Read Online Hip Deep in Dragons by Christina Westcott - Free Book Online

shape soared overhead and I got my first look at a real dragon.
    Shakagwa Dun was no friendly, animated beast or the jerky stop-motion monster of a Ray Harryhausen film. It was the spawn of the Loch Ness monster and a vampire bat, a nightmare H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up after an all-night bender. Thick, bony ridges covered its back, colored a blotchy green and black for camouflage in a marshland. The sides and belly looked no less impervious, armored in thick gray-green scales. A pair of powerful hind legs, tucked up under the body, clutched a large python in obsidian claws.
    At first, I thought the dragon’s front limbs had evolved into wings, like a bird, but as it landed and began to move about the nest, I noticed clawed hands midway down the appendages. The scientist in me analyzed this adaption almost dispassionately. The outside digit had elongated to provide support for the wing, much in the fashion of some of the flying dinosaurs, the pterosaurs.
    I wondered if that’s what dragons were—dinosaurs that hadn’t gone extinct. Perhaps Mycon hadn’t been struck by the meteorite that had brought the Cretaceous Era to such a thunderous close in this world. I could be looking at a living dinosaur. I remembered I had a camera, rose, and began snapping pictures.
    The dragon shuffled about on all four limbs, its shorter front legs forcing it to move in an odd, hopping gait that parodied a kangaroo. Folded up, its wings rose behind its back in twin spires. It settled on it haunches, tearing the snake into chunks and bolting them down with a quick toss of its head.
    Through the lens, I locked gazes with Shakagwa Dun. In my excitement to get a better picture, I’d crept into the open, in full sight of the dragon. The cold yellow eyes studied me and then narrowed in hunger. It crouched, sliding first one foot and then the other forward, stalking me like a cinematic velociraptor, but this was all too real. I staggered, and the movement triggered the dragon’s hunting instinct. It opened its bloody maw to reveal a set of serrated teeth that would look at home in a great white’s mouth. It hissed with the sound of a thousand tea kettles boiling at once, and a cloud of greenish vapor sprayed from its mouth.
    The dragon attacked, throwing itself into a graceless charge across the marsh, spraying muck and broken vegetation in geysers behind its powerful hind limbs. I whirled and lurched toward the low palms, more in instinct than any real hope of attaining safety. The Jeep lay too far away to reach before that nightmare overtook me, and nothing in the way of cover lay between me and there. Flight seemed useless, but I still ran.
    A hand clamped down on my mouth before I could let out a scream. A strong arm wrapped around my waist, lifted me, and pulled me against a warm, hard body.
    “Do not move, milady, and make nary a sound,” Robby whispered, his lips next to my ear.
    I wanted to scream his name, but against his restraining hand, it came out as a whimper. He shushed me again and began a mumbled litany that I felt against my skin as much as heard. The singsong words meant nothing at first. I thought he was trying to comfort me, but the air around us began to change, to thicken until it was like breathing pudding. He muttered an incantation. A flash of hope filled me, only to be dashed in the next instant as I realized we were out of time. The dragon would reach us in seconds, long before he could complete his spell.
    I rolled my eyes to the side, watching death gallop toward us, but now it seemed to move slowly, as if it, too, was trapped in that viscous fluid. The fountains of mud thrown up in its wake pirouetted in the air and drifted to the ground like falling ashes. Green droplets sprayed from the dragon’s mouth and hung in the sunlight like ichorous crystals.
    The cadence of Robby’s words changed, and the atmosphere solidified into a transparent cocoon pressing in on us. The world beyond the invisible