Dragon 2 Chapter 18 (Patreon)

I changed out quickly into a set of sweats I kept at the bar, deep within Morgana’s twisting corridors. It was starting to feel like I almost lived with her.

“Ready?” Morgana came back after dropping Sabrina off.

I released a sigh, having changed quickly enough for her not to catch me with my pants down, literally. The two times she had, she’d made me fight like that, in the name of preparing for everything.

“Yeah. What did you have in mind?”

Morgana prowled the space. It was a wide open room with a matted floor meant for combat practice. Practice weapons were arranged along the walls, and those were not-so-soft although at least not deadly. I should know. She’d whacked me in the back of the head with all of them at least once.

“I want to see you shift.”

Nodding, I reached, starting to take my shirt off, but then moved to keep her in my line of sight. She loved to attack when I least expected it when we were in the training room. “Don’t try anything.”

“Oh, please. It was just that one time.”

“Twice. You did it twice.” I growled.

“Who knew dragons were such drama queens?” Morgana waved away my concerns, sticking her tongue out at me. Her blue tongue. That always caught me off guard.

Throwing off the rest of my clothes, I stood there comfortable in my nakedness for a moment before shifting. I pushed the beast to the surface, my bones cracking and popping into the new configuration.

But, of course, Morgana wasn’t going to wait for me to finish.

A heavy blow hit my head even as I was shifting, and I staggered to the side. The movement halted my shift midway. It was so goddamn uncomfortable that I almost shifted back. But I realized that was exactly what she wanted.

Pushing through the shift, I came out of my shift a pissed off dragon-hybrid. I was a big, scaley beast capable of standing on two legs, or prowling on all four. But I didn’t have wings, nor would I fit through any doorway. Even in the large training room, I couldn’t stand on my back legs or I’d be too far above Morgana to fight her.

Pausing, I realized I’d lost where she was when I finished my shift.

My head jerked back as someone landed between my horns and started pulling. Frustrated, I was more than happy to fight her in my hybrid form.

I curled in on myself and slammed my head against the floor, working to throw her off. But Morgana simply ran down my spine, smacking me with whatever practice weapon was in her hand.

Rolling onto my back, I tried to crush her, but she jumped, leaving me on my back as she was flying down, sword in two hands, to stab my stomach.

Damnit.

But a golden blur caught her right in the chest. My tail had swung based on instincts I didn’t know I had, sending her flying against the wall with a wet crack.

Rolling back on my feet, I stood up and grunted as I went to check on her. My tail had crushed in the side of her chest, and it looked like she’d broken her neck against the wall. Both of those were popping back into place, though.

She took a deep breath. “I might have deserved that.”

Of course you did. I grumbled, but it came out as guttural nonsense.

“Oh. My. God. You can’t talk.” She clutched her still healing chest and fell over sideways, laughing.

Not funny, I huffed, which of course only made her laugh harder. Hard enough that she sputtered up blood from her crushed chest.

I grabbed her hair with my jaw and tossed her into the air again. She landed back in the center of the mats. But that still didn’t stop her from rolling around laughing at me.

Rolling my dragon eyes, which I could still do clearly, I stretched and let my beast come back down from the full dragon hybrid form. I stopped when I was still covered in scales and had put on a few hundred pounds, but my throat was human. “Cut it out Morgana.”

“He talks!” She gave one last chuckle and rolled to her feet. “But seriously. Be careful. Your size isn’t always an advantage. If I were using my magic there, you would have been dead a dozen times over.”

“What do you recommend?” I asked, curious. For all the shit I gave her, she was an expert in fighting, and I knew many would kill for the chance to train with her. Although they probably were less aware of her somewhat brutal methods.

“This right here isn’t bad.” She stepped around me, looking at it. “A little showy, though. You look like a knight in golden armor.”

My face was human, but she was right. Scales coated me like a suit of armor, and a wicked-looking crown of spikes curled from my brow to protect my skull. “It doesn’t feel that bad.”

“Yeah? Think you can fight like that?” She asked. “I think your hybrid form is too big to be useful in most places. Almost anywhere indoors it isn’t going to work.”

I grumbled, but she was right. I liked being a big fucker, but this form was more likely to be of help. Now, I stood at maybe seven and a half feet tall with another two hundred pounds of weight on me. A small doorway would be a challenge, but otherwise, there wasn’t going to be much in the normal world I couldn’t operate within.

“What are you going to call it?” She asked.

“I feel like a knight in gold armor, so this is me as a dragon knight.” I gave the pseudo form a name.

She nodded. “I like it, and you get to pretend to be a knight in shining armor when you save yet another girl. Or a guy, you know you could save a guy for once.” Morgana tried to deadpan, but her smile quirked ever so slightly at the edge.

I rolled my eyes. “Come on. Enough talk. I want to get used to this form.”

Morgana came at me quickly, with the grace and speed that only an elf turned vampire could have. Compared to her, the rest of us must have seemed like bumbling toddlers.

Still, she wasn’t able to crawl over me anymore, and I had enough training to handle her first flurry of punches. Changing tactics, she moved to try to sweep my legs out from under me.

I hunkered down, putting my weight on the leg and stopping her cold. Then I grabbed for her, but space bent away from me and she was out of my reach. She twisted and turned over me like I was a stripper pole, ending with my head in her hands. She pulled me in the direction I had been leaning.

I toppled over onto the ground, but not before sinking my hand into her arm and pulling her down with me. “It never ends well when we get down on the floor together.” She might be agile to the point I couldn’t hit her, but down on the ground grappling? My strength was king down here.

“Who knows, maybe this time it’ll end just right.” She winked and bit her lower lip.

It distracted me only for a moment, but that was all she needed. The world turned upside down, and she rolled me, springing to her feet and escaping with a husky laugh.

“Keep your head on. Never know when you’re going to have to fight something pretty.” She waited for me to get to my feet.

“Yeah, well, let's see if I can’t make you less pretty.” I made a tight fist, eager to get a score on Morgana.

The elven vampire had hundreds of years of experience on me, though, and by all accounts was a war hero three hundred years ago. A war that she still hadn’t told me much about.

I dodged another hit as I asked, “Morgana, what is ‘The Church’? You’ve mentioned it, but you never went into detail. Is it the Vatican?” Sometimes Morgana opened up better when she was fighting.

She wove under a punch and I met her neck attack with the hard horns on my head, sending her stumbling back with a bloody fist that healed instantly. “No, not exactly. What we call ‘The Church’ and any practicing religion here isn’t the same. Though they were once the same.” She came back at me with another hit. “They might be loosely connected, but remember, paranormals are the bad guys. We are the bad guys.”

I took a chance and let her get a solid hit to my chest, bringing her closer. Wrapping my arms around her in a hug, I crushed her to me. It stung to take that blow to the chest, but once she was in my arms, she wasn’t getting out. Already, the bones in her shoulders were starting to strain. “Submit.”

She slapped me twice, and I let her go. Morgana stumbled back, wheezing as her shoulder popped back into place. “That was good. Didn’t expect your chest to be so hard.”

“I might not be fully shifted, but these are still dragon scales. But don’t dodge the question. I want to know more about The Church.”

She sighed, panting a bit as she relented. “Think back to hundreds of years ago. Who do you think peasants called when vampires were eating people in their hamlets? Or when some other ‘monster’ showed up that everyone was afraid of.” Morgana air quoted the word.

“Monster?” I asked, offended.

“What do you think we are? Stories about dragons don’t often have them being kind, merciful creatures now do they. No, you kidnap princesses, hoard gold and rampage villages.” She looked me in the eye. “Regardless of what you stand for to yourself and the rest of the paranormal community, know that they see all of us as monsters.”

I frowned. We certainly had some extra skill sets, but we weren’t monsters, especially not in the sense that we were innately dangerous. But it made more sense for why the secrecy of the paranormal world had to be kept. I wanted to rebel and deny that the people I grew up with would think of us as monsters, but if I were honest with myself, I had a feeling they would.

A right hook caught my chin while I wasn’t paying attention, and I stumbled to a knee.

“Quit moping. Stand up and fight. At the end of the day, you are what you want to be. I don’t see Scarlett or Jadelyn running from you screaming. Sabrina, who’s crazy shy, seems instantly comfortable around you. Hell, you have the entire wolf pack drooling over you. Don’t throw yourself a pity party just yet because some idiots would consider you a monster.”

She waited for me to recover. “The Church is a relic of a bygone era. They used to hunt us down with crosses and crossbows. The best among them were warlocks wielding powerful artifacts blessed by angelics. Now they, like us, must live in secret.”

I got back up, raising my fists to go another round. “Then I just have to be better than them.”

“There we go.” Morgana got back into a tempo, really starting to work me and put me through my paces while I held onto my dragon knight form.

She was a challenge like no other. Somehow I knew that she had put herself through a crucible stained with blood to have the instincts she did when we fought. The distant echo of hatred that was in her voice when she talked about The Church was clear.

I wanted to know so much more about her past and what really happened back three hundred years ago, but I had a feeling that she’d crack my jaw if I asked any more then.

So I did the next best thing. I taunted her to help distract her from going back through her memories. “Is that all you got? Pretty sure your age is getting to you, Morgana. That was weak.”

She stopped on a dime and spun, her heel lashing out and catching me hard enough in the ribs that I knew I was going to have a wicked bruise tomorrow.

But I grabbed her leg and drove her body to the floor as I went all out on her, letting her push me as hard as she could.

Every time I forced her to use her magic, I counted it as a win, because someone who wasn’t Morgana would have been dead each of those times. That, and her using magic, was cheating. I mean, she could bend space. In a fist fight or even with simple weapons, that was a cheat code.

She worked me on the mat until I was too tired to hold my dragon knight form and reverted back to being human mid strike. Morgana didn’t miss the chance to pull me off balance and flip me on my back with a wet smack as my sweat-soaked back made contact with the floor. “Not bad. You lasted pretty long.”

“Hard to hold that form. Human and hybrid dragon feel natural, but that one takes effort.” I grunted, my lungs straining to pull air in.

“No, I mean it. Good work. But you could use your shifting a little more when you fight. More than a few times if you’d changed your size on me, it would have been easy for you to take the advantage and pin me.” She tossed me a water bottle while she popped open another one of her champaigned blood bottles.

I’d seen her have more than a few of them before, but that was in the dark club. Here it was clearer. The dark glass bottle was decorated, oddly enough, with angel wings.

Taking a heavy pull from the water bottle, its plastic crinkled as I sucked down to hydrate myself before coming up for air. “I think that might be a little more advanced than I’m ready for.”

Morgana hummed to herself as she took a satisfied sip of her own beverage. “Something to look forward to then.” She looked at my nakedness. “We need to get you some clothes that stretch too. Think you can keep your scales under your clothes? That might be a nice surprise if anyone tries something on the street.”

I paused in my chugging. “Think I’m going to need that?” I asked.

“Can’t be too prepared, but I think those scales could stop a low caliber bullet. Think of it like a bullet-proof vest.” She offered.

That… made sense. I might be tough, but I didn’t think I was bulletproof. Now I could be, if I learned to use my shift correctly. My powers were coming in hard and fast, but it still felt like I was just scratching the surface.

Taking another swig of water, I tried to casually pry a bit more on our conversation from earlier. “Morgana. Can you tell me what really happened three hundred years ago with the church?”

She looked up at me, her eyes growing more serious than usual. “I told you. People died. Lots of them. For no reason except someone leading the church saw an opportunity to press an advantage. It wasn’t even about killing paranormals, it was about giving the populace of Europe a shared enemy.” She drained her glass and poured another.

She’d said that part before, but she rarely ever went into detail about her role within the fight. If she had played such a pivotal role in the war and was such a dangerous enemy of the church, why the heck was she out in the open? Shouldn’t they be hunting her down? “Why isn’t The Church coming after you? After everything I’ve heard, it’s public knowledge that you beat their asses back. They should be coming after you.”

She paused, her freshly filled glass halfway up to her mouth before she put it down and looked away. She turned back, weariness across her face. I’d seen her fight time and time again, and she never looked tired. “There’s a truce.”

“A truce?” My mind whirled at the idea. She wasn’t part of the elves, and she wasn’t part of the vampires. If there was a truce, it meant that she alone was able to hold off the church? While she was no doubt amazingly skilled and a kick ass mercenary, she was just one person. I hadn’t seen anything from her to suggest she was that powerful.

“There’s a truce between The Church and I.” She swirled her glass and sipped from it.

“You’re going to have to give me more than that.” I growled, not liking being in the dark.

“Suffice to say, I can’t harm them and they can’t harm me.”

Now she was just being evasive. “I know what a damn truce is, Morgana. Why?”

“Because I’m a big, spooky paranormal and I leaned into my reputation. Don’t worry about it. Even if you pick a fight with The Church, I’ll back you.” Morgana smiled around her glass as she drank deeply, enjoying her special vintage of blood.

I wasn’t quite sure what to think. There were clearly more layers to peel back to get to the real Morgana than I thought.

I went to ask another question, but my phone vibrated in my pocket. Morgana smiled, knowing she was off the hook for the moment.

Pulling it out, I confirmed what we’d both expected. “Kelly is here.”

“Then go get cleaned up. The last thing you want is to be smelly and sweaty around her. She might try to rub as much of your scent off of you as she can. Stupid werewolf.” Morgana cursed the last bit into her glass as she drained it. “I need to start setting up a few things.”