"What the—!" Kyrie said, as she came through the door, and saw Tom being attacked by a creature out of a museum's diorama. For a moment that was all she could think, her mind seemingly frozen on that point—wondering if she was dreaming, if all those visits to the museum had finally affected her sanity, as she told Tom they were bound to. The museum was his favorite haunt, when they took a day off to go to Denver, and sometimes she felt as though she could have drawn every display from memory—including the broken places in the bassilosaurus skeleton.
She heard a soft growl at her side. Rafiel. A look at the policeman showed him, by touch, without even seeming to notice, stripping off his clothes.
And Kyrie, feeling the shift shudder through her, as she stared at the unlikely creature striking at her boyfriend, thought that this creature moved like nothing she'd ever seen. His movement was like a special effect, where the movie editors cut and pasted frames without regard, so that they displaced someone from one place to the other, without moving them the intervening distance. She was sure this was not what was happening, but the effect was rather as though the creature teleported from one place to the next instantly. And it was biting, rounding on Tom, and slashing, rending, always attacking.
Rafiel, already in lion form—tawny and sleek and large, though not half the size of the creature battling Tom—rushed into the battle, his mane snow-flecked. And Kyrie charged, right behind.
It was folly, her human mind said, sheer folly, to rush like this into battle with a creature that seemed supernatural in its movements. But what else could she do?
The creature teleported towards Rafiel—materializing right in front of him, Tom's blood dripping from the huge dagger teeth, a look of unholy amusement in the slitlike yellow eyes. It lunged at Rafiel and it was clear from the movement that it meant to take Rafiel by the throat, or perhaps to bite his neck in two, killing him in one of the few ways a shifter could be killed.
But as the massive-fanged mouth opened, Tom leapt, and bit the creature sharply on the hind quarters, causing it to close its jaws just above Rafiel's neck, barely touching him with its fangs.
And now Tom was raking what seemed to be a badly bleeding paw across the creature's flanks and making a high, insane hiss of challenge.
And Kyrie, who could see that the creature's eyes were—startlingly—more amused than scared, jumped in, her fur ruffled, growling low in the back of her throat.
The creature rounded on her, ignoring Tom's attack on its exposed flank and pinning Rafiel, casually, beneath a massive paw. It sniffed at Kyrie and the slitted yellow eyes looked more unholy and more amused than ever. Hello, pretty kitten girl. It would be a shame to kill you, wouldn't it?
The voice, in her mind, made her jump. She knew it was this creature in front of her, and not the Great Sky Dragon, but she suddenly understood why Tom had reacted as it did to the dragon in his mind. She heard a keen of not quite pain escape the panther's throat and she felt what seemed like a dirty finger rifling quickly through her mind. Interesting mind, Kitten. Better defended than Lion Boy's. The feel of unholy laughter. But not by much.
And then, suddenly, there was a streak of red from above, and a thing that looked much like a falling boulder through the snow resolved itself into Red Dragon, flying in.
It roared something that sounded much like "No," or as close to the word "no" as a dragon's mouth could form. And in the next moment it landed in front of the dire wolf. Kyrie expected the wolf to port away or to attack, but he didn't do either. Instead, he stood in place, looking confused.
Red Dragon let out a stream of flame at the dire wolf, just as Kyrie wondered why Tom hadn't done so. And the dire wolf wasn't there.
What sounded much like "spoilsport," echoed in her mind, and the dire wolf seemed to be quite gone, though they couldn't tell where. Moments later, a sound that seemed disturbingly like human laughter floated from the place where it had retreated.