In Your Dreams by Tom Holt, Tom Holt Page B

wasn’t enough to contend with, a monster came rushing at him, a vulture-beaked, leather-winged feathered dragon, swooping through the air with its talons flexed and its claws out—
    â€”Which grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and lifted him into the air, yelling, How many times have I told you, you’re not to play outside without asking first in some form of speech that didn’t need words. The expression maternal instinct had just formed inside his mind when a Himalaya-sized Mr Tanner’s mum swatted the monster with a rolled-up newspaper, volleying both of them to the ground in a confused and painful heap.
    â€˜Ow!’ Paul yelled, and realised he’d yelled it in English; also, he was sitting on the monster, which had suddenly shrunk down to the size of a small King Charles spaniel.
    â€˜Get up, you’re squashing it,’ commanded Mr Tanner’s mum, pulling him out of the way and placing her stilettoed heel firmly on the wyvern’s neck. She’d shrunk, too, which was something. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t be doing with, it’s cruelty to animals.’
    Paul flopped against the wall. ‘What did you do to me?’ he gasped.
    â€˜Turned you into a baby wyvern, of course,’ Mr Tanner’s mum replied calmly. ‘It’s a well-known fact, mummy wyverns in the nesting season can’t tell their own offspring from strangers. So, soon as it heard a baby in distress, it was out of there like a ferret up a Yorkshireman’s trousers.’ She beamed at him. ‘Job done. Mind, it’ll be a bit pissy when it wakes up, so if I was you I’d kill it now.’
    Paul scowled at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Absolutely not. You can’t go around killing things just because they’re inconvenient—’
    The wyvern woke up, and bit him in the leg.
    After that, things got a bit confused, what with Paul trying to stamp on the wyvern’s head with a foot he’d have been better off using to stand on. It was probably falling on it that made it let go of his leg, though Mr Tanner’s mum insisted that she’d felled it with a well-aimed kick from her steel-toecapped Roland Cartiers. By the time he’d staggered to his feet again, everything had gone quiet.
    â€˜See?’ said Mr Tanner’s mum. ‘You changed your tune pretty quick.’
    â€˜But—’ Paul hadn’t bothered looking at the wyvern to see if it was all right. But it didn’t matter, because one glance at it told him there wasn’t any rush.
    â€˜Poor little cow,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said. ‘Still, that’s the pest-control game for you.’
    Paul waited to see if it moved, but it didn’t. ‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’
    â€˜â€™Course it’s dead,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said. ‘You were sitting on its windpipe for about half a minute. They may be fierce little bastards, but they’re fragile. It’s like I always say, in seven cases out of ten the bum is mightier than the sword.’
    Paul’s knees had gone wobbly, and it probably wasn’t due to the pain from his savaged ankle. ‘I killed it,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to do that.’
    Mr Tanner’s mum grinned at him. ‘Drat,’ she said. ‘Still, there you go. Omelettes and eggs. Talking of which,’ she added quickly, ‘you’d better get a wriggle on if you want to nip inside and make them open the vault.’
    â€˜Why would I want to do that?’
    â€˜The eggs, stupid. Wyverns’ eggs. They’re solid gold with a diamond shell, worth an absolute bomb. You don’t want some light-fingered cashier getting to them before you do.’
    â€˜No.’ The authority in Paul’s voice surprised him. ‘I’ve just killed the poor thing, I’m not going to steal its eggs too. Maybe if they’re left alone