The Hatchling

Motive

"No?" Beck's smile wavered.

"No," I repeated, cementing my answer. "Not like this at least."

Beck rolled his eyes and dropped my hands. "I'm not proposing to you!" Before I could get a word out, he put his finger over my lips and leaned down to be within centimeters of my face. "You're mine whether you're saying yes or not at this moment. You sleep in the same bed as me for God's sake."

"No means no!" I spat, snapping my teeth at his finger.

Beck ruffled my hair and smiled at me like I was some naïve child. "You want me. That's all I have to know."

"You don't know that!" I stammered, my face heating to an uncomfortably hot level.

Beck shrugged and rest his hand on his hip. "You kissed me because you wanted to need I remind you," he said in a matter-of-fact way.

"Physical attraction doesn't mean anything. It's purely physical. I can't help how I react."

"You can't resist me," Beck sang the words like they were a lullaby to his own ears. He laughed as he walked back to the bathroom. "All I needed to hear Emira!"

He slammed the door shut just before I reached it, and I found the door was locked. "That's not all you need to hear you buffoon! Now my answer is definitely no!" I screeched.

He most certainly blocked out my ranting as he hummed in the shower. I cursed him under my breath and stormed to the bed, opening the chest to look for the first aid kit.

Prying it's lid off, I pulled out the bottle of isopropyl alcohol and wet a large cotton ball. Slowly sliding up the polyester briefs, I started from the wound lowest on my leg and went up. The severity in the bites and scratches got worse the closer to my hips they were.

When we shifted down from being a dragon, our wounds still followed us, but they just morphed into a human equivalency. My wing had been dislocated, and so when I shifted, my shoulder was. Any scar on us was the same it was on us when we were shifted, only smaller and perhaps in a slightly different position.

Our clothes were a different case. Our clothes were still technically on our bodies when we were dragons, but when we shifted, our bodies expanded at a rapid rate, sucking energy from the air around us and putting it into ourselves as our bodies produced more matter. Aka: our dragon form.

Our clothes were all specially made with loosely bound molecular fibers. The molecules that created our clothes were very barely attached and extremely flexible, unlike human clothing particles, so when we shifted, the molecules simply broke apart and sat out our bodies till we shifted back. Hence how we always had clothes on when we shifted down.

That technology was the only good thing humans had ever given us is what my father said.

We were like titans compared to them the more I thought about it. They were so small and puny. They were intelligent enough, but that was their downfall. Half of the time countries were corrupt. A select few were supposedly good places, but from what I'd heard in school and growing up, those places were rare.

My mind wandered back to my home as I saw an old scar on my knee. It was one of my first flights, and I had failed miserably. Reaching about twenty feet in the air, I had spectacularly lost my balance and fell like a rock. A few tears and a bandage later, I was at it again.

I couldn't help but worry about the borders after what I had heard Beck and Malachai discussing several days before, but I didn't want to let Beck know I knew that I had been spying.

Who was Salva, and how big of a threat was he?

He sounded ridiculous to me with a name like that. Might as well have named him saliva. But the way that Malachai spoke of him prompted immediate alarm inside me.