn’t be here if there had been.”

Marcus frowned. “We seem to have dropped off the priority list.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Not sure.” Marcus’s eyes slid closed. The shoulder wound was deep. The rock had not only pierced into the muscle but, I thought, bruised the bone as well. I didn’t think anything was fractured, but I couldn’t be sure. All I could do was clean it. I’d washed the blood away with water from the little stream we’d camped beside, but I lacked a way to even boil it.

“This could get infected.” I peered into the wound.

“Centaurs have good resistance to infection,” Marcus muttered. He sounded ready to collapse.

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