Her snakes hiss at me reproachfully. “Sorry,” I tell her, except I say it in cockatrish, so it comes out like, goroshhhhhahissssss.
She flips me off and then jumps back into the fight, just as Wolfy uses my momentary distraction and attacks me. Fully shifted now, his wolf is a big, ugly motherfucker. He could seriously use a trip to the groomers. Baring his teeth, he launches at me, earning impressive height as he arcs and lands right on me, his teeth latching onto my neck.
Fucking ouch!
My cockatrice roars in pain, shaking her head back and forth to try and dislodge him from our throat. But the wolf’s teeth dig in harder, despite the fact that his body is being flung back and forth.
I try to bend my long neck down to peck at him, but the angle is wrong and I can’t get to him. My arms are now wings, and they’re great for flying but not so much for flexible bending. I’m basically like a hotter, feathered T. rex.
Since my arms are useless for snatching him off, I take to the air instead. With a powerful sweep, my wings lift me off the ground, and I shoot up like a rocket, hoping the move will catch him off guard enough to let go.
I fly higher and higher, as fast as I can, feeling the wolf whine against my throat. But just before I can reach the clouds, I slam into an invisible barrier that crackles on contact, and I start falling, dazed from the electrified impact.
Wolfy’s whines intensify, but after a couple of seconds of free-falling, I manage to shake the stupor off and flap my wings, righting myself in the air.
Fuck. This prison’s magical barrier is no joke.
Despite my awesome flying moves, the wolf still hasn’t let up. If anything, he’s just holding on tighter. The pain in my neck is almost to the point of being unbearable. Wolfy tries to partially shift, turning just his front two legs back into his human arms so that he can grab hold of me and not fall, but all he ends up doing is losing his fur there and getting stuck in this weird and gangly half-leg, half-arm stage.
Fed up with him, I start doing barrel rolls in the air. His leg-arms scrabble for purchase, but my neck is too big around for him to get a good hold. When he starts frantically grabbing me and plucks out a couple of feathers, that’s when I get really pissed. No one messes with my feathers.
I dive.
The air whips at us so strongly that Wolfy’s teeth finally start to loosen on my neck. The ground rushes up at us faster and faster, but I don’t slow down. It’s me against him, and Wolfy just entered a game of chicken with a goddamn cockatrice. You can’t win chicken against a half chicken. This dude has no hope.
We’re a hundred feet from the ground. Fifty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten.
He starts to full-on panic as the ground gets closer and closer.
He screams and squeals in a wolf-human way, and just as we’re about to hit, I pull up my wings parallel to the ground and shoot forward, my underbelly barely missing the dirt. Wolfy isn’t so lucky. I purposely drag his body against the ground, giving him the worst road rash in history.
With a yelp, his jaw unhinges off my throat, and he lets go, his body flipping to a stop in a heap. I circle back around, slowing my momentum as I go, and land right over his bloody, panting body.
I snap my beak at him, clucking at him aggressively, my beast ready to tear into him. Wolfy has the good sense to tuck tail, which, in shifter’s language, is waving a white flag.
But my cockatrice isn’t satisfied. Our throat is throbbing, blood pouring from the deep wound he left with his teeth, and she wants to get even.
She lunges for him.
The wolf barks, eyes wide with terror, because he knows that he’s about to get pecked to hell like a bag of seeds. But right before I can turn him into minced wolf meat, Rook suddenly steps between us.
My cockatrice jerks back in surprise. Holding my eyes, he shakes his head. “That’s enough, Sinclair. It’s over.”
I look around and see that the fight has indeed been broken up. Most of the inmates are already kneeling in the dirt and are either being gathered up because they’re in major trouble or taken away for medical