C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

“He looks like me da! ”

I took that to mean Cat wished we would stop having palpitations over the guy, which was fair enough. I wished we would, too, but I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at his backside. “How long,” I said a bit desperately. “How long will it take to get to Evil’s lair?”

“Ah, sure,” Gancanagh said blithely, “ah sure and we’re there.”

A three-headed dragon rose out of the dark and spat fire at us.

If the werewolf hadn’t bit me, I wouldn’t have learned to keep my shields up at all times and we would have been roasted, so in some small way Tia Carley had done me a favor. But the heat blast still knocked us over backward, and we lay there in the dark for a split second before the beast galumphed toward us. Méabh, always quick with a sword, sprang to her feet and charged the dragon head-on while I mostly just wondered who or what I’d offended in a past life that this one was peopled by dragons. Except I didn’t have any past lives, so apparently I’d offended somebody in this life and was facing instant karma. That didn’t really improve anything, in my ever so humble opinion.

Caitríona sat up beside me, both hands fisted against her mouth. Tiny sounds emitted from behind the fists, but at least she wasn’t all-out screaming. Me, I kept lying there, reviewing my list of things to do: heal the werewolf bite. Kill the Morrígan. Find Gary. Save my mother. I added “string Gancanagh up by his luscious toes and use him for target practice” to the list, and finally sat up.

Gancanagh had disappeared. Quel surprise. Méabh’s silver sword barely dented the dragon’s scales, but on the other hand, neither it nor she nor her armor were melting as the monster spat fire at her again. I knew I should leap up and rush to her side, but I didn’t have a damned thing to fight a dragon with. My sword was missing, and besides that, not much use, if Méabh’s was any indication. My power never had cottoned on to being used as a weapon, and frankly, I didn’t think a dragon would be much impressed if I went after it with tooth and nail.

The damned bite flared up again, suggesting I had more tooth and nail at my disposal than usual. I ground my teeth and reached past both pain and temptation—the goddamned thing didn’t hurt when I gave in, at least not once the actual transformation was over—and rather pathetically whispered, Rattler? at the back of my mind. Any chance we can push past the poison for a…normal…shapeshifting?

Perhaps. The magic is there. But the taint is…distracting. My poor snaky spirit guide was really wiped out, if he wasn’t getting all sibilant on his esses. Fix a simple shape in mind, Siobhán Walkingssstick. Something familiar to us both. Something—

“Something that strikes?” I started shimmying out of my clothes. Caitríona dropped her fists to gape at me and I handed her my glasses. “Don’t let them get crunched, okay?”

She took them speechlessly and I interpreted that as agreement. Everything else, including my precious, ruined coat, became a pile on the ground as Rattler coiled himself in my mind. He got stronger the tighter he curled on himself, like he was concentrating his focus so we might shove past the poison trying to turn me into a monster. He balled up smaller and smaller, becoming brighter and brighter, and just at the moment he became incandescent, I snapped the image of what I wanted to become into place.

It was not supposed to feel like the world was being torn apart. Like I was being torn apart. Like my left arm, specifically, had gone to war with the rest of me, resisting transformation with a will of its own. I was a mass of twisting bones, trying to find a shape that satisfied me, but the shape I wanted was at odds with the werewolf’s curse. I changed partway and gasped for breath, caught in a loop of unending shifts.

A hiss erupted from somewhere near the bottom of Rattler’s snaky little soul. He lunged for the wrongness permeating my magic, his jaws gaping in a reminder that snakes could and did eat things three times their own size, and he fastened on to the werewolf’s bite from the inside.

Magic pumped through his bite, spirit animal power at war with demonic determination. That flood of strength backed up my own magic, all the power that had for days been frantically trying to keep me from transforming. Then it superseded my power, freeing up a magic that was working overtime, and between one breath and the next the pain of prolonged shifting was gone. I flowed into my new shape, and struck.

Méabh flung herself to the side as I threw myself into the fray. For an instant she looked as though I might be a fresh new enemy, but Caitríona’s protest reverberated off my ear bones when Méabh lifted her sword against me. Then I was nose to nose with a more-than-slightly shocked dragon, and much like Rattler had done, I dropped my jaw in my own version of a snaky grin. The dragon backed the hell up, all three heads taking a break from breathing fire to get a good look at me instead.

I was pretty sure I was worth looking at, what with being fifteen feet of rattlesnake. Fifteen feet of raspy muscle and rattling tail and, very importantly, of venom-injecting fangs. The dragon was bulkier, but not a lot longer. It had fire, but I was betting I had speed. It had claws, but I had—

—all right, still with the speed, but that was going to have to be enough. I coiled and struck all at once, relying on my peculiar heat-sensing snaky vision to find the dragon’s most vulnerable spots. The throats, in this case: there were heat blooms in all three throats, suggesting the fire it spat was engendered right there. My teeth closed on the nearest throat, quenching the fire a-borning.

Quenching that fire a-borning, anyway. The dragon screamed with its other two throats and flame washed over me. It didn’t burn, my shields as strong in a shapeshifted form as they were as a human, but my muscles kind of melted anyway. Sunshine melting, the happiness of a snake baking on a desert rock. If I’d had shoulders they would have sagged, and as it was, I dragged the head I’d captured with me toward the ground as comfort sluiced through me.

Clearly I had not thought this whole “fighting as a snake” thing through. I clenched my teeth harder, determined not to let the one throat go even if I had to take a little nap mid-battle. The dragon spat flame again, then coiled its other two heads down to gnash at me with multitudinous teeth. I had a much bigger mouth than theirs, and while I could get my teeth around one of their throats, they couldn’t exchange the favor. That was good, since although I assumed poison was pumping through its veins by now, I had no idea how much it took to bring down a dragon, nor was I certain that rattlesnakes poisoned their prey rather than suffocating them. It was possible the poison was just a paralytic to make the suffocating easier, which would be less helpful than it could be if I had one mouth and three necks to choke. And Rattler, who presumably might offer some insight into those questions, had gone quiet inside the confines of my skull. I suspected he might still be fighting the infection, and didn’t really want to disturb him for fear breaking his concentration might send me back to the spasms of conflicting shapeshifts.

The dragon backed up, dragging my melty self with it. I caught a glimpse of the distant blobs that were Méabh and Caitríona, both of them emitting a kind of cool uncertainty that had to be psychic but still registered in my heat-based vision. I wanted to yell to them, to say, “Come on in, the water’s fine!” except I had a mouthful of dragon and the damned thing wasn’t suffocating fast enough. Nor would it ever, with two more windpipes to breathe through. I gave up on the hope of suffocating it, let go and hoped the poison would do the trick before the encroaching warmth-induced sleepies did me in.