“And you think the dragon council has a commitment to justice?” she asked. It was a question she’d been afraid to ask every dragon she’d ever met. She was almost afraid to ask now, but there was something about him that put her at ease. Perhaps it was simply his age. He was like a boulder in the way he did little but observe and act as a solid force.
“I think sometimes, they must be reminded that times are changing,” Lumos said carefully. “But—and maybe this is centuries of police work talking—I don’t think trying to stop humans from committing crimes against each other merely because work is slow is the way to do that.”
Kristen sighed. So she was simply supposed to sit there and do nothing? That was worse than anything else.
“Things will pick up, and when they do, you’ll be there. You’re on Stonequest’s team now. He doesn’t exactly sit things out.”
“That’s true,” she said and thought back to all the conflicts the dragon leader had involved himself in. Maybe part of being a dragon meant sitting back and letting people work things out for themselves and only getting involved when absolutely necessary. But how much longer would she have to wait for something to happen?
As if in answer to her question, He frowned, tilted his head, and smiled slowly at her. “Do you feel that?”
“Feel what?” All she could feel was her own miserable aura.
“Stone has something. He's on his way here, I think.”
A door at the end of the hallway slammed open with enough force to echo down the hallway. “I need Stonequest’s team on the roof in thirty seconds. Let’s go, dragons. This is not a drill!” Pounding footsteps meant that he had followed his own advice and raced to the roof.
“Thirty seconds? That doesn’t give us enough time to gear up,” she said. “Are there weapons on the roof or something?” She tried to recall if she’d ever seen anything, but if there were she hadn’t noticed.
“There will be very soon,” Lumos said and ran down the hallway.
She followed, impressed at the dragon’s speed despite his age, and took the stairs two at a time. Despite that, she still arrived on the roof without being winded. Dragon stamina was awesome.
“We have an unsanctioned battle happening about sixty miles northwest of here with collateral damage and the potential loss of human lives in the hundreds. Let’s move. We can talk more on the wing.”
With that scant information, Stonequest transformed into his dragon body. First, he was surrounded by dust. The cloud expanded and with a gust of wind, it was gone and a dragon stood in its place. In this form, he looked like he was made of marble—off-white with ribbons of green and pink shot through like his massive body had been cut from a quarry. With a pump of his wings, he took to the air.
“Don’t we need to gear up or something?”
“You’re a steel-skinned, fire-breathing beast who’s larger and stronger than any land animal on the entire planet. What gear do you think we need to bring?” Lumos asked, his voice light but his point serious.
“And we’ll simply fly there?”
“Did you want to ride in the back of a van?”
“No, never mind.” Kristen prepared to transform but he put a hand on her shoulder.
“Wait your turn. If we have two dragons up here at once, it’ll cave the roof in.”
She nodded, her anticipation now almost at a fever pitch.
Heartsbane transformed next. Other than her aura, she had no unusual abilities so her shift lacked the grandeur of Stonequest’s. Her body simply grew scales and wings, her limbs elongated, a tail sprouted, and that was that. By the time she was airborne, John Emeraldeyes was transforming.
The process was the same for him. He went from human to dragon like a rapid-motion version of metamorphosis.
“Your turn,” Lumos told her and she nodded. Steel shards erupted from her like glitter. They encompassed her and blocked her from the world around her while her body grew as if an interdimensional force filled a dragon mold with molten steel. A moment later, the steel glitter sucked back into her skin and she was a dragon. She pumped her wings and took flight.
Kristen gained altitude and spun in circles above the streets of Detroit, using the thermal from the concrete to take her higher and higher. She looked down once—hoping to catch a glimpse of Lumos’s transformation—but he’d already changed into his golden dragon body.
Higher and higher she rose until she reached the other dragons. As soon as she did, Stonequest headed off with Heartsbane and Emerald behind him. She knew that they were riding his wake. Like geese, they could ride the wind he tweaked, and although she had done it once before, right now, she was simply too nervous.
While the other dragons all matched pace with each other and flapped their wings in a repeating cascade that started with Stonequest, then to Heartsbane, then Emerald, and finally Lumos, she struggled to keep up.
“What’s the protocol when we get there?” Kristen asked. She had read the manuals of course—or tried to, anyway—but they were written in language that must have seemed out of date the moment it had been put to paper. There was something about confirming combatants’ right to duel, and a ground most proper, and weapons of flame and claw, but she hadn’t made any more sense of it than she had the Detroit SWAT training manual. Some things one had to learn by doing.
“Heartsbane, stick with Steel. Get her drafting your wake so she’ll be fresh when we’re there. Answer her questions too.”
Immediately, Heartsbane made her feelings about the order quite clear. Her aura screamed disdain for the rookie, but she obeyed all the same, dropped back, and positioned herself in front of her. “The first rule of engagement is to draft. If we show up flapping our wings like a flock of damn sparrows, we won’t calm the situation at all. Move to my right and follow my wingbeats.”
Kristen obeyed, despite it being difficult given that the dragon’s aura made it quite clear that she would far rather see her crash.
Still, she got the hang of it. She found if she focused on following Heartsbane, her wings could more easily do their job. If she tried to focus on flapping, she messed it up.
“So, what do I need to know? Will we secure the perimeter from the air, or what? Will I go in because I have steel skin? Will you do the negotiating because your aura is more powerful, or will you leave that to Stonequest since he’s the boss?” She couldn’t stop talking. Even when she flew through a tiny swarm of moths and felt a good number of them go down her throat, the questions continued to spew.
“The first thing you need to do is calm the fuck down,” Heartsbane replied, which of course didn’t help her nerves at all. “Unsanctioned battle can mean many different things. We’ll assess when we reach the location.”
“So we will land?”
“Can you please shut up for the flight? I won’t have any sway on them if all they can feel is how fricking annoyed I am to have to babysit the freaking human turned dragon.”
That effectively stopped the babbled flow of questions. It reminded her where she was in the world right now—namely, isolated. Too physically dragon to be human but too emotionally human to be a dragon. It really sucked. She had a thousand more questions to ask, but she kept them to herself.
Her focus shifted to an effort to tell herself that she wouldn’t rush in and would follow her boss’s lead. The idea was good, but part of her knew that if people were in danger, she wouldn’t be able to help herself. Hopefully, Stonequest recognized that this was the nature of the dragon he’d hired.
They could see the destruction from miles away. Houses were all but demolished as if airplanes had been dropped on them and then removed. Between the houses, people ran, drove, and did everything in their power to get away.
Kristen could feel their fear, even from the sky. It was a palpable yellow, sweaty feeling, one that came when people were reduced to their most basic animal instincts—run, hide, and survive.
“What did this?” she asked, mostly to herself.
&
nbsp; Heartsbane answered all the same. “Dragons, you twit.”
They soared past the fleeing people, over the abandoned town, and toward a hill in the middle of the town. On the sides were attractive houses, not mansions—there weren’t too many of those in Michigan outside Detroit—but nice all the same. A picturesque church stood at the very top of the hill.
Now, however, many of the houses burned from holes blasted into them, no doubt the aftermath of dragon fire. The church itself was completely ablaze. As she approached, she saw firefighters at the bottom of the hill, waiting and not rushing in.
“Why aren’t they helping?” she demanded.
“I thought you cared about humans.” Heartsbane sneered. “They could get roasted to a crisp if they go in now.”
Sure enough, another gout of flame erupted from the church and the blast was enough to finally weaken the steeple. It imploded and debris pounded into the roof which—already weakened by the fire—collapsed inside the building.
A roar came from within before a dragon was hurled from the interior, up and out through the broken roof. Before it could land, it flapped its wings and dove back into the structure, breathing fire with such force that the few windows still intact shattered outward.
“Let’s stop these assholes,” Kristen yelled to the team.
“Not yet,” Stonequest said. “Start the circles of warning.”
“What do you mean, not yet?” She wondered if she’d heard right.
“For fuck’s sake, Steel, we can’t simply rush in there and break up a duel. That’s against the dragon code of engagement.” Heartsbane scoffed like was supposed to be common knowledge.
“I thought this was unsanctioned combat,” she protested and followed her to join the other dragons circling around the church like a flock of vultures waiting for an animal to finally die.
“They shouldn’t be fighting here,” Lumos yelled from the opposite side of the wheeling pattern the five members of Dragon SWAT now maintained, “but if we interfere without giving them the circles of warning, we’ve essentially joined the battle.”
Kristen couldn’t believe this. They would simply let the dragons spew destruction and wreak havoc on the landscape below? It was a small blessing that the humans had escaped—she didn’t sense any of their auras—but what would they come back to? Many of their homes had already burned and now, their place of worship would be reduced to rubble.
Below, a dragon’s tail pounded through one of the walls, which then fell on top of it. The rubble slowed it and the other one—a coppery-toned, slender dragon—used this opportunity to attack the larger red dragon. It slunk in—moving fast like a skink—and caught hold of its adversary’s throat. With a violent gesture, it yanked its foe’s head back with such force that she thought the other dragon was about to be decapitated. Instead, the red dragon pumped its wings and avoided losing its head as it soared across the church turned battleground. The copper dragon still held it by the neck and controlled its trajectory, and the red dragon careened into the altar at the center of the church.
“We have to go in there,” Kristen roared in frustration. Three walls still remained, but not much else. If they didn’t step in now, nothing would be left standing.
“One more circuit,” Stonequest said and sounded as calm as Drew did on a stakeout.
She didn’t know if she could do it. How was she supposed to fly in lazy circles while the center of these people’s community was destroyed? Then there were the burning houses. Every minute these dragons battled was another minute the firefighters wouldn’t go in. Already, a few of the houses had collapsed in the flames, and the fires hadn’t stopped burning.
Orders be damned. These dragons had to be stopped.
She broke rank, veered toward the center of the circle they’d maintained, and dived toward the church. As soon as she broke rank, John Emerald did too.
Oh, thank God. It was a relief that she wasn’t the only person on the team horrified at the violence these dragons were allowed to inflict on this town and its place of worship because of protocol.
But he didn’t swoop down toward the church. Instead, he swerved in front of her, twisted his body, and clawed at her.
She flapped her wings to slow her descent and avoid a collision with him.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Making you follow orders. If you go in there now, these people might not get a damn thing.”
“They’ve already lost so much,” she screamed and tried to sneak around him, but he was too experienced. She wasn’t nearly as comfortable in flight as the other dragons. He was far more maneuverable and could take risks that she wouldn’t dare to attempt. As much as she wanted to help the people of this town, she didn’t simply want to tuck her wings and plummet. She might demolish another house or destroy one of the church’s remaining walls.
“If you interfere now, they get nothing back,” Emerald said.
Horrified, Kristen could only stare beyond his green wings as the copper dragon pounced on its adversary. The red dragon—larger and seemingly more powerful—caught it on its back legs and hurled it away and into the front wall of the church. The masonry literally disintegrated when the huge body bulldozed through it.
Still, the two combatants continued to fight. The red dragon glanced at the dragons above them and raced back into the burning wreckage.
“All right, three loops,” Stonequest said. “Steel, you follow our lead if you care about the people of this community.”
“If I care?” she shouted indignantly.
“This is not the time,” Lumos said as he swooped past her. Heartsbane also descended and once the three had landed, Emerald finally allowed her past.
She settled behind the other three dragons, the green dragon at her heels.
The five of them stood on the front steps of the destroyed church—front row seats to the senseless destruction of a holy place. By now, there was nothing left save two walls. She stared as the crucifix on the back of the church—already on fire—fell from the wall to join the devastation. It was a vision of hell on earth.
The combatants didn’t notice any of it. Instead, the red dragon pounced on its opponent. The copper dragon, unable to escape, thrashed with its tail and scattered smoldering wreckage as easily as a child could kick over a sandcastle.
“This is Dragon SWAT. I am agent Stonequest. We have completed the circles of warning and allowed each of you an honorable end to this duel. Now, in accordance with the will of the Dragon Council, you must cease this battle or face the intervention of this team of enforcement officials. Furthermore, any failure to comply will force the Dragon Council to seize your fortunes without trial and without regard to the outcome of this duel.”
Kristen couldn’t believe that he went through this entire speech while the dragons continued to brawl. Humans were read their rights too, of course, but after they were apprehended.
The dragons—who had both scuffled as he spoke—finally stopped when he spoke about seizing their fortunes.
“For the record, I won,” the red dragon said. His claw rested on the other’s chest, who was sprawled on his back. He spoke like a lord from a British drama and was the first dragon she had encountered whose voice sounded as self-interested as most dragons behaved.
“Sheep’s guts you did,” the copper dragon replied in an accent that she couldn’t place beyond being somewhere in eastern Europe. He slipped out of his rival’s talons, rolled over, and whipped the other dragon across the chest with his tail. The copper one was smaller—Kristen didn’t know how to express the size of dragons as they were so large. It was perhaps the size of four horses end to end instead of the red dragon’s five, but that didn’t seem to affect the ferocity of his strike at all. His adversary replied in kind and lunged once more at him.
“The success and veracity of your duel will be determined in front of a tribunal. Please step away from the human structure. If you attack us, the rules of duel will not ap
ply. The five of us are allowed to use lethal force to subdue you if we must,” Stonequest said and sounded like a cop running through a script despite actually telling these dragons he might kill them.
The combatants tussled through the entire speech but once he stopped speaking, they ceased as well.
Kristen thought back to the airsoft battle between human and Dragon SWAT. In that battle, Stonequest had stopped fighting because Jim had offered his hand to shake. At the time, she had thought it absurd that he’d fallen for such an obvious distraction. Now, after seeing the other two dragons stop fighting after his little speech, she thought that maybe it did make sense. Dragons were beings of immense power and one of the ways they navigated this was with an overemphasis on manners. They were politicians, every one of them, and politicians weren’t supposed to brawl.
“Come this way at human speed,” Heartsbane ordered.
The dragons complied and approached the SWAT team. Their massive claws shattered what was left of the blackened pews into nothing more than chunks of coal.
Chapter Thirty-Three
To say the dragons stepped from the church would sell short the damage done to the structure. There was no longer a door to step through, let alone the wall that framed the entry. All that remained of the church was two walls—the back and the right if one faced the altar. In a span of minutes, the combatants had reduced the structure to burnt ruins.
Even the hill itself was scarred. Huge gashes rent the ground where the dragons had hurled one another’s spiny bodies across the lawn. Many oak trees had stood in front of the church not an hour before. Now, they were charred stumps. The heat from the dragon’s flame was no doubt enough to have killed even the roots.
In short, Kristen didn’t see how people could ever return there. A place of worship and community had become a scorched reminder of mankind’s fragile existence in the world.
The dragons emerged from the wreckage and came to stand in front of Stonequest. Both of them flicked their tails like cats annoyed at being pulled away from wounded birds. She had a sudden urge to neuter them.
The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2) Page 25
