Yes, she told herself firmly. It’s only empathy. And you are a terrible liar.

“Should I infer from your little nickname for Beckett that you haven’t been sucked into the bottomless chasm of his charm yet?”

The bitterness in Magnus’s tone stunned her. As did the final word he’d spoken: yet. He fully assumed she’d be looking at Beckett the way Kali, North, and Sayer looked at him. The way everyone probably looked at him: googly-eyed and drooling.

“Nah. I could never be interested in a man prettier than me. My ego’s way too fragile.”

She’d been joking, her tone light, but he turned and looked her fully in the face with an intensity even more surprising than his obvious dislike of Beckett. He said vehemently, “There isn’t a person who’s ever lived who’s prettier than you.”

Her heart did a funny little flip. No one had ever said anything remotely similar to her. She’d never thought of herself as pretty, only as different, dangerous, an outsider who was worth more dead than alive. To everyone else but her parents, she’d been a thing.

To everyone else but her parents . . . and the Magnus of her dreams.

She said, “Thank you. That might be the first compliment anyone’s ever paid me.”

To which Magnus replied, “That’s because people are fucking morons.”

His posture held the same rigidity it always did when he spoke to her, his face the same hard, closed lines. But his eyes burned dark with raw emotion, and for a split second she almost recognized her dream lover.

Then something vast hurtled by overhead with a powerful whoosh of cold air, darkening the sky, and Lu ducked down with a scream.

In mere seconds it was gone, and she looked up and saw what had passed. She saw, but she didn’t believe.

There making a slow banking turn in the sky, skimming the underbellies of the clouds and leaving a swirling trail in its wake, was a dragon.

Pure white, with silver-tipped wings and silver barbs along its tail, it was enormous but elegant, moving gracefully with powerful thrusts of its wings. Even from this distance she could see the creature’s vivid yellow-green eyes, the long, silky white mane along its neck, its muzzle full of razor-sharp teeth.

Magnus exhaled with a sound that was frustrated and aggravated in equal measure. He muttered, “Your sister has a real flare for the melodramatic.”

Lu rose, her gaze fixed on the horizon and the creature flying closer. Making, it appeared, a beeline in their direction. “Honor . . . that’s . . . I don’t . . .” She shook her head, too blank to respond.

Magnus had moved several steps away. He glanced at her, everything about his face and eyes now guarded, closed down. He said, “I suppose this would be as good a time as any for you to try it as well.”

“Try it?” Lu repeated, barely able to form the words as she watched the dragon fly closer and closer, its muzzle curling back in what looked like a grin.

“Flying, Lumina.”

Her head snapped around and she gaped at him. “What?”

He said, “From what I’ve seen, the flying itself is the easy part. It’s the landings that’ll give you some trouble.”

Then he walked away, and Lu was left standing alone as her sister the dragon began to descend.

FIFTEEN

Magnus had been right: Landing was a problem. The white dragon barreled down toward Lu, its wings pumping a furious backbeat as it attempted to slow itself. Legs out, talons extended, fangs bared, it made such a terrifying picture that Lu’s first and only thought was to bolt.

Lucky she did, because the dragon landed with a thunderous, ground-shaking boom in the exact spot she’d just been standing.

Crouched a few yards away, Lumina was pelted with clods of dirt and tufts of dislodged grass. She stood, brushing muck from the new outfit Morgan had given her, and stalked back to the dragon.

“Are you crazy?” she shouted at it. “What is your problem with me?”

The dragon folded its wings, shook back its mane from its face, and fixed her in its feral yellow-green gaze. With a derisive snort, it exhaled a chuff of white vapor and rose to its full height. Its powerful tail flicked out from behind it, lashing dangerously close to Lu’s legs.

Lu crossed her arms and straightened her spine. “I’m not afraid of you, and you only have yourself to thank for—”

The dragon opened its mouth and exhaled again, this time with a powerful blast of blue frosted air so cold it burned like fire.

When the air cleared, Lu was unscathed. Unfortunately, she was also naked. Her clothes had frozen solid, then been shorn away in tiny bits of scintillating fabric that floated gently down from the sky like snowflakes. Only her boots remained intact, and they were crusted in ice.

She felt all the eyes on her. She felt with acute humiliation the chill of the slight breeze on her naked stomach, buttocks, and thighs, the warmth of the sun on her shoulders. And from the corner of her vision she saw Magnus running toward her, tearing off his jacket and shirt.

The shirt off his back, she thought. That’s really sweet. Then she stalked over to the dragon and punched it in the face.

That was the first moment of what would become the most amazing hour of her life.

The dragon reacted by snapping its head to the side, but toward Lu, instead of away. It caught her in the ribcage and tossed her into the air where she sailed, spinning with her arms and legs flung wide, until it caught her on the back of an outstretched wing. Its pale flesh was tough but smooth, pearlescent in the sunlight, exuding heat, and as she stared down at the pattern of interlocking scales, she thought in grudging admiration, It’s actually kind of beautiful.

Then with a flick of its wing, the dragon sent Lu sailing into the air once again. She flew over its back and landed on the opposite wing with an audible oof!

Panting, she looked up to find the dragon staring at her over its shoulder, its long neck craned back, an expression in its reptilian eyes that was . . . smug.

It was toying with her.

Something inside of her just snapped.

Lu didn’t know exactly how it happened, but one minute she was screaming in impotent rage, pounding her fists on the unyielding hide of the dragon wing so hard her wrist popped, the next she was fifty feet in the air, looking down on the creature from above.

In an instant, everything was different. She was different. She inhaled, and felt the suck of air into massive lungs, smelled mice and voles and rabbits deep beneath the earth, tasted the sweet, ripe bite of an apple from some faraway, unseen tree on her tongue. She exhaled and from her mouth came a plume of smoke intermingled with an orange blaze of fire, and it was then that she realized what she’d done.

She’d Shifted. To dragon.

Holy. Shit!

And the most astonishing thing—aside from the sensation of wind beneath her wings, and the expressions on the faces of the group of people staring up at her wide-eyed and frozen from below—was that it was effortless. She knew she must be pumping her wings, but it felt as if she were standing still, floating, not flying. It felt as if feet and hands were things she’d learned how to use, cumbersome things in another cumbersome body, but wings and talons and smoke and fire were the way she was really meant to be.

As if she was, finally, wearing the right skin.