Page 112 of Wickedly Ever After
Ida backed through the crack, bumping into Amber’s warm nose, and Alistair followed, but with a sudden sickening sound like a swelled frog popping, Alistair’s head turned into a massive dragon’s skull. Hector’s cry of despair was the last thing Ida heard before he was cut off completely.
Alistair’s human eyes vanished, and his hair too, but he still sported human flesh, all of it turning purple. The door was too small and he was choking.
“Hurry!” Ida stepped back as Amber shot through, trying desperately to get her mouth into some configuration for a kiss, but dragons, it seemed, didn’t have lips.
“Alistair!” Amber screamed, biting his nose, his eyebrows—
Ida sucked in a great gulp of air. Someone needed to be calm; she couldn’t panic. “Amber—listen to me. You must transform.You’ve got to grow some lips, girl—come on, you can do it!”
“I can’t—I can’t!”
“Yes, you can! Transform! You’re a dragon—you can do anything!”
“Alistair!” Amber bit him again, then hunched, squealed, and a strange, fleshy shape took the place of her dragon snout.
Alistair gasped, his tongue protruding from between his teeth.
“Alistair!” Amber screamed, trying desperately to compress herself. She thrashed her wings, and the leathery skin clubbed Ida in the back, pushing her aside. She tumbled backward off the ledge.
For the first quarter second, she didn’t believe she was falling. This was a dream—a terrible dream, but she’d wake up and be back in the dragon’s lair, or in the creepy hostel with Sebastian’s head floating above her like a doomsday alarm clock. Better yet, she’d wake up in the hotel room in Kingsmanor, nothing had gone wrong, and everything would be fine—
The sky fell away as she dropped down. She screamed. She’d hit rocks in a moment.
The world went red.
“Hang on!” Hector yelled.
Adair swirled past in a flurry of scales and wings.
“Hector!”
The wings flashed into view again.
“Grab on!” Hector yelled.
She reached out, missed him.
The wings vanished.
She twisted in the air again, the rocks shimmered below, another blur of crimson, and then a pair of knifelike talons cutinto her shoulder. She screamed again.
The rocks stopped, and she rose upward.
“Hector!” She sobbed. Blood warmed her skin as it flowed down her throbbing arm and back, and then she was back on the ledge.
Hector knelt beside her. “Stay calm.” He pushed both his hands over her wound. “I’ll stop the bleeding.”
“It hurts!”
“It will only take a minute.”
She gritted her teeth and risked a glance. Her robe was saturated with blood, and meat and tendons sprouted obscenely from the ruined fabric. “Oh, Gods.” She tried not to faint. Hector drew a knife from his belt and cut away the lower part of his robe to make a bandage.
“How—how is…”
“Alistair is fine, for a handsome prince, that is. He’s with Amber. Don’t move. There’s not much room on this ledge with them on it.”
“But Adair and Morga are flying. Ouch!”
