The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

“It’s the mustache,” he said.

  “We could’ve been something you know. Light and dark.”

  “Good and evil.”

  The hallway erupted into violence.

  This wasn’t Kristen’s fight—not yet and not now. She had to save Brian.

  “Let’s go!” she yelled and the human SWAT team obeyed. They sprinted from the battle between Lumos and Obscura, down a hall into a right turn and down another.

  “There!” Keith shouted and pointed down a corridor where every button was illuminated. “We never did that shit. It’s gotta be Brian!”

  She nodded and raced forward down the hallway.

  When she spun around the next corner, he didn’t see her at first. He stumbled along as fast as he could and pressed every button, committed to his strategy like he always was when playing a game.

  Drew and Keith arrived next and moved much more loudly than she had. The noise alerted Brian to their presence.

  Kristen realized she should have said something, but the sense of relief had been so palpable, she’d frozen. That was a mistake as when her brother saw the two men, he screamed.

  “You fucking ghosts. Go away! Please,” he pleaded. “I’m tired. All I want is my sister.”

  “It’s me, Brian,” she said and pushed past her teammates.

  Brian ran to her and they embraced. She was smiling and tears ran down her cheeks, her brother safe in her arms. He wept the great wracking sobs of the doomed who had realized that they’d live another day.

  The moment was short-lived as seconds later, the roof collapsed.

  “Get to me!” Kristen screamed and instinctively transformed into her dragon form. She used her massive steel wings to envelope Brian and the human SWAT team while brick, ceiling tiles, and shards of debris rained upon her.

  Lumos’s shining golden form pounded into what she at first thought was a storm cloud that Obscura had summoned. For a moment, she had a flashback to fighting Shadowstorm—he too could control the weather—but the cloud coalesced and she realized that it wasn’t a storm cloud but Obscura herself.

  She was massive, almost twice the size of Shadowstorm, who had been substantially larger than Kristen in her dragon form. She bit Lumos on the neck and hurled him aside. The team lost sight of him as he careened from the window into the sky above them.

  “You have to go,” Jim said.

  “I have to get Brian out of here,” she argued.

  “I’ll be all right.” Her brother still sounded shaken but seemed better. “Go kick some ass.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Kristen didn’t have to be told twice.

  She vaulted into the air and pumped her wings as she did so to clear the warehouse roof and emerge into the midday sun. It was insane to think they’d arrived there as early as they had. Now, the sun was high overhead and shining down on the battle before her.

  There was no opportunity to look around because Obscura rocketed into her and sent her skittering across the roof. Hastily, she turned into regular dragon skin instead of steel in an attempt to prevent the roof from caving in, but even without that, she was still a dragon. As she careened across the surfaces, pieces inside came loose and plunged into the maze.

  Instinct told her that she couldn’t let her adversary dictate where this battle would take place. She had to get off the roof and take the fight somewhere with less collateral damage. When the vengeful dragon struck her again, she moved with the blow instead of resisting it. Her momentum carried her from the roof and into the asphalt parking lot that surrounded the warehouse, where she donned her steel skin once more and roared at the larger black dragon.

  Obscura leapt off the building and moved with the speed of a viper despite her enormous size, but she didn’t make it far. At the top of her arc, Lumos pounded into her. It wasn’t enough to bring the dragon to the ground—she was so much larger than either of her two adversaries—but it did succeed in deflecting her headlong trajectory toward Kristen.

  The black dragon landed and whipped her tail into Lumos, who catapulted away.

  His attack had left an opening for Kristen, and she took it. She vaulted onto Obscura and landed between her wings. Before her foe could retaliate, she sank her jaws into the back of the larger dragon’s neck, hoping to sever her spine or a vein but it wasn’t enough. She simply shook her off like a dog from the back of a grizzly bear.

  The Steel Dragon spread her wings to ease her landing.

  In an instant, Obscura launched her next assault. She constantly expected the old dragon to be slower because she was so massive but that wasn’t the case at all. In addition to her speed, she turned insubstantial, raced toward Kristen, and transformed to her solid state in time to crash into her.

  Kristen fell once again and landed heavily in the parking lot. Her assailant was on top of her almost immediately, her claws on her chest and her weight pressing down.

  “You took him from me and for that, you will suffer,” the black dragon said viciously.

  The Steel Dragon experienced true terror in that moment because an energy unlike anything she had ever sensed before coursed through her enemy. It started in one of her claws and surged through her body to empower and invigorate her. When Obscura pounded on the young dragon’s face with her fist, the back of her skull cracked the pavement.

  “How can you—” she managed to say before another fist drove into her with enough force to knock out some of her teeth.

  “A blood oath is nothing to be trifled with. Everything I’ve done up until now, I’ve done to hurt you the way you hurt me. I’ve used your family and friends against you like you did to my son. I made their strengths into their weaknesses, exactly like you did to my son. And now, I’ll kill you like you did my son.” Obscura reared her head back, opened her jaws wide, and was blasted in the face by what appeared to be a beam of pure sunshine.

  “Watch my back,” Lumos said as he bounded past Kristen and bulldozed into the black dragon. She hadn’t seen what he’d done but it must have been some kind of blast power. While she hadn’t ever paused to think where he got his name from, it was now becoming clear—he was a dragon of light. He could illuminate, apparently to a devastating degree.

  But that didn’t mean he could defeat their adversary. He collided with her, but that seemed to be a mistake. Before he’d touched her, the shadow dragon had thrashed around blindly, obviously incapacitated by the solar blast and blinded as well as hurt. But once he made contact, sight was no longer necessary to strike back. Her tail whipped around and its barbed point aimed directly at his gut.

  Kristen had realized that they couldn’t fight this dragon by themselves. It had to be together. She’d waited to help Lumos and when Obscura’s tail whipped toward the older dragon, she caught it in her teeth and bit down hard.

  Her foe screamed and Lumos struck. He opened his mouth and emitted a blast of what Kristen would only ever be able to describe as sunlight. It blazed more brightly than the sun above them, and its target writhed in pain.

  But still, she fought. She tugged at her tail—still in Kristen’s jaws—and was able to yank the young dragon into Lumos. The two rolled across the pavement.

  “I will avenge him!” Obscura roared and a wave of shadow blasted from her to envelop them in darkness.

  Kristen tried to keep her bearings but that became impossible when claws came from the darkness to slash at her eyes and stab at her throat. Lumos cried out and she assumed he’d been injured.

  “Can you do anything about this cloud of ink or whatever the hell it is?” she asked, thinking again of his ability to use light itself as a weapon.

  “I can try.” With that, his entire body began to glow. It started with his eyes and nostrils and gradually glimmered from between his scales. Finally, the scales themselves gleamed until Lumos became a blinding light, a beacon in an artificial cloud of darkness and shadow.

  She could now see through the gloom. Within it, Obscura moved in human form, her hands still huge and
with the massive claws that belonged to her dragon form.

  Everything in her said that this should have been impossible. There was no way a dragon could control their transformation for the length of time that she seemed to be able to, but then she remembered her oath of revenge. In the cloud, she could practically taste her attacker’s rage. This was more than a vendetta and so much more than personal. This was everything to her. She would get revenge or she would die trying.

  That meant Kristen had to push herself that much harder.

  The black dragon attacked through the now luminescent mist. Able to see her because of Lumos’s illumination, the Steel Dragon struck at the human form with her tail.

  It whipped savagely and Obscura stumbled back, then cursed as her hiding place no longer provided the advantage.

  “You’re a traitor,” she screamed as she sucked the cloud of darkness into herself and resumed her dragon form. “You’re a traitor to us all, Lumos. The girl I can understand. She’s but a whelp and grew up among the filthy, hairy humans, but you’re a dragon even older than I am. Why side with these…these inferior beings.”

  “Because they’re people,” Lumos said. “They have as much a right to live on this planet as we do.”

  “Pish-posh,” she retorted as she circled. Lumos and Kristen tried to flank the larger dragon. Their only hope of penetrating her defensive perimeter was to draw her attention one way and attack from the other, but even that would be fraught with danger. Unlike a human or any other creature on the planet except the scorpion, Obscura’s rear was as well guarded as her front.

  The black dragon continued. Although she spoke to Lumos, her aura was focused on Kristen. “Humans kill other species all the time. Cockroaches, rats, chickens, and even noble lions and wolves. They treat this planet like it belongs to them and I don’t fault them for that. The other creatures are exactly that—creatures. Their intellect and abilities preclude them from a right to rule.”

  “Humans are different,” the golden dragon responded.

  “Indeed. I would argue that they are the second greatest force on this planet. But in nature, second doesn’t mean much.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can slaughter whoever you wish,” Kristen yelled.

  “Oh, but I’m not. My goal is only to slaughter you. To me, you’re the wolf that came to the village and killed a child or the tiger that attacks the men in the rice paddies. My opinions of what humans are and their place in the world doesn’t alter the fact that you must die for what you did to my son.”

  Obscura—unable to abide this standoff any longer—launched herself at Kristen. Lumos sprang into action, surged toward the black dragon’s side, and sank his teeth into her gut, but it was to no avail.

  Their adversary bulldozed into her and buried her teeth in Kristen’s chest, no doubt in an attempt to damage her heart. She responded in kind, closed her jaws on the back of her attacker's skull, and tried to use their strength to leverage a snapped bone and end the fight. If she could only crack the massive dragon’s spine, this whole thing could be over.

  Obscura was too strong and moved too much. It took all Kristen’s strength to simply hold on as the three of them tumbled wildly in the throes of battle. At some point, they rolled over a car and completely destroyed it. A nearby pond retention system and stand of trees were demolished in the whirlwind struggle. She hadn’t even noticed the woods when they arrived, and now they were gone, reduced to kindling and firewood, nothing more.

  All the while, she tried to maintain the pressure on the back of Obscura’s skull, and the black dragon continued her attempt to bite her way into her chest.

  It seemed both endless and fruitless until something very strange happened.

  Later, she would have trouble describing it. It wasn’t conscious, but it happened all the same.

  While her teeth locked into Obscura’s skull, the massive dragon tried to become insubstantial to break the grip. In an almost immediate response, Lumos did the same thing and together, a form of shadow and light began to flee from Kristen.

  With no idea what she was doing, she did the same thing. She transformed from her dragon to her human form but as she did so, she tried to follow the others.

  Somehow, it worked.

  Security cameras caught the next minute of the battle, otherwise she might not have believed it was possible. In one moment, the three dragons scuffled and struggled in a huge, bloody tangle and in the next, they became clouds of darkness, light, and silver. These transformed into people, biting and scratching as viciously as animals before they became clouds once more and from there to another tangle of dragon bodies. This pattern repeated constantly as they moved around the warehouse and demolished trees and everything in their path. Sometimes, they would become airborne before the battle continued in the now devastated parking lot. Again and again, the dragons tussled and fought and tried to maintain their hold on each other, an impossible task that the three of them somehow made possible, at least for a time anyway.

  Kristen thought she was getting the hang of it. They were about to land in human form and she was ready to kick the shit out of her adversary when Obscura shifted into her dragon body instead of her human one.

  “Enough,” she hissed and took to the air.

  “Don’t let her get to the warehouse,” Lumos bellowed as he too transformed into a solid dragon once more and followed.

  Kristen didn’t need to be reminded of this, of course. She wasted no time and as soon as she was airborne, she sent a blast of fire that cut off Obscura’s path to the warehouse with the humans still inside.

  The black dragon roared and pumped her wings to rise higher and higher. “I will have my vengeance on you. You are an abomination, a monster on this earth. You’ll ruin dragon kind.”

  “The only monsters are the beasts like you and your son!” she shouted in response.

  That earned another roar from Obscura and she tucked her wings to dive into the attack. Kristen made to dodge but her adversary was still too fast. She fell more rapidly than seemed possible and they collided in mid-air. The black dragon used her momentum to guide her toward the warehouse, released her at the last moment, and added a thrust that drove through the roof to scatter the maze walls beneath her bulk.

  She looked around wildly and located Brian and the human SWAT team nearby. They were inside some kind of control room or office space in the middle of the warehouse.

  “We’ll be okay,” Brian shouted. “This room is reinforced. I think she used it as her base.”

  Kristen smiled and returned to the skies.

  Her friends would be fine unless one of the dragons crashed directly into them. They would make it, and that was what mattered most.

  “Lumos, there’s a control room in there.” She pointed with her tail and Lumos nodded before he dodged another blow from Obscura. “As long as we don’t hit that, my friends will be fine.”

  “Then let’s end this,” he said and evaded another of their adversary’s oath-powered attacks.

  She roared in frustration and ascended again. The two dragons followed and tried to keep up with their larger foe but were unable to do so. She was too fast and too powerful, fueled by magic that neither of them could use.

  But maybe there was a way to take it from her.

  “You can’t hurt me,” Kristen screamed.

  “Oh, I most certainly can.” Obscura turned, opened her jaws, and spewed fire on her two pursuers.

  They both swept aside and managed to elude the blast. Dragons could withstand regular fires, but dragon’s breath was another thing entirely. It could easily melt steel and incinerate flesh. It might not kill a dragon instantly, but it would hurl them from the sky.

  Kristen retaliated with her own gout of flame, but the larger dragon dodged effortlessly.

  “I will melt the skin from your flesh, Kristen Steel. Then, I will gobble your friends who are still alive one by one.”

  “They’re all still alive, you big lizard.�
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  “All the better for me. I’d love to feel your aura when I crush one of their fragile mammalian bodies with your own steel spine.”

  “It won’t happen, Obscura. They found your little control room. You can’t use Lumos or me to destroy them. Face it, they’re safe.”

  The black dragon roared in frustration. Obviously, that was not what she’d intended.

  “And another thing. You have my name wrong. It’s not Kristen Steel, it’s Kristen Hall. I was raised a human and always will be.”

  “Then you’ll die a human’s death,” she said and lashed out with her claws as the two dragons flew past each other.

  Obscura managed to rake her claws across Kristen’s gut, but before she could sink them past the steel skin, Lumos clawed at her back and she let go.

  “That’s the problem with your plan, Obscura,” she yelled at her opponent as she flapped her wings to circle for another strike. “You seek to kill me, but I’m human. You can’t.”

  “What foolishness is this?” her adversary demanded as she barreled into her. This time, the two dragons managed to take hold of one another. They pushed and kicked at each other’s stomachs, but before either could do any damage, Lumos blasted Obscura with another beam of light and she fell back.

  Kristen followed her this time, rather than trying to turn to strike head to head. It was a risky plan because her opponent was both faster and more maneuverable, but she had begun to realize she couldn’t beat her physically, not with that oath powering her. She had to take that magic away and weaken her resolve.

  “You can’t kill me because humans don’t die as long as their loved ones live on. My brother will remember me. My friends will remember me. Your son might have died in darkness and his name will soon be forgotten, but that doesn’t happen to humans. You see, the only dragons anyone cares about are the ones who are still alive. Humans, on the other hand…well, most of our greatest heroes are dead.”

  “We shall test that!” Obscura roared and spun into another attack.

  Now, the two were in a kind of hummingbird’s battle. Each pumped their wings furiously to stay aloft while they struck out at each other with tail and claw. Lumos swooped into the fray again and again in an attempt to keep their foe off balance and thus make the combat somewhat more even.