A Shade of Dragon by Bella Forrest

my God. I lived in a world where Zada understood reality better than I did.
    The beast didn’t carry me far. On the top of the mountain overlooking the sea, a cupped formation dominated the pinnacle. The formation consisted of assorted materials, soft and pliable, packed together. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. This was a nest. And how many of them had I seen in the sky the other night? Four?
    The creature dropped me into the nest and I landed with an oof, rolling onto my side and curling into a ball. But the creature didn’t seem that intent on killing me. Those talons could have ripped me open in a matter of seconds. But the bird-woman landed—her feathers were a mottled auburn and chestnut—and she hardly looked at me. She fluttered to the ledge of the nest and gazed out across the beach, just leaving me balled up in her nest, gasping for breath, trying to figure out exactly what… what was going on?
    Then I saw what the bird-woman was scouting off in the distance. Approaching silhouettes in the sky. I didn’t bother to look closely. I was certain they were the other three members of her flock. Maybe they hunted together and shared meals.
    I began to crawl backward as silently as possible off of the nest. It was a long way down from the top of this cliff, but I had to try something. Of course, they could pluck me easily off the rocks and bring me back, but—I had to try. And something told me that simply saying, “Excuse me?” wouldn’t work, no matter how human their faces seemed.
    I tumbled backward out of the nest and a shriek rose over my fallen body. The bird-woman hovered over me, her black eyes glittering with malevolence.

Chapter 22: Nell
    A blur of brown and white surged from behind me and became airborne, tackling the massive beast to the ground. I screamed again and shot to my feet. It was Theon.
    He wrestled the giant bird to the floor of its nest, but more were arriving. I looked behind me at the steep, jagged decline of the cliff. Theon must have heard, or seen, and climbed it to follow us. But I didn’t know if I could. I could barely move at all, in fact, except for a tremble which ran through my every muscle.
    Theon reared back and kicked the beast hard in the face.
    “Your battle is already lost,” the bird-woman wheezed, cocking her head and grinning. Her sharp teeth were tiny.
    “Explain yourself, harpy.” Theon pinned one of her wings beneath his moccasin. “With whom have you been consorting?”
    The harpy whistled a tune back at him.
    I gasped as bone snapped beneath Theon’s heel, and the harpy screamed into the night sky.
    The other three harpies descended onto the nest. One of them was snowy white and speckled with coal spots; another was as black as obsidian. The third bore the same coloration as the broken-winged one, and she immediately went to her sister while the other two swirled forward and cawed at Theon.
    “Ladies, ladies, I mean you no harm,” Theon promised, bowing low to the ground. As he did so, he dug his right hand into their nest and whipped a log at them. It struck the white one and sent her tumbling into the nest; the black one fluttered overhead, out of reach. Theon wasted no time in disarming the bird. His left hand dove into the nest and extracted a length of hose. He wrapped it around her neck and the white bird-woman thrashed with such despair, I almost intervened on her behalf. “Tell me why!”
    He relented in his brutality with the speckled bird, and she hobbled away from him, calling out in a wounded warble to the others.
    “Tell me why,” he said, moving forward. The harpies shifted away from him, watching him closely. The black one wouldn’t even come back down. “Tell me why you have attacked my mate.” He flung his hand back to indicate me and my eyebrows jumped into my hair. His mate? We’d only kissed once! It was a strange way to say “girlfriend,” I guessed—or perhaps it was an error in translation, and he didn’t know what mate…