“What have you crashed?” Connie asked suspiciously.
“Never you mind.” Chase gunned the engine to drown out any further discussion on the matter. “Let's go.”
Connie gave him the first heading, and Chase obediently turned the plane, pitching the nose upward as he did so.
Show me what you've got, old girl…
The Spitfire climbed like a homesick angel. Chase laughed out loud in sheer delight. Connie muttered a soft curse in his earpiece, but didn't tell him to be more cautious. She too knew that the best strategy for the race would be to gain as much height as possible at the start, so that they'd be able to dive if they needed to get a speed boost later on.
Connie called the first turn point. Chase tipped the Spitfire up on one wing, banking while still climbing. The harness straps cut into his chest as the plane whipped through the turn, as fast and deadly as a hunting falcon.
His pegasus spread its wings and soared along with the plane, filled with fierce delight. Faster! it urged him. Show our speed, win our mate!
A distant speck in the sky caught Chase's eye as he banked through the next turn under Connie's direction. He craned his neck, peering through the glass bubble of the cockpit.
“Connie,” he said. “You cleared our flight path, right?”
“Of course I did. Air traffic control are keeping this area free for us. Why?”
“No reason,” Chase said, his forehead creasing as he stared hard at the rapidly-approaching speck.
A rival! His pegasus bared its teeth. Overfly him, swoop, strike!
Hush, Chase told the aggressive stallion absently as he tried to identify the other flyer. Of course it isn't a rival.
Even from a distance, the bat-wing silhouette clearly wasn't a pegasus. He would have said it was a dragon, except that it was much too small. He knew all the dragon shifters living in Brighton—including his own teammate, Daifydd Drake—and all of them were at least the length of a bus.
This dragon, if dragon it was, looked to be about the size of a large horse. About the size of his own pegasus, in fact, which explained why his own stallion had mistaken it for a challenger. It was a poisonous emerald-green, which wasn't a dragon color Chase had ever seen before. There was something not quite right about its tail, too…
“Chase!” He jumped at Connie's shout. “I gave you the heading twice! Why aren't you turning?”
“Sorry.” Chase hastily changed course, the plane lurching as he jerked it roughly round. “I got distracted.”
“Distracted by what? It's empty sky out there.”
“That's what you think,” Chase muttered, too quietly to be picked up by the microphone.
The other shifter was approaching swiftly now, on an intercept course with the Spitfire. Chase couldn't imagine that it could possibly have failed to notice them. The Spitfire was loud enough that the shifter would have to be stone deaf not to have heard the plane.
Maybe it's just having some fun? It probably doesn't realize I can see it.
Chase had occasionally buzzed light aircraft himself, just for the challenge of matching speed and course with them. A normal human pilot wouldn't be able to see a mythic shifter like a dragon or a pegasus, not if it didn't want to be seen.
Deliberately, he tipped the Spitfire first to one side, then the other, waggling the wings in hello.
“What are you doing?” Connie demanded.
“Just, uh, a little crosswind,” he lied, still watching the other shifter.
It hadn't responded to his impromptu greeting. Chase tried to mind-speak it, but it was like shouting at a closed door. The other shifter was deliberately blocking all psychic communication.
I'm starting to get a bad feeling about this.
It was close enough now that he could see that it was roughly dragon-shaped, with a long neck and wedge-shaped reptilian head. But it only had two legs, not four. Its curved, muscular tail ended in a scorpion's barb, the needle-sharp point at least two feet long.
Bloody hell, it's a wyvern!
Chase had never seen one before. He'd never heard of someone who'd actually seen one before. They were so rare, they bordered on legendary, even amongst mythic shifters. They were bogeymen in the stories shifter kids told around campfires: Stone heart, poison blood, acid breath…