Light Dragons 03 - Sparks Fly

it doesn’t negate the point that I think these challenges are idiotic. Even Baltic, who loves nothing more than a reason to fight, looks bored to tears by it.”
    “That is only because I’m waiting for Kostya to fail, so that I can take over,” my love said, cracking his knuckles.
    “I am not going to fail. You’re my second only because I must have one,” Kostya snarled at him, “and because the only other choice was that watery twit.”
    “Oh!”
    I held up a hand to stop Cyrene as she leaped to her feet. “My original statement stands, and to it, I add a new rule-no more dragon form. It’s too destructive.”
    “Aw, man,” Jim started to complain.
    I set its toes briefly on fire. Jim yelped.
    “Oh, it’s all right if you set it on fire?” Constantine asked in an arch voice.
    “Yes, it is,” I said, examining my fingertips. “I’m a mother. It’s part of our arsenal of behavior management.”
    Aisling grinned.
    “Baltic!” Constantine swaggered toward me (dragon form is very prone to swaggering), stopping in front of me with a peeved expression on his face. “Inform Ysolde that she cannot interfere in a challenge, and that by the terms of this challenge, we must fight body to body. That requires dragon form.”
    I raised an eyebrow at Baltic. He was silent for a moment, then made a short, annoyed gesture. “It pains me greatly to say the words, but about this, Constantine is correct. You may not interfere in the challenge, mate.”
    “I will not have this house destroyed because you boys don’t want to play nice!” I said loudly, turning back to glare at Constantine.
    “I really hate it when she refers to us as boys,” Kostya said in an aside to Baltic. “We’re older than she is, after all.”
    Baltic nodded. “She was always that way, though.” He smiled suddenly. “Do you remember the time when she dragged you out of Dauva by your ear for swiving that milkmaid in the main hall?”
    Kostya rubbed his ear and shot me a surly look. “I haven’t forgotten. My ear has never been the same since.”
    Aisling laughed openly. I ignored them to address Constantine. “Either you beat the crap out of each other while you’re in human form-and without breaking anything but each other-or you can just take it outside.”
    “Ysolde-” Constantine started to say, but I interrupted him with brutal disregard.
    “Out!” I flung open the two front doors and made a grand gesture. “You go outside with your challenge, or you call it off.”
    “Are you going to allow her to speak this way to us?” Constantine asked Baltic, clearly expecting him to do something.
    Baltic looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then shrugged. “She is my mate. If she does not wish for the challenge to take place in our home, then it will not. I do not desire her to be unhappy. You will conduct the challenge outside.”
    Constantine was obviously about to explode, but in the end, he stomped his way out the door, down the verandah, and out into the yard, grumbling the entire way. “I have never been so treated, and I have been abused by the very best! To speak that way to me , the wyvern of her own sept, is unthinkable. Were she my mate-”
    “If I had been your mate, I would have been insane a long time ago,” I called out after him as Kostya, with a martyred sigh, trundled after him. The others followed, Baltic bringing up the rear with a slight twitch to his lips that told me he found the situation as amusing as I did.
    As I walked down the steps to the yard, faint sounds caught my attention. I paused for a moment, trying to pinpoint where the yelling was coming from, but it was too distant, almost on the edge of my awareness.
    “Do you hear that?” I asked Baltic as I approached him, counting on his exceptional hearing to locate what I couldn’t.
    Baltic stood with the others in a loose circle around Constantine and Kostya as they pounced, tails whipping through the air, claws flashing, grunts and oaths rising upward on a reddish cloud of dust from the disturbed ground.
    “Hear what?” he asked without turning toward me.
    “That noise. It sounds like ... ” I paused and closed my eyes in order to focus my attention. “It sounds like someone is doing bodywork on a car. I can hear metallic pounding and yelling.”
    “I hear nothing.” Baltic stepped backward as Constantine and Kostya, now fully engaged in battle, rolled toward us. He grabbed my arm to pull me back, but the second he did so, a