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“The devil!”

“OMG, the special effects are insane!”

They point their phones and their eyes skyward.

I know that this feels like a moment of revelation, and maybe ten to twenty years ago it would have been, but things have changed a lot lately. Humans no longer entirely believe the evidence of their eyes, and that is a very good thing, because what is happening before their eyes would have caused a worldwide crisis if it had happened any time before the advent of artificial intelligence, Photoshop, and mass media manipulation.

People are recording this, but their videos will be instantly discredited. It’s happening with the Hollywood sign in alignment behind her, so it looks like an attempt at viral marketing.

She is beating her wings, going far too high. She cannot help it. It’s reflex, one she does not understand and cannot control. But she cannot stop, and there is only so far one can rise before the wings start to tire.

She falters.

They’re too much for her. I do not know that her body has any ability to use those wings properly. Does she have the muscular control? Does she have the skeletal structure?

She starts to fall. Tumbling head over heels, wings askew.

I take my dragon form. I have no choice. I burst from the ground and of course I catch her in my talons, stopping her from falling and being destroyed on the ground.

We have to go. We cannot stay in this world. Whatever is happening to her is not born of this place.

I open a portal in the middle of the first O of the Hollywood sign, and fly through, tearing it into pieces in the process. Just insane enough that nobody will ever believe what they saw. It will all be forgotten in a week, just the way the spate of actual UFOs was that one time. The world no longer has eyes for miracles.

I step from the human realm straight back into the Golden Keep.

“Medic!” I call for aid even as I take her to the infirmary. This is not good. She will survive, but she is clearly in pain. The whimpering sounds she is making are quite pathetic and nothing like the ones she makes while being punished. This is a different kind of agony.

Her wings are bloody from their first emergence. I think they might also be broken because of the way she fell. They are quite large, and wings are delicate things when they bend the wrong way. Young whelps learn to fly when they are much lighter and smaller. To be suddenly saddled with wings you don’t know how to use as an adult is a horror.

I take her straight into the infirmary, where she is sedated and given pain relief. Her wings tuck up behind her, but do not disappear the way dragon ones do when we take out different forms.

“What happened to her?” I ask the healer, Aja. “Have you ever seen such a thing?”

She sleeps on her stomach as her wings are carefully expanded and inspected. There is an air of curiosity and reverence in the room. We are witnessing something unprecedented. A human with full span developed wings capable of flight.

It takes some time before Aja speaks.

“Usually a human takes the semen of a dragonkin and produces a whelp who conforms to dragonkin shape and has a human form, a humanoid form, and a flight form. What’s happened here is… different.”

“Help me, don’t just tell me it’s unusual. I know it’s unusual.”

“Did anything happen out of the ordinary?”

“She escaped to the human world.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well. That is not how it is supposed to work, is it. You see humans must stay in the dragon realm once they are seeded. Their bodies are, well, by their definition infected. Returning to the human world changed her human form. These wings are… frankly, mutations. Abominations. They are not the wings of a dragon. They are, like humans, entirely unscaled. They don’t have the structure or the strength they would need in order to attain sustainable flight. I recommend amputation.”

I nod. “Take them off.”

CHAPTER 8

Melissa

I wake up lying on my stomach with my shoulders bandaged, but without the horrific wings that hurt like hell. I don’t know whether to be relieved or furious. Something that was mine has been taken from me, but it was something I couldn’t control and hurt like hell every second of its existence.

I was trying to run away from Ornix when it happened, when the itching and the bleeding and the weird pressure suddenly turned to relief and then the new limbs on my back started to follow the impulses of my mind. I was flying before I knew what was happening. The ground just fell away from me, right up until I started to fall back toward it.

When I look around, I see that Ornix is right next to me, eyes focused on me. I have the feeling he has not stopped watching me since we returned from the human world. A wave of relief and guilt washes over me at the same time.