The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “A dragon might have figured it out, but he used human tech to do so. I’m only trying to say that thinking oneself invulnerable is actually a fairly dangerous mindset. It makes it too easy to get surprised.”

  Stonequest straightened at the table and blew out a long breath. It steamed, despite the spring afternoon being fairly warm. “The problem our two cultures have faced for so long is that there’s no common ground. You can change all that. Don’t burn down the bridge before we’ve even finished building it. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m simply saying we need more evidence to lead us to the right answers.”

  Kristen nodded and let him join the rest of the party. She simply didn’t know what else to do. He dug his heels in and clung to his beliefs despite being confronted with evidence that directly disproved them.

  Maybe humans and dragons were more alike than she had realized.

  Chapter Thirty

  Obscura arrived in the city of Detroit at nighttime. She preferred nights. Shadows were her friends, after all, but something about the way the city was garishly lit up appalled her. The arrogance of these humans, to take the night like they took everything else. To subjugate a force of nature and then complain when they themselves were subjugated. It was hypocritical. If humans recognized that they were above some forces—those as ancient and powerful as the dark—they also needed to recognize that there were others more powerful than them. Forces like her.

  This city and the rats who called themselves its rulers had taken her son from her. Sebastian Shadowstorm had been born to rule. He’d had not only one unusual power but two, plus a mind and the strength to back it up—or, at least, Obscura believed he had. She was not so arrogant in her own abilities to fail to recognize that she’d made a mistake with regard to the true abilities of her son, especially his intelligence. But it mattered not. He was gone, killed by a human—no, worse than a human. He had been killed by a dragon—one with powers greater than most yet who thought of herself as human. It was unnatural, obscene, and utterly not right.

  Her task in this shining city was to fix it.

  And—unfortunately for her quarry—the trail wasn’t hard to follow. There was a video of her and her son fighting online, posted by one of the Steel Dragon’s human lackeys.

  She found it to be the most offensive thing she’d ever witnessed in her millennia of life. How dare this Kristen Hall with her peasant’s name hurt her son and broadcast it on the Internet like a battle with him was nothing but cheap pornography.

  When the news of his death finally reached the world of dragons, she had already heard about it through her own channels. She was thankful that there wasn’t a video of that battle, but she knew in her heart that if there were, the humans would have posted it all the same. They had no scruples and no sense of decency. This Kristen, the Steel Dragon, was no different. She had to be completely destroyed. Humans could be useful and those who weren’t could be squashed, but Kristen had the toxic ideas of humans plus the powers of a dragon. She represented a real threat to dragons and would try to push the status quo in exactly the wrong direction. Obscura would do a good thing by killing her. In fact, it would be a gift for dragons everywhere. The hurting that she would do beforehand would be the only part that she would personally enjoy.

  And how could she not take the death of her son personally? He had died in a trash facility, of all places, hardly a fitting grave for a dragon of his pedigree.

  Obscura flew toward it now. The location was no secret and the Internet had maps and diagrams. There were even conspiracy nuts who had somehow traced out the battle.

  She didn’t shy from the Internet the way most dragons did. Especially in the wake of Sebastian’s death, she threw herself into human culture and technology. Obviously, the creatures were gaining in power. Dragons had long had a power advantage over humans, but there was much more to it than that. One of dragon kind’s greatest strengths was their auras. The ability to communicate instantaneously on an emotional level was powerful, as was the ability to manipulate lower life forms.

  Humans now had those abilities. Their technology made them smarter than they were individually, and although most of them squandered this power, she would not make the mistake her son had of underestimating her opponent. She would use Kristen’s people to kill her. Oh, revenge would be a sweet thing.

  Moments later, she soared over the grounds of the facility where he had done battle. She landed amongst the trash trucks in her dragon form.

  While Sebastian was large, she was truly massive. She was larger than a garbage truck, large enough that she could probably pick one up and lift it high enough into the air to drop it and destroy it completely.

  Part of her wanted to do that now—the same part that her son had no doubt inherited and failed to exercise control over—but she didn’t. Instead, she settled between the trucks and flashed her aura once to make the workers think nothing of her. They would continue to go about their work. When they went home to their human wives and broods of children, they would fail to mention the massive dragon who had prowled among them. They wouldn’t mention her bat-like wings or her scales that seemed to change color depending on the light shining on them. Nor would they mention her crown of horns or the anarchic spikes at the tip of her tail. They wouldn’t mention a damn thing, because her aura could hide her from them almost effortlessly.

  The failure to properly hone this skill was Sebastian’s first mistake. He’d had a penchant for the garish and had liked his human servants and the pleasures they could provide him. While he had hidden from some humans, he’d relied on others. He had been weak, whereas his mother had to be strong.

  She told herself to be strong as she entered the facility and transformed into human form as she did so.

  As a human, she was unremarkable—average size and build, a little thin, and old. She had white hair, light brown, wrinkled skin, and a face she kept devoid of emotions. If she chose to, she could appear much younger, however. Auras affected perception, and perception was the window to the mind. She didn’t need to for this task, but Obscura could mask her true appearance in many forms. For now, she settled for the invisibility of being instantly forgotten. She wore a suit, a dis-gendering of human culture that she—for once—approved of. As she walked through the facility, the humans who noticed her treated her like a visiting bureaucrat, someone to avoid and nothing more. If her son had learned anonymity, he might still be there but of course, one couldn’t teach a shark to fly like a bird.

  Obscura approached the towering incinerator. It was old in human terms, her research had told her that much, but she could tell parts of it were new. It had been touched by magic. She could feel that and knew it had been rebuilt by the dragon Timeflash and the mages who served her. How convenient that this particular dragon was on another continent at the moment. The last thing she wanted was to face human mages. They occupied a frustrating middle ground between the two cultures that she would happily grind out. She thought it unremarkable that her web of secret influence spread to other continents and was such that a murder could be used for a distraction, but there were surely others who would have been awed by such effortless power.

  Ah, but now was not the time to think about that. Her purpose was to look upon the place of her son’s destruction and understand what had happened there.

  She stepped inside the incinerator. As soon as she’d moved within range of the humans who worked at the garbage processing plant, she’d used her aura to tell them to stop burning the trash. As a result, what she now walked into wasn’t a blazing fire but a mountain of smoldering coals. The heat didn’t bother her at all, though. It would take temperatures far higher than this to harm even the weakest of dragons, and she was most certainly not the weakest of them.

  Although the bricks were no longer below where Shadowstorm’s body had been robbed of its life and turned into a corpse, she could see his blood on them all the same. It was spread all the way up the shaft. Timeflash had restored t
he structure but she hadn’t been able to remove the blood. Now, even in the heat of the incinerator, his dragon blood was still present. Like molten glass, it clumped together on different bricks, black and hot.

  Obscura touched one of the drops on a brick in front of her but felt nothing. Her son had already been dead too long for these tiny specks of blood to still hold any of his essence. Despite a lifetime that stretched millennia, despite losing hundreds of friends, she felt her heart lurch at this lack of sensation. Not toward sadness and definitely not toward remorse for the loss of her foolish son but toward anger. This Steel Dragon bitch has snuffed out my son’s life in a garbage pile, she thought bitterly. Sebastian had been many things—arrogant, impetuous, and hedonistic—but he deserved more than to die and be forgotten in a heap of trash.

  And to think that humans were part of his death. The disrespect to dragon kind and the blatant disregard of the natural order was almost too much. She swallowed and fought back the churning pit of fire in her stomach. She wanted to burn this entire building to the ground so everyone in this cursed city would know she was there and fear her, but she knew that would be counterproductive. If she announced herself, the Steel Dragon would come for her and Obscura would have to kill her. She didn’t want that, not yet.

  But she didn’t want to simply leave her son’s body to be forgotten either. She knelt amongst the coals at her feet and pushed aside the burned trash, stumps of chair legs, and pieces of metal that had once been screws or broken tools. There was a fair amount of debris to clear away but she finally found the brick floor beneath the garbage.

  She extended her hands to feel for her son’s presence or some memory of him. There was power in dragon’s blood as there was in all things dragon. This place would no doubt give humans uncomfortable feelings and even spawn ghost stories given enough time. That was if she could find—

  Her search located a puddle of blood, Sebastian’s life essence spilled there in this place of ultimate human waste. It was far larger than any of the burnt specks that had been on the bricks magically rebuilt into the towering incinerator. She touched it and it clung to her fingers, still slightly sticky despite a fire being burned atop it every day for months now. She’d had to wait until Dragon SWAT stopped their regular patrols there and she was relieved that some of the blood was still almost slick.

  Obscura raised her right hand and transformed the pointer finger of her left hand into its dragon form. She extended the clawed digit, pointed it at the palm of her hand, and scored a line across her palm. Blood blossomed and with it, the pain of being wounded by a dragon’s claw.

  The dragon pressed her bloody palm against Sebastion’s blood. She added her own rage to the energy present in the residue to further taint the site to the human psyche before she continued with something a little more extreme.

  Still on her knees, she spoke words in a language long unused. To say it was forgotten would be a disservice to the type of memory dragons had, but it was safe to say that a human hadn’t heard words said in this tongue since they’d settled in cities to serve dragon kind.

  It was a guttural, rasping sound, only possible to make by letting her teeth and tongue change to their true form, that of a dragon. Although the words were unknown to human ears, the message might have been familiar.

  “I vow to avenge my son, to make his tormentors suffer like he suffered, and to kill his killer. May my blood see it so.”

  The heat of the oath coursed through her arm to bind her to these words. It would strengthen her as long as she served it. It was old magic, old and powerful, and somehow tied to the same magic that let dragon’s bodies exist despite them going against what humans called “physics.” If her purpose faltered, the magic of the oath would remind her of her duty with the oldest of memory aides—pain.

  But Obscura wasn’t worried about that. Her plan was not to murder the Steel Dragon as quickly as possible but to make her as desperate as her son had been. He had made his last stand in a glorified garbage heap. That spoke of fear and desperation. His murderer must feel the same thing before she was snuffed out, and the humans who served her must feel it ten-fold. The language with which she spoke the oath made this distinction clear.

  It was not death that she wanted for this dragon and her band of human servants but emotional collapse. When she finally ended their lives, they had to have reached a place where they begged for their own death, if not consciously, then in their dreams. This would mean that when she did kill them—and kill them she would—relief would be the last thing they felt. Relief at finally escaping the shadow of dread that had hounded them. Relief at finally being free of a world ruled by dragons.

  Oh yes, she thought. Oh yes, this would definitely be fun. As the magic of the oath coursed through her, she felt it strengthen both her resolve and her body itself.

  She walked from the facility with her shoulders back and head held high. The power she felt—taken from the place of her son’s death—bolstered her. She would feel this way as long as she endeavored to make the Steel Dragon suffer.

  The old dragon decided that she might actually enjoy her stay in the Motor City.

  It was with giddy excitement that she once more transformed into her dragon body. She was no larger—after all, she was already quite massive—but there was an energy in her muscles that could only come from a dragon sworn to vengeance. She flapped her wings, took to the air, and raked her claws across a garbage truck to tip it as she passed.

  In the morning, the workers would report it as a malfunction. They’d explain the gashes as best they could, but if their supervisors chose to investigate, it might become clear how large a threat had come to their city.

  Obscura flew into the night sky toward her hideout.

  There was much to prepare—traps within traps and feints within feints. She couldn’t wait to reveal herself to the Steel Dragon but wait she would. Her oath would give her patience until she’d taken everything from the aberration and then, she would snuff out the creature that shouldn’t be—a dragon who’d killed another to protect people.

  The idea of that was almost enough to make her wish to declare war on the Steel Dragon and the humans she served, but the oath she swore reminded her of her purpose. War was about eradication. This was about suffering.

  The time for a fight would come. Until then, she had much to do.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Kristen had been impressed with the pork shoulder that Lumos had smoked—crisp on the outside yet tender on the inside. While she thought it could have gone for another ten minutes, there were people who would have disagreed. She only felt confident in having such a particular opinion because of where she now stood beside her brother while he worked the grill in his parents’ backyard.

  “I hope you’re hungry, Krissy.” Brian lifted the lid of the grill to reveal four deboned chickens, each being crushed beneath a brick. This was one of his favorite dishes. Brick-chick, he called it, and she knew he’d waited all winter to be able to indulge that particular preference. Now that spring was here, her family would basically live in the backyard, which suited her perfectly. She tried to come home at least once a week—although sometimes it was closer to once a month—so she could keep in touch. If barbecue would be part of that equation until the snow started to fall again, she had absolutely no problem with that.

  “I’m starved.” She realized she’d salivated over the chicken sizzling away beneath the bricks instead of answering him. “Although yesterday, Lumos made some damn good pork shoulder. He knows how to use his dragon abilities to keep the temperature exactly right.”

  “Oh, wow. Someone named Lumos is a dragon? What a shocker. Do you really think his food will be better than mine?” Brian didn’t sound like he thought it was funny. In fact, he sounded kind of pissed.

  “Hey, your grilling is good and always has been. It was only interesting to see him use his abilities to do something that—”

  “That people have to slave away a
t?” Brian retorted before she could finish.

  “No…I mean, yes, I guess. I’m simply trying to make small talk. Are you all right?”

  “Trying to make small talk by saying my grilling is less than exactly right. Gee, what a compliment.”

  Kristen didn’t know what to say to that, so she wandered inside and left him with his brick-chick. There was something about him that seemed off, but she couldn’t quite place her finger on it. It was almost like something pushed at his aura, but she would have been able to tell if that was the case.

  In the house, her parents were setting the table.

  “Hey, guys!” She gave her mom a hug and kissed her dad on the forehead.

  “Hi, Kristen,” Marty turned back to a bowl of potato salad.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” Frank said. “Did you go straight around back or something?”

  “I flew. It’s more efficient than driving and better for the environment too.”

  Brian came through the back door with his platter of chicken. He’d left the bricks outside, although his face was as red as they had been. “Really, Kristen—really?”

  “Really what?” She had no idea what she’d said.

  “Now dragons are better for the environment?” he demanded as if it was the most offensive thing in the whole world.

  “Instead of cars? Yeah, obviously. No fossil fuels. What’s your deal?”

  “My deal is that you’re acting all high and mighty about being a dragon. Shit, at least people are trying to make electric vehicles and solar panels and shit. What do dragons do for the environment? Light more shit on fire?”

  “Brian Hall! Language!” Marty snapped. “I will not have that kind of talk at my table.”

  “We’re not at the table, Mom,” he replied querulously.