Though I was certain she couldn't speak draconic, I stuck my nose just inside the door; as far as it would go, and hissed for her.
"I'm almost done. I'm sorry. I'm working as quick as I can. What was all that noise out there?"
I pulled my head back out, retrieved the gun that had been dropped when I'd shoved the human, and tossed it inside. Her head poked out of the room and went white as a sheet when she saw it. She dove back into her room to gather whatever the fuck was still so important that I was waiting on her.
Mostly I was thankful that I'd left the whelp at home. I doubted that any of my wingmates would be happy about it, but I'd put him down on the table before I'd taken off again. He didn't need to be exposed to this sort of nonsense. We'd all seen too much as youngsters. It had affected my wingmates deeply, myself a little less but enough that I couldn't really trust humans.
The tank drew ever closer and I growled, impatient. If she wasn't out in the next minute or two, I was going to leave her to the justice of the human authorities, the rest of my flight be damned. Shells could kill me if they hit me in the right place, and she'd be dead when they leveled the building, anyway.
She ran out just as the thought left my mind. All she carried was a doctor's bag stuffed to bursting, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Was she cold in the sky? The idea hadn't occurred to me when we'd flown back, but she didn't have a heater living in her stomach, either. Poor little warm-blooded witch. My heart bled for her.
Olivia hauled herself onto my back and I took two steps before I saw the barrel of another tank come around the corner just ahead. I backed up, and heard the crunch of the tank behind me as it drew within range. Looking between the two, I moved toward the side street just ahead of me and heard one of the speaker systems crackle to life.
"We don't know what you want with us, but if you don't stand down and make your pet drop you, we're opening fire."
What. The. Fuck.
Did they think she was some sort of alien? Olivia Monx, warrior princess, riding her fleet of dragons into eternal battle. Come on! I hissed at them, showing all of my teeth, which was probably a bad idea. But what were they thinking?
"He's not my pet. He's my friend," Olivia called, tightening her hold on my wing joint. "And if you open fire on him, you'll be killing an innocent citizen. He's a person under those scales and he's completely unarmed."
Unarmed, unhanded; whatever she wanted to call it. My paws were better at gripping her stupid little bag than she was, anyway.
There was a long pause before the foremost tank lowered its barrel to my face. This was how it had happened years ago, with Mother. This was how it was going to happen to us. Even if I moved quickly, if I threw the first tank, the second one would kill me; or injure me badly enough that I wished to be dead. Caught between a rock and a hard place, I waited for the shot.
And it came.
...But nothing hurt.
The shell stood in front of me, a sparkle of bright pink magic holding it away from my face. A second shell waited behind me, stuck in the same shield. I looked back at Olivia, who poured sweat as she maintained the spell. She panted down at me. "Would you get going? Please?"
My mind ran through what I could do. Both of her arms were extended, meaning she had no real purchase on my back. I snapped my jaws through the handle of her bag and knocked her off. Before she hit the ground, I caught her with a paw and jumped into the air. The first few wing beats were rough, choppy ones, but we got through the clouds and beyond the visibility of the tanks.
Back into the place where I belonged.
"Thank you," she said, hanging in my clenched paw.
I lowered my head to look down at her. "You just saved my life and you're thanking me?"
"You saved me as much as I saved you," she said, patting my paw. "And you grabbed my bag. Can I have that?"
She took the bag from my clenched teeth and held it aloft as we flew back toward the house. Though I worried that, perhaps, we would be too late. If there were tanks headed to a bed and breakfast, would they be so quick to come after Eskal's house? There were four different places we could be, but Eskal had been taken in by the authorities. Surely, they would look at his and Nariti's places, first?
"What are we likely to do now?" she asked. "We have to get the eggs somewhere safe, but after that? What do you guys do when everything's fucked to pieces? Because this has to have happened at some point to all of you."
I felt a flutter of pride drift through me. "It happens now and again. We can't always control our shifting. Iyadre brought down an entire restaurant a few decades ago when he was a professional chef. He couldn't handle one more bad review and raged into dragon form. We moved from California because of that one."
"Have you guys spent your whole lives running from who you are?"
The question was an innocent one
