Free Captive Dragon by Ella Drake

young.
    Patroclus jerked his tail straight toward the water, but his tail found damp, packed sand. Trembling shot through his body with unassailable panic.
    Suffocating.
    He couldn’t die now. He had to save the colt. After many attempts, he’d finally managed to breed with Cressida, but she’d still turned from him. He’d been too late to keep her to himself, and she’d found another. He couldn’t be too late to save their colt.
    The air cramped his gills while he struggled uselessly. In random circles, his tail whipped and thrashed but found no water. His torso would collapse before he made it back. The unthinkable became his desperate hope.
    He’d have to shift to breathe. He had to breathe to survive. He had to survive to carry his colt. He’d never shifted on dry land before—usually he started the process while in the lagoon and he hadn’t done so since Cressida had claimed him. With no thought other than saving his child, he reached inside himself. In all his eighteen years, he’d never had the courage to walk on two legs in a human settled area, but now he would do so.
    Deep inside, he prodded that sleeping part of himself, and it awoke. With a warm, stretching sensation, a hot wind swept through him as if a ball of fire started in the pit of his stomach and expanded.
    Pain ripped through him, but when he tried to curl into a ball, he could not. Strange appendages weighed him down. Like a punch to his chest, he gulped down air. He coughed and spit sand out of his mouth. Loud thunder rang in his ears, and he found relief in the sound of his lungs pushing and pulling air to keep him alive.
    Before he could open his eyes to the bright sun, a startled voice came to him over the crash of the waves.
    “Do you need help? Are you okay?” a stranger, a female, asked.
    Like all seadragons from the Kallial clan, Patroclus understood languages well, but though her concern touched him, fear washed over him. Cold shocked his body into fine tremors, and he curled on his side.
    His protruding stomach got in the way, and he lay there while confusion over this seldom used shape and situation paralyzed him. Loud sounds assaulted him, unused to the sharpness of surface acoustics.
    “You’re not okay.” The human female spoke from much closer. A scent permeated his senses, but unfamiliar with the sensation, he couldn’t place it. He’d never forget it. It overpowered all previous fears and tremors with a thoroughness that calmed him. More so when she spoke again.
    “My name is Lilly. I’ll be right back. I wouldn’t leave you, but I need to get help. There’s a house at the top of the hill. I’m going there to call an ambulance.”
    A soft brush of movement over the top of his head set him to trembling again, but he stilled. Patroclus relaxed on the ground and let the sun warm him while he waited. Lilly might be human, but the man who owned the house at the top of the hill was not.
    ***
     
     
    Available summer 2014
    http://www.elladrake.com