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the passenger side of the car, where Tom was blinking and, she suspected, had just opened his eyes after calming himself.
    "We should really—" Kyrie started and stopped. Through the snow she'd glimpsed something, half seen. She thought it was . . . but it couldn't be. Surely . . . 
    "Was that," Tom said, his voice small, "a dragon's wing?"
     

* * *
    "Go inside," Tom said, as he glimpsed the wing again, through the multiplying flakes. "It's a red wing. It's . . ." He didn't say it. He couldn't quite assemble words.
    His brain, still fogged from his quick shift into dragon and back, still laboring under the guilt of what he'd done to the bathroom—let alone the terror of the precipitous drive here, which had felt less like driving than tumbling down a chute—could not manage to describe the wing. But he was sure, from his two brief glimpses, that it was a Chinese dragon. An Asian dragon like the Great Sky Dragon and his cohorts.
    Feeling for the door handle with half-frozen, still aching fingers, Tom managed to grasp it and throw the door open against resistence of what he hoped was stiff wind, and not a dragon tail or claw, as he yelled over the howling storm at Kyrie. "Go inside. I'll deal with it."
    He plunged out of the car, his hair and his unzipped black leather jacket whipping about in the howling storm, just in time for his feet to go out from under him, and to reach, blindly, for the car door for support, and bring himself upright, and stare into . . . 
    He was big and red. No. As he blinked to keep his eyes from freezing, he thought he wasn't that big. Smaller than Tom himself in dragon form. But he was also horribly familiar—more familiar as Tom focused on the details and noted that the dragon's front left paw was much smaller than the other. He was . . . Red Dragon. Not only was he was one of the Great Sky Dragon's cohorts, but when Tom had last seen him there had been a big battle, and Red Dragon had ended with his arm ripped out at the roots. Or rather, Tom had ripped Red Dragon's arm off, then used it to beat Red Dragon with.
    Tom knew—from experience—that his kind was hard to kill. But this was a particular foe he'd never thought to see again; one he was sure had more reasons for vendetta against him than anyone else alive.
    He felt his throat close and the panic he'd—barely—managed to control in the car surged through his body like electric current, seeking grounding. Not finding it, it twisted in a sparkle through his flesh. He felt his bruised, battered limbs wrench, and his body bend, and a hollow cough echoed through his throat mingled with a scream of pain that he could no longer keep back. His mouth opened, and he swallowed an aspiration of snow, cold and suffocating. He knew, absolutely knew, that if he shifted he would attack Red Dragon and probably try to eat him. He was that protein-starved. A protein-starved Tom ate uncooked meat and whatever else he could get his hands on. A protein-starved dragon would hunt live prey.
    "Run," he told Kyrie with what was left of his human mind and his human voice, already sounding slurpy and hissy as his teeth shifted position. "Run inside, Kyrie."
    He could just tell in the periphery of his beclouded vision that she was not obeying. Not even considering it, and he wondered if his voice had already changed too much. If perhaps she couldn't understand him. His body twisted again, the pain of shifting unbearable on his bruised flesh and caked bones, and he kept his eyes on the other dragon, in case he should have any ideas of flaming or striking. Dragons were hard to kill but not impossible. This Tom knew. If you severed the head from the rest of the body, if you divided the body in two. If you incinerated the body. Possibly if you destroyed the brain. Those deaths even a dragon could not overcome.
    Tom had to think of how to inflict them on his foe, and he had to protect himself from them. He felt his fingers lengthen into claws