Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) by D.W. Moneypenny

replaced by a low groan that came from the spot where she had left Ping.
    Holding out her arms, she ran for the back of the building, expecting to be incinerated at any second. She kept running until her palms painfully smacked one of the metal roll-down doors at the loading dock, sending an echoing clatter throughout the dark warehouse. The back entrance was to the right, and so were the lights. She inched in that direction, feeling the wall with her hands. After running her fingers over several conduits and pipes, she came to the edge of a metal box. The switch box. Wrapping her fingers around the lever, she pressed upward, but stopped herself. Looking over her shoulder into the darkness, she couldn’t see anything and hoped nothing could see her.
    “Ping? Are you okay?” she whispered into the dark, as if she could get the question to him past the dragon. “Oh, this is stupid.”
    She slid the switch On.
    Ping stood on his knees in the middle of their makeshift classroom, trembling, covered in sweat despite the cold air, his skin a shifting sea of gray and peach, as scales came and went, as horns and bones pressed outward along his skull and torso. He fell forward onto his hands and knees. His limbs thickened and strained against his clothing. Claws erupted from his fingers, and he turned his face to the ceiling and howled. When he lowered his head, his face was gone, replaced by something more akin to a reptile. Its red eyes burned at Mara.
    “Just let go,” she said to him.
    He exploded into a cloud of swirling gray dust.
    The roiling cloud stayed in the center of the warehouse, sending cold gusts against the wall where Mara stood. She wrapped her arms around herself and watched the amorphous storm spread up to the rafters and flatten out, a fine gray powder sculpting itself in midair into the familiar spiny profile flanked by massive wings and trailed by a long thick tail that snaked along the floor. The shifting silhouette solidified into the dragon.
    The creature lifted its head almost to the ceiling, rearing back in a manner that Mara recognized.
    She raised her hands in front of her. “Nuh-uh, don’t do it.”
    The dragon paused.
    It stood so still Mara thought she had inadvertently stopped Time. But she could still hear its raspy breathing. Its red eyes glinted, narrowed, as it stared down at her.
    “I don’t want to fight you. It just makes a mess, and no one ever seems to win,” she said. She stared back at it, looking for a hint that it understood. If Ping could tell when it senses something dangerous, maybe the dragon could tell when Ping doesn’t. That struck her as a good bit of logic, if not just wishful thinking.
    It sat back on its haunches but did not lower its head. Mara could hear the dry shifting of its scales, so large she could see them slide over each other, flexing across its muscles and bunching at its joints. The pose seemed less tense, but the piercing stare, the raised corner of its mouth, exposing just a portion of fang, and the tautness of its snout had the look of a snarl, a mad dog about to attack.
    Mara lowered her trembling hands, attempting somehow to diffuse the tension; to what end she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t successful. In the presence of something so large and so clearly predatory, she couldn’t help but stay in a partial crouch, braced for what might happen. Under the dragon’s gaze, she felt like the carved turkey on her mother’s counter.
    “I have never thought the deal you struck with Ping could work,” Mara said. “It is impossible for you to remain in this realm. Even if you could stay asleep until the end of Ping’s life, you would not be able to continue your existence here. The people in this world would never accept you. You would be hunted, until you were slaughtered.”
    A low rumble boiled up from the creature’s chest, rattling through its long neck, turning into a growl that slipped from between massive teeth bared when its lips pulled back. No