“They will,” Xandros stated with admirable enthusiasm as we moved through the alleyways.
We paused when we approached the main street.
“You need to split,” Xandros said in English.
Rhodes eyed him. “I am assuming you are referring to me leaving you now.” As usual, he refused to speak in a human tongue unless absolutely necessary. His gaze moved to me. “I will meet you two at the hopper.”
“Try to have rapid feet,” Xandros told him.
“I think the term is “not to drag your feet”,” I corrected.
“I am, as always, faster than you,” Rhodes rumbled, having understood it anyway.
Xandros glanced at me. “Are we going to track that tasty human female?”
Rhodes raised a brow. “What female?”
“She was beautiful,” Xandros purred. “With incredible eyes and a lovely ass to fondle.”
Now I rolled my eyes. “She was cloaked. We barely saw her ass.”
At almost the same moment, Rhodes growled, “You tagged a female? Is that why you were late?”
“Late? We were not late,” Xandros protested. “You should have seen her?—”
I interrupted the impending argument. “Okay, enough.” I turned to Xandros and said in English, “No matter how theoretically delectable her ass is, we are not tracking a human female in Tazier territory. I should not have tagged her.” To Rhodes, I said in Drakonian, “We will meet you at the hopper.”
Both looked as though they would say more on the matter. Instead, Rhodes growled and strode away down an alley at right angles to the one we were in, while I led Xandros in the other direction.
It was now fully dark, with the streetlights fizzing in an unsettling manner. When Xandros’s stride hitched, I followed his gaze to a small, round form clad in moth-eaten bits and pieces—a Vrep, scurrying on its four legs to wherever it would spend the night.
Before I could stop him, Xandros had jogged up to it. The tiny alien spun around, eyestalks waving uneasily.
“Do you have another—er—carrot?” he asked.
How he knew it was the same Vrep, I had no idea. They were everywhere on these streets. But the Vrep dug a tentacle into its voluminous pockets and emerged with yet another banana.
Moments later, Xandros rejoined me, lustily smacking. My brother almost never stopped eating.
“I can give you some,” he said. Which, knowing Xandros, was a very generous offer. He waved the half-consumed fruit in my face.
“Keep it,” I told him.
He crammed it in his mouth and pitched the peel as we walked through the downtown area and then into a more industrial zone near the old train tracks. Once there, we climbed up onto an even more ancient brick building.
With a sense of immense relief, we pulled off our cloaks.
I stretched my wings from their cramped folded position along my spine. As they began to expand in size, I embraced my dragon.
It was always a painful experience, shifting from our humanoid form to that of dragon. Bones and muscles expanded, sending agony shooting through me. But it was a familiar thing, and welcome.
We were born to fly.
Xandros shook the last red-hued scale into place and stretched out his orange-tinged wings. His blue eyes glowed with gemstone luminosity in the light of the rising moon.
Most of our clan swung to redheads and blonds. I shook the last red-gold scale into place and spread my golden wings.
We scooped up our cloaks and took to the sky, flapping hard to get straight up into the clouds. From there we navigated, using our people’s natural orientation to the magnetic field, droppingdown below the obscuring layers once in a while to visually check on our progress.
