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“Wow, pretty!”

“Very,” he says, slowly easing out of my tight sex. “We are going to have one quick walk around to see if that triggered the seal, and if not, we are going back to my realm. I cannot risk you being seen.”

“People will see me outside, though?”

“As long as they think it’s a costume, it won’t matter,” he says, righting his clothes. “Just. Don’t. Fly. Understand?”

“Yessir,” I agree. “Don’t fly.”

CHAPTER 11

Melissa

Okay, I get outside and kind of fly right away.

I know it’s disobedient and obviously a problem, but when a girl gets her wings, she wants to put them to use. We are on the sidewalk, with people going back and forth, but I figure they won’t believe what they see anyway. They’ll think it’s a trick. Guide ropes or whatever.

I flap my wings and zoom up next to the building.

Flying feels a little like walking probably did at first. It is an awkward, wobbly process, but it’s already better this time than it was the last. I think I am going to get the hang of it.

“Come down!” Ornix is instantly furious, of course.

“I don’t know how to land!” I yell the words back at him. It’s a lot easier to go up than it is to come down, that’s for sure.

“Just let more time elapse between beats, and make sure you flap before you land so you don’t…”

“Ow!” There is a very unpleasant crunching sound as I land, or not so much land, as fall, right in the middle of the sidewalk. A man on his phone steps over my leg, which is at a weird angle.

“Break both your legs,” Ornix sighs.

“I think I might have broken one of them.”

“Yes. I’d say you have,” he sighs more deeply. “Keeping you in one piece is fast becoming an exercise in what feels like futility. Does it hurt?”

“I think it’s going to. In a second.”

He picks me up ever so carefully and before I know it we are back in that infirmary with an old dragon doctor who also seems unsurprised to see me again.

“I’ve seen fledgling whelps do themselves less damage leaping off the top of the Golden Keep before their wings are fully grown,” he says. “What are you doing to yourself?”

“Experimenting?”

“The wings don’t fit her,” Ornix says. “They keep coming back. This time they’re stronger, but she doesn’t have the natural instinct of how to use them.”

“Hm,” the doctor says. “Interesting.”

“My leg really hurts.”

“Yes. I imagine it would.” The doctor lays his hands on me and closes his eyes. I am between two massive dragonkin, broken again. I have never spent so much time being injured in my life. It doesn’t hurt like it should, and the longer the doctor stands over me, the less it hurts.

“Human bones are soft and easy to heal with the resonance,” he says. “She will be well in the morning.”

“Will it hurt now, or can I take her back to the human realm again?”

“I would have her rest here.”

Ornix sighs. “The seal is getting further and further away all the time. We have no idea what has happened to it.”