Dating A Dragon(27)
“Hey, stop it! Stop it right now!” Cadence cried out.
Cynthia kept moving towards Maude. Scales covered her body – glowing red scales edged with black. She was like a living flame.
She was going to burn Maude alive.
“Get back!” Cadence screamed. Or rather, she tried to scream. It came out in a blast of frosty air that met with Cynthia’s stream of fire. Suddenly hailstones were swirling in the shape of a mini tornado, blocking the flames. A giant hissing steam cloud formed. The ice on the trees melted and dripped.
Cadence reared her head all the way back on its long, snaky neck and let out a blast of icicle spears at Cynthia. Cynthia had gone full dragon now, as had Maude and Aurelia. Cynthia met the icicle barrage with fire, and an enormous cloud of steam boiled up into the air.
Cadence flapped her mighty wings in rage, lashed her tail, and let out another blast of icicle spears, hundreds of them. She rose several feet off the ground, then twenty feet, so she could circle away from Cynthia’s flame and blast her from behind. She could see it in her mind’s eye, the maneuvers that she needed to do.
Then it hit her. She was in dragon form. She was airborne!
Panic-stricken, she stopped flapping and fell to the ground with such a hard thud that the ground shook.
She felt her wings folding back into her body, tail shrinking and vanishing, curved claws retracting.
Her scales melted into smooth skin, and she was human again, staggering and stunned. She stood naked and barefoot in the snow. Maude shifted back into human form too, and ran up to them. Aurelia circled overhead, flapping her wings and watching Cynthia warily.
Cynthia stood before them in human form, naked and pale, her beautiful hair in wild disarray.
“Oh, my God, I shifted! I flew!” Cadence cried out in astonishment.
Cynthia glanced at Cadence with amusement.
“I really didn’t think you had it in you,” she said. “No, seriously, I didn’t.” And she shifted back into dragon form and flew off, letting out mighty streams of fire as she rose high above them.
“Wait, I’m confused,” Maude said, shaking her head. A big pile of snow slid off a pine tree and plopped onto her head, and she blinked and wiped water from her eyes. “Did she help you on purpose?”
“I think so, but I also think she’d rather jump off a cliff without wings than admit it,” Cadence said, watching Cynthia fly away.
Chapter Eleven
“Hello, gorgeous! I hear you had quite the training session today,” Orion called out to Cadence, who was sprawled out on his enormous bed reading a Georgette Heyer novel.
He strolled over to her as she tossed the book aside.
“Furthermore, I heard that your dragon is one sexy beast,” Orion said to Cadence. “I can’t wait to meet her.”
“I hope that you get to meet her, but I don’t know. I mean, it’s true I can get scaly all over now,” Cadence said, holding out her arm and covering it with scales. Then they melted away again. “And my ice blasts are much bigger. But I haven’t been able to turn again.”
“All in good time. You’re making amazingly fast progress.”
“Flying was incredible,” Cadence mused dreamily, as he sat down on the bed next to her.
“Flying with you by my side will be even more incredible.” He ran his fingers along her arm, raising a trail of gooseflesh.
Then he looked her in the eyes. “You and I have been together. You really could be carrying my dragonlings now. And you know about the issues with dragons losing their clutches.”
“Yes.” Her smile faded. “It’s scary.” Normally a female dragon shifter would be pregnant for seven months, and in the final month would shift into dragon form and deliver her eggs. She would sit on them in dragon form in a nest for another month until they hatched. However, because of the rise in air pollutants and pesticides, dragon egg shells were so thin these days that dragonlings frequently didn’t survive the hatching.
“There’s a clinic in Pine Heights, about an hour from here, that’s been doing some experiments. The doctor there is world-renowned. Dr. Kowalski; she was recruited to work there all the way from Poland. They have had success with surgically removing entire clutches from the mother, coating the eggs with a special breathable substance made partly from the mother’s blood, and keeping them in an incubator.”
“I know of the clinic. How much success?”
“They’ve only done the process with three clutches so far, but they have had a one hundred percent success rate with them.” He frowned. “The best thing for you to do would be to start giving blood now, to ensure that there’s enough by the time they would need to remove the babies, which is at about four months.”