Her claws sank in, but it was hard to keep her balance on the slithery, squirmy neck. She tried to bend her head to bite, but a slimy tentacle grabbed her around the waist and yanked hard.
A glint of silver sparkled, and the pressure released. Roland stood with one hand pressed to his side and one holding his sword high. Half a tentacle fell at his feet.
“Come back, Roland! You’re next!” Carter called, as he twisted a tiny tool. Ransom’s collar dropped to the floor with a clatter.
Nick managed to get atop the green neck, but was shaken off; his wolf claws couldn’t dig in the way a big cat’s could. Undeterred, he leaped and snapped at the green head, dodging blasts of acidic slime. Pete ran forward, ducked under a jet of acid, and boosted Nick up. His shoulder muscles bulged with strain, but he held his position until Nick could sink his teeth into the green dragon’s neck.
A tentacle whipped out and slapped Justin off the blue dragon’s neck. He fell to the floor, rolling to escape a lightning bolt. The blue dragon head darted to follow him. Shane and Catalina leaped for it, their lithe black and yellow bodies moving as one, and landed on its neck. Justin hissed and clawed at it from the floor, dodging lightning bolts as his friends tried to sink their teeth in.
Beside Destiny, Ethan was trying to get a grip on the black head, biting and slashing. But a nest of tentacles pulled him off and flung him hard to the floor.
The fire-breathing red dragon head bent over him and drew in a breath. Destiny released her hold on the white dragon neck and jumped down to protect Ethan. But as she landed beside him, she realized that she was too late. She’d only share in his fiery death.
Better to die with Ethan than live without him, she thought.
But the blast of flame didn’t come. Bewildered, she looked up. A beast she had never seen was ferociously attacking the red dragon head. It was a black hound the size of a pony, shaggy and fierce, wreathed in black smoke and with fiery eyes like windows into Hell.
Ethan and Destiny scrambled away. Justin stopped taunting the blue dragon head and, shielded by the giant hound, leaped on to the neck of the red dragon. He clung to it, biting and clawing, as the black hound snarled at it. The red dragon head jerked back, its tentacles cringing away, as if even that fire-breathing monster was intimidated by the hound’s burning regard.
Destiny had no time to figure out what was going on, only to see what still needed to be done. No one was attacking the white dragon head. It twisted sinuously to spray everyone with dagger-sharp shards of ice. Ethan and Destiny leaped for it together. Their teeth and claws sank in as they sought to bite hard enough to kill it.
Out of the corner of her eye, Destiny saw that Catalina’s butterfly kitten and Shane’s moth kitten were flying at and distracting the dragon head they fought, Nick’s little dragon was doing the same for his, and Justin’s Cerberus puppy was leaping up and down and snapping at the tentacles that tried to drag him off.
“Everyone!” Roland shouted. “Bite NOW!”
Destiny bit down as hard as she could.
CRUNCH.
The thing that had been Lamorat collapsed with an immense thud, followed by an immense splat a split second later as all the tentacles hit the floor.
Destiny and the others scrambled off it, shifted to human form, and backed away, eyeing it warily. It was a huge heap of ugly fanged heads and tentacles, so tangled up that she couldn’t trace the necks back to the body. Not that she’d want to.
“Looks like Eel Day at the Venice fish market,” Justin remarked.
“I’m crossing Venice off my list of places to visit,” Catalina said.
“Does anyone have any more spare clothes?” Destiny asked plaintively. Justin and Catalina might be comfortable standing around stark naked in an evil lab in front of people they barely knew, but she certainly wasn’t.
With a grin, Justin ostentatiously turned his back, then bent to pick up his backpack. She was too relieved to care about him mooning her when he tossed it over his shoulder. She scrambled into the spare clothes as the rest of the non-mythic shifters did the same. When she turned back around, she saw that everyone was dressed, the fiery-eyed hound (which she had by now figured out had to be Ransom’s shift form) was still a hound, and an audibly frustrated Merlin-raptor was maniacally switching between chicken and turkey sizes.
A clang of metal made Destiny jump. She whipped around, only to see that Carter had finally succeeded in getting Roland’s collar off. The noise had been the metal bouncing off the floor.
She heard an unpleasant sucking sound, and swung back in the other direction.
From the midst of the enormous pile of heads and necks and suckers, a slimy tentacle as wide as her waist was blindly feeling its way out.
“Everybody back!” Roland shouted.
They instinctively obeyed his commanding voice. He stood alone, facing the mass that was once again beginning to writhe, a tall man who looked small before it, a dark silhouette in a white room.
Roland spread his arms wide. Flames blossomed along his arms, but he didn’t burn. Instead, his arms became fire. They stretched out behind him, and for the briefest moment he was a man with wings of streaming flame. Then his entire body transformed in the blink of an eye. He hovered in midair, burning wings outstretched, a magnificent bird made entirely of fire.
Destiny had never seen anything so beautiful. She could feel the heat, as hot as a furnace fit to melt steel, but it didn’t burn her. She could see the brilliance, bright as the mid-day sun, but it didn’t hurt her eyes.
A phoenix, she thought, and was filled with awe. I never knew they were real.
The phoenix cried out in the high pure voice of a hunting hawk, and dived. He left a trail of flame in the air. A single blazing feather at the tip of one wing touched a single reaching tentacle. For a split second, the reviving monster was outlined in white-hot fire.