Free The Princess's Dragon by JManess

around him in happiness, her delight for him overriding her propriety. Derek enjoyed the feel of her arms around him, her soft body pressing against his hard chest. He remained still, not wanting movement to remind her that the embrace must

    ✥ Th e Princess’s Dragon ✥
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    end. She finally pulled away, her face averted, the blush riding high on her cheeks visible in the lantern light.
    “Now that I am titled there is something I have always wanted to do but never could …” Derek released her hands and stood. Sondra watched him, waiting, holding her breath, her heart dancing with excitement as he bent his knee, bringing him face to face with her. He took her hands again and then stiffened when a voice called out to him.
    “Warlord!”
    A page searched the shadows around the castle, calling softly for Derek.
    Derek released Sondra’s hands and sighed.
    “I must see what this is about. Don’t move, Sondra, I need to ask you something. I will return.” Casting one last heated glance her way, he rose and strode briskly to the page. They disappeared into the castle and Sondra fanned herself, suddenly feeling overheated.
    It took only seconds for her to realize that the warmth she felt didn’t arise from excitement, and it was steadily growing more painful. Her skin felt like it burned in a fire and, glancing at her arm, she nearly shrieked in fear. The skin along her arm had melted, and beneath it laid glittering, glistening, horrifying scales. She jumped up, dropping the fan as if that would stop the horrible things happening to her. Her heart pounded and she dared a glance at her other arm where the same sight choked off her screams.
    Her entire body blistered; the ache in her joints increased to incredible proportions. She suddenly heard snapping and creaking as though they labored under great strain and without warning her skeleton broke apart, twisting and deforming her body, moving beneath her melting skin and provoking an agony so great she nearly fainted. A sound must have escaped her swollen lips because she heard concerned voices moving toward her. She panicked and, seeking an escape, scrabbled clumsily up the wall, throwing a leg hampered by skirts and even now twisting from the inside out over the wall and dropping to the other side. She landed on one of the pikes ranged along the wall to deter unauthorized entrance into the back garden. It impaled her hip and she bit her tongue, striving not to scream as tears of fear and pain steamed off her blazing cheeks.
    Shouts of alarm and Derek’s familiar voice calling her name galvanized her and she pulled herself from the pike with an unnatural strength. She limped 44
    ✥ Susan Trombley ✥
    toward the meadows and the Woods, the only thought in her mind, “get to the wizard!”
    By the time she reached the Woods, traveling at an impossible speed, she barely resembled her former self. Horny spikes tore through the melting skin over her spine and she felt a warm liquid running down her back. The huge, flaring nostrils forming over her face even as she ran scented the blood on her body soaking into her clothes. She sensed the blood from her rapidly healing hip and the blood shed by a layer of skin that didn’t melt away fast enough for what replaced it. Spikes pierced her elbows as she loped along, falling to all fours to accommodate the deformed bones reshaping in her limbs. She nearly screamed again as her neck popped and snapped, her orientation changing and her head suddenly slamming to the ground, hideously twisted and heavy.
    The two horns that now curved from her flaring nostrils to the top of her skull embedded themselves in the soft, rotting soil of a secluded glade in the Woods.
    She couldn’t move any farther; the agony of the change forced her to stop, shuddering, heaving, and writhing in pain. The screaming in her head sounded far different from the guttural, animalistic grunts and growls emanating from her dripping jaws. Something moved beneath