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“You can dial the music down, Ian!” Belle bellowed to the bored DJ on one side of the exclusive VIP room in the choicest club in Amsterdam. It was, Samantha thought idly while batting a wine glass between her hands on the table, an empty party the night before an empty wedding. “And grab yourself a drink already. All courtesy of the great, the rich, the absent, the philandering Stephen de Graaf. Skål Godverdomme!”

A ragged and half-hearted cheer went around the room while a creaking groan echoed back and forth within Samantha’s abdomen beneath the shelter of one concealing arm. She had been feeling strange all that day, her digestive tract being extremely unsettled along with a hint of blood had made her think her period had come early.

But in the end there’d been no more discharges beyond the usual. Instead, her abdomen and everything between her coccyx and her pubic arch felt… weird… swollen… and extraordinarily sensitive. Sensitive enough that Samantha had raided her temporary clinic earlier for the inflatable doughnut she was perched upon. She felt both ridiculous and extremely old, at the advanced age of thirty-eight. Sitting on a squeaky piece of polymer while in a little black dress. At least the pleats of her skirt hid the damn thing.

Belle snatched up a tumbler full of an amber liquid that Samantha hazily recalled was a very expensive vintage of cognac and held it aloft before downing the lot. The strikingly red-headed woman roared a wordless challenge to the watching room that would have done her distant Viking forebearers proud and then fell giggling madly onto the couch and Samantha both, with her dirty, stocking-clad feet kicking in the air.

Ian, a man with the wildest array of dreadlocks Samantha had seen in some time, shrugged and killed all the pulsing lights and blaring sound, replacing them with a stream of classical mood music that played at a much lower volume to fill the background. He wandered over to the bar to converse with the incredibly endowed and wasp-waisted blonde there. The one with hips and legs that Samantha could admit were rather enviable. She was bartending in clothes that somehow made her look more naked than if she actually were.

Micah, the bartender, was the one club employee in the room who was actually doing anything at that point. Not that the bartender seemed to mind as she fished another ten euro note out of the string with two triangles sewn to it that somehow passed as a bra. The cash was from Samantha’s other lifelong friend, the giant of a man, Noah.

The jaded doctor that the whole party had been for wondered what gynecologist Micah had visited to have painted on the piece of string covering just part of her obviously irritated labia. As Samantha watched, one of her long-fingered hands reached down below the bar to adjust herself as a grimace flashed across her face. The grimace quickly turned to shock when she unleashed a terrific sneeze that must have irritated her nose as she made a pained grunt with her hands flying to cover her face.

It did not greatly surprise Samantha to see the woman read the room and leave with all the discomfort she was experiencing. Micah sneezed four more times on her way out. Each nasal blast made her chest shift and sway from a lack of support that Samantha was glad she never had to experience in her more petite life.

Micah returned a few minutes later, wearing shorts and a low-cut midriff-baring shirt covering a more substantial bra that still advertised her well-formed physique. A significant improvement over the egregiousness of a pair of strings irritating the most sensitive and nerve-packed areas of a woman’s body. Samantha could see the difference in how easily the bartender now moved. The doctor shook her head, hoping that the tips were worth it.

The bride-to-be watched the staff of the club, not having anyone to really entertain when the entire bridal party consisted of three people, including herself. Scantily clad men and women had given up on titillating their sparse guests and dropped their professional airs to engage more loosely with Samantha and her friends. She had just finished talking with a man as sculpted as Adonis himself, wearing nothing but a sling that only showed how well-endowed he was. He excused himself to go home to his family just across the border as soon as he understood that the night wasn’t going to be as lucrative as he thought. Idiot.

“With the aliens and dragons everywhere… I don’t know why I came in tonight. What use is money now?”

Idiot, Samantha thought with venom, the superficial ardor that attracted her to him cooled the more he spoke. It was a relief when he left. His inanity was making the tension she felt in her body worse, and a bit twitchy.

“Are you sure you’re not a praying mantis, Samantha?” Noah said taking a break from the undoubtedly exaggerated story he was relating to the man and the woman he each had an arm around. He lit the cigarette he took from behind his ear and blew smoke in the air. “You looked like you were going to lay your eggs in his neck.”

“I haven’t felt right all day,” Samantha grumbled, pushing firmly downward with one hand along her spine near her buttocks beneath the snug silver and black dress she wore. “I keep losing my balance, everything is the wrong size, and I am constantly misjudging the distance to my surroundings. Maybe it finally happened. The stress has finally brought me to a cerebral hemorrhage.”

“She’s preeeeeegnant with the prince oooooof Rotterdam!” Belle royally declared from the formal position of being sprawled across the velvet sofa. She poked at her phone until a sudden trumpeting flourish filled the room at deafening levels.

“Give me that,” Noah snatched the phone from her hands and turned the crashing sound off. He sighed when he tried to return it to her, only to find that she had passed out and was snoring in a manner out of all proportion to her skinny frame.

“Good thing we have a chauffeur waiting for us. The way she snores, she really must get herself scheduled for a sleep study.”

“Hmm,” Samantha grunted absently, shifting on her doughnut. She just couldn’t find a way to sit that felt comfortable. It kept feeling like something was stubbing her tailbone.

A pill bottle suddenly rattled in front of her face. Her dazed eyes slowly focused on the label to see it was a bottle of bismuth subsalicylate being held by Noah. In his other hand was a shoulder pack full of basic first aid supplies. It figured that the giant rogue would bring a medical kit to a club.

His companions watched him while he quizzed her on water and salt intake for the day as she took two tablets, letting them soften on her tongue before chewing the chalky drug to dissolution. Samantha wanted to laugh at their star-struck expressions. And they weren’t the only one, she had an admirer of her own.

“Grand Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau Samantha Von Holden,” Micah said, fairly well flouncing in her seat with a flex of her toned abdomen and legs. Samantha’s admiration for the younger woman’s body warred with sudden apprehension at being recognized like this.

Oh, no…

“Can I shake your hand?”

God, I hope she’s not going to work an angle for something. I can’t do this right now. Ever since they granted me that blasted title…

“I wanted to meet the woman who inspired me to make it through graduate school. This is the greatest day for me! I could go on and on all night. How you got aid into Afghanistan! Or the work you did after the 2004 tsunami!”

“That’s great, kid…” Samantha said, grimacing as her buttocks cramped painfully. She could feel her skin jerking as a muscle twitched uncontrollably beneath the flesh of her thigh.

“And what you are doing now!”

“And what are we doing now?” Noah leaned forward to ask, his brows furrowed with worry. There was the whole thing with dragons and aliens that made him a little jumpy from time to time. It was the same emergency that made getting their medical equipment moved imperative before the coming energy embargo. Something the knave that was her intended was lording over them all to get what he wanted.

Her and, eventually, a son. She hadn’t told her friends that part of the grand bargain yet, though. She didn’t want her ersatz partner to die from an unforeseen medical condition before she could force him to save more lives against his naturally selfish instinct.

Micah seemed to realize she’d overstepped in the presence of the man looming over her, even while seated, and she shrank into herself on the couch. She was a little intimidated by Noah’s sheer size until Samantha patted him on the knee and he relaxed back into the embrace of his arm candy.

“It’s okay, Micah. There were a lot of security concerns with this shipment. More than we’re used to. It is vital that we get the shipment out before Europe closes its borders and starts impounding fuel and oil. There are others out there that need to be helped, before no more help comes.”

“I’m going to hug you now. Can I hug you?” Micah said, blushing fiercely beneath the freckles on her fair-skinned cheeks. “They say never meet your heroes, but…” she didn’t even finish before knocking Samantha off her cushion in a crushing hug that was out of all proportion to the taller blonde bartender’s size. Noah laughed uproariously with his companions, causing Belle to waken from her drunken stupor to rub at her eyes.

Hero worship was a new experience for Samantha. She was taken aback by the impact she had on those in her own country, far more used to the reaction of those she actually helped. The nationally recognized woman could have done without feeling like Micah’s unexpectedly mobile nostrils were snuffling at the crook of her neck, though.

When the youthful nascent medical professional leaned back, Samantha was startled to notice for the first time that her eyes were two distinct shades of blue. One much deeper than the other. Aquamarine and cyan. A striking combination that she would have sworn wasn’t there earlier.

Micah relented, and Samantha was able to restore the cushion beneath her unnoticed in the dimly lit VIP room. She had no idea if the young woman was on the track she claimed, but Samantha was willing to give her a chance. Enthusiasm went a surprisingly long way in her world. The philanthropist reached into her clutch, now half-buried into the sofa cushions, to swap phone numbers with the young woman.

“In two days, after my wedding, give me a call. We can always use energy like yours if you are willing to volunteer. If you do your residency with us, there is no place you couldn’t go. I can’t promise the pay will be the best, but the satisfaction of seeing someone smile that wouldn’t have lived otherwise is more valuable to me than all the gold in the world.”

“Oh,” Micah Wolf, she finally named herself, sighed, looking crestfallen as she swapped numbers with Samantha on their phones. “Your honeymoon…”

“Hmph,” Samantha couldn’t help the snort that started in her chest, rolled up her throat, and tickled her nose on the way out. “Sometimes love is not a consideration in marriage. I hope you never have to realize that. Here,” she wrenched one of the gold and platinum rings that she’d been plied with by the man-child that would soon be her husband and handed it to the young woman. “Use that, it’s a Georg Jensen, to pay for your schooling and get out of a place like this. Be better with each day, Micah.”

“Oh! I couldn’t take that, Dame Von Holden!”

Mortified, Samantha rushed to shush her before more of the staff she saw peeking into the VIP room learned of her presence. “Just Samantha, dear friend. And, please, I insist you use it for a nobler purpose than it served adorning my finger to puff my fiancée’s ego up.”

Blushing, Micah slid the ring onto her ring finger. She frowned down at her hand and tried to slyly look at Samantha’s before transferring it to her pinkie. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Samantha. I had been worried about next year’s tuition!”

An idea popped into Samantha’s head as she was bear-hugged again by the youthfully vibrant woman and nearly lifted from her seat. She needed to arrange for a scholarship for medical students like Micah. It was just the thing needed to make the demanding life of volunteerism more attractive to the next generation. It was time for old women like her, she thought wryly, to start encouraging their replacements in the field.

“At least I hope Vrije is open to me next term.” She reached up and rubbed at her face before continuing. Her heterochromatic eyes crossed to look at her nose briefly before their brilliance slid to Samantha’s transfixed gaze. “The future is changing before us. For some, the changes will come sooner than for others. What will life be like for us after this?”

To ponder that, everyone took another glass of champagne. Micah didn’t at first, until Samantha nodded to her, and showed herself not to be shy with drink. Her height must have given her some tolerance. As she rapidly did for a bottle from behind the bar herself.

“What do you think the changed are like?” Belle’s sudden voice made Samantha jump with her hips flexing strangely. “I want to meet one,” she drunkenly admitted. “I want to rub my hands across their scales and feel their long narrow tongue in my mouth as I taste them…” she finished with a giggle, sitting up too fast and collapsing against the sofa with her hand to her head. “Oh, there are two of you!”

Samantha snatched Noah’s medical kit away from her when she stretched one foot out from her seat on the couch to drag the bag closer. Belle lost her balance with the absence of the bag’s weight and spilled to the ground. The only thing of her visible for the moment as the drunk contemplated the floor was a sheaf of her copper hair spread across the filth of dried booze and tobacco ash on the table. Micah and Noah each did a shot of something and slammed their glasses upside down into Belle’s hair.

“Samantha…” she whined, getting to her feet and pulling her hair from the table, knocking the shot glasses astray. “Noah is distur…dispa…disresp…disrespecting my hair again.” The woman, who was actually a year older than Samantha, swayed on her feet until her friend gently guided the drunken woman to sit next to her.

“Alright, I’ve had enough of drunk Belle and her fantasies tonight,” Samantha said, rifling through the medical kit in her lap to pull out what she needed to give an IV.

“Drunk Belle is the best Belle, girlfriend,” drunk Belle slurred and elbowed Samantha, who only grunted. “Ow!” Belle protested. “Did I just hit bricks?” she peered blurrily around for something. Something with bricks in it, Samantha supposed.

“Hold still, girlfriend.” Samantha replied snidely, punching the IV lock into the saline bag and then plopping it onto her friend’s head. Noah and his cohort snickered while Samantha wrapped surgical tape around the saline bag and her friend’s head, keeping it elevated. She pulled the tape tight to add pressure to the bag. In minutes, a steady drip of saline was making its way into Belle’s arm.

Samantha laughed and then held up her cell phone at the same time as Noah, taking pictures of her ridiculously improvised first aid. Belle was beyond caring that a bag of clear fluid was taped to her head.

“Ahhh,” Belle sighed as the cooling liquid spread through her veins. “No more drunk Belle.” Bonelessly, she slouched on the couch in her glittery red dress with arms and legs akimbo. Samantha reached over and pushed her legs back together when they became a bit too akimbo for the length of dress she wore. She would have blushed if there were anything about Belle left to blush about. She hadn’t worn any panties. “That’s the good stuff…”

Micah laughed demurely at the oddity of the scene, and then sneezed with a thunderous blast that rocked her head backward. Her hands flew to her face in shock and from behind them, rubbing below her wide, startled eyes, came her muffled voice.

“Entschuldigung!”

“Prosit,” everyone else said reflexively.

Once, twice, eight times, the roar of Micah’s sneezes startled poor Ian away from the news he had changed the TV behind the bar to. Finished at last, Micah lowered her hands to reach for another shooter of Jenever. Samantha stared for a discrete second at the woman’s broad dorsum, bridge, and widely set nostrils before looking away with a blush she hoped was hidden in shadow. Now she felt she was just being jealous of Micah’s beauty, and was meanly warping her appearance in her mind.

“Belle, your horny zoological fantasies aside…” Noah said.

“Oy, boyo!”

“…you bring up something that weighs heavy on my mind as well. The body cannot be changed so without an equal change to the Id. It is not for us as humans to imagine what they may feel or think now, no more than we can understand how a whale must think. What if the changed are not who they once were? With their strength, they would be most dangerous, ja? If their thoughts are so different that they…”

“But they might be well and sound, too, right?” Micah said, nervously shifting. She seemed to be wanting reassurance about the changed, or the Children of the Egg, as they have claimed they are called in their new bodies. “The change is just one of body, surely? It must be a proximal quality of the broadcast that causes it, correct? There have not been any new cases for a day or two?”

Samantha agreed with Belle and Noah as they replied. There were too many unknowns at the moment. The impossible had become possible, and it had been left to them to discern what that meant, and what came next. There had been no guidance from the governments beyond an inane plea for calm and sober thought. Which made their actions of barring all nonessential use of fuel, set to take effect in two days, all the more jarring with the panic it had caused.

Like cutting off all foreign medical and nutritional aid. Which was all Samantha cared about. Not… how many candied snack varieties she could get at the mart.

Micah sneezed again, and then excused herself quickly as she ran from the room. Her hands once more covered her face as the thunderclaps of her exhalations followed her out. When she returned, having taken long enough that Samantha was on the verge of going to find her, she was wearing a surgical mask to cover her nose and mouth.

“I’m sorry, Dame. I don’t want to risk you getting sick,” she said, not sounding all that convincing. There were tears in her eyes, Samantha saw to her startlement, and she leapt from the couch with unexpected force that nearly had her tackling the woman in her rush to comfort her.

“Are you in danger? Do you want me to leave with you?” Samantha thought nothing about hugging the young woman, moved by her distress. Micah rested her head briefly on the older, shorter, woman’s shoulder before whispering from behind her mask. Noah stood, glowering as only the giant could, and waiting for Micah’s answer.

“No. No, I am ready for this,” she sniffed. Samantha noticed with some uneasy alarm that the sound of her breathing had changed, taking on a raspy quality in addition to the length of her hissing inhalations. “And I hope you are as well. I will see you in the skies, Samantha.”

She left the group with those strange words, begging apologies for the alacrity of her departure. Samantha sighed, growing bored with the stilted socialization full of nervous looks to the ominous thumping on the ceiling and the news, as she was perturbed by the spasms of her buttocks. By mutual agreement, the three friends called their chauffeur to return to their palatial quarters at the estate manor.

****

She had finally put drunk Belle to bed, against her protests for more, and waved goodbye to Noah, slipping into his quarters with the man from earlier. Samantha wanted to give herself an examination in front of the mirror to diagnose the ongoing unpleasantness radiating throughout her lower abdomen.

As she walked from the guests room all the way to the bridal suite her gait began to change under the sideways pressure on her hip joints. Normally, her legs came in a bit to make each step. Now they were swinging forward and a little out, forcing her to relearn how to walk in the more masculine stride. The bride-to-be was passing by her intended’s rooms, she could tell by the techno music and multitude of women’s voices, when the pressure and the strangeness in her hips overwhelmed her. She staggered into a table, knocking over a vase that was probably priceless. She reacted without thinking, snatching the vase out of mid-air with one hand to place on the table and continue on her way.

Samantha fell into her room with a bang. Lucky that no one was around. After shutting and locking her towering door, she wobbled uncertainly to a mirror. Ready to undress for an examination of her body. With shaking hands, she slipped the shoulder straps of her cocktail dress from her shoulders and shimmied it to the ground.

The brunette woman tore her gaze away from the mirror and stumbled across the room to her bed with her breath raggedly hitching in her chest. It was just in time, as she collapsed, to shove a wad of the downy bedspread into her mouth against the screaming cry that tore from her throat.

The skin just below her hip bones had turned as black as the night sky, and flesh had begun to seal her buttocks together where something lithe and bony wormed beneath to push her lacy underwear down and away.

She screamed again against her gag with tears bursting from her eyes. Her body shook violently as her legs slid against the ground, her hips feeling strangely displaced and the motions of her legs altered to stop lateral movement. The screaming woman buried her face into her palms, desperate for an escape from what she’d seen in the mirror.

Samantha was now one of them. Those people. Those… dragons.

Already, being human was not something she could claim any longer.

O god.

O god.

Al die mensen. Al die mensen. Ze zullen moeten lijden!

Door haar toedoen...

She couldn’t let all those people suffer. All because of her. All because of those aliens. She could not. She would not! The countries that the medical aid was destined for would not suffer because of her.

Samantha spit out her gag, groaning and grinding against the bed. Trying to use the stimulus to ground her and instead inflaming her changing body.

No one could know.

No one could know.

Not until that rat bastard fiancée of hers could sign the legal agreements to release the cargo. Which he had made clear would not happen until after the ceremony. From her spot writhing on the floor, she could see the thick envelope containing the stack of documents waiting for him.

It broke her heart, but she knew she couldn’t even tell the friends that she’d had since she could string three words together. They wouldn’t hesitate to stop everything for her well-being. She couldn’t even call her father. He did not need the stress in his slow decline. It was for the best that the memory he had of her was as the leader of her medical NGO, not listening to her sob helplessly as scales tessellated across her epidermis.

Samantha dragged herself back to the mirror and stripped the rest of her clothes frantically. The changes were limited to between her crotch and her hips with black skin preceding black scales. Which was good, she panted and moaned as something in her pelvis tweaked. No one would see that part of her before she grew too large to hide in human clothing. Certainly not her playboy fiancée.

So no one was around to hear her moans and stifled cries from the floor after her hips had betrayed the indomitable Samantha. The night stretched on as her organs transposed themselves to new locations. Some bulged strangely, and others shrank away beneath her hands. The mutating woman felt something tug at her crotch, a grimace wracked her as flesh tore, then the feeling of a loose strand of muscle worming away up into the depths of her pelvis. She was clueless about what that meant until she dragged herself into the powder room for the toilet and made a mess everywhere. How could she even classify what she was becoming? From her knowledge of human anatomy, certainly nothing like the woman she was two days ago.

After that fun sensation, she had dosed herself liberally with Vicodin from her medical kit, always nearby, and was feeling alright where she lay sprawled on her royal canopy bed, clutching her roiling abdomen and the changes there.

Skin and muscle had begun to replace the cleft of her buttocks, sealing itself into one piece and forcing her hip joints to shift position. A mass of flesh grew pointed at the tip of her backbone, and began to extend downwards. Her lady bits were changing as well, the transformation was not merely internal. Her vulva grew alarmingly sensitive in a general sense and was badly aggravated.

Pressure and friction seemed to help, as she closed her eyes and ground against a pillow. The familiar bulb of white-hot sensitivity that was her clitoris was gone, now an equal amount of sensitivity had spread over the thickening ridges of flesh that marked where her once human groin had simplified into a long cleft void of any features beyond the black hide it was made of.

Her grinding grew more intense, and she felt her inner drive reach a familiar height. Samantha’s moans filled the room with the spicy smell of her arousal. Even her smell had changed. The wave broke, she gave a muffled cry even as her body rocked and flexed, and she rode out the fulfilling cataract until she was grounded once again. The stress and the strain of the transformation eased for a time in her brief sensation of fulfillment. Her hormones were completely out of control, as evidenced by her flushed and sweaty skin. She felt shame in equal parts with confusion and post-climax relaxation that was already on the way to building to the level of need once more. Samantha’s emotional wants had truly and fully run amok.

She had no more tears to give from her bloodshot eyes. Sleep came fitfully, only minutes at a time before the next change made her body convulse. Samantha could only gasp and sob tearlessly. She had moved past denial and pleading for this alteration of her body to stop. For it all to stop tormenting her. For the thoughts of those she had failed with her weakness to disappear. When emotional torment didn’t work for her sense of calm, another bout with her newly favorite pillow did. Again and again to relax the stresses building in her lower body.

Samantha wanted to talk to someone else who had gone through this, who was going through it… oh god! Micah! That poor girl! It had started with her nose, her face! That poor girl!

A surge of emotion overwhelmed her, travelling down her body and making her… spine… twitch the growing sheath of muscles there. Her backbone felt like a worm beneath her skin. A part of her that moved sinuously more than it ever had before. Everywhere her vertebrae had felt strange, was an equal amount of strangely loose movement. So much so that with her arms braced on the bed, she was even able to flex her hips and lower back around until they were nearly alongside her upper torso.

“This shit is too strange for me,” Samantha finally declared after looking back on her own black-stained and naked rear bent into her view with her entire backside bent like she had a swayback deformity. She went for the wet bar in her room and the bottle of iced champagne there. The wary woman eschewed the glasses and poured the carbonated beverage straight down her throat. Giggling mindlessly at the tickle of the bubbles. Fortified, she called the newly added Micah’s number. Hoping for a sympathetic voice, to be honestly selfish, but also knowing the young woman might very well be looking for that help as well.

The phone call went through, but no voice came from the other end. At least at first, there was nothing but a rising and falling rumble of breath and faint high-pitched chirps, like from a bird outside.

“Sssssssaaaammmmm…” the voice of a rock, the voice of a boulder, came from the tiny phone speaker. Who was this? A nonplussed Samantha asked herself. She remembered the sound of the young woman’s voice, high and bright, it had been the pinnacle of a feminine tone that matched the bombshell’s body. That was not this, and then she remembered. Micah’s nose, her face, her mouth. Of course she would sound differently. Oh god, the poor girl.

“Micah?”

“Jaaaaa,” hissed from the speaker in that inhuman voice. “Ich bin Micah. Ich bin immer Micah. Niemand sonst. Bitte sag mir, dass ich Micah bin.”

Samantha racked her brain, trying to dredge up her rusty German. She hadn’t had to use it much for a few years. “Moppie, of course you are Micah.” Something strange…r must have rattled Micah. The woman knew she was transforming before she even left the club. But was she alone now? Samantha wondered in rising panic.

“Ich…” Micah tried again before something weird happened to her voice. It dissolved into animal sounds coming from the speaker, terrifying Samantha with nightmares about what awaited her as well. A dark future where her mind slipped away to be replaced by something else. Something that would erase her identity. Something that chirps and whistles, growls and screeches, warbles and yips, and yowls and tweets. All those sounds dredged up anecdotes of dragons that no longer responded to their names, that no longer knew friend or family.

Oh God!

“Micah! Stay with me, my friend! You are Micah. Say it with me. You are Micah, and you are not alone. Micah, please, I’m afraid… I’m afraid for you…” The part that Samantha left unsaid was that she was also afraid for herself. She thought that she had no tears left to give, but they soon returned to burn her eyes and cheeks with their scalding intensity as despair swam around her head, clouding her thoughts.

“Sssssss… Ssssssaaaaam. Ich… Micah. Ich bin Micah.”

“You are Micah,” Samantha soothed, her transforming butt temporarily forgotten.

Eventually, Micah felt capable of speaking English once again, and not just what must have been the language of her birth.

“Myyy face,” she had wailed. “I have a blind spot between my eyes! They’re too far apart. I can see too much. I can see too much! Mein Blickfeld ist zu weit. Ich kann die Mitte nicht sehen! Meine Augen haben sich bewegt und sie … sie leuchten blau!”

Samantha broke into the woman’s incomprehensible rant. She spoke too fast in that rocky tone for the medical professional to understand. The panic came through clearly, though.

“I’m growing a tail…” Samantha volunteered, feeling ashamed to even speak the words. Animals had tails, not humans. Would that be all any one saw her as soon? Was that all that Micah saw in the mirror already? She was afraid to ask.

Soon, they were trading stories about what helped ease the transformation. Samantha unabashedly, she was a medical professional, told of the inflatable donut to use while it worked, and then masturbation when the tension grew to be too much. She could almost feel the blush of Micah over the phone, but she was too far gone from humanity to care anymore.

Micah in turn told her that moisturizer over her ears as they became fins helped, and that ice to numb her gums as her teeth changed and multiplied into hooked fangs was a godsend. The unfortunate woman told Samantha how her two upper incisors had become hang-teeth, and had badly scored her bottom lip until the fat within had hardened into a rigid flap of hide that covered her mouth. Samantha was stunned, Micah would be the first dragon she’d seen with that condition.

“I’m sorry, Micah. I had hoped that you would be as beautiful as a dragon as you were a woman.”

“Youuuuu do not need to beeeee ssssssorry, Dame Samantha. Iiiii will trade my beauty for a single chance to be aaaa greater good in thissss world. Iiii will finish school, and then travel as the dragon with snaggled fangs to help as you have.”

“Is that your new name? Snaggle Fangs?”

The roar of dragon laughter came from the speakerphone, followed by explosively hacking coughs. “It issss my Child of the Egg name. Snaggle Fangs. Yours will be Big Tail,” Micah broke into huffing laughter at her joke. Samantha self-consciously felt her naked behind again. She had tried to dress herself with some pajama shorts that she had brought, but with the elimination of the cleft of her buttocks the clothing just felt as bizarre as it looked in the mirror.

Pushed out of the way as it was by new muscle and flesh, she felt the victim of a prank where someone had yanked her pants down to leave them halfway along her thighs. To make do, she chose a set of underwear for sacrifice, from a multi-pack bought at a department store, and cut the connecting fabric between front and rear out. Her operation had turned them into a crotchless pair of triangular loincloths bound together by cloth at the hip and the elastic waistband.

The nascent limb that was now freed of fabric confinement was about ten centimeters long. She found that with a flex of her butt, the little appendage could push back powerfully against her fingers. She could… she could feel the texture of her fingerprints against the small fin starting just at the base of the tail, and could feel the slightest graze of her finger against the well-muscled nub. The fine scales growing there through black skin were extraordinarily sensitive to pressure. She thought it might become useful once its size grew too large to conceal.

A loud and obnoxious knocking at the door. Had Samantha forgotten the time? What time was it? She rather rudely whispered a hurried apology to Micah and told her that no matter what happens, to make her way to the de Graaf estates and yell Samantha’s name to anyone who would listen to her.

Which, to be honest, Samantha wasn’t sure if anyone would respond to a dragon yelling a human name while running at them for sanctuary.

“Is Madam awake? Is Madam proper?”

“No, Madam is not proper!” Madam stumbled into a dresser and knocked over a heavy candelabra with a crash. She had to relearn how to walk with a wide stance after hours on the bed. Her hips did not move how she remembered them.

“Does Madam require relief from overindulgence?”

“Give me ten minutes.”

“Does Madam desire fresh pillows?”

“Go away, Margaret! Go have your fun somewhere else!”

“….does Madam require spanking?”

Jesus, these maids could be creepy. The way they ghost around everywhere, neither seen nor heard, only to pop up at the most inopportune times to spout some nonsense like that.

Samantha was glad her voice had not been affected as Micah’s had. At least not yet. It was better for her to have as many conversations as possible through the barrier of a closed door. Everything inexplicably changing about her could be hidden by a baggy set of clothes. Easily enough! In the very back of the walk-in closet were sets of men’s clothes, including a large button-down shirt that came down to her thighs to cover the narrow, curving bulge taking the place of her butt. The shirt was perfect for getting her hair and makeup done. She just needed food and a shower to wake up. Sleep was no longer possible except in fits and starts between bridal events.

Before she headed out, she sent a text to Micah to remind her again who she was and a gif of a cartoon alligator snapping its jaws shut. It worried her that there was no immediate response. She didn’t want to know what the poor girl was going through with her head and face, but knew she would soon enough.

The breakfast buffet was an adventure for her. In full view of the interns who’d volunteered to attend as bridesmaids, she had emptied seven plates of eggs and sausages chased by an equal number of glasses of milk and six chocolate muffins. A stupendous amount of food for a woman that had weighed all of sixty kilograms before her skin had blackened.

By the time she had returned to her room for her shower, her bloated stomach had returned to its normal flatness. All that food gone into her tail which had doubled in size along with the growth of her thighs. The tail was now thick enough in girth that she could not wrap one hand around the base of it. Unfortunately, also brushing her hand against the puckered flesh of her relocated anus. A fine scattering of scales had formed around it and bridged the gap, the perineum, a growing distance as her tail lengthened and her groin changed by bulging outward with the swelling of her pubic bone.

She was in for a new shock while taking her shower. The black had spread further, nearly up to the crests of her hip blades and starting down her legs. But the physical changes were not what grabbed her attention while the steamy water cascaded across the unevenness of her altered skin.

It was all the sensations her newly sensitive scaly skin was sending her. She groaned and bent at the hips to lean forward against the tiled shower wall, letting the new lower half of her body extend its weight straight out and into the rain from the showerhead. She shivered, starting at the end of her body, as her mind worked to process what it was being told by the tiny red fin beginning to unfurl from her fifth appendage. Samantha could sense the pressure of the room, the slight air currents, the humidity, the temperature differences. They all added up to one thing that her mind was certain her senses were telling her.

It was raining.

Well, no shit, tail fin!

The mutated woman looked back at herself, moving a curtain of soaked brunette hair to one side to see how long the tail had become. The length of two hands. She could move it about as easily as her arms across its limited range. That is, if one of her arms had replaced her ass. The dragon-woman tried to forget that it existed to see if it would lie still against the side of one leg and cooperate by hiding there. If it behaved, she might just be able to shove it down one sweatpants leg. The base of the tail was thick enough that she could pass it off as her missing buttocks in the right kind of clothes.

But, alas, the tail would not. Springing back to horizontal as soon as she thought of it. She would have to tie it down with something and hope to make it through the wedding before anyone noticed. More importantly, before her fiancée could notice. Afterward, she could play the ignorance card. Who was ever going to call her out on it when she was a dragon and the aid supplies were somewhere in the Atlantic? As soon as the playboy signed the stack of documents waiting on her room’s desk, she’d eat as much as she needed to grow her tail to its full size so she could smack that philanderer into the wall. It had only been a few days since Zero Day, but the strength of the dragons was already the stuff of legend.

She needed to stop talking about them like she wasn’t one, now.

****

Feeling like she was wearing the main sail of the HMS Victory in the button-down shirt that inexplicably had her alma mater, Oxford University, stitched over one breast, draped over three-quarters of her body. The concealment helped her peace of mind by keeping all eyes away from what squirmed and ached restlessly in her pants. Which wasn’t helped by the fact that every time she felt any kind of emotion at all her tail tried to shift against the denim loops, cut from a pair of jeans she’d brought with her, that bound it to her.

And it was a powerful bundle of muscle to make matters worse. An upsetting pendulum of growing mass hanging from her hip bones that threw her balance off more with each passing minute. When she had thought about the conniving cad Stephen, the tail had yanked her left leg from beneath her and sent her tumbling down the hallway she had been walking in.

It was only blind luck that no one had been around to see the thrashing of a third limb in her pants and taken the wrong idea that she had grown a monstrous phallus or something. As if transforming from one species to another wasn’t enough, she shuddered to think that she could just as easily be losing her sex as well. Which might have been the last step over the line she needed to drive her into insanity. Dragon, okay sure, male, no, thank you.

Like she had a damn say in anything about her situation at any rate. She couldn’t even find a way to control the progression of her changes, which seemed to hover around the level needed to make the subtlest intrusion into her life as possible. Samantha could not rely on the least thing making sense any longer. She could take some solace in the fact that her changes moved along at a glacial pace. Some of the videos Micah had sent her had shown people exploding into dragon forms in only minutes, screaming and crying the entire time in horror. A Cronenbergian horror that had the few onlookers that remained vomiting on their shoes while the rest ran.

The unease caused by her transformation was made worse when she was finally summoned to the meeting with her true benefactor. Samantha handed off the packet of papers to the de Graaf family lawyer, who nodded at her with a distant expression after perusing the indexed pages needing signed. Samantha followed the distracted lawyer’s gaze to see that it was fixated on her in-law problem.

“Well, what is this then?” the raspy source of the last third of her problems demanded in a disaffected drawl. The voice came from a tall and distinguished woman with short, spiky, silver hair and cheekbones that could cut titanium below hazy blue eyes. The dame's regal demeanor was ruined by the bitterly impatient scowl etched across her face. She was in the middle of browbeating her estate’s event coordinator, staring glumly down at her clipboard. Samantha felt sorry for the woman when she saw that the only item left unchecked on her list was ‘Keep Petra Happy’.

“We think this is Oswald. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since the alien message,” Judy, the event coordinator, explained. She gestured at a few other house staff who Samantha noticed were gently trying to speak to the dragon.

“A garden man inside the manor? How absurd!” Petra de Graaf, Samantha’s pending mother-in-law, exclaimed acerbically. Samantha was astonished Petra even knew of the man. She was not astonished that the dame cared more about where he was than what he was.

Petra snatched up a butter knife on a nearby table and poked one of the giant haunches of the groundskeeper with the handle. The only reaction was a shivering wave of the scales in the area that knocked the knife from Petra’s hand. Samantha fidgeted uncomfortably when an unexpected smell reached her nose and the scales spreading across her thighs rustled in sympathy for the former man.

Samantha tried not to show the reeling sensation flooding her mind at seeing her fate up close. Unsteady on her feet, she leaned against the wall as the same circling thoughts whirled in her head.

Oh god, will I be a danger? Oh god, that’s going to be me. Oh god, will I forget who I am?

Her mother-in-law made a few more comments that quite ignored the fact that the ‘man’ in discussion was actually a three-meter-tall dragon curled up tightly around himself in a corner of the wedding room. He was essentially unmovable. “You will call my drunken buffoon of a game warden to move Oswald outside at once!”

Samantha’s future mother-in-law grew exasperated that no one was able to do more than give excuses for why the dragon could not be moved. Excuses like needing to demolish the manor wing’s roof to bring a crane in if he wouldn’t move on his own. Or that the military was too busy to deal with dragons who weren’t a threat to anyone.

“You will then place curtains around him,” Petra declared imperiously. “I won’t have my second son’s wedding besmirched by the sight of one of the help that can’t control their beastly nature.”

Petra cast a look at Samantha that she could barely even acknowledge. Samantha was lost in her own world. The musty allspice smell of Oswald was changing in her nose, leaving her pale and shaking in fear as she began to find comfort in it. Petra made a noise deep in her throat of disapproval at Samantha’s state.

“Make sure the powder woman puts a nice base on your skin. Your pallor is dreadful, and it’s getting worse. You must fix yourself before the ceremony.” Samantha could see something odd about the elder woman’s normally pale blue eyes as she stared at Samantha. One of them was now glowing diffusely, like the sun through a dirty window. She didn’t have much time to dwell on it before Petra swept from the room with her entourage, complaining loudly about a painting being askew and also demanding to know if anyone else had gone missing.

That was the kind of thing Samantha had to constantly deal with for the marriage of convenience. Not that the bride necessarily hated her intended, but the feckless, philandering, second heir to his family’s fortune had been pressured to end his meaningless caroming through life to take a wife, and Samantha had found herself judged adequate in looks, reputation, and steadfast demeanor by her terrifyingly powerful mother-in-law, after being acquainted with her son.

They’d first met when he had been gamely, but absently, managing a large promotional booth with about twelve people for the division of the family estate that he was running at a medical exposition. Eight of the people at his booth had been women wearing something more fit for the bedroom. Something she would only learn the significance of later when he asked Samantha to join them. Ugh. The whole sordid ordeal was eventually how she came to Petra’s attention and was hooked by promises of massive fundraising connections for her charities.

Before she made much headway in getting a fix on the old battle axe’s mood, she heard a raspy exhalation and felt a hurricane of heated air tug at her carefully coifed hair. Samantha froze, like a deer in headlights, with the sudden awareness that she was alone in the room, and something very big was breathing down from far above her head.

The sound of a seam giving way as her nascent tail thrashed in her sweatpants was her first physical reaction. Then, she turned slowly to see the long muzzle with two flaring nostrils set between bright gray eyes, nearly silver, staring down at her. Samantha saw her hair get sucked towards the slanted nostrils. She only then realized that he was sniffing her.

“When youuuu arrrre ready for help, Iiii will be here. Doooo not ssssuffer whaaat isss coming for youuu aaaalone.”

Samantha turned and fled from those sympathetic eyes and smell. She had to flee from the sight of what she was becoming. To pretend it wasn’t what it was for just a little while longer.

When she awoke from her dazed flight, she found herself in her dressing room with her back against the door. The need for privacy burned in her just like the changes of the night before. But there was something new in her awareness. A need to return to Oswald for the company that scared her in its intensity.

So, Samantha was not surprised when she felt her spine flex between her and the door. She moaned in denial as she felt her, herself, wrap around the simple latch to lock the door and flick it over. Her violently shaking hands reached her back, tracing over unfamiliar contours across her thickening waist until she felt down to her flattened butt and the new limb there.

It had grown since her last assessment, now four hand spans of unsupported flesh that curled its tip around her fingers as she neared its tapered end. Along the top of the appendage, a paper-thin crease had formed in the rough texture of her skin with a flimsy ribbon proudly growing between rays of cartilage propping it up. As opposed to the coarse skin on either side of the feature, the ribbon relayed the presence of the moisture of the tears still dampening her fingers.

A hiccupping laugh broke from her throat as she stumbled away from the door, pulling her pants back up over the hump of the tail protruding down one grossly distended pant leg. An abomination that had no place on a bipedal human body. When she fell into a chair, sitting on her tail and sending a burst of pain racing up her spine when it bent nearly ninety degrees, she burst into fresh tears that burned the human skin of her cheeks.

She tried to call Micah, but there was no response. Samantha could only hope the poor girl was alright. If the transformation had moved to her hands, she was likely unable to answer any longer.

The need for companionship grew in her mind until it shoved the human desire for privacy aside. She had felt safety in the comfort of Oswald’s smell. Now that it was gone, she felt small and alone.

Belle and Noah. Where was Belle and Noah?

“Belle,” Samantha croaked brokenly into the phone, trying and connecting with her first.

“Where are you?” her ginger-haired friend said without hesitation. “I’ll kill the bastard!”

Samantha hiccupped a laugh, and the burning, roiling change in her lower half calmed.

“Not that,” she stopped with a breathy groan as something else in her body gave way. “I don’t have long. The dragons are here and I don’t have long.”

It wasn’t two minutes later that a battering on the door at Samantha’s back sent jolts of pain up the noodle giving her a fifth member. This time it slapped between one thigh and the other in protest. A meat pendulum. Ha. Ha ha.

“What’s wrong?” Belle demanded when she’d forced her way in with a steak knife from who knows where. She couldn’t see the problem as Samantha backed away around the dress-clad manikin in the middle of the room and out of view of the mirror spanning one wall. “Where’s the dragon?” Belle held up the knife menacingly as her attention turned to the door of a walk-in closet, the closest of conceivable places that one of those brutes could hide in within the room. “Hiyah!” She screamed and threw her knife at the wooden door, leaving its hilt vibrating where it had stuck, just as a new blade appeared in her hand from nowhere.

Her shaking hands said a lot about her opinion of being able to confront a dragon with a steak knife. Even the smallest ones, former children that they are, had been the end of more than one human who had foolishly attacked them.

“It’s me…” Samantha said quietly, tearing her friend’s wary gaze from the door that still hadn’t burst open. Belle’s hands, held up defensively with knife in one and a vase in the other, dropped listlessly as the woman, the girl she’d known since she was three, turned to the side. Despite the bulky sweatpants she wore, there was no missing the curving length of something between Samantha’s legs that shed its bindings to rise up and flick madly with her racing emotions.

“I am the dragon,” Samantha cried, fresh tears pouring from her reddened eyes. With one hand, she removed her sweatpants to reveal all. Samantha was disturbed to feel that it had become heavier and longer than just an hour before at her last check.

“Oh god, Samantha…” Belle said, stunned. The knife dropped from her hand as she flew to her friend, wrapping her arms around the slightly taller woman.

“You have to help me hide this!” Samantha begged Belle. “You handle logistics, you know how critical the shipping window is. He won’t sign until after the wedding.”

“Bleeding hell, Sam. How can you possibly worry about that when you’re…”

“No!” she shouted in denial. Her tail smacked the bench she stood in front of in agreement, making Belle jump with a squeak at the sound of the furniture skidding across the floor. Samantha moaned as a rush of energy funneled into her tail, then squealed in surprise as a new vertebra split into existence and she lost all control of it.

“No,” she said more calmly with her tail hanging sedately against her thigh. “We are talking about fifty thousand HIV kits, three ROWPU plants, and five mobile surgical theaters. And that is only the initial shipment. There were twenty-three million, six hundred thousand, and two hundred euros of aid at stake.”

“Your change is not going to stop, Sam.” Belle fussed around her friend’s head. She peered closely at her friend’s skin. “Your skin is starting to pale, and I see little bumps on your ears. People are going to notice…”

Belle turned around to watch Samantha worriedly inspect herself in the mirror, looking sadly over the changes to her hips and then brushing her hair back to peer closely at her ears. “What I am going to do about all this?” Her tail lifted and waggled widely side-to-side. “Do you know how pisse weird that feels!?” she said with a hysterical scream. “I didn’t ask it to do that!”

Overcome by curiosity, Belle reached out toward Samantha’s tail. She saw her out of the corner of one eye and twisted her head to look. It wasn’t much, but she could swear that her head turned a little further than before.

“Can…can I?”

Samantha sighed, pulled her pants up to the base of the immature limb, and turned her head away with her arms crossed defensively.

“If you must…”

The changing woman gave a not inconsiderable gasp when her friend wrapped her hand around near the flexible tip of the new biology. Belle, for her part, was fascinated by the smoothness of the linked scales and couldn’t keep the grin off her face after finally being able to touch a dragon's tail. When she rubbed the newborn spinal fin with her fingers Samantha shivered from tail tip to head and made a hissing inhalation. But, after a time, one drifting hand drifted a little too far and a lone finger strayed up against a thick ridge of flesh covered in much finer scales.

“Whoa, hey. Hands off, Belle.” Samantha said with sharp finality and a startled jump that had her shoes leave the ground. She would never admit in a million years to the thrill that had coursed through her at the accidental contact. There was a crack from where she’d placed one of her hands to brace against the manipulations of her tail. Her clenched fist had shattered a portion of the wooden door frame with grayish veins standing up all along her arm as the muscles flexed. “Not cool, sister.”

“Was that… was that your…”

“Yes,” Samantha seethed at the unwanted intrusion. Her touch made Samantha remember the intense cramps and burning the night before when she stopped being a woman and started being something else. “Congratulations, you felt the result of my vulva burning to a crisp all night long. I am no longer Samantha the woman, I am now Samantha the lizard.”

Belle looked at her hand with disgust at arm’s length. “I’m going to go wash. Who knows what STI caused this!”

“Very funny,” Samantha muttered and returned to using her hands to hold her sweatpants open enough that she could worm her tail back down one leg. The sensation of a part of her spine rubbing along her leg was almost more than she could bear. Her tail did not go willingly, though. The constraining fabric felt oppressive. She wanted… she wanted to feel the air on her fins and scales again. It felt… right

Belle went into the small bathroom next to the closet to scrub herself up like the doctor that she was. Over the splashing of running water, she called outside to her friend.

“Do you want me to examine you? I am your gynecologist.”

“No,” Samantha gritted through clenched teeth as something in her belly shifted position. Blood filled her mouth when an oversized tooth in her upper jaw tore a bloody groove down the gums of her lower, surprising her with the new change. The taste was heavy in iron and something else she couldn’t identify when she swallowed. “I don’t need you putting your speculums in my new pussy to ring your bell. I remember what you said about… us… last night.”

“Already thinking of yourself as one of them, huh? Can’t say I blame you. You said new pussy, are you sure I can’t have a look? Your labia felt strange…”

“Stop that,” Samantha snapped at her friend when she tugged down on her sweats again. Belle let go of the elastic and walked around to face her lifelong friend, putting a hand on each shoulder. Samantha stopped the snide remark on the tip of her tongue at seeing an uncharacteristically sober expression on her friend’s face.

“I know what happened to some of the other dragons. Samantha, are you still the girl I’ve known my entire life?” Tears appeared in her eyes, and Samantha found her own vision growing blurry as well. “Are you… still you? Are you still my friend?”

Samantha went quiet as she froze in thought at the question. The memory of her being able to smell the intentions of the gardener earlier coming first to mind. The fact that her new tail was feeding her information on the ambient air conditions right on the heels of her first concern. It wasn’t until Samantha noticed Belle spinning her slowly until her friend had a clear run to the door out, that she replied.

“I….” Samantha swallowed, nervous. “I am… more than what I was yesterday. I think my mind has changed to control the tail. My senses are changing, expanding even. I could smell emotion from Oswald, and I can feel the atmosphere on the fin. I know when it’s going to rain! But it is still me, Belle. I even remember you breaking your collarbone when we were both seven on that slide in the park.

“Please…” Samantha begged. “Don’t leave me alone…” she began to cry again, fresh streaks of painfully hot tears burned down her soft cheeks. “I’m afraid that if I’m by myself, I will disappear.” She told her about her conversations with Micah. How desperate the woman had been for confirmation on who she was.

“Oh, Samantha,” Belle sighed and drew her friend into her embrace. “Of course I won’t leave you alone.” She said, holding her head and rubbing her back soothingly.

****

“If you want to pull this off, we need to see if there’s a way to slow the change down. I noticed when you calmed earlier your… hahaha… tail… I’m sorry how cool is it that you have a tail!? What do you think I need to do to grow one? Save a life, check. Help the disadvantaged, check. Make the world better, I think so, so check. Maybe I need to earn the title of Dame, too…”

“You’re not helping right now with my remaining calm, if that’s what you think.”

“Does Noah know? He should know. Never mind being the third part of our circle, his specialty can help keep your trouser snake still. I can’t get the good drugs that he does.”

“No, no, I haven’t told anyone else. I didn’t even mean to tell you until I panicked.”

“That hurts, Sam.” And the look on Belle’s face told Samantha it truly did, too. “When this is over, we’re going to have a talk about trust.” She took out her phone and asked Samantha to take a picture of her tail. Belle sent the picture and text to Noah. Within minutes, he was there, banging on the door, aid bag slung over his shoulder, and the determined look on his large face that meant he was serious.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell us,” Noah said, sitting on a chair and holding Samantha’s tail across his legs. He was rubbing it in a methodical pattern while writing himself notes on Samantha’s reactions, gauging her neurological feedback, he’d said. Samantha found herself not minding the intimacy of his wandering hands. Her eyes were nearly closed with relaxation at the feeling. “We would have…”

“You would’ve stopped the wedding from going through.”

“We would have listened to you and your concerns,” he said calmly and evenly. Samantha shivered as he soothed her fin, trying to bristle with her unwarranted agitation. She felt like she should be objecting to the treatment, but it felt so amazingly comforting to have her scales brushed and her fin caressed. The physical socialization tickled the same part of her mind that interpreted what she felt from the limb.

“I’m becoming more of a dragon…” she whispered to herself. But not quietly enough. She was still Samantha Von Holden. She was Samantha Von Holden, not the dragon whispering how good it felt to have her tail stroked.

“You are,” Noah said simply, mistaking the direction of her comment, and motioned to a white circle he had drawn with a grease marker on her scales. What had once been a continuous circle had now been broken into a series of disconnected lines as the scales of her skin grew larger and further apart for new ones to slot themselves from beneath. Not that Samantha needed a visual indicator, the tail was heavier with every passing second.

“The growth is slow, but consistent for now. I think you have half a day or so before this cannot be hidden any longer beneath the dress.”

“Haha!” Belle exclaimed triumphantly, cutting the last of the bustle out from the rump of the wedding dress. “Room for your tail without anyone asking questions. I already told the seamstresses that I’ll be doing the fitting myself. I told them that we didn’t want to create a scandal.”

“Yeah,” Samantha groaned breathlessly. Unable to help herself, she leaned back against Noah, the feel of her tail sliding beneath his large hands exquisite. “Black and red I’m turning into a dragon scandals.”

“Easy Samantha, Noah. Don’t do anything you’ll both regret later,” Belle said, plopping down on the bench next to Samantha and putting her arm around her shoulders. “At least until I get to try it first. How good does it feel, Sam?”

“Uuuuhhhh,” Sam moaned, delirious as Noah’s fingers traced along the taut webbing of her fin between spines.

“Exactly. If anyone is going to get wet from becoming a dragon, it is going to be me!”

“I’ve learned enough,” Noah said, retracting his hands. Samantha couldn’t help the sound of protest that came from deep in her throat with the removal of the stimulation. She blushed, and Belle laughed.

“If you really want to hide this, Samantha, and I don’t think that you should…”

“I must,” she protested. “The aid!”

Noah sighed, looking defeated. “I have some botulism toxin leftover from treating a patient with migraines at the clinic. It will relax your muscles enough that you won’t have any involuntary movements.”

He placed his hand on Samantha’s tail again and then slid it until it covered a spot just to the left of the spinal fin. “I believe an injection in this region here would be best,” he said, ignoring her squeak of surprise. “Then we can, loosely, tie your tail to one leg. It should buy you enough time to get the authorizations signed by that libertine fool. Although you are going to be walking off-kilter, it shouldn’t be any more noticeable than wearing those heels over there and being bound by the dress skirt.”

Noah looked between Belle and Samantha. “Sound like a plan? Any more ideas?”

“How will we know this won’t…” Belle stuck out her tongue and pretended to choke herself.

“As you’re no longer human, Samantha, we don’t.” Noah said, addressing the one with a tail directly. “I have no idea if botox will help or kill you. I beg you to reconsider. There must be some other way to get that aid released…”

“Not in time, my friend. Not in time. The borders are closing, the shipping companies are being impounded. It must go today, Noah,” a frightened but implacable Samantha replied.

“Always the martyr, Sam,” he hugged her tightly, rubbing her back just as Belle had earlier. “I’ll be right back,” the giant of a man said after nodding at Belle in mutual understanding. Before he left, he looked back at Samantha once more with a sad, haunted look in his eyes. Samantha’s expression fell with realization.

“I love you like a brother, Noah. You are my brother. If… if…” she trailed off. There was nothing left to say. Both women saw him wipe his brown eyes clear of tears before the door was shut.

If, if, if.

“C’mon, let’s get you ready for your makeup and hair. I want you to keep doing that breathing exercise while I find a larger pair of sweatpants and the beautician for you. Now, where will you sit so that your adorable tail won’t be sticking straight behind you?”

Samantha was slow to come around, but even she could see what a mistake it had been to try to go it alone. The warmth of her friends being there to support her was heartening. She had much to atone for in not trusting them with the truth.

****

The women hired to get Samantha and Belle ready for the wedding were more than a little intimidated by the latter’s stern scowl as she watched them like a hawk. Belle was on guard for her friend and, at the slightest signs of attention straying past Samantha’s waist, was there to bark orders to hurry them along. Using their fear and irritation to keep them from thinking clearly about why the bride’s ass and one leg were so unevenly shaped.

When it was Belle’s turn to be pampered, Samantha fled to the relative privacy of the attached powder room. She locked the door solidly and fell into the padded couch in the room, her tail coming up to rest between her wide set legs. As she stared, the tip of it began twitching restlessly. The bride closed her eyes and focused deeply inward, ignoring the feeling of her tail sliding against the billowing cotton garment concealing it.

Belle’s voice came from outside followed by a soft knocking. Samantha stirred from her calming meditation and stood. She was pleased that the tail didn’t feel any heavier, taking that as a sign the growth had slowed. The dragon-woman pondered that, wondering why the transformation would be influenced by emotions. What were the aliens playing at?

Samantha couldn’t help her tail rising to twitch angrily when Belle immediately felt her friend over, checking for new change in the most intrusive way possible by sticking her entire arm down the back of her pants.

“That thing on your tail is growing up your lower back. Did you feel my hand?”

“How could I not?” Samantha snapped, losing her calm. She shivered and fell against her friend as a surge of energy rocketed up and down her spine. Audible creaking came from her tail, and she whimpered as she felt herself fill more of the pants keeping her modest. New scaly pinpricks arose against the cotton cloth, lifting it in small ripples as grey skin and black scales replaced more pink human flesh.

A moan left her mouth that drew out into a warbling trill. Samantha gasped as both hands shot to cover her face in mortification. It was these damn changes to her hips making everything so strange for her. She ached standing upright, and that sound she had just made would have been a feminine sigh of pleasure last night.

The seat of the bride’s pants split into a cloud of cotton fluff when her fin sawed through the fabric in an instant to reveal a pair of badly stretched tan bikini briefs pushed to the side by the tail. The underwear stood in stark contrast to the blacks and greys of her skin where they hugged the filling curve between hip and waist. The freed tail smacked Belle’s reaching hand away with a crack.

“Ouch, Samantha! That felt like you hit me with a hammer!”

“Don’t ‘Samantha’ me! Why have you been so weird today? I’m the one… unghhhhhhh…” she stopped to spread her stance a little wider. At this point the inward q-angle of her legs was completely gone. Like pillars, every joint in her legs was squarely in line with her widening hips. “…turning into a dragon!”

Belle didn’t answer right away, instead going back out into the empty dressing room, rubbing her stung hand the whole way.

“I’m jealous,” she said, spinning on one toe to face her friend while bouncing on her feet.

“Jealous…” Samantha said incredulously, emerging without pants after a wary glance around to ensure the room was clear. Her thickening tail swayed gently when she stopped to lay a hand on her shorter lifelong friend’s shoulder. Her tail was now long enough that she felt it brush the back of her knee and matched her body in thickness at its base. Every swing of its mass made her shift to compensate for the burgeoning limb.

“Belle, I’ve been in nearly constant pain for a day. My spine grows at something like two centimeters per hour. Every time a new vertebra is created in my backbone, I collapse because my spinal cord disconnects. Micah couldn’t last one minute without having to remind herself who she was and had to relearn how to speak this morning from scratch.

“Humans have been attacking us, corralling us like beasts, or shunning us out of fear. Everything I hoped for the future has been flipped. All my plans, gone. And you’re jealous even after seeing the chaos becoming a dragon brings to my life and the danger it puts others in? Belle, I’m afraid for you right now in my presence. My mind is not the same… I am more than a human, I am a dragon. Please, don’t ask for this…”

“But I do. I do ask for this,” she exclaimed and taking both of Samantha’s hands in hers to hold. “You see a curse, a danger. I see freedom. I see a whole new set of horizons to explore. Don’t you see what a gift you’ve been given? What promise you could bring about in this world? Yes, I am jealous. Do you think if I lick your scales it’ll be my turn?”

“No…” Samantha replied, her eyes half-lidded with exasperation. “I don’t think that’s how it works. You kissed me last night, you drunk. You would already be infected if it were.”

“Maybe I do have scale flu already? I’ve been a bit dizzy today…”

“You shouldn’t even joke about that. You’re just hungover from doing shots with that dancer.”

“It would be a thing of beauty…” Belle whispered, absently feeling the fabric of Samantha’s borrowed gown. “If I could grow wings and share the sky with you.” Belle turned her distinctive amber eyes on Samantha. They were full of tears. “We’re losing you, Samantha… We’re losing our friend. You’re going somewhere we can’t go.”

“Sshh,” Samantha soothed, gathering Belle into her strong arms. “I’m not going anywhere without you or Noah. I promise.”

“If anyone could keep their head in all this, it would be you, Sam.”

“Only with your help, Belle. Only with yours and Noah’s help. Let’s face it, I’m nothing without the two of you.”

“Haha,” Belle hiccupped thickly through her tears. “Stop making me cry, you’ll ruin my makeup.”

“Come on,” Samantha said after hugging her friend closely again, struck by how much shorter she was now. How small she looked, like she was becoming a toy or a doll to the changing woman. The bride glanced at an ornate clock on a shelf to the side. “The interns will be here soon. Help me strap my tail down and get this dress on. The sooner today is over, the easier I’ll be about having five limbs.”

****

Samantha had the rigid grin of a corpse plastered across her pallid face. Listening to the babble of the interns flowing around her in giddy currents propelled by bottles of champagne.

“Aren’t you happy?”

“Isn’t this the greatest day ever, boss?”

“Cheers!”

“Can you believe this place? You really got lucky, Dame!”

“Let me adjust your gown, Samantha. Today is the day to let your girls show!”

Samantha listlessly swayed with her eyes distant under the barrage of increasingly loud voices rocking her thoughts. She had to remain calm. Calm. It was only the thinnest of chances that her changing was tied to her emotions, but it was the only possible thing she could control. So, there she was, embracing her inner Zen in the eye of a bridal hurricane.

Only Belle and remembering that Noah was coming with a drug that she hoped would help her relax the stranglehold she held her body in, kept her emotions in check. The terror was ever present that, if she let up even a little, everyone would know her secret when a giant anaconda slithered to the ground and then from beneath the hem of her dress.

It turned out she was worried about the wrong thing.

“Sam,” Belle said lowly, having taken her away from the crowd in the room to inspect the bridal veil displayed on a marble statue head. “We need to think about hiding your face now.” The maid of honor led her friend over to a corner of the wall spanning mirror. The bride could see the problem at once, and froze, transfixed upon her eyes.

As she watched, she could see the color of her brown iris take on a new brilliant copper hue that spread outwards like a slow-moving stain. Half of the room, everything to the right of her nose, swam out of focus. With her good, unchanged eye she could see her other pupil lose its round form as it began to taper vertically.

That was new, she thought detachedly. In a roundabout fashion, she realized that she was suffering emotional shock in the face of these compounding changes. To her, it began to feel like she was a balloon afloat in the room. Loose and untethered as reality reshaped her. She was shaken back to herself by the steady hand of her friend on her bare shoulder. Belle’s hands came up to cup Samantha’s cheeks. The bride found it odd that she could hear the sound of her friend’s fingers dragging across her skin. Her ears twitched.

“Stay with me, Sam. Do your breathing.”

“Hey, Dame Samantha!” a voice, an intrusion, spoke behind the two women. Belle turned with some irritation flashing in her hazel eyes that nearly made them glow. One of the interns volunteering as a bridesmaid was there, briefly quailing under the force of Belle’s glare, before the Champagne she had clearly been drinking drove her onward. In her hands were clutched a bouquet of flowers and an embossed envelope.

“These were sent on behalf of Mr. de Graaf. Isn’t it so sweet that he picked the bouquet?”

Samantha was willing to bet adding two meters of length to her tail that he hadn’t done any such damn thing. Her cynical attitude towards the man wasn’t helped by the fact that her pinkie finger’s nail had sharpened to a triangular point that effortlessly sliced the envelope open. A great tension settled on her body as she read and reread the letter within. Her tail twitched and strained at its bindings. A chill ran through her body. The scales covering her lower abdomen rustled wildly, and the smell of the air around her changed to ozone. It was strong enough that some of the other women in the room looked warily around for an electrical fire.

The little rat bastard! How dare he ask for a pisse hand job before the wedding because he was bored? What vrøvl did he think this sham marriage was all about when he spoke of wifely duties?

Belle outright snarled when she traded the bouquet for the letter, crumbling the scented paper in her fist.

“I’ll kill him if you don’t, Sam. An embolism is untraceable and more than what he deserves…”

Samantha felt the anger sweeping her emotions to unneeded heights. Her mood swung from rage to frustration to the strange detachment she’d felt earlier. The tension in her body spiked. She could feel her skin, how it itched on her shoulders. Pressure mounted in her butt and she covered her mouth against the moan of expectant pain. Her ears twitched, and then kept twitching as she felt more and more air pass over them.

“Oh my god…” Samantha heard the blonde intern behind her whisper. The bride’s gaze focused her mismatched eyesight on the mirror to see the color drain from the woman’s face. She was staring right at Samantha and was already turning to run.

“Sam,” she heard Belle moan in disbelief, covering her mouth with one hand as sadness flooded her eyes. “Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry”

But Sam was beyond caring. Her body rocked with an undulation starting against the back of her thigh. Fabric tore and she leaned against the mirror as mass weighted her bottom. Her center of gravity shifted lower and lower, making her unbalanced. The tension in her, the energy, released all at once.

“Unnnnnnnngggggggghhhhhhhaaaaaa!” Samantha’s moan turned into something else. She could feel the weight of the dress pushing against the line along her spine. She felt muscle and flesh shift as… as part of her skin rose into being to unfurl like a flag.

That’s when the screaming started as the rest of the women in the room spotted Samantha’s tail lifting the skirt of her dress. Black against the silvery sheen of the gown, it could not be missed.

“Uh!” Samantha moaned and groaned. Each undulation of her body growing with mass and inertia. She felt herself touch the ground and then slide along it.

“Belle!” she cried, her ears twitching and shivering into tiny fans with sharply pointed rays that poked and jabbed at her reaching hands.

But what help could her best friend offer in the face of the impossible squirming along the ground? The ginger-haired woman only shook her head with tears spilling from her eyes and over her hand. She was helpless as she watched the woman she considered another sister outgrow her human form.

“She’s one of them!”

“Run! Run before she turns on us!”

The screams did nothing for her sense of calm. Shattered, she could do nothing as she became a passenger to the ride her own body was taking her upon. Already, black patches were erupting on her thickening shoulders. Her teeth itched intolerably as she bit into her lip. Her blood was nearly black as it welled sluggishly from the gouge she had scored.

As the women fled, screaming, it attracted attention from those outside in the hallway. Unwanted attention from the rat who just demanded that she jerk him off. Samantha braced herself against the wall to anchor the snapping and whipping of her tail. Sharp cracks and thuds resounded in the emptying room accompanied by the sounds of breaking champagne glasses and bottles.

“I knew it!” Stephen exclaimed. “Anyone who could get along with my mother must have been one of you! You dragons! You beasts! Stay away from me. Stay away!”

Get along with Petra? That was news to the transforming woman lost in the fierce gaze of her changing eyes. In the mirror, Samantha could see when Stephen turned to run just as the larger than life Noah appeared behind him. The groom ran right into the much larger man, tugging at the hem of his tuxedo suit, seemingly ill-fitting for him.

“You are a coward, Stephen de Graaf.” Noah said, picking the much smaller man up and shaking him severely. “And you were never good enough to even say my friend’s name…”

Samantha fell into Belle’s arms as one particularly energetic swing of her tail knocked her off balance in the heels she wore. She could just barely see in the mirror as Noah cast Stephen aside, only for the groom to stumble into his mother who caught him with strength out of all proportion to her slim figure.

“You are a coward, son of mine. Every bit of spine that you lack seems to have gone to double your bride’s. Get out of here, I will deal with you later…” she shoved him down the hall and out of sight.

“Everyone out!” Petra roared to cut through the bedlam. “I need to have words with my dragon-in-law.”

Some strange force that felt like a leaden blanket seemed to fall across the room, and Samantha reached out with one spasming hand, that cricked and cracked as it thickened, for her friends before they were gone obediently behind the closing door. Only one last glance of their sad faces before she lost the comfort of their presence.

“I meant it, you know. How I’ve grown to respect you.” Petra said, offering Samantha a hand to help her stand where she had fallen after Belle had left. The changing woman rose halfway into a crouch before gasping loudly and falling heavily against the matriarch, who grunted at the unexpected weight of the seemingly slight woman.

“I… my hips… I can’t stand! Ah, ah, aaaahhh…” Samantha moaned as pressure built in her calves and thighs. Like a rubber band being pulled tight. “Aaahhh!” she screamed when the shape of her legs abruptly shifted into a partial crouch, rotating her body forward at the pelvis to raise more of her tail off the ground and drawing her bony heels further into the air after kicking off the destabilizing heels.

“Come. To the bench with you before you can’t walk at all. That ridiculous silk padding may help your discomfort, and I won’t have someone who has proven themselves to me demean themselves on the floor. Nor sully the wedding dress I loaned you.”

“Haha,” Samantha gasped breathlessly without mirth. “I never could figure you out, you old battleaxe. I never could figure out how you can be so caring and yet so abrasive in the same sentence.” She rested her arm across Petra’s shoulders and was helped to teeter unsteadily over to the bench. Chased by the feeling of herself dragging on the ground, as her tail was in fact doing.

The bride, jilted by her own body, fell in a heap of bustles and lace to lie on her side with her arms holding up her chest. Her new growth sprawled down the length of the bench and to the ground. She panted as her spine groaned audibly and clenched at the armrest, whipping her hair out of its careful arrangement by shaking her head in denial that her hands and shoulders were there, yet more than two meters away she could feel a part of her also lying sprawled upon the ground. Her tail pushed across the wood floor as it grew with the sounds of straining sinew and the sudden tear of her beleaguered lingerie bottoms giving in. Samantha blushed and moaned with sensual relief as the fabric binding her tail, some of which had begun to dig with distracting intensity at the interior walls of her reshaped pudendal cleft, fell away.

“Control yourself while in company, young lady!” Petra admonished severely, dragging over a chair easily with one hand. Samantha once again found herself marveling at the matriarch’s strength. “Pleasuring oneself when there is no warm alternative is a journey experienced best in privacy.”

Samantha felt her blush furiously deepen until the pounding of her blood was nearly all she could hear in the sweeping fins that flicked at each sound in the hallway. Despite that, she could hear her friends argue in harsh whispers beyond the door about what to do with her.

“It really is true,” Samantha said, half in wonder. “Old women have no filter.”

“I hope that you live to find that freedom yourself, Samantha. After a life of the joys and agonies of raising a family, it is only our due. And yet that lack of a filter is why I find myself at liberty to tell you the truth now.” Petra sat in her chair, primly crossing her legs within her mid-length skirted dress. Samantha was astonished to the point of forgetting her metamorphosis for a moment when the older woman reached up with both hands to remove a contact lens from one hazy eye.

To reveal that the suffuse glow Samantha had first noticed earlier was, in actuality, a brilliant mix of azure and lavender radiating from around a slit pupil that constricted nearly shut upon unfiltered exposure to the light of the room.

Petra leaned forward until their foreheads touched. The contact brought with it a strange and overwhelming sense of comfort that lasted until Petra leaned back. “I will ensure that Oswald is available to guide you through this, as you know more of this than I do. I must also keep up the charade of being human a little while longer to deal with the foolishness of my head landscaper, airing out his change like the underwear he hangs on his cottage windowsill. I must also attend to my shiftless son and his siblings. None of them are ready for the estate they might be forced into managing at the end of this. But not if I have my way! There is much work yet to be done before others know to ensure the continuity of my house.”

Petra replaced her contact and stood, smoothing the lines of her dress with her hands. When she did, Samantha saw to her startlement the faint outlines of rounded scales covering the woman’s abdomen and obliques. Somehow, the matriarch noticed her noticing despite Samantha being certain she hadn’t reacted, as she was too busy being flustered. The scales emerging from her shoulders had fluttered in a wave, releasing a musky odor as she was surprised.

“Yes, I’m further along than you would think. Even as we speak, my gums itch intolerably, and pressure builds in my face from behind. It now feels as if my lips are stretched against my teeth as my mouth grows. After seeing what the others have become, I’m sure I’ll be lapping out of a dish on the floor like a mongrel in three days at most.”

She worked her jaw open and closed, rubbing at the corners as twin pops came from the tendons there with fingers that were thicker than she would have expected. Samantha was able to see deep into her mouth, the darkness no longer an obstacle, to spy a growing distance between her sharpening incisors and premolars. Hidden behind her lips were slight bulges where the tooth roots had expanded in a conical fashion, leaving small bumps where the skin had indeed been drawn taut.

“There will be no more hiding my departure from one life to another soon enough. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to what I can only surmise is the same process you are going through that will end with my hands in the dirt and my ass in the air.”

Petra turned back at the door to say one last thing to Samantha, and while in profile, she could definitely see that the old woman’s jaw line was starting to extend and take the whole lower half of her face with it.

“Take that dress off before you destroy it. It’s been in my family for three generations, and it looks like that fin on your back is starting to grow.”

“W…wait…” Samantha groaned through the crunching and twanging from her hips. She stood and felt her tail rise with her, scraping scales across wood and metal, the new end of her body flexed and curled.

“There is a girl, barely even a woman. She is like us, but she is alone and afraid. Please help her find her way here. Help her be safe. I beg you for her. Nothing for myself.”

Petra said nothing, she could say nothing through the groan that left her mouth. Without turning around, she leaned and braced herself against the door. The elderly woman’s wordless sound of pain ran upwards in pitch until it was a thin whine. On her back two small lumps appeared near her shoulders. There were sounds of wet, splitting flesh and the strain of growing tendons.

Petra gasped as tiny fingers spread their talons to spear against the thin back of the dress. After a moment of grunts and twitching muscles, the fingers drew closed, and the wing buds shrank away by wrapping the phalanges along her sides beneath her arms. Samantha watched, fascinated, as one smaller finger, caught on the wrong side of the matriarch’s bra strap, worked open and closed until it could rejoin its siblings.

“I cannot easily describe how peculiar it feels to have another pair of arms,” Petra said. Possibly the understatement of the year.

The old woman shuffled to the closet, hunched over against the growths tenting her dress, to find a matching shawl, which she threw over her shoulders, then forced herself upright. Beneath the wrap, Samantha saw the hidden new limbs shift until the woman’s balance was restored and then settled, frozen against her back and invisible beneath the knitted fabric.

“Time…” Petra panted as she turned. When she did, Samantha could see the distension of her mouth had grown. The length of jaw bones more readily apparent as was the concavity of the skin of her cheeks where her skull had morphed. “…is no longer our friend in the world we knew.” She gestured at Samantha’s bent legs. “Give me her name, and I promise that I will do what I can.”

“Micah Wolf. She is a pre-med graduate student at Vrije University Amsterdam, and I have no idea what she looks like now.”

“I’m sure I can guess,” Petra dryly suggested.

“She lost the ability to speak last night,”

Petra’s outstretched hand froze just over the doorknob, her body tense. “That is a problem. One I had not counted on with my face changing first. I no longer have time for this. Keep your friends close, Samantha, and I will see our lights reunited when this is over.”

Funny, the bride not to be thought. That was nearly the same thing Micah had said. Petra yanked the door open and snapped at the eavesdroppers jumping away to pretend they hadn’t been listening. The last time she saw her that day, the matriarch was dragging her son away by his ear with her nose lifted in disdain. Samantha’s friends ran past her, and the younger woman welcomed the feeling of their arms around her shoulders. A mournful cry escaped her mouth as she wept at the feeling of safety that glowed brightly in her mind.

*****

The wheels of the Land Rover command car squealed to a stop at the head of a column of armored personnel carriers in the grand turnabout among the shaggy overgrowing lawns and fountains before the tan-bricked der Graaf manor. An edifice erected in worship to a decadent past that had been scoured by the chaos after Zero Day.

But the movements of the government were being set back into their tracks, even if it were just for now, and claims of wild dragons outside the quarantined areas needed to be investigated. Bringing the Dutch army to the possible location of one more dragon. One that had been single-mindedly running roughshod over the major port nearby, demanding certain cargo be shipped against the government’s own interests.

“Men!” the commander called out to half the companies of her command, the 30th Infantry Battalion. Formed up in neat squares of a company each with their rifles held rigidly at port arms, just as she liked to see. The world going to hell was no excuse in her battalion. That was certain!

“We’ve finally tracked the Dragon Bride to her lair. Now it is her turn to have the situation explained to her. Be on your toes, we don’t know what happened to many of the people that once lived here. Alpha company, nets on every entrance and report any opening large enough for one of the creatures. Bravo company, anti-air and scene control. I want a CV90 at every cardinal direction. Charlie company, secure the interior and bring all civilians inside to me for questioning. Let’s get this beast and any misguided humans enabling them under control!”

It was only scant minutes later that Luitenant-kolonel Meijer got the call she was hoping for.

“We’ve found their way in and out, ma’am. East wing ballroom, scales on the ground and heavy claw patterns in the dirt and brick. Four tonnes, minimum.”

“Charlie Six, lock it down. Have a detail escort all humans out. Wait for me before proceeding in.”

“Charlie company, one dragon inside, expected size of four tonnes which should make them about six meters in height.” Meijer briefed her men when she’d arrived through the darkened and ornately decorated manor. I don’t want to hear any shots fired unless the dragon moves first. I’m on point, no one else speaks no matter what the dragon says.”

Meijer had three rifles on the door when she opened it, revealing a dim expanse beyond, all the curtains drawn. Here and there, brief light intruded through cracks in the billowing window covers. Just enough light to see the scoring that claws had carved into the old wood floor.

“We do not wish to be disturbed. We have suffered enough…” a rumbling voice came from every corner of the room. The words filled the vast open space that could hold her entire command twice over. A shapeless mound of utter darkness shifted, and then a pair of haunting blue-and-purple eyes opened, their gaze fixed on the battalion commander. She would never admit to her men that a river of sweat always appeared whenever one of the dragons looked at her like she was an annoying pest.

Especially not after she’d seen one beat a main battle tank into pieces with an armored car after being fired upon unprovoked by scared troops. It had taken thousands of rounds of heavy machine gun fire and four rockets to put the angry dragon down, at the cost of thirty-four casualties, to include eight KIA, and several million euros worth of equipment.

It was not an experience she wanted repeated for any under her command. It had been an invaluable lesson, nonetheless. The dragons would not attack unless they were attacked first. They were always willing to talk. And what they had to say had to be respected.

“I apologize, dragon. But all of you have been ordered into one of the three preserves set aside for you by order of his majesty’s government. Now, will you come willingly?”

“No,” the dragon rumbled with implacable finality.

“Then you leave me no choice…”

“Tell me… soldier. How many of us were you told to expect in my home that you have so rudely trespassed in?”

Her home? Us? The commander thought to herself in slowly rising horror. Suddenly getting a very strong idea that the whole mission was based on shaky intel. The iron-willed bitch at the head of the family that ran the estate hadn’t been seen in months. They had already had a state funeral for her. The last of the heraldic families dissolved in her absence when her children had loaded themselves onto a pleasure yacht and vanished in the direction of the equator.

The sound of new human voices came, nervous and afraid, and were just as quickly hissed into silence. More eyes opened in impossible colors. Two, three, six, ten, more than ten sets of eyes. Blues, greens, reds, yellows, and violets, some were mismatched, some had no color at all. One dragon had what had seemed like every hue of blue known to the world in its eyes. Some eyes were bracketed by shadows that reached the roof of the towering ballroom while others were not much larger than horses.

Movement and rhythmic thumping came from the abyss as at least one tail moved. The rustling of canvas sails. Rumbling growls seemed to make the ground shake beneath the commander’s boots. She was starting to realize how badly this had all gone south.

A head loomed just before her. Nearly as tall from jaw to crest as Meijer was in her entirety. The eyes had the color of burnished copper and gold. The Dragon Bride. On each side of her head two more dragons appeared to flank her, including the largest spiniest example of a former human the commander had ever seen. Eyes of soft brown and vibrant amber looked down at the human female. The Dragon Bride extended a wing across both of the dragon’s backs, sending a chandelier rocking with a mad tinkle of crystal. The dragon with blue and purple eyes from before made a sharp snarl at the Dragon Bride, who ignored what Meijer knew to be words spoken in an impossibly complex language.

Oven-hot breath swirled against the commander’s face. A heavy thud rattled the windows as the dragon took a step closer. Its mouth opened to reveal rows of uniform teeth in the light coming through the door. Each serrated fang was the size of her hand.

“We have only tried to move the food supplies, spoiling as they sit on those docks. That we scared a few humans is no cause for you storming in here…” the Dragon Bride said from deep in her throat, guessing right away why they were there. Sticky ribbons of saliva dripped within the humid maw of swamp-like heat. The stench of spice in the room was beyond oppressive. The high-pitched murmurs of the dragons speaking to each other and the rasping chuffs of their breath grew louder as they shifted and rose. She felt the weight of all their focus fall right onto her shoulders.

“Leave.”

“Leave.”

“Please…”

“Get the helvede out of my home.”

“Leave!” the immense volume of who knew how many lungs growled all at once in the ballroom.

The dragons were right, this group hadn’t done any real harm. Beyond the deer in the local forests being in short supply. There were, she counted pairs of eyes, fourteen more dragons than she’d been told to expect. She would not put her troops into a fight that very likely might end up killing them all.

Luitenant-kolonel Meijer thought that leaving was the best idea she’d heard all day.