Chapter III
HAILEY
We turned our backs on the portal and looked around.
The first thing was the sky. It was everywhere, deeper and wider than Earth’s, banded in blue and pale honey, lit by not one but two suns.
One was fat and blood-orange, and the other was a pale-yellow disc hanging further off.
Below the suns were mountains, their ridges crowned with thick clouds edged with gold.
The valleys were lusher than I expected, but not green, nothing here was simply green. More like a teal-color.
We stood on a boulder overlooking all of it, no sign of a road or path.
Adalinda tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply through her nose.
Jax scanned the horizon, taking in every possible threat.
Flint hopped up on the edge of the boulder and squinted into the sunlight.
I was the only one gawping with my mouth open, but someone had to play the tourist.
There was a moment, a single, yawning second, when everything felt almost weightless. Then the gravity of the place hit. I don’t mean metaphorical gravity. I mean the physics here were different. My body tingled at every edge, rewiring my internal logic.
I looked at Jax. “You feel that?” I asked, my voice oddly thin.
He nodded. “It’s like a pressure change, but deeper. Like it’s in the bones.”
“Lovely,” I said, and tried to ignore the uneasy itching behind my ears.
Adalinda snapped her eyes open. “The boundary here is adaptable. The realm is responding to our presence.”
Well, that was comforting. What the heck did she even mean?
Oh. Oh, no. Without warning, it started. The shift. I had shifted dozens of times before, on purpose, in emergencies, in training, but I always had a choice. This time, it seized me like I had no control over my inner dragon.
My hands went numb first. I looked down and saw my skin crawling, shifting under itself, the blue veins darkening and flattening into ridged patterns.
The shift had never been painful, but this was a bit.
Maybe because I was resisting. The logical part of my brain said not to fight it, but my panic at losing control made it hard to focus.
The scales on my arms shimmered, overlaying my skin, but my hands still had fingers, ending in black-tipped claws.
My canines slid into sabers, but my lips couldn’t hide them.
Closing my eyes, I took deep breaths in and exhaled until the panic building inside me lessened. Then I gave in to the shift, allowing my dragon to fully take control. Bright light flashed out of my body as I shifted into my dragon form.
Adalinda and Jax were also in the middle of shifting.
Jax’s eyes had gone entirely emerald, glowing so bright they cast green shadows on the rock.
His hair blew back even though there was no wind, and scales were breaking through his skin in neat, patterned lines, each scale gleaming the color of tarnished copper in this light.
When Jax looked up at me, he frowned, then released all control to his dragon.
Adalinda’s shift was eerily graceful and a lot quicker than ours.
Her skin took on an iridescent shimmer. Her pupils elongated to vertical slits, and when she blinked, it was with a nictitating membrane like a lizard’s.
She unfurled her wings and smiled, unbothered by the new arrangement of her face.
I turned to see where Flint had gone and found him a few feet away with his face scrunched in pain.
My heart squeezed. I wanted to pull him in my arms, which wasn’t really possible in my dragon form.
He made a noise that was halfway between a mewl and a bark, but his eyes were twinkling.
I didn’t know what to expect since he was already a dragon.
Flint’s little body convulsed once, then twice, and then just unspooled.
One moment, he was a compact blue-green baby dragon, the next he was a small, wiry human boy, pale and wearing basic cotton shorts and a tee.
Apparently Kendra’s shifting spells had stretched to Flint.
His hair was white-blond and stuck out in every direction, and his face was sharp, foxlike, but unmistakably that of a child.
He looked down at his own hands, opened and closed the fingers a few times, then let out a peal of laughter so unfiltered, so astonished, that the entire valley seemed to echo it.
“Ha! Look!” he shouted, and it took me a second to realize he was speaking, not just telepathizing. He stood up, wobbly, legs thin as reeds. “Look! I have toes!”
He stomped his feet on the stone, delighted, then ran in a tight circle before promptly tripping and face-planting into the mossy ground. He didn’t even cry. He just picked himself up, brushed dirt off his knees, and started poking his own face with both index fingers.
“Flint. You okay, kiddo?” I said, only the words were in my head like when I project my thoughts to Jax through our mating bond.
He nodded, teeth flashing. “I am like you now!”
He balled up his fists, flexed his arms, then tried to leap into the air.
It was a valiant attempt, but the human body had none of the innate springs he’d relied on in dragon form.
He flailed for balance, then just rolled with it and tumbled in a heap.
When he looked up, his eyes were full of wet, happy tears.
Jax let out a rumble that was somewhere between a laugh and a cough. “Congratulations,” he said telepathically, the voice rough but unmistakably his. “You figured out how to shift.”
Adalinda watched the scene with a smile, eyes bright with pride. “The body chooses its own path.”
We stared at each other, breathing hard.
In this world, the shift hadn’t just altered our bodies.
It had shifted something deeper. I could feel the thoughts of the others, not like mind-reading but as an ambient pressure, a background music of wants and intentions.
Jax was focused on the perimeter, on threats.
Adalinda’s mind was luminous, filled with warmth and calculation. Flint’s thoughts pinged and sparkled.
I lowered my head to Flint, and he ran to me, wrapping his skinny, human arms around my scaled neck.
“Mama!” he shouted, grinning. “I’m so tall now!”
“You sure are.” My voice sounded weird, laced with a metallic overtone. I watched him, trying to memorize this moment. This was my first time seeing my kid discover himself for the first time, and it was perfect.
Flint spun, lost his balance, and reverted, without warning, back into his baby dragon form. The change was instant, almost anticlimactic, but he seemed to take it in stride. Now that he was a dragon again, his mind felt sharper than it had before, almost adult.
“I like both of my forms,” he projected, looking up at me with enormous, crystalline eyes. “But this is the best.”
Adalinda smiled lovingly at Flint. “You are learning quickly,” she said, her telepathic voice a velvet ribbon. “Most dragons need years to master the shift.”
Jax stilled beside me and scanned our surroundings. “We need to be ready for whatever lives here.”
As if on cue, the wind picked up, carrying with it the smell of smoke and something sweet. The vegetation in the valley rippled, shivering in sequence. The clouds above coalesced, stretching into long, menacing shapes. I felt it too, that hair-prickle of being watched.
“Something’s out there,” I said. Jax nodded, tail sweeping the ground in a slow, deliberate pattern.
Adalinda stretched her neck, eyes narrow. “We are not alone.”
Flint scampered up the side of my leg and perched on my back. He pressed his cheek to my neck. “It’s okay, Mama. We’re the scariest thing here.”
He might have been right, but I wasn’t about to take his word for it.
We moved as a unit down from the boulder, Adalinda taking point, Flint and I in the middle, while Jax protected our back. We surveyed the valley, waiting for whoever or whatever was watching up to show themselves.