The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  But still, even though opponent’s her size and experience gave her the advantage, Kristen could sense that something was slipping. Her strikes—while still fast and powerful—weren’t quite what they were a moment before. When she clawed at the black dragon, she flinched.

  “You see the truth of my words, don’t you?” Kristen yelled. “You haven’t hurt me like I did you. I’m not afraid of losing the ones I love, and if they lose me, they’ll know that I died with honor. You’ve broken your oath to your son. You won’t make me hurt even if you do get vengeance.”

  “I don’t need an oath to slay the likes of you,” Obscura said and latched onto her with her jaws once more.

  She bit in retaliation and for good measure, sliced one of her wings with the steel ax blade at the end of her tail.

  They fell together and plummeted toward the earth. Lumos grasped Kristen’s tail and towed them away from the warehouse but other than that, he didn’t interfere. He had no doubt made the same calculation that she did. If she landed on top, she would crush Obscura. On the other hand, if the heavier dragon landed on top, she might kill Kristen, but Lumos could finish her off.

  They tumbled wildly as they fell, Kristen on top one moment and Obscura the next while they blasted each other with fire in a battle that could be seen for miles.

  Her skin blistered from the heat and her wounds healed slower and slower as the attacks used up all there was of her healing power.

  In the next instant, too soon to even register, they impacted with the earth and she was on the bottom. Obscura’s bulk hammered her into the hard surface.

  Lumos had managed to get them onto earth instead of concrete so the impact didn’t kill her, but it came damn close.

  The breath was knocked from her—an experience new to her dragon body—and she had cracked ribs, of that she was certain. Her adversary didn’t do much better. She stumbled away and then, to Kristen’s shock, transformed into a human.

  She changed back into what she thought of as her true form—an opinion that no other dragon shared—and tried to stumble after her foe.

  A little dazed, she stopped when she realized that she didn’t need to. The fight was over and she really had won.

  Stonequest had arrived with Emerald and Heartsbane. The three of them plus Lumos all walked toward Obscura in their dragon forms.

  The shadow dragon, her fists still clenched, held her arms out in surrender.

  Heartsbane transformed into her human form and clapped manacles on her.

  Instantly, the power that emanated from the other dragon diminished. The manacles limited her and trapped her in this form.

  “You’ll come with us to face the Dragon Council,” Stonequest said. “You will defend yourself and your actions, and they will decide your fate. If you do not come willingly, we are authorized to use lethal force, but do not feel compelled to speak. Our task is only to take you to the Council, not hear your pleas.”

  To Kristen’s shock, Obscura turned to her. “You were right, you know,” she said, her words heavy.

  “About you being an ancient bitch?” she asked. She didn’t know if she’d said that yet but she’d certainly wanted to call her that.

  “About vengeance. Me killing you is not the same as you killing my son. I didn’t want to kill you, not until you’d suffered like I had. Maybe the oath sensed that and prevented me from finishing my quest.”

  “Maybe you’ve simply grown weak in your old age,” She smiled.

  “No, no, no. I lost track of my purpose. After all, you didn’t kill me, you took a loved one from me.”

  “I didn’t know you could feel love.”

  “Oh yes,” Obscura said. “And heartbreak. And I’m sure you can as well. In fact, I’m counting on it.”

  “You’re out of your fucking mind,” Kristen said. “Lumos and I were able to stop you from hurting my friends. Now, you’re cuffed and in case you hadn’t noticed, there are five of us. The fight’s over.”

  “You’re right. The fight is over, especially since your friends are all inside that nice little room in the middle of the warehouse. However, did they find it? I was sure I had hidden it so well.”

  Her stomach lurched when she felt Obscura’s aura. It was muffled by the cuffs but was still there. She hadn’t really noticed it, what with being pounded into the ground after their dramatic free-fall, but she felt it now.

  Obscura did not feel fear, resignation, or even defeat. She felt triumph.

  The black dragon smiled as she held her fists up.

  “What’s in her hand?” Emerald yelled, but it was too late.

  “I thought that office was nice and secure, that’s why I put most of the explosives there. I wouldn’t want them to go off accidentally.” She pressed the detonator and the warehouse exploded.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Kristen took her dragon form and raced toward the collapsing warehouse. She used every ounce of speed she had available in her dragon body and pushed her muscles as hard and as fast as they could go, but she still couldn’t outrace Obscura’s taunts.

  “They all die and you live, Kristen Steel.” The black dragon howled with laughter.

  She tried to ignore her and reached out to her friends. If she could only get a sense of their aura, she’d know where they were.

  “This is how it ends, you abomination—with your failure and a return to order. I may be punished, but in a century, dragon kind will look at me as a hero.”

  “My name is Hall!” she roared.

  Obscura bellowed in frustration and that was the last she heard from the shadow dragon. She was close enough to the warehouse that all she could hear were explosions.

  The center of the building was already a smoking hole. If her friends had stayed there…well, it was better not to think of that.

  The rest of the building, though, thundered with a seemingly endless series of detonations.

  Kristen pumped her wings and took flight. It was more of an extended jump, for as soon as she reached the top of her leap, she coasted down into the warehouse, through the flames, and into the wreckage.

  She found the room where Brian and her friends had been hiding. Frantic, she hurled cinderblocks aside like they were leaves and checked the wreckage for bodies, blood, or anything that might confirm their deaths. She found nothing and relief seeped in behind the panic. That meant her friends were either still alive or that they hadn’t died there, at least.

  Her mind racing, she looked around and tried to decide which way they could have gone. In that moment of hesitation, another bomb went off above her and brought down a large chunk of the roof. In her steel form, she took the brunt of the blow and shrugged it off. She wouldn’t die there, of that she was certain, but if she lost Brian and her friends, she might not really ever live again either.

  Another blast high up loosened another avalanche of debris. Kristen pulled back but not quite quickly enough and part of the rubble landed on her tail. The pain was excruciating. Despite having steel skin, her body was still very much filled with flesh and bone and having a roof fall on it hurt.

  But it hadn’t killed her.

  Not like it would the people she cared for.

  She forgot her pain when she saw what was maybe a clue—a line of buttons. Half were turned off and the others still on. Hope flared and she immediately raced down the hall.

  Before she made it even ten feet, her dragon body’s shoulders pushed up against the thin walls that had been used to construct the maze. This didn’t slow her down, of course. She could move cinder blocks so cubicle partitions or whatever these flimsy walls were made of presented no physical barrier. The only issue was the smoke that seeped from the floor.

  Kristen pumped her wings to disperse the noxious gas into the air before she realized that she shouldn’t actually do that. Not with her friends ahead of her. Instead, she transformed into her human body and sprinted on down the passage.

  Despite still being made of steel, being in her hu
man form made the crumbling maze much more terrifying. Whereas before, as a dragon, she could see above the maze, as a human she was back inside the tunnels. If not for the gas primed to release if the walls were broken, she could have simply demolished the maze and saved her brother in an instant. But Obscura’s planning once again made her dragon abilities more dangerous to her human allies than they were useful. Frustrated, she ran through the tunnels and followed the lights. She occasionally had to duck or even fall prone to avoid something that fell from the warehouse roof far above her and through the thin ceiling Obscura had installed to house her speakers.

  Her search continued past broken drones, walls that had been moved, and the gas already expended. She increased her pace and pushed herself to the limit until finally, when she thought that all hope was lost, she located her friends.

  Brian had fallen and was weeping. “I can’t, I can’t. I’m too tired.”

  “You have to, for fuck’s sake,” retorted Hernandez, ever the motivational speaker.

  “What’s the point?” he shrieked. “Every door we come to is locked and rigged to blow. We might as well lie here and wait for the ceiling to come down and crush us.”

  “I don’t think your sister would like that,” Drew said. He’d noticed Kristen and his grin showed brightly from a face covered in soot from the explosions.

  “I only hope my sister’s okay! I hope she flies off safely and beats that fucking sexy dragon and lives a thousand years and never has to worry about my fat ass again.”

  “Sorry, Brian, you’re stuck with me,” she said and closed the distance to her team. Everyone cheered except Brian, who merely smiled the largest smile she had ever seen him wear. He pushed himself to his feet and threw a giant hug around her.

  That was when the roof finally collapsed.

  She heard it before she saw it. A great rending of metal flooded the maze with light. Kristen knew she had only moments to act. Escape wasn’t an option. Survival might not be an option, for that matter, but she would fight like it was.

  Kristen transformed, pummeled by the debris even as she did so, and resumed her dragon form. She spread her wings, turned them to steel, and like a mother bird, pulled the humans beneath her chest.

  There was only a split second before the building collapsed and pinned her beneath a mountain of brick, lumber, metal, and shingles. The avalanche continued to trap her wings and her tail and pummel her relentlessly until finally, a brick struck her on the temple and she was knocked unconscious.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The first thing Kristen could sense when she came to was the light. It had been dark—so lovely and cozy and dark. Beneath her were other warm things—her friends, part of her knew, and they had clung to her like tiny birds afraid to leave the nest. They’d been afraid. She had felt that even in her dreams, but they also hadn’t been able to go anywhere and nothing had been able to reach them. It had been comforting, like hiding beneath the sheets in her parents' room.

  And now there was light. It was demanding and told her to open her eyes, to make sense of it, and to leave the comfort of the nest. She sighed—a shockingly painful thing to do—and tried to move her head. Her neck—far longer than it should have been—felt like it been beaten with a hammer in a dozen places. How a neck could even have a dozen places was beyond her current powers of comprehension. All she knew was that it hurt and she couldn’t move it.

  She settled for opening her eyes.

  A dragon stood in front of her. He had wise eyes, radiantly golden scales, and a long mustache that flitted with the breeze. She thought briefly that she had woken from a dream into another dream, but when the dragon spoke, a flood of memories came back to her.

  “I found the Steel Dragon!”

  That was right. She was the Steel Dragon. But she was supposed to be strong, tough, and almost invulnerable. Right now, she felt like every muscle in her body had been ground into a pulpy mess. The Steel Dragon wasn’t supposed to suffer concussions. She wondered vaguely why she hadn’t thought to turn completely to steel.

  “Hold still, Kristen. We’ll get you out of there,” Lumos said and began using his massive claws to shift debris with surprisingly delicate movements.

  She smiled at that. Holding still was an order she could currently obey.

  Two more dragons approached—Stonequest and Emerald, she remembered when the haze of unconsciousness faded—and started pulling rocks and rubble from her back.

  “I can’t believe that crazy dragon loaded the roof with boulders,” Emerald said to their leader.

  Kristen shook her head and grimaced at a jolt of pain in her neck. “We saw no rubble.”

  “I know we didn’t,” Lumos said. “There was a false roof. I think her plan the entire time was to get you to fight her, then kill the humans inside. If I hadn’t had been there to help…”

  “Are you saying I owe you a drink?” she mumbled.

  “I think you owe Lumos a bottle—and top-shelf too,” Emerald said and lifted a massive beam from one of her wings.

  Once the weight moved, a fresh wave of agony surged into her wing. But there was also reason to feel hope as well. From beneath it, she heard sounds. For a moment, she pictured a bird on its nest except there weren’t hatchlings under there.

  “You folks stay where you are,” Stonequest yelled through the membrane of her wing.

  “Yeah, no shit,” Hernandez bellowed in response. “Where the fuck does this asshole think we’re gonna go?”

  “I heard that,” he said with a chuckle.

  The dragons removed a few more pieces of debris from her wing. Strangely, no longer being pinned in place made the pain worse. The pressure of hundreds of pounds of jagged stones had been a familiar thing. Now, the crisp breeze over fresh wounds stung like acid.

  “Hold still, Steel. Don’t shift yet,” Emerald said.

  Kristen grimaced and fought the urge to transform into her human form. She didn’t have wings as a human so they wouldn’t hurt—or, at least, that was what her still recovering brain had latched onto.

  “We almost have you clear. Then, you can shift to human and we’ll get your friends out. If you do it now, a boulder might crush them,” Lumos explained.

  She understood that because she was currently being crushed. It didn’t feel great.

  Finally, after what was surely only a few minutes but to her felt much longer, the rubble was cleared and Stonequest told her to transform into her human body.

  It actually took effort and she had to summon the last reserves of strength she had to transform her body into silvery shards of confetti that vanished into nowhere and left her bruised and battered in the middle of her friends.

  They were all there—Drew, Jim, Hernandez, Keith, and Butters. All bruised, some bloody, but all fine. All except—

  “Where’s Brian?” she demanded and tried to push herself up.

  “Right here,” he groaned from beneath her. “You basically sat on me, so I guess you owe me.”

  Drew and Keith helped to pull her to her feet and off her brother. He stood slowly, filthy with dust that had clung to his sweat. Dried, crusty blood around his nostrils seemed to indicate that he’d faced the shock-rod wielding ghosts at least once inside the maze.

  “Brian, you’re all right!” She lurched forward and threw her arms around him, stink and sweat be damned. It felt good to have him safe.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m a little hungry, but fine,” he said.

  “I hear that,” Butters agreed.

  Kristen chuckled at the two of them joking about food despite the fact that they’d been only the thickness of a dragon’s wing from certain death. Laughing made her ribs hurt, however. “You guys decide about dinner. I have to talk to the lizards.”

  She stumbled out of the wreckage with Brian and the other humans at her back. Once clear of the devastation, she tried to stand at attention before Stonequest but it wasn’t easy. Her ribs hurt like no one’s business, one of her eyes was swollen
shut, and her left arm hung limply at her side, obviously broken.

  Stonequest, Emerald, and Lumos all smiled with genuine pride, now in human form like her.

  “Where’s Heartsbane? Is she pissed off that I went to save the humans or something?” she asked in what couldn’t have been more than a loud mumble.

  “She’s taken Obscura back to Headquarters and will take special care to make the ride as bumpy as possible,” Stonequest said.

  “I thought for sure she’d be pissed that I took the wrong side.”

  Emerald laughed. “Typical, isn’t it? Heartsbane finally says someone’s growing on her, but only after she’s done pissed them off too much for them to care.”

  Stonequest and Lumos smiled at that. She didn’t really follow the reversal but was pleased to know that Heartsbane apparently hated her less.

  “What will happen with Obscura?” she asked. She had to know. If she would be released within twenty-four hours, she had no idea what she would do. She wouldn’t fight her, not immediately and definitely not with her body feeling like someone ran it through a meat grinder. It would need at least forty-eight hours.

  “You don’t need to worry about that right now. Lumos is writing up a report on what she built here. She really crossed a line—using human technology, kidnapping people, and doing it all to lure you here for an unsanctioned duel. This simply isn’t how things are done. We’ll have her locked up at least until the Dragon Council goes through the report of what happened here.”

  “So, what does that mean—a week?” Kristen asked. She tried not to sound bitter but failed miserably.

  Stonequest shrugged. “I think this case will change how the Dragon Council and dragon society at large view human culture. Many of us see your kind as transient, powerless beings.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Hernandez interjected.