Skyborn (Dragons & Druids #1)(12)

“Yeah, well, what if tomorrow morning you woke up completely human, in a new apartment with new roommates and a bunch of other crazy stuff? What is the one thing you would want?”

She grit her jaw, silent. After a few beats, she answered, “To be a shifter again.”

I nodded. “Exactly.”

Logan placed a hand on my shoulder. “Alright. I think that’s enough for toni—”

He was cut off by a shrill hissing sound. It was like a massive tea kettle had gone off and I could actually feel pressure building around my body. My ears hurt and my chest was constricting, making it hard to breathe.

“DOWN!” Nadine wrapped both arms around Logan and I, yanking us to the ground just as a sonic boom blasted every piece of glass in the room, shattering it to bits. Nadine was surprisingly strong, and I fell to the ground hard, sending a shooting pain up my elbow. I grabbed my ears, sure that they were bleeding. Shaking my head, I tried to clear the ringing that now whined there. Nadine’s clothes tore; the faint sound of cracking bones filled the room, and she changed into her wolf form. I looked up, slightly dazed, to see Logan crouched before me, fighting his own change. Black scales were crawling down his face, his neck, his left arm.

Whoa.

The entire outer wall of the entertainment room had been blown out and a troop of hunters now stood behind a man with a bald head and red tattoos—the same man from my dragon sleep-induced dream. How was that possible?

“Druid,” Logan spat as the pack assembled before him. Four had shifted to their animal form while the other two stayed human. The humans, Gear and Cooper, were pulling crazy weapons out from behind their backs and from inside of their boots. Cooper had what looked like some small throwing knives in his hands, the tips glowing a fiery yellow, while Gear was holding a sleek black gun in each hand.

I went to move and Logan’s tattooed hand reached backward suddenly, grasping my right ankle tightly.

“Hey! Owww!” I told him, as I instinctively tried to jerk back, but his strong hand pinned me and a green light poured from his palm, crawling up my leg and wrapping around my pelvis. It moved up around my entire upper body until I was encased in a bubble of greenish-blue light. It tickled my skin, encompassing all of me in a magical haze. I was both fascinated and terrified. I tried to move but was cemented to the spot. Logan let go and I realized he had once again caged me.

“Logan!” I tried to scream, pushing against the green light. My dragon scales were already pouring across my skin but I couldn’t move. I just sat there helplessly on the ground as the hunters advanced with weapons drawn. I tried one final time to stand, but the heavy green magic blanketing my body pushed against my efforts and kept me frozen in place. What the hell had he done to me?

Logan ripped off his shirt quickly and stood, pants and underwear dropping to the floor, which left him completely and gloriously naked, with his back to me. Don’t look, I told myself, but I couldn’t look away and my eyes landed right on his impressively toned glutes.

Good Lord, he must do squats in his sleep.

Black scales began to pop up on his feet, working their way up his calf and then along his shoulder blades, meeting at his lower back. His muscles changed, bulking out, as the pack leapt out onto the snowy forest floor, pushing the hunters back and away from the house. The druid had his hands sunk deep into the earth; his eyes glowed red, and a crimson mist of what I assumed was magic poured off of him.

Logan moved towards the outside, his figure hulking larger and larger with each step. When he was fully transformed, all I could do was gawk at the massive size of his dragon. I could see now why the alpha had called me small. Logan was a menacing twenty feet tall. The tip of his black tail had serrated spikes on it, and he lashed out at the hunters with it, sending them flying to the ground with every stroke—the various pack members pounced on their bodies and ripped their throats out. It seemed blood loss was the best way to kill them.

The druid was encased in his red glowing magic, and I thought there was no way in hell he stood a chance against Logan and his huge dragon. Until the druid started working the red magic with his hands, shaping it into a ball. Okay, that didn’t look so good. He pulled his arm back, and with one quick movement threw the magic fireball straight at Logan’s chest. The black dragon was otherwise engaged and didn’t see it coming. I tried to cry out, but it was too late. The ball of red energy slammed into Logan’s back and knocked him forward a few feet. He opened his dragon snout and roared in fury; the walls of the house shook with the sound.

I felt the tingling along my arms and heard the crisp popping as my red pearl scales came to the surface fully. My dragon could be caged no longer. But one of the hunters had slipped out of the protective line of wolves and was heading right for me. He had an arrow nocked in his bow, the tip glowing bright red. Why had Logan stuck me here in this green blob? I was about to become skewered dragon meat!

My dragon finished the last of her transformation, and although I couldn’t stand, still pinned to the ground, the green magical cage Logan had stuck me in had grown to accommodate my new dragon size. Cool party trick, but I was still pissed.

The hunter loosed the arrow. I raised my left dragon arm to try and intercept it, bracing myself for the pain. But as the arrow crashed against the green light dome, it shattered to pieces, leaving me unharmed. Whoa. I looked up to see that Logan was breathing fire onto the druid, but when he stopped to take a breath, the druid was hovering in a protective red magic dome similar to mine, unharmed. I pushed against my green cage and reminded myself to have a talk with Logan later about his obsession with caging me.