Rescue- Magma

Laying on my bed I sigh as I look at the clock. There are only twelve more hours left of my break until I am back on duty. I can hear the guys moving about for a mission and my inner beast swirls inside me needing something to do with all our energy. I try to calm her by envisioning an inescapable inferno in my mind. I picture my Drakaina surrounded by fire and burning embers beneath her talons. As I see what she wants I feel her calm.

    With the ability I have it was natural to choose the life career of a smokejumper. Unlike my human companions I had a way with fire. I don't have to depend on dirt and water like them to fight the blaze. While many of them would burn in a conflagration I relish in it. To be inside of a flame gives me pleasure like nothing else I have ever known. It is the only way the beast and I experience euphoria.

    "Red. Come in Red. This is the United States Forest Service control center" the radio crackles.

    "Red reporting. What's your status" I answer with a bored tone.

    "We've got a huge problem here. Report to squadron forty-two off highway 79. We have men down and so is our captain" I hear reported back.

    "Roger that control tower. Red is over and out" I respond in a rush.

    I jump from my bed and grab my sack to tie to my ankles. In a panic I don't even bother to change out of my pajamas or put on shoes. If they are pulling me off of the break that they demanded I take I know the situation is dangerous. My dragon roars in excitement in my veins at the prospect of it being a huge blaze for us to absorb. If it was able to take out several men as well as a captain this fire has to be a remarkable sight.

    I climb the stairs to the landing pad and stand in the middle preparing to shift. I close my eyes relishing my change. I feel the rush over my skin of my scarlet scales take over my human flesh. The bones in my feet break to form claws and talons. My belly rounds out as my arms stretch wide to form my winds. My neck and face elongate to form my snout. As I spread my wings to their full span my hair forms to make black, jagged spikes down my spine to the tip of my tail. When my change is complete my dragon gives a mighty roar to the air in triumph at finally being let out. My consciousness goes to the back as she takes control and changes our vision.

    Seeing through the cat like slits of her eyes never fails to amaze me. She rushes forward and jumps of the landing pad.

    "Freedom at last. It has been much too long since we have flown" she says.

    "We flew only two days ago. Don't you go acting like I deprive us of this exercise" I berate her.

    "WE eshould find a way to stretch our wings every day. If we are not in the forest fighting fires you keep us cooped up in the room. This is why we have not yet found a mate. It is your fault" she says.

    I roll my eyes at her as she banks toward highway seventy-nine This is all she ever wants to talk about. She tortures me with blurred visions of a man that is to be my mate whom I have never met. She claims that once we meet him I will finally be free to use my body as I wish. In my youth I had tried dating. Due to my dragon the relationships always ended because she never approved of my choices. While others my age were experiencing love and fornication, I sat on the sidelines wishing I could to. However, my Drakaina never let me take it beyond a few kisses.

    "This is the inferno we were called to. This is nothing but a minor fire. I haven't even absorbed it yet and I'm already bored" she says with a huff.

    As I look at the fire in the distance I can see that it hasn't even spanned more than three miles of the forest below. How could a small blaze such as this take out so many men with experience I wonder. I feel my scales shiver as we fly over the blaze to reach the middle. Through her nose I smell burning fuel and metal. Surveying the area from this height I can still see the remnants of what looks to be a helicopter near the northern edge of the fire.

    When we land in the center of the blaze we don't feel the heat. All we feel is power in the air. As our eyes close I can feel our lungs warming prepared to take a deep breath as I flashback to the very first fire I saw.

    A week before I turned six I had been sound asleep in my bed at the orphanage my parents owned. Even at that tender age I knew that I was different from everyone around me. I had no idea that in an accident I would prove just how different I was. When I had awakened from my bed I panicked when I was surrounded by our home up in a plume of smoke. It wasn't until I was huddled underneath my bed that my panic disappeared. I saw the room dancing with flames and as they reached my hiding spot I screamed in terror. I believed that I was dying when the flames touched me at first.

    I remember opening my hazel eyes and seeing that I was engulfed in flames. Yet for some reason I could not feel them. I reached out to touch them with my hand and it went right through them as if it were a mirage. I had liked the way touching them made me feel. Even we my clothes caught aflame and turned to ash I felt no panic. With the joy I felt I danced in the fire as if I were greeting a new friend. That is exactly how all the neighbors found me when the front of the house came crashing down.

    My parents faces were tear streaked in horror when they saw how I danced in the flames. The look on their faces snapped me out of my joy. In that moment I felt ashamed. When I am reading myself to exit the burning home I took a deep breath to settle myself. I felt myself pull in some of the fire on an inhale. Feeling a state of shock at what happened I had decided to try to replicate it so I took the biggest deep breath I could and took all the fire into me.

    When it was out my mother rushed to me and wrapped me in a blanket. She had looked so scared and when I went to touch her, she flinched away before I could. That day seeing the fear on my mothers' face I thought that things couldn't get any worse. I was wrong. I got angry on my birthday when even though I had sent out plenty of invitations no one had shown up. I ended shifting right there in the home of some extended family.

    My first shift was out of control in my raged state. I destroyed their living room and stayed in my form talking with my dragon for hours until my mother talked me down. Soon after the threats started. The people of my village believed that I was a liability. They believed I was uncontrollable. They called me a monster just like many of the kids born from eggs. My father was so distraught when I controlled the fire the first time he hadn't spoken to me. When I transformed into a beast he only looked at me in fear. I was sent to live with different relatives shortly after.

    As the memories fade I come back to the present in the forest fire. On a large inhale we start to pull the blaze in from the edges. With our ability we shape it into a burning river as it peels back from the trees and heads in our direction. The flowing sea of orange and black fills our lungs as the burn spreads through our body recycling the flames around us. When I no longer feel surrounded by power I open our eyes and peer at the forest to make sure we got it all. We swallow the flames, and they cause our scales to glow and shimmer. When it dies down I peer around my surroundings to assess the damage and look for the men.

    In few hundred feet from me I make eye contact with one of the flame jumpers that is sitting high in a tree. He is covered with ash, soot, and grime. After holding my gave for a few moments he passes out. I listen with the ears of my dragon and can hear his heart beating still. I listen closely and hear no other heart beats. I walk through the charred forest in dragon form to where he hangs. I lean my nostrils close to smell him so I can assess how badly he is burned. When I inhale his scent I can tell there has been a lot of damage to his body and the scent of blood is heavy in the air around him.

    I pull away from him and when I look at his face his eyes are slightly open.

    "Well, you are a pretty kitty" he says gruffly reclosing his eyes.

    Inside I fume at being referenced to a feline. He must really be out of it to make that assumption. My Drakaina however has a different opinion.

    Mine She says

    I raise of the ground onto my hind legs and use the tip of a talon to cut him free as I catch him. once I am sure I have a good grip I push off the ground and take to the sky. As I fly toward my home to take him to our healer I listen to his heart. It still beats in his chest, but it seems to be slowing. I push my consciousness forward so I can take over the vision of my beast. When her infrared sight disappears, I am glad to see the world and all its colors return. I peer at the man gripped in my claws and immediately notice he is not like the other humans I have met. Normally when I see others through my eyes they are always surrounded in an aura. Usually, the auras are only of one color but for some reason this man has two colors flowing through his.

    As I fly I find that I am mesmerized by the colors. The silver that I see surrounding him lets me know that he is a good person. Closer to his body is aura flows to a lighter pink shade. As I look at his aura I feel my beast settle down inside me. I get an instant vision of her laying down in a field of grass with the most relaxed pose I have seen her in. I wonder what that's about. What is it about this human that calms my raging beast? I shake out of these thoughts and focus on arriving safely to the landing area of our village.

    Landing on the cement circle with my hind legs first I gently release the human from my talons so that he lies on the cool stone floor. I immediately begin shifting down to my human form so I can rush him to be treated. In the distance I see the head of our security team for the property, Maximus, approaching fast to see who I have brought. I know that I receive some backlash for my rash decision to bring him here, so I take a deep breath to get ready to defend my case.