Silver - By Kailin Gow Page 0,11
several yards away, just staring at the two of them. Briony felt Kevin tugging at her arm.
“Come on. If we back away slowly, we might be able to get back to the edge of the woods.”
Briony shook her head. “I think it’s cleverer than that.” She raised her voice. “Do I know you? Do you want something from me?”
The creature snorted, but its great head rose and dipped, just once.
“Where then?” Briony demanded. “Where do I know you-?”
She didn’t get the chance to finish her question, because a cluster of fur covered forms burst from the trees, yipping and snarling as they bounded towards the golden-scaled creature.
“Wait!” Briony cal ed. “No!”
If she was worried about the dragon’s safety, though, there was no reason to be. The creature whipped around in a circle, forcing the wolves back with the threat of being clubbed aside by its tail and then leapt into the air, its wings beating in a hurried take off that had it away from the clearing in seconds. Briony couldn’t help admiring the power of the thing, even as it fled.
“Wel ,” Kevin observed dryly, “that isn’t something you see every day.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. Did you see the way it nodded, Kevin?”
“I saw. It’s intel igent. More than that, it knew you.”
And the others had to go and drive it away before Briony could find out where she knew it from. She didn’t know whether to be angry with them, or simply grateful that they were prepared to attack a creature that size to “help”
her, even if they didn’t know what they were getting into.
As Briony thought that, some of the wolves in the clearing started changing back into their human form, leaving her facing a smal group of young men and women whose clothes were in various states of disarray. Briony couldn’t help looking at the front of the group, where Josh and his brother Brian stood. Through the fresh gaps in their clothing, Briony could see that the werewolf king and his brother were a lot more muscular than they appeared, built more like athletes than anything else.
Briony looked away. Why did the werewolf men she knew always have the most perfect male bodies? She sighed. Given that she had already had to tel Brian once that she wasn’t interested in him, it wouldn’t be fair to the col ege age werewolf to let him see her staring at him like that. Besides, Briony thought as she shifted her gaze to Kevin, if she wanted to ogle muscular young werewolf men, she had one of her own to stare at.
“There’s a cache here somewhere, isn’t there?”
Josh asked, and one of the werewolves behind him confirmed that there was. “Get it then.”
Soon, he was handing spare shirts to Brian and Kevin, while buttoning up one of his own. Around him, most of the other werewolves made some effort to make themselves more presentable, although a few hardly bothered at al .
Briony wanted to rebuke the werewolf king for chasing off the dragon as he had, but she knew better than that. Josh was new to being king, and it wouldn’t be right to do something that would make him seem weak…
especial y not after the kind of defeat they had just suffered.
Instead, she settled for just saying, “That was something else, wasn’t it?”
Josh nodded, and Briony got the feeling that he had guessed what she had wanted to say. The smal smile he gave her definitely seemed like a thank you for not saying it.
“I think it’s the first time that we have had a dragon show up, certainly. Though there have been stories of other things.”
“What kind of things?” Briony asked.
Josh shrugged. “Al kinds of things. Things that you don’t find in this world. My family has always believed that these woods are special.”
“You make the appearance of a dragon sound like it’s something normal,” Kevin added. He also put his arm around Briony. It seemed that Kevin wanted the other werewolves to know where he stood… that Briony was his girl.
Josh just shrugged again. “In this town, I hardly think it counts as that out of character. What’s a dragon on top of everything else?” His expression turned suddenly serious.
“We need to talk about the battle.”
Briony had been wondering when it would get to that. Josh’s tone was stil calm, but she could hear some of the sadness at the edges of it. Maybe the werewolf king didn’t get to show more