Free Nothing But Blue Skies by Tom Holt

humans stampeding for shop doorways and awnings, but it didn’t seem to bother his shadow at all; the little man merely drew the collar of his raincoat tight around his neck and opened an umbrella. Irritated, the dragon opened the throttle a crack or two more, enough to make the car-drivers turn up their wiper speed to maximum; the little man shuddered at the feel of water on his skin, but kept up the pace. The dragon considered that to be downright offensive - after all, this was the good stuff, from his personal reserve, some of the eighty-per-cent proof wet he’d been saving for a rainy day. He jammed the faucets wide open, so that the gutters in the street filled, overloaded and flooded the roadway, creating instant lakes for the cars to aquaplane through. Sure enough, the little man received a direct hit from the tyres of a passing sixteen-wheeler and was instantly transformed into a self-propelled pond. He stopped and shook himself, just like a dog - and then, dammit, he kept on coming, quickening his pace to make up lost ground.
    It was at this point that the dragon realised that he was getting wet, too . . .
    The fact that it bothered him, bothered him. If someone had told him a week ago that a time would come when he’d feel uncomfortable standing in rain, he’d have laughed hard enough to dislocate his wing sockets. But humans were different. They didn’t have immaculately contoured coats of scales, designed by nature to shed water as efficiently as possible; instead they covered their unthatched hides with absorbent materials like cotton, wool and leather, as if they were deliberately trying to catch the rainwater and snuggle it close to them for the rest of the day. The dragon wondered about that, in passing; was it a genetic throwback to the days before they had bottles and jars to carry water about in? It seemed an extravagantly perverse way of going about it. The same could, however, be said for nearly everything they did, from reproduction to gardening.
    Since it would take at least ten minutes for rain of this intensity to wind down to a full stop, he decided that it would be a good idea to find shelter; not only would he not get any wetter, he’d also put pressure on his shadow, who’d also have to stop. He would make it clear to the strange little man that he knew exactly what he was doing - humans often find embarrassment as intolerable as pain or fear, so he ought to be able to make the man feel so uncomfortable that he’d give up and go away. Failing that, of course, he’d have to scare him off by a more direct and traditional method.
    He turned down a side street that looked ideal for what he had in mind; on both sides rose the sheer, mountainous backs of large office buildings, and there was only one small archway that offered any kind of shelter. He darted under that, as swift and neat as a goldfish, and waited. Sure enough, his shadow was caught in the trap. His only options were to come in under the same arch and be shoulder to shoulder with his quarry, to stand out in the middle of the street, where pretty soon he’d be both painfully conspicuous and extremely wet, or to go away. To his credit, he stuck at the second option far longer than the dragon had thought he’d be able to, but in the end he turned his back and splashed through the puddles back the way he’d just come. The dragon smiled, carried on to the other end of the alley, and headed left.
    Unfortunately the manoeuvre had taken him a little out of his way, and he wasn’t quite sure where he was in relation to the main thoroughfare he’d been following. Trying to maintain a sense of direction in two dimensions when all your life you’ve been used to navigating in three can be awkward at the best of times, and the plain fact was that having to walk round the buildings instead of floating majestically over them at a height of several tens of thousands of feet made him feel dizzy