Again, he shrugged. “It’s not an opinion I share, but there it is. What Obscura almost accomplished here, primarily using human technology, will convince many that human advancement has risen to a level that must be reckoned with.”
“It probably scares you shitless, huh?” Jim said.
Stonequest chuckled, obviously not intimidated. “I’ve argued for dragons to pay more attention to people since the automobile was invented. Some of us have, but I think nothing besides nuclear weapons and television has really impacted the dragon sphere. I hope this changes dragon opinion on that. One way or the other, though, Obscura broke all kinds of rules. I’ll do everything I can to make sure she has the book thrown at her.”
Kristen nodded. It would have to do.
“So, uh…not to interrupt or anything, but she is my sister,” Brian said, stepped up beside her, and threw an arm around her shoulder. It felt wonderful to be hugged by her brother and also absolutely terrible to have a reminder that her ribs were bruised or broken.
“Do you mind if we take her away from here?” he asked.
“Just one more thing—Emerald?” Stonequest said.
Emerald stepped forward. “You know you’ll be healed in a few weeks, right?”
She nodded. “Yeah. If there’s a way to speed that up, it would be great.”
“There isn’t. You merely need food and sleep.”
“Like I was saying,” Brian said smugly.
“First, we have to do something about that arm, though,” Emerald said.
Kristen grimaced. She’d hoped that transforming between her two forms would have healed the broken bone but that obviously wasn’t the case. Although she’d broken the bone in dragon form, it was still snapped in this body.
“Your body will prioritize fixing that bone first,” he explained. “It’s a structural issue and limits your effectiveness as a predator. Your subconscious dragon healing knows this—at least that’s what our mages think—and will start there, but we have to make sure it heals cleanly.”
Reluctantly, she nodded. She had been afraid of this.
“Are you ready?”
She nodded again and gritted her teeth.
In a blink of dragon speed, he grasped her arm, yanked it from the wrist and elbow, and straightened the bone.
Kristen screamed in pain. Her aura poured from her and swamped her human friends with enough force to make them all scream in pain as well.
In the next moment, he placed a splint next to it and wound it in a soft cast. “I’m sorry.” Kristen didn’t think the asshole sounded sorry enough but that was no doubt the pain talking directly to her brain. “It should be fine now. Don’t fuck with it until tomorrow. By then, the bone should be solid enough. It’ll take time, though, and while that’s working, uh…”
“What the handsome man with dreadlocks is trying to say is that your face is as bruised as fuck and you look like a creature from the supermarket tabloids,” Hernandez said and grinned.
“Hey! What the fuck?” Keith cut in.
Kristen smiled at the Rookie who had no doubt come to her defense.
“I thought you thought I was handsome,” he finished, affronted and insulted.
Hernandez rubbed her eyes and shook her head. “Straight boys. So simple and so shortsighted.”
“Anyway,” Brian said and sounded a little desperate. “The thing is, I’ve played Pac-Man for hours and hours.”
“Yeah, so? It sounds kind of cool to me,” Jim said. “Except for the thugs trying to shock you into cardiac arrest.”
“Right, yeah, so obviously, you’re not a gamer,” Brian responded.
“Guilty as charged, but what’s your point? Your sister makes you sound like the video game king. Those ghosts would never have caught you.”
“Yeah, but Pac-Man had power pellets, dots, and fruit to eat. Did you notice what wasn’t in there? Food. I’m starving!”
“Pizza?” Kristen asked.
“Pizza!” everyone replied.
“All right, awesome.” Her brother looked relieved. “I don’t seem to have my wallet, what with being kidnapped and all, or I’d call a rideshare. Kristen, do you mind being the pony?”
She laughed. As a kid, she’d ridden Brian as a pony too many times to count but even this fond memory couldn’t push away the pain she felt in her ribs. “I don’t think I can transform, Brian. I think we’ll have to wait for a ride.”
Stonequest glanced at Lumos and Emerald. They both sighed.
“Just…get in your SWAT van and we’ll, uh…I’ll give you a ride,” Stonequest said, although he didn’t sound too enthusiastic.
Lumos transformed into his dragon form and twitched his mustache. “But if it gets out that dragons give rides to cars…well, we’ll eat you instead of whatever games Obscura had planned for you.”
The parking lot attendant at Buddy’s Pizza gasped audibly when three dragonsone of which carried a SWAT van, landed inside the fenced-off area surrounding the parking lot.
Kristen stepped from the back of the van, still too exhausted to transform into her dragon form, and asked him for a table.
Apparently, dealing with bruised people with an eye swollen shut and a nose that continued to bleed intermittently was way more up to speed for the man. When she asked him for a table for—she had to count—eleven, he led her to a large one in the back without so much as blinking.
They all settled in. Keith ordered six pitchers of beer, only because when he first tried to order one for everyone at the table, the waitress looked uncomfortable and didn’t take the order fast enough. Brian was as prepared when it came to pizza. He ordered cheese sticks, two salads, and five pizzas in the amount of time it took the rest of the people and dragons there to even pick up a menu.
“Is that all for you?” Kristen joked.
He laughed and shook his head. “Naw, that should cover at least you and me, right?”
She smiled. It felt good to have her brother back.
For a few minutes, the conversation was awkward as it often was between the exhausted and the famished. When the food and cheese sticks showed up, however, everyone relaxed and fell into their side conversations.
Hernandez dissected the explosives while Keith and Lumos listened indulgently. Butters complained that he’d never had to get into a sniper shooting contest with Obscura. Beanpole replied that it was good because Butters didn’t know how to draw emojis anyway. Drew and Stonequest argued about proper infiltration technique but kept coming up against logistical differences based on their species. She honestly expected them to start arm-wrestling. The chest-beating couldn’t have been any more apparent.
Emerald and Jim also seemed to be engaged in some kind of testosterone-fueled beer drinking contest. She grinned at that. Both had serious chips on their shoulders about being born into a place in society that was obviously less privileged than others. They boasted about who was better until Emerald revealed that he could burn off any alcohol he drank, thus making drinking contests obsolete. This caused the Wonderkid to declare himself the winner, which prompted Emerald to swear off his sobering ability for the evening to show Jim that he knew how to drink better than a human. So far, that didn’t seem to be the case as the green dragon’s human form was already swaying, but maybe Jim’s drunkenness would catch up.
Kristen, though, couldn’t take her eyes off her brother.
“Are you all right, Brian?”
He nodded and put a slice of pizza down—only his third—and smiled at his sister.
“Yeah, I’m doing all right. You know, when you came to Mom and Dad’s last time, I didn’t mean to be so shitty to you. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Its cool, Brian. I think it was Obscura’s aura.”
Brian nodded, obviously relieved to be absolved of the guilt, but there was still a tightness to his expression, something that made it obvious he wasn’t comfortable.
“Yeah…I guessed that. Obscura was…well, let’s say I’ve neve
r been attracted to a ten-thousand-year-old before.”
“Wait, what?” She wanted to laugh but he still looked so nervous that she held it in.
"You’ve told me about auras, though. You said they can influence people’s emotions but that they can’t make you do something totally against what you believe. Like it would be really hard to make a vegan eat a steak or a Christian light a bag of dog poop on fire and put it at the front door of a church.”
“Yeah…that’s true.”
“Well, I guess all this made me realize that I do have issues with you being a dragon.”
“Brian, it’s fine, really.”
“No, it’s not. Listen to me for a second, okay?” he demanded and sounded angry once more. “I thought I would die in there. You know that, right? Every time those fucking ghosts came around a corner, every time a drone swooped toward me, and every time my fat ass fell while I tried to run away from them, I thought it was the end.”
“I wouldn’t let someone take you from me,” Kristen stated. She knew it to be truth. Brian was her brother.
“That’s what makes me feel so shitty, though, Krissy. You’ve always protected me, stood up for me, and saved me, and this was how I repaid you? I’m so sorry…like so, so, sorry, Kristen.”
“It’s fine, Brian. I’m only glad you’re all right.”
“Do you know what I thought about when I was running, though? I thought that I would never see my sister again and that your last memory of me would be of me yelling at you and being a shitty asshole. That was a scarier thought than dying, you know? I love you, Kristen. I know we say that on the phone or whatever, but I want you to know that if anything ever does happen to me, I love you so much. I don’t care if you’re the Steel Dragon or anything else. You’re my sister, and I’ll always whoop you in video games, and well…it was fucking terrifying to almost lose that.”
“I love you too, Brian,” she said and threw an arm around his shoulder.
They hugged and he tried to wipe his eyes. The cops all around them—more familiar than most people with the emotions that followed a violent situation—pretended not to notice. They maintained their conversations and arguments, although perhaps in slightly quieter tones. They might have been professionals, but gossip was gossip.
“And that’s another thing,” Brian said when he finally pulled away from her. “I don’t know how long I was in there. It couldn’t have been more than six hours, though, because she took me in the morning and you saved me by the afternoon.”
That was a wild thought to Kristen, that all this had transpired—the glitter bomb at Hernandez’s apartment, the sniper taking shots at Butters to send a message, the bouquet of flowers—in less than twenty-four hours. “It’s been a long day,” she agreed.
“Yeah, for fucking sure, but I should have been able to last longer. When you rescued me, I thought I was dead. I could hardly run anymore.”
“It makes sense. You didn’t have food.”
He grabbed his gut. “I had plenty of calories. What I didn’t have was any training at all. I don’t remember when the last time was that I walked around the block, let alone ran to the park. That’s…that has to change. Especially with the Steel Dragon as my sister.”
“You don’t have to change because of me,” she said.
“No, I really do. All your other friends are crazy cops who play airsoft for fun. All of you are fit and strong and have, like, plus four to constitution. Still, with all that shit, they barely survived that maze. If y’all hadn’t have come for me, I would’ve died.”
“That’s true, I guess,” she agreed. “But you did keep up with them, despite all of them doing all their training and you never doing anything. That’s impressive, really.”
“That’s only desperation,” Brian said but he smiled. He hadn’t thought that the fact that he had managed to make it that long was kind of impressive.
“I think it’s more than that, Brian. But if you want to start training, I know the right folks.”
He looked around the group of fit cops who laughed and arm-wrestled and boasted to each other. “Yeah… I think I might start with the gym,” he said.
“Well, whatever you want to do, I want to be there. I’ve been gone too much too, and it totally bugs me. I joined SWAT to keep people safe and Dragon SWAT because I thought I could make a difference, and now, I think maybe I finally am. All this would have been impossible before, and because of the crazy shit you went through, we’re all able to share this moment,” she said.
“Hear, hear!” Keith raised a glass. “To the crazy fucking shit we all go through for each other!”
Everyone grabbed their glass and raised them in the air, clinking and spilling beer absolutely everywhere.
“Wait, you guys listened to that whole conversation?” Brian demanded and looked terrified.
Drew raised an eyebrow at him. “Cop powers. We pretend to be indifferent while we eavesdrop. Speaking of which, I have some great techniques to try if you want to start working on your arms and shoulders. You have the frame for it.”
“That’s all bullshit,” Hernandez said. “The shit that matters is cardio. We start with a five-mile run. You think you can’t do it, but you can. We suffer through and then you know—like you fucking know—you can run five miles, so training is possible.”
“Oh, God, what have I done?” He gasped and looked around the ring of smiling, fit people.
“Welcome to airsoft, Brian,” Kristen said. “Your experience with first-person shooters will help…a little.”
He swallowed hard but didn’t reach for his pizza. “I guess I need to stop drinking if I don’t want to be hungover for airsoft?”
Everyone cheered at that, although the rest of them downed their beers. It was a great night, made all the sweeter because she knew the monster who had precipitated the crazy shit was behind bars imbued with enough magic to keep them all safe, for a while anyway.
Chapter Fifty-Three
“Is there anything else we can do for you, my lady?” the insolent little mage asked with a false tone of politeness.
“Yes, you can remove these manacles and let me stretch in this filthy hole,” Obscura replied.
“I can’t do that ma’am. Strict orders. And sorry about the accommodations. This is the nicest we have. Dinner will be served at seven. Please place your order by six or our chef will choose for you.”
“There are things I can do for you, even in these cuffs,” Obscura said and turned her aura into a thing of seduction.
“No thank you, ma’am,” the mage said, left the room, locked the door, and recast the impermeable spell that would keep her inside. Her attempt should have worked, except the mage had tattoos of protection all over his head. She couldn’t penetrate those, not with the manacles stifling her and not with the other dragons waiting outside. Heartsbane especially was a beast when it came to auras. She was less controlled than the shadow dragon but perhaps even more powerful. And so insolent.
She came to the window, her platinum-blonde hair still in its natural state. Her aura was the shining silver that came with age, even to the human forms of dragons. “I want you to know that I’m missing pizza and beer for this shit,” Heartsbane stated coldly through the window of the cell.
“I’m so sorry, dear,” the prisoner said sweetly.
“Oh, there’s no need to apologize. I love locking away old assholes like yourself. It makes me feel young.”
Obscura snarled and stood from the plush bed. “Come in here and say that.”
“How stupid do you think I am?”
The black dragon merely smiled. “Then be gone with you, whelp. Let me rest.”
“You got it. I know how tiring failure can be. Rest up. You have a long trial ahead of you. If everything goes your way, this’ll be the last bed you sleep in with blankets.” Heartsbane left with a definite air of smugness about her.
The black dragon scowled because she recognized the truth in that. The room she was c
urrently in wasn’t befitting of one of her stature, but it was still adequate. The bed was plush and there was a desk with an electric light and paper and a quill if she wished to work. Tasteful art hung on the walls. It was a holding room, not a cell, normally used for dragons who broke the peace rather than those who swore vengeance oaths.
Thinking of the oath forced her to lay down again.
Even with the oath in her blood, she hadn’t been strong enough to beat Kristen. Well, that wasn’t true. She was sure she could have beaten her if not for Lumos. This whole debacle merely proved how unjust Dragon SWAT was. They could have had a fair fight, Steel Dragon versus dragon of shadow, but Dragon SWAT had to stick their snouts in her business. When she was free, she’d make them all pay.
But first, you must make Kristen suffer.
Obscura nodded and let the pain wash over her. What the oath did to her was debilitatingly painful but ultimately cleansing. When she’d failed to kill Kristen’s friends in front of her, the oath had sapped her strength. It knew as well as she did that to truly make the Steel Dragon pay the price for taking Shadowstorm’s flesh, she had to be stripped of those she loved. When she had thought that she had failed, it believed it too and stopped empowering her.
But she no longer believed it.
Oaths of vengeance were ancient things. They used the magic of a dead dragon to work and historically, when they failed, killed the dragon who’d sworn them. To take the oath, one had to totally commit to vengeance. Failure, then, meant that one’s entire mental resolve was challenged and confronted with its own shortcomings.
For most dragons, this was debilitating. The oath, once denied its purpose, no longer empowered. It took back all the strength it had given and more. This left dragons weak and listless. Those who survived that original vacuum of power rarely lasted more than a week. If Dragon SWAT knew anything about the magic in her blood—and they surely did, considering the smartass little mages they employed—they’d try to keep her in this cell as long as possible and let her suffer the consequences of her own failure.
Except that wouldn’t work with Obscura. As soon as the rest of Dragon SWAT had arrived, she reformed her plan in her brain. She had thought that the Steel Dragon’s friends were the humans and that she tried to keep up with the dragons and failed. But no, no, no, that wasn’t the case.
The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2) Page 38
