The invisible wires started dragging him backward, and at the same time they heated up. The pain was enough to sear his skin.
Jess felt it too. She let go in surprise, and he was yanked backward a few feet before she lunged and grabbed him.
"Oh no you don't," she ground out. She wrapped both arms around him and pulled.
She was astonishingly strong, for a human. He hadn't realized humans could be that strong. Could she be some kind of shifter? She wasn't a dragon—he would almost certainly have known—but she might be something else, an ordinary, non-mythic shifter. It would explain the torn clothing as well.
He could feel the strength of the invisible wires dragging at him, but Jess was slowly and steadily winning the tug of war. His feet scraped forward over the pavement as she planted each bare foot and dragged him one step at a time.
But this wasn't going to get them out of here nearly fast enough. If she was a shifter, shifting in front of her shouldn't matter.
"Jess," Reive got out, "I'm about to do something. Just ... don't let go, okay?"
"What?" Jess asked breathlessly.
Reive shifted.
For once, it went off without a hitch. His dragon uncoiled from inside him, huge and gleaming in the sun. As a dragon, he was the same warm brown-gold color as a polished copper kettle, with red stripes down both his sides and huge wings spreading above him.
The invisible bindings disintegrated, shredding as Reive's dragon burst out of him. They had been meant to contain a weak human, not something like him. He was free to move again.
And he was also still holding the book, clutched in one claw. His clothes had gone with him into the shift, but it was always tricky to take a new object; it required concentration that he just didn't have at the moment. It would have been nice to have the book safely tucked away in whatever pocket dimension his clothes went into.
The stone mottling was visible in his dragon form, a moldy-looking gray patchwork all over his right front leg. But it was slightly easier to move his leg as a dragon than as a human. He wrapped that leg around Jess's body. Her arms had dropped away from him when he shifted, her face a picture of shock. Holding Jess with one foreleg and the book with the other, he took off with a hard downbeat of his wings. Jess gasped and clung to him.
He was flying in daylight in a populated area. Uncle Heikon, his clanlord, was going to kill him.
Suddenly it felt like there was a powerful weight dragging him down, like he was hooked to an anchor and he had just hit the end of the anchor rope. Reive beat his wings vigorously and looked down.
Black Robe was a small shape in the parking lot, holding both hands up in a rope-gripping motion. Reive felt that hot-wire sensation around his back legs. Down below, wisps of smoke curled up from Black Robe's clothing, and the glow of the runes was visible even from up here.
Reive, frantically beating his wings, was dragged slowly backward. The tether became faintly visible as he fought against it, a faintly glowing rope of fire wound around his back legs and tangled up in Black Robe's hands.
Damn it. Damn it. There was only one thing he could think of to create enough of a distraction to give them a chance to escape. He didn't want to. But if Black Robe kept pulling, they were going to fall.
He had wings. Jess didn't.
If they fell, she would die.
Damn it.
He opened his claws and let the book, and the possible cure it contained, slip through his fingers and fall, tumbling in the sun. Some of the pages came loose as it fell, fluttering in all directions.
Jess gave a little cry, as if the disintegration of the book physically pained her.
Reive had only meant to throw it at Black Robe, giving them a chance to get away, but then the book hit the glowing tether and abruptly burst into flames.
The tractor-beam pull instantly vanished, as suddenly as a snapping rubber band. Black Robe and his stoneskins scrambled for flaming pieces of the book, and Reive, beating his wings vigorously, soared over the mix of trees and small houses below, putting as much distance between himself and the library as possible.
People stared up at him. Oh well, sometimes you had to do what you had to do. As long as he kept moving fast, nobody would have time for a cell phone picture. He'd be just another cryptid.
"Is there anywhere nearby we can hide?" he asked.
Jess yelped when he spoke aloud.
"There—uh—my house?" she gasped out. "It's about a mile from the library. It, uh—wow, things look different from up here, I haven't seen it like this in the dayl—er—Oh, turn right at that gas station on the corner! Up that little street there. It's the yellow house."
It was a two-story house with a pocket-sized backyard. Reive aimed for the backyard on the general principle that he'd be less obvious shifting behind a fence, but he hadn't accounted for the backyard's small size. He crash-landed on top of several flowerbeds and a patio chair. His spilling copper coils filled the entire backyard from one fence to another.
Carefully, he set Jess down on one of the few patches of lawn not covered with dragon, and shifted back.
"Sorry," he said.
"Sorry?" she echoed, staring up at him with round brown eyes and the rags of her cardigan clutched around her.
"For, uh. Breaking your garden. And your library. And your book."
"Hush," she interrupted, grabbing his arm. Unfortunately it was his bad arm; he tried to suppress a wince. "It's okay. Don't worry about it. Let's just get inside."
She's got to be some kind of shifter, he thought as he followed her to the back door. She was taking this much too well not to have at least some idea that shifters existed.
What did she turn into? Something beautiful, he thought. Something graceful and serene. A crane, maybe; a gazelle; a cat.
Jess unlocked the back door, let them in, and locked it quickly behind them. "I only rent the downstairs," she explained, "but my upstairs neighbor is a waitress, and she's at her afternoon shift right now. So, uh, I guess I'm just going to grab something to put on," and with that she fled into a bedroom off the back hall and hastily closed the door, leaving Reive standing by himself in her house.
"Tiny and cute" were the words that came to mind. It was a comfortable little place, with a neat kitchen, shelves stuffed with books, and plants on the windowsills.
None of which would provide the slightest amount of protection if a stoneskin crashed through the wall.
Will they come after us?
Honestly, he doubted it. At least not immediately. The book was what they wanted. To find Reive, they would have to search house to house, and why would they even want to?
His hand and arm hurt so brutally that it was difficult to think. He cursed under his breath and pulled up his sleeve to see how much worse the combination of shifting and gargoyle exposure had made his illness.
It didn't look quite as bad as it felt, but the spread of the stone was noticeably more extensive than it had been at the library. His upper arm was almost entirely stone now, which was actually kind of a relief because now it didn't hurt as much. But it also made it harder to move the entire arm, and the whole thing felt heavy.
The patches on his wrist and the back of his hand had spread almost all the way down to his fingers. Until today, he could cover it with his sleeve as long as he was careful, but now he was going to have to keep his glove on all the time.