She yanked a few more bricks from the wall so he could fit through.
“All right, then,” Drew said with a nod, clearly impressed. “Note to self. One is never safe from the Steel Dragon.”
“Damn straight,” Keith responded.
They entered the maze, knowing full well that the building might blow up at any second. She didn’t know whether to be thankful for the courage of her friends or to prepare herself to mourn all their deaths.
Chapter Forty-Nine
When they first entered the maze, it was completely dark. A hallway stretched in both directions, right and left, equally dark and shadowed.
“Which way?” Jim asked.
“There’s a light that way at the very end,” Lumos said. His dragon eyes noticed what the humans could not.
“Then we go that way,” Kristen said and they turned left.
She took point, with Hernandez directly behind her to watch for bombs and Drew at her right. He held his gun up, ready for action.
They reached an opening in the side of the hallway at another corridor with a long row of glowing buttons on the floor. Keith stepped forward and stood on one and its light extinguished. For a moment, nothing else happened. Then, a drone buzzed down the hallway.
It stopped about ten feet away and hovered above one of the lights. A voice spoke from a speaker above them. “A new player. Did you remember to put your dollar in?”
“Pac-Man was always twenty-five cents, you fucking monster,” the Rookie said with not a shred of irony in his voice.
“There are a few more bells and whistles to this version,” Obscura said from behind her network of speakers. Her voice filled the hallway, a strange, ominous sensation.
“I’m impressed that you got through without blowing a door up, but the walls were obvious enough. Don’t make the same mistake in here. If you knock a wall down, it triggers gas. It might not kill you, Steel Dragon, but it might make these minions of yours cough their lungs out.”
“They are not minions,” Kristen replied.
The dragon laughed. “Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I would’ve hated torturing people you didn’t care about to death. This is much better.”
Drew shot the drone out of the air. “Is that against the rules, bitch?”
The woman laughed from the speakers yet again. “Of course not! If I told you to limit your gunfire, it would limit the chances of you accidentally shooting the Steel Dragon’s brother. What fun would that be? In fact, I’ll give you ten bonus points for each drone you do shoot down. That means you could make up to a thousand bonus points. You might even beat Brian’s score.”
Suddenly her brother’s whimpers came over the speakers.
“Brian!” Kristen yelled.
“He can’t hear you, moron. He’s holed away somewhere, trying to set a time score or something. It’s pathetic. He never even activated some of the features you already have.”
She tried to ignore Obscura and flexed her aura in an effort to calm Brian and make him feel that she was there and was coming to help. She knew her brother could feel her aura and would know it was her. He’d told her as much before. But as she reached out, she felt like it was being stifled. It was as if she tried to blow wind through a closed window or through a wall. She tried harder, but it wasn’t exactly easy to feel calm while all her concerted efforts failed.
Finally, Lumos put a hand on her shoulder. “It won’t work. Obscura is a master of auras. Much of what we can do to people is based on her original research. Of course, she was always willing to push limits many of us weren’t. For now, your brother is alone.”
Before Kristen had time to process what that meant—her mind immediately jumped to how angry Brian had been with her the last time they’d been together—another drone appeared at the end of the hall. This one was smaller and zigzagged as it approached.
“Butters,” Hernandez said sharply and stepped back so he could move forward. “I think I’ve seen these things. You have to take it out.”
He fired three times before he managed to hit the drone and it plummeted. The demolitions expert picked it up and turned it over.
“This has a cone-shaped charge on it. If it tags one of us, it’ll blow a hole in us.”
“Great. Only ninety-nine more to go,” Keith muttered.
“Don’t worry. I understand that sending these things at you isn’t fair, not with the board being what it is. If you’re to have any chance of winning here, you’ll need more dots to set the high score.”
“What the fuck is she talking about?” Jim asked.
“Dots are the food Pac-Man consumes to clear a level,” Keith explained, but what happened to the maze made it clear exactly what the dragon had meant.
All the buttons on the floor turned on.
“Shit.” Kristen cursed. She’d hoped to use the extinguished lights to track Brian but Obscura must have had the same idea.
More buzzing issued from the hallway behind them.
“Butters, Drew,” she ordered.
Both men moved to the back of the group and began to fire at the two tiny drones that approached.
“Keith, which way?”
“We can’t cut through the sides of the board and teleport like you can in regular Pac-Man, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Hernandez echoed, her voice heavy with sarcasm.
“Which means this is like any other board game. We move toward the middle of the board. That’ll be the strongest position and the place where we’ll most likely be able to pick up Brian’s trail.”
“Let’s go,” Kristen ordered.
The Rookie led the way and the others followed. Drew and Butters caught up once they’d dispatched the drones.
Keith led them like a man possessed. He seemed to have some kind of sense of the layout as he would glance left and right at each intersection and make a decision without hesitation.
This worked for a few minutes—or Kristen thought it was working, anyway, although they still hadn’t seen Brian—until they rounded a corner and encountered one of the men they’d seen in the video.
Already, gunshots rang out as Drew and Butters dispatched more drones, which had become a constant threat. Her focus, however, was on the person at the end of the hall.
He stood with his shoulders hunched and stared at them before suddenly, like a lion sensing that its prey had scented it, he ran toward them.
She braced herself. The man might have thought of himself as a predator, but she was a dragon. The shock wand that sparked in his hand would hurt, but she could withstand the pain if he managed to land a strike.
“We have more chances,” the man yelled as he approached and another man stepped from behind him, followed by two more. All of them carried shock wands in their hands.
“Kill the holograms for our freedom!” one of them yelled.
Well, at least she knew what their plan was.
“That should be all of them,” Keith commented. “Pac-Man only ever had four ghosts.”
Kristen turned to steel, ready to fight. The shocks would hurt her steel skin but she could eliminate them with a single punch. Her fighting them was what made the most sense.
The team apparently disagreed.
Jim darted past her and struck one of the men in the head with the butt of his gun. The guy stumbled back and collided with a wall to knock the thin partition over. As promised, smoke began to pour from behind the damaged wall.
Keith joined the fray, ducked below one of the shock wands, and sank his fist into his attacker’s gut. The man wheezed and collapsed.
More gunshots from Butters and Drew meant that more drones had been unleashed. After four shots, they stopped firing. That was a good sign and meant they’d hit their targets.
“Forward,” she ordered and as a group, they proceeded out of the smoke and toward the two attackers who were still standing.
Kristen tried to strike one of them with the bottom of her hand, using it like a blade, but despite
her dragon speed, the assailant only had to move his wand in the way. The electrically charged barbs touched her metal skin and pain lanced through her, traveled across her conductive shielding, and made her body convulse. She fell and her assailant kicked her savagely in the gut. It didn’t hurt, of course. In fact, he seemed to have broken his toe from the impact with a steel surface as he screamed and dropped onto his butt to clutch his foot.
He didn’t drop the wand, however, and he thrust it into her neck to release a fresh wave of convulsions across her body.
No longer able to move, she was forced to watch as he caught his breath and stood, raised the wand, and grinned a perverted rictus smile. Clearly, he would enjoy hurting her.
More gunshots told her that another drone was coming.
“Get down, you damn fool!” Butters yelled, but Kristen didn’t understand what he meant. Was he talking to the guy about to strike her?
Hernandez leapt over Kristen and threw her shoulder into the man who’d been ready to attack the Steel Dragon. She was fairly short and he was tall and broad, so she didn’t knock him over, only back.
The drone that had raced down the hallway thudded into his back and activated its trigger.
The demolition expert screamed with indignation—a short, high shriek—and immediately fell silent. She was covered in blood that spewed from a hole in the goon’s chest where the drone had detonated.
Even this grisly death caused by their master or captor or whatever Obscura had made herself to them wasn’t enough to stop the others.
The fourth man struck Hernandez with his wand and flung her into convulsions on the floor. He advanced on Kristen, who was still unable to move.
Keith was tangled with a goon, as was Jim. Drew and Butters couldn’t join the fray and risk letting another of the lethal drones through. She realized then that they were royally screwed.
Lumos stepped forward.
He made no attempt to even vaguely dodge the wand’s electrically charged tip.
It struck him and he flinched, obviously not completely impervious to the electricity, but he didn’t collapse as a result. Instead, he glared at the man who’d attacked him.
“That’s quite unpleasant you know,” he said.
His adversary grimaced and brandished his wand for another strike, but this time, when he brought it down, Lumos moved with dragon quickness and caught his forearm.
With his free arm, he slowly and almost casually plucked the weapon from the man’s hand. He released him as if he were a struggling child and snapped the shock rod in half like it was nothing more than a stick.
More gunshots indicated that another wave of drones had been eliminated.
Keith drove his knee powerfully into his opponent’s gut and the man collapsed.
“Enough of this,” Lumos said and the last attacker, who still struggled with Jim, paused to look at the dragon.
“I don’t know what kind of deal Obscura made with you, but I can assure you she won’t honor it. If you follow the lights we put out, there is a hole in the wall. Run now. Your freedom awaits.”
The man on the floor shook his head as he pushed to his feet, although his eyes showed nothing but fear. “She has those drones. There ain’t no way we can escape. If we don’t beat you…you holograms, we die. Plain and simple.”
“Do you think a hologram could have snapped your little toy in half?”
The man looked at the broken pieces and seemed to weigh the implications of the broken weapon in front of him before he returned his attention to Lumos.
“Whoever you are, you can’t hurt us as much as she can. She told us the Steel Dragon herself was coming, and we beat her. Who are you?”
“The question is what, not who.” He growled and his eyes became slitted and his teeth extended. A forked tongue lolled from his mouth and he licked his lips once before it vanished inside. “And the answer is hungry.”
The man took a few steps back, cursed, and realized he needed to run through the smoke that was now behind the dragon and everyone else.
He did so without further hesitation and in moments, was hidden by the smoke.
Jim pushed his opponent against the wall. Instead of continuing the fight, he raced away after his friend—or fellow prisoner, whichever it was.
The attacker who had broken the wall held his hands up in surrender before he followed the others through the smoke. He was slower, most likely due to an injury, and coughed heavily as he made his way through the gas that issued from the broken section of the maze behind them. Within moments, he too was gone.
“All right,” Kristen said when she finally caught her breath and pushed to her feet. “Well done.”
“You know, we probably should have arrested those men and kept them for questioning,” Drew said matter of factly. “Humans are our jurisdiction. They were kind of the bridge in this situation.”
Lumos shrugged and looked completely unconcerned. “I’m here for a bad dragon. Having them around would have complicated matters.”
“Complicated is the name of the job,” the man replied.
“Not with Obscura. She’s a master with her aura and could have made those men agree to come with us if she wanted to, then had them turn on us at the most opportune moment. Believe me, this way is better.”
“If you’re quite done defeating the ghosts, there is more to accomplish before I slaughter the Steel Dragon’s brother. It’s interesting that a dragon could even be related to a pig,” Obscura said over the speakers. She’d watched the entire fight, then, and had simply let it play out. That was the behavior of someone who still very much thought of themselves as in charge.
“I think Lumos is right,” Kristen said to Drew. “We can catch those guys later, but none of this is their fault. We have to stop Obscura.”
He nodded. Hearing the dragon’s voice had a way of clarifying their goals.
The team moved on.
They proceeded through the hallways in search of Brian. Once or twice they found dead lights, which indicated that either he or they had moved through there. After the fight, Keith had lost his bearings, so it was a random hunt and was as frustrating as hell. She wanted to simply incinerate the entire building but she couldn’t, of course, not without knowing where her brother was.
They rounded another corner and something surged toward her through the darkness. It was like a shadow incarnate as if darkness had been given form or the night itself was animated with rage. It pounded into her but was unable to topple her. Her steel skin made her too heavy.
It did, however, knock everyone else—including Lumos—to the floor. Worse still was that as everyone pushed to their feet, she could sense the terror that poured from them.
“What the fuck was that?” Hernandez shrieked.
“That was her,” Lumos said. He didn’t look as shaken as the rest of them but he still looked fairly freaked out.
“What was her? That fucking cloud of crazy?” Jim said.
He nodded. “That means we’re getting close. She wouldn’t reveal herself if she didn’t feel like she had to.”
“That was revealing herself?” The Wonderkid was incredulous. He was the one who’d spent the most time studying dragons because of his vendetta against them, and he’d obviously never come across powers like these.
“We need to keep moving,” Kristen said.
“Agreed.” Lumos nodded. “But be ready. She’ll try to split us up so she can pick one of us off. She’s powerful in her dragon form, but when she uses these abilities, well…she can be almost impossible to stop.”
“Almost?” Drew asked.
He didn’t answer and merely followed the Steel Dragon’s lead.
Kristen thought he was right about Brian. She finally felt like she could sense him. He was close, scared, tired, and worried that he would never see the light of day again. Still, he was close and that was what mattered.
They stepped beyond another corner and again, the cloud of angry shadow barreled pas
t them. This time, she tried to strike at it but her hands found no target. The cloud struck back, however. Claws materialized and lashed out at her team as the insubstantial dragon passed between them.
Gashes appeared on Butters’ chest and he screamed in pain as he fell. Jim and Keith hauled him up, but he was bleeding from the neck. Fortunately, his bulletproof vest had stopped most of the attack but he wouldn’t be able to be their gunner anymore. He had to keep a hand on his neck to staunch the bleeding and couldn’t go back alone either. Obscura would simply devour him.
She surged again, this time from the direction she’d vanished into.
Her claws found Drew, but he raised his arms in the way and earned gashes on his forearms instead of his chest.
“She’s trying to take our gunners out,” Kristen said. She couldn’t believe they were close to Brian—so close—and yet Obscura would manage to stop them. This was the end.
Again, the shadow of the dragon attacked. Kristen braced herself but didn’t know what she could do as she was steel, not shadow. She supposed she could turn her body to flesh and maybe goad their adversary into attacking, but that didn’t seem wise, not when Obscura might simply slice her head off.
Lumos, though, had a plan.
As the shadow-form careened toward them, the golden dragon’s human body began to glow. At first, Kristen could hardly notice it but in moments, light radiated from his skin and filled the hallway. His eyes and fists seemed to burn brightest, and this time, when Obscura tried to creep past them, he struck out with his hand held in a claw and caught hold of something.
For a moment, it looked like nothing more than black cloth but it began to coalesce almost immediately.
“Go. I’ll hold her for a time,” Lumos said and his glowing hand dimmed a little as the shadow began to take a solid form around him.
“Lumos,” the darkness snapped. “I should have recognized you,” Obscura growled from her shadowy form. As before, the voice seemed to come from all around them but it was no longer distorted through the tinny speakers. Now it was low, ominous, and seductive too. They were the words of a woman who knew she was in control.
The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2) Page 35
