“I told you it would be cold,” I grumbled as I listened to Alicya complaining for the fifteenth time about the temperature. “We’re a kilometre up over the sea, and it’s winter.”

  “Have you got any blankets in your storage space?” she chittered, teeth clacking together audibly over the wind.

  I pulled out the thinnest blanket I had and used a tail to pass it up to her. You’ve got to let people learn from their mistakes, and I’d told her to wear a jacket. Splitting off one tail and raising it over my back ruined my aerodynamics, and I wobbled in the air for a moment, eliciting a worried squawk from my passenger.

  “Bob! Jace has found them!” Bargleblaster swooped up and past me, yelling his message on the way. He circled back and then beat his wings hard to come into formation next to me.

  “About time!” Alicya snarled.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Looks like all of them—over a hundred ships. Jace wants to try out his new bombs. They’re due south of you.”

  “We talk first. It’s why I’ve brought the puppy.”

  Bargleblaster chuckled and turned his neck for a second to look at the werewolf shivering just behind the horns that framed the base of my neck. I craned my head back and suppressed a smile. The blanket was just blowing out behind her like a cloak as she clutched it around her shoulders.

  “I’ll drop down and try to talk to them. Burgerbungler, get the others to form up, high enough to be out of bolt range,” I ordered.

  “It’s—”

  “Kelvin, go do as you’re told, there’s a good nerd. If we have to bolt, start bombing. We can negotiate with the survivors if we have to.”

  He snorted out a column of brown fire, then flipped and dove to build speed before wheeling away to my left. As I traded my own altitude for speed, the wind blew past us faster, and I could feel Alicya shivering across the base of my neck. Next time, she’d damn well listen when I suggested some outerwear. While I was sympathetic, I wasn’t terribly sympathetic.

  The fleet was impressive. The VDU movies hadn’t really captured the splendour of a preindustrial/magical fleet in motion. Smaller ships, the metallic ones that glowed or clearly used some sort of combustible fuel, led the way.

  There were perhaps twenty of them, and I tagged them as the major threats. They didn’t have archers or sailors climbing the rigging like the more medieval-looking vessels, but they had what I could only describe as cannon barrels that were tipped with crystals, which glowed in various sickly colours, mounted along the sides.

  Someone had been teching up, and I suspected the High Hirsute One might be an Outremonde who had the bad luck to be reincarnated as a furry.

  The bigger ships were all tacking as I caught sight of them. I wasn’t a sailor back home, but I was familiar enough with the concepts that I knew that sailing against the wind required a lot of moving diagonally to get where you wanted to go.

  I braked to a halt and began frantically flapping my wings, just ahead of the leading destroyer-type, the littlest one. I was not a hummingbird, and hovering took a hell of a lot of effort. It must have looked amazing to the crew. A dragon, midnight black scales glinting in the sun and the light reflecting from the waves, horned and bat-winged, a long-haired, hairy woman clutching desperately to my horns as my shoulders heaved with constant wingbeats.

  “I’m here to talk!” I roared.

  The leading ship was a sleek grey lozenge that glowed faintly. It came to a halt a few dozen metres away from me. I clutched the pair of crystals held in my left forepaw and smiled confidently. Then I thought better of it and let my lips slide back over my fangs.

  “There doesn’t need to be any violence here today!” I yelled.

  “Bob, don’t mention violence. They like violence.”

  I glanced back at Alicya with one eye and shrugged. Once I had stabilised and regained my altitude, I muttered an apology to her.

  A hatch opened on the top of the ship and something… slithered out? I narrowed my eyes and blinked.

  “Hey, snake dude, any chance we can have a chinwag?”

  “Sometimes I regret accepting this ship.” The hissing, sibilant voice reached me over the wind blowing past my ears. “Remove yourself, or face the consequences. We bear no ill will to your kind, and you alone cannot stop us.” Every S sound was extended and serpentine.

  There was a whistling noise, and something flashed down between the ship and me. A whump followed, and a fountain of water shot up into the sky from a circular eruption that disrupted the waves. I was annoyed that Jace was trying out his new bat-shit infused toys, but I couldn’t deny his timing was impeccable. It was also more likely than not that he hadn't intended to miss the ship.

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  “As you can see, I am not alone.” I nodded upward as the other dragons circled together. “And that wasn’t even a breath attack, just a device we built.” My colleagues looked like five giant scaly bats circling slowly overhead. If bats had tails as long as their bodies. “I’m here to negotiate.”

  Alicya was kicking me with one heel; the beat was frantic, but I chose to ignore her.

  “You will not be comfortable on my little vessel as you are. You can shapeshift?” yelled the creature I assumed was the captain of the ship.

  “Yep.” I leaned into the wind and, with a few powerful wingbeats, my back legs were dangling above the squat ship. Then I shifted back and realised my body contracted from both ends. Not normally an issue when I changed while standing on the ground, but the four feet my toes had been hovering above the deck suddenly became sixteen, and my passenger and I plummeted to the slippery deck.

  I spat sea spray from my mouth and groaned as I tried to keep my feet on the slick metal. “You can get down now,” I muttered. I had a pair of muscular and very hairy legs on either side of my face. I tapped one thigh delicately. She was gripping very tightly, and I was slightly concerned about the blood flow to my brain and permanent cauliflower ears.

  Alicya hopped down, her toe-claws striking sparks as they curled on impact. “I don’t like water.”

  “Scared of a bath?”

  She glared at me, then looked back at our host. He had slithered backwards. His lower body was just a giant snake; it extended nearly nine feet behind him and ended in a rattle that shook faintly in fear.

  “Human!”

  “I’m not a mammal, buddy.”

  “Bob is a beastkin like us,” Alicya added, pulling the blanket I’d given her around her shoulders. “Can we get out of the wind?”

  “Who the hells are you?”

  “I am Alicya Caine. I was blessed over a thousand years ago. I’ve gone by many names over the years: Mother of Pups, Jaded Fur, Nightfang. But you probably know me as Moon Shiver.” She walked slowly forward as she spoke.

  “The one who led us in the First War of Independence? Moon Shiver is long dead,” he sneered. Snake faces were built for sneering, I discovered. The curl of the lips, the primary fangs swinging down into position and dribbling venom. Was he sneering?

  His tail had coiled up behind him, and he exploded forward, jaws open and clawed hands held out to either side. He crashed into Alicya and wrapped around her, his fangs sinking into her shoulder as he bit deep.

  “The fuck!” I stamped over to them and snatched at the end of his tail. Then I squeezed, and he released his bite to hiss in pain. “Conjurare Barnaculum!”

  I’d been practising with my new favourite spell, and discovered that it responded to my will, sometimes. On this occasion, it worked, and the bulk of the conjured crustacea appeared in the snake-thing’s mouth, wedging his jaws open and covering his fangs, with a single barnacle appearing on each of his eyes.

  He unwound from Alicya, who staggered as the pressure was released. “Why did you interfere?” Her shoulder was already swelling where the scaly’s teeth had pierced her flesh.

  “He attacked you? And you’re going to have eight tits soon if we don’t do something about that. Poison? I don’t have any spells for poison.” I added it to my list of obvious shit I should have already acquired.

  “My tail!”

  “Oh, quit bitching. Why did you attack my friend? What kind of poison is it, you long-toothed piece of shit?” I grabbed him by the scruff of his captain’s jacket, brocade crumpled in my grasp, and heaved him up to face me. The end of his tail was cradled in his hands, and he moaned in pain.

  “I was greeting her according to the prophecy!” he hissed. Oh, great. Another fucking prophecy.

  “Bob, put him down. If you can heal him, please do so.” She sighed wearily. “I suppose I should have mentioned it, but I told them I’d return, and how to treat anyone who claimed my name.” She held up her hands and motioned for me to drop the snake dude.

  “What’s your name?” I demanded, shaking him back and forth.

  “Vakushi Takshaka, you… You human!”

  “They know I can’t be killed, but my name was dangerous. It could be abused to unite them, so anyone who claimed to be me had to be tested,” Alicya said slowly, as though she was explaining things to a child. I gave her a level four glare. “It’s not stupid if you don’t know something, and now I’m telling you. So put Captain Vakushi down and heal his tail!”

  I let him fall and cast the basic healing spell on the… “What species are you?”

  “Shesha, you stinking traitor. Moon Shiver told us the only way to be sure it was her was to kill her.”

  I sniffed at my armpits. I’d worn sensible boxers when I set out, or at least I’d thought I had. Simple silken shorts didn’t do well when soaked and in the freezing cold of the middle of the ocean, but at least I was tackle-concealed.

  “Stinking?” I growled. Vanity was not amused. He was poking Wrath inside my mind and trying to get him even more annoyed than usual.

  “Oh… There it is.” Alicya collapsed.

  I rushed to her and lifted one of her hands. It flopped back onto her furry stomach as soon as I let go.

  “Augendae Vitae! Abnegant Mortem! Sanara Vulnera! Systema Tarda!”

  Her tongue lolled out of the side of her mouth as her eyes stared unblinkingly at the grey skies above. Her inflammations had begun to deflate, but when I gently brushed one with a finger, the fur fell out, revealing pale skin riddled with black veins.

  I tenderly closed her eyes and turned towards her killer. I didn’t know her well, but she’d signed on with me, which made her my property. Kind of. Not in a bad way. And this walking—ambulatory—no, slithering, soon-to-be-handbag-and-matching-boots had just robbed me of her.

  Scales appeared under my skin, and my mouth grew wide. I opened it far further than a human should be able to and revealed rows of razor-sharp fangs. “Let’s see how you like it,” I hissed, my now-forked tongue flickering out to taste his fear. The partial transformation should be enough to make sure his fangs just bounced off me.

  His jaws dislocated and expanded, then the mass of barnacles vanished, his throat expanding as they moved slowly towards his chest. He yanked the ones on his eyes away and blinked at me. The vertical pupils were narrowed into slits and surrounded by yellow irises.

  “It was the law!” He didn’t try to come fully upright as he slithered away from me. “If she’s who she says she is, then she’ll be fine!”

  “Are you deliberately picking words with sibilants in them, or are you jusssst ssssstupid?”

  I reached out and caught the end of his tail, yanking him towards me and starting to spin, the terrified snake-man stretched out as I built momentum.

  “Bob!”

  Alicya’s voice. I let go in shock and watched as Vakushi went sailing out to sea.

  “Oops. So poisons aren’t a problem for you then?” She climbed painfully back to her feet and gave me the kind of look men know to fear. The captain splashed into the water a couple of hundred metres away, having sailed over the next closest destroyer.

  “What part of unkillable confused you?”