9. Alexandra

They attacked Malik's clanhold at dawn. He had curated a compound over the centuries centered on an old ranch house perched on a hill. Nothing but wild forest surrounded a patch of groomed lawn for miles in every direction.

Malik had a basement, of course, but the housing remained limited. A vampire wasn't worth his weight in blood if he lounged around the house. Instead they were sent to the scattered homes and warehouses around the city to do their work.

All but one of those now destroyed.

This time, Alexandra and Dakota are prepared for wolves.

Alexandra didn"t hesitate to open the fight with her flame. She swooped in low, like a bomber jet, and dropped fire right into the front door of the building where it exploded the windows satisfactorily. She heard several screams cut off abruptly. She growled with pleasure and banked upward, pumping her wings hard to regain lost altitude.

Dakota swept in as she cleared the airspace. His big black wings let him slow in the air and he painted the surrounding forest with fire, drawing his breath in a long sweeping arc just as the defending wolves sprang out of the trees.

They burned.

Alexandra banked hard and lined herself up with the burning ranch house. It flickered merrily in gold and white, gouts of black smoke smudging the morning sun. She carved a low pass through the air and raked at the building with all four claws. She came away with splintered roof, chunks of masonry, and a solid metal beam that must have been load-bearing. The structure collapsed inward in a violent eruption of sparks and fragments.

She dropped burning building pieces into the forest, lighting new patches of fire to disperse and confuse the wolves below.

Dakota swept his flame a second time, covering the other side of the treeline in white-hot plasma that erupted into conflagration.

Only when the hill was surrounded by dragonfire and the morning sun shadowed by acrid smoke, did Alexandra risk a landing.

She crashed deliberately into the burning house, crushing a wall under her weight and swinging her tail around to lay the remaining structure out flat. She scratched at the closed metal door she found buried under the rubble and roared her challenge to Malik directly. Her voice shuddered through the metal.

No vampire who had lived as long as Malik would sleep the day away cornered underground. Consequently, Dakota swept through the air in a widening circle, sharp eyes peering through the forest for any movement from wolves or otherwise. He occasionally dropped lines of fire in the distance, happy to burn the entire countryside to the ground.

Alexandra left him to it. She had a tougher nut to crack.

With detritus from the house swept away under her claws, Alexandra wedged her jaw around the frame of the metal door. It was a solid construction, but the problem wasn't in its design. The problem was no door on earth could stand against a dragon when she decided to open it. Alexandra had a bite-force equivalent to a crocodile the size of fighter-jet with the intelligence to leverage it properly.

In practice, that meant she took a patient minute to wedge one of her lower canines into the seam of the door frame for a good grip, then simply bit down with carefully increasing pressure.

The frame bent first, its rivets popping like gunshots. The door bowed next, folding into her mouth like the world's worst taco. And when she had a solid grip on the structure, Alexandra braced her front paws and, using every muscle in her back and neck, simply lifted the door, its frame, and the connecting descending stairs and hallway right out of the ground.

The early bird catches the metal tube worm, or something. She threw the offending structure toward the trees where it crashed beautifully into a dozen pieces.

Vampires steamed out of the underground.

At the first touch of sunlight they began to smoke, a billowing white ash that filled the stairwell and fogged everything around. The smoke in the air made the light less-than-lethal. Clearly Malik had sent the remainder of his clan to sacrifice themselves for his escape.

Alexandra had to take a breath to draw fire and in that breath the vampires swarmed her. One sprinted up her foreleg and speared his claws into her wing joint. He punched under the ridge of her scales and raked the flesh underneath.

Another slipped past her and raked his claws through the leathery spread of her wing membrane, tearing deep lines in the flesh and even puncturing through as his claws caught on a finger joint.

A third vampire snaked up onto her back. Alexandra didn't let him go any further. She tucked her undamaged wing and rolled, deliberately scraping her scales against the ruin of the house. She wanted to scratch the vampires off like barnacles, but they were too fast. They ran off her shoulder and back, and dodged her swiping claws.

But then she had breath for fire. She tipped her head and breathed the flame right down her chest, across one wing and down to her tail. One of the vampires fled toward the forest. She caught the second in flame, where he crisped into a white ash in a blink.

The third escaped her fire and circled in a billowing, smoking trail until Alexandra had to take another breath. Then he dove in, claws ready to carve through her scales until he reached something critical. Alexandra wasn't faster than a vampire, but she had fought them her entire life. It wasn't hard to predict his angle of attack. She struck hard, her teeth bared not where the vampire was, but where he would be. Her teeth crunched on smoking vampire like bad barbecue.

She rumbled satisfaction in her chest.

In the distance, Dakota landed in the forest and blew a jet of flame at something near his feet. The roar of fire and smoke billowed urgently out of Alexandra's end of the stairwell.

He'd found the emergency exit.

Alexandra shifted. She pulled her dragon inside with steady pressure, her eyes settled on the stairwell for any sign of Malik. The hallway smoked and the shifting air obscured her vision.

Human-shaped, confident in her success and with Dakota as backup, Alexandra stepped down into the dark.

The hallway transitioned from cement supports that had once held the metal doorway down to solid cement walls. Recessed lights had once illuminated the space, their power severed by the destruction above. Doorways split off from the hall left and right, bedrooms, storage, offices and the like. Vampires enjoyed a nice mattress just like anyone else. No coffins around here.

She checked every room carefully, and left their doors open as she worked her way deeper. The smoke billowed across the ceiling—Dakota had clearly lit something on fire at the other end—forcing her to occasionally crouch away from a gust of it. She shifted some of the scales on her face, giving her eyes the nictitating membrane of her dragon—a perfectly clear, soft scale that slid horizontally across the eye—so she could see without her eyes burning in the smoke.

Malik found her, then, in the smoke and the darkness.

A blur of a vampire snapped out of the next room before Alexandra could draw breath. Malik flashed his fangs at her on the way by, a feint toward the exit. Alexandra spun the other way, hands already lifting as claws, her focus on the way the smoke shifted and billowed around her. Malik might be fast, but even in human form, Alexandra was a dragon. Her understanding of smoke and fire far outstripped his.

Malik slid past her claws. She caught fabric and air only. He doubled back, his needle-fangs bared as he struck twice at her chest, then a swipe across her throat.

Alexandra staggered. She coughed blood and fell against the wall. Hot blood soaked her chest rapidly.

Malik sneered at her, suddenly still. His thin hair drifted around his head like the smoke in the hall. He looked physically young. Late twenties at the oldest. But his eyes were ancient and his voice had the lingering pull of an accent long extinct. "Did you think I'd let you have the first strike? My vampires might be poor strategists in hand-to-hand, but I've been around much longer."

He stepped closer, looming over Alexandra as she slipped down the wall. "Did you think you could walk into my home and simply take my heart without a fight?"

Alexandra's heart raced faster, trying desperately to pump blood that was instead leaking onto the floor. She was losing edges of her vision. She needed to shift.

Why was it so hard to focus?

Malik hooked one of his claws under her chin to lift her head. She didn't realize she'd slumped away from him. He smiled at her. "Good night, little dra—hurk!"

A blur of darkness impacted from the right. It tore Malik aside and the force of it slumped Alexandra to the floor.

Dakota. His hands were entirely claw and scale up to the elbow. His teeth were dragon in a human mouth, and he'd clamped down on Malik's throat. He sliced and tore through the vampire, ripping muscle and breaking bone with abandon.

Alexandra narrowed her eyes. Malik was her kill. She was the one he'd been hunting for so long. She deserved to finish him.

She must have make some kind of sound, because Dakota abandoned the ravaged vampire and turned to her, nearly human again in that instant. He hauled her up in his arms and they were outside again, in the sunlight, in a flash. She was losing time. Everything seemed blurry.

"Alexandra!" Dakota shouted in her face. She tried to frown at him. He didn't need to be so loud. The sun was nice, though. She closed her eyes to feel it better.

"No, nononono. You need to shift, Alex. Hey, hey, look at me." His hand patted her cheek gently and she blinked her eyes open again. Did he call her Alex? She hated that. Dakota perched over her with a stricken expression. His hazel eyes were damp. Was he crying? Why was he crying?

She tried to lift her arm to touch his cheek but everything weighed too much. She sighed.

"Alexandra, listen to me. I'm going to call your dragon and it's going to hurt like hell, but you need to shift. You hear me?" He moved, did something she couldn't see, and cursed fluidly. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry."

And he plunged his claws into her chest to kill her once and for all.

The pain crested upward like an oncoming wave. An inevitability that she saw coming and could do nothing at all to brace for it. It rose up over her head and swallowed her whole, a tsunami of roaring agony in every limb, along every muscle, in every bone. She was breaking. Reforming. Shredding. Healing.

She groaned and the sound was a deep rumble of rocks in her dragon chest. Alexandra opened her eyes and found herself large, resting in the rubble of the house. Her entire body ached.

She'd felt the pain of forced shift before. She did it to herself every day. This ache would ease eventually.

Dakota lay slumped beside her, also in dragon form, and completely unconscious. Forcing the shift had knocked him out cold. His black scales were gray with ash and dust.

And a brand new white stripe marred his perfectly dark hide. It cut through his chest at an angle, slicing up over one wing joint and stretching downward to his ribs. A massive, pale scar from the forced shift.

Oh, Dakota…

She snarled at him. Angry that he'd forced them both to save her. That he'd carry the reminder of that act for the rest of his life. And she growled again, remembering suddenly the vampire they'd left behind in the tunnel.

Alexandra stepped over to the stairs. She didn't fit in this form, but if she remembered correctly, the vampire hadn't been in any state to get away. She reached her front paw in all the way up to the shoulder and raked the vampire—what was left of him—out into the morning sun.

She hissed in his face. Malik was alive, though not doing well. His entire chest and belly had been shredded. Most of his blood lay in a pool in the hallway. He bared his fangs at her, but had little ability to do anything else.

She hooked her claws into his destroyed stomach and dragged him across the ruin of his house to a clear and sunny spot. Immediately, the light began to burn.

The smoky clouds thinned and like a creeping wildfire, the vampire burned like coals in an old campfire. The light of destructive fire crept across his face and down his legs, slowly banishing the monster to ash on the breeze. His expression contorted in agony and terror, but Alexandra stood beside him, watching. Unmoved.

Malik had made her life hell for a long time. A clean death under the light was better than he deserved.

His entire body sublimated away into ash. Alexandra stood there for a long time after, staring at the stain he'd left behind, wondering if this was finally the end.

She didn't feel any pleasure at the vampire's death. There was no elation. No sense of freedom.

She'd thought killing him would give her some kind of relief.

Dakota woke with a startled snort. He scrambled to his feet, twisted, found her, and rushed to her side. To her surprise, he rubbed himself up against her, pressing head and neck and body all along hers with a purr that could have vibrated the house apart if it hadn't already been destroyed.

Slowly, still aching from the earlier transition, Alexandra shifted down to human. Dakota did the same, and grabbed her the first moment he could.

He tucked her head under his chin and held her tight, like she might drift away in the ash if he let go. Alexandra sagged against him, leaning into his strength all around her.

She'd thought defeating her enemy would give her joy. Instead she broke down in Dakota's arms. She sobbed heavily, all of her stress and fear pouring out of her all at once. All the terror she'd held inside, packed deep in a box for some time later because now was for survival.

Well it was later. And she was safe in the arms of someone who loved her. Someone who was willing to go to the ends of the earth for her. Dakota helped her sit between his knees. She clung to his dress shirt and screamed her agony into his strong chest for what felt like hours.

In the end she was wrung dry. Emotionally exhausted. Physically wiped out. She sat tangled around Dakota, breathing his spicy scent and letting the direct sun scour her clean of the vampires.

Malik was gone.

She turned her face to the sun and took a deep breath. She was finally free.

Alexandra untangled herself from Dakota and pulled them both to their feet. She left her hand in his as she surveyed the destruction around them for miles. Such was the consequence of going against a dragon.

Pride and fierce pleasure at the evidence around her swelled in her chest. She turned to Dakota. "It's really done?"

"It's done," he said, with that familiar smirk. He tugged her close up against him, chest and hips together. "What do you say to some celebratory barbecue?"

Alexandra turned her face up to him with a grin. "Think you can eat more ribs than me?"

"Probably not," he admitted, his hazel eyes glinting. "But I'm willing to give it a shot." He closed the distance, pressing his lips to hers softly.

She didn't want soft. She grabbed his neck and opened herself to him. She explored with her tongue and nips of her teeth until they both breathed hard.

It was Dakota who pulled up first. "While I'm more than willing to worship you in the ash of our enemies, I think we could both use a shower."

She chuckled and stepped back so they'd both have room to shift.

She tired to do so slowly. Smoothly. Like stretching instead of tearing and breaking. Alexandra didn't have a lot of practice lately, but once she'd been able to do this without pain.

It took a while, and when she lifted her dragon head, Dakota's was there to nuzzle her. She narrowed her eyes at the sweeping white scar across his chest, growling her dissatisfaction. But he knocked her head up with his and purred.

Worth it, she translated. Worth any scar for her.

She bounded away from him all at once, wings up and tail high, daring him to chase. In two strides she jumped into the air, pumping her muscles hard. He pursued.

Together they soared into the sun and left the vampires far behind.