The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “All right, everyone, take a few steps back so we can get a good shot,” she said.

  Everyone obeyed and only one clever observer noticed that Jim hadn’t given anyone his phone to take a picture. “Hey, buddy, who’s gonna take your picture?”

  The Wonderkid didn’t have time to answer. Kristen pumped her wings and the crowd stumbled away from the gust of wind. In seconds, she was airborne, flying through the streets of Detroit with a human rider on her back.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Normally, Kristen could simply flap her massive wings, aim her body vertical, and ascend into the sky. Now, with Jim on her back and in real danger of falling off, she had to take a little more care and slightly longer to ascend.

  That was fine, though, as it would give her more time to use the Detroit buildings as cover, but he was less enthusiastic about it.

  “Can’t we fly straight?” he whined, clinging to her back.

  “You mean into one of those buildings?”

  “No, no, no, no, no, no!” he screamed as Kristen banked hard and followed the direction in which she’d seen Constance’s car go.

  She finally saw it enter a highway that led away from downtown.

  “I’m gonna have to get up to the clouds, all right? We can’t let her see us.”

  “Why does it make me nervous that you bothered to warn me?” Jim called in response.

  “Because you’re smarter than you look.” She laughed, tucked her wings, and plunged without further warning.

  Wind whistled past them as she descended until her belly almost grazed the tops of the busses before she extended her wings once more and used her momentum to rocket them up.

  Jim screamed for dear life but hung on tightly.

  That was good. She knew she could catch him if he fell—she’d come a long way since dropping duffel bags—but that maneuver would cost her time and probably result in Coney Island splattered all over her spines.

  “Are you telling me you do this every day?” he hollered over the wind.

  “It’s faster than the morning commute and better for waking up than a cup of coffee.”

  “I’d take the coffee, thanks!” He squeaked as she punched into the clouds and leveled out.

  For a few moments, she merely flew northwest and followed where she thought the highway was. Then, she ducked down below the bottom of the clouds to get a visual confirmation on Constance’s car. Thankfully, it was still there. She adjusted her speed so she was at roughly a forty-five-degree angle up from the roof of the vehicle. That way, it was impossible for the assassin to see her in the rearview mirror. Luckily, she didn’t have a convertible, but then again, in this weather, it’d be miserable.

  Which reminded her of her passenger. “Are you all right up there?”

  “I won’t lie, I’m a little chilly!” the Wonderkid replied. She could feel him shivering through her scales.

  “I can warm you.” She blew a small jet of flame.

  That finally calmed him enough that he could actually laugh. “I’m gonna have to pass on that one. Although, when this is all over, I think you definitely owe me something to warm me up. Something like a stiff drink.”

  “I’ll stay in the clouds as much as I can, okay? I know it’ll be cold but I don’t want her to see us.”

  “It’s cool. The adrenaline that makes my heart pound like a jackhammer is helping.”

  “Okay,” she confirmed and felt slightly bad but had no idea what else to do about it. If it were winter, this wouldn’t work at all. Hell, in summer, there’d be far fewer clouds. But springtime in Michigan meant overcast days, so it was a boon.

  “Do you think this is another hit?” Jim asked after a few minutes.

  “I don’t know,” Kristen replied. She didn’t actually have to speak very loudly for Jim to hear her. Perhaps he could feel her voice vibrating through her scales or something. “It feels like it, though. We’re past the wealthier suburbs and are moving into estate territory. Many dragons live around here.”

  “Oh yeah? friends of yours?”

  “I can tell by the landscaping and weird statues, you dork. Now, be quiet or I’ll eat you.”

  “Be careful what you wish for. I might take you up on that. It sounds warm.”

  “Nah, you’d probably give me indigestion.”

  After about fifteen minutes, Constance exited the highway, made a few turns down increasingly private streets, and parked her car. She slid out and moved furtively into the woods.

  Kristen waited until she could no longer see her outline among the trees. “Hold on.”

  “Why?” Jim asked, but he did as he was told. He tightened his grasp on her spines and held her with his thighs like she was an uppity horse.

  Satisfied that he was secure, she tucked her wings and plummeted toward the earth. He didn’t scream—she would forever let him brag about that—but she thought she might have heard a prayer mumbled into the howling wind.

  After a breathtaking moment, the descent was over. She landed beside the car, Jim climbed off her back and hugged the ground, and she transformed into a human.

  While Jim went to examine the vehicle, Kristen called Dragon SWAT.

  Stonequest picked almost immediately. “Go, Steel.”

  “Stonequest. Another attack is going down right now, I think. I saw that woman—Constance, the assassin—and followed her to a dragon estate.”

  “Damn it. I was afraid of something like this.” Now that she had heard more than two words from him, she could hear the strain in his voice.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We just found Lumos. He’s been badly beaten and is unconscious.”

  “Oh, my God. Will he be okay?”

  “I…yes. Yes, he’ll be fine if we get him back to base but he can’t turn into a human right now. We can’t spare anyone to send, Kristen. We’re trying to stabilize him, and I already sent Emerald and Heartsbane to try to catch Obscura. He was on duty watching her.”

  “You lost her, then?”

  His silence was as definitive an answer as she needed.

  “Shit,” she said. “Shit! All right, Stone, I’ll be there soon. If Obscura decided to attack Lumos, it means she wanted to dump her tail. My friends might be in danger.”

  “Hold up, Kristen.” Washington put a hand on her shoulder. “Detroit SWAT can handle themselves. You know that.”

  “My family—”

  “Is safe. I already texted Drew and told him to bring them into protective custody as soon as I felt your aura shift when you were talking to Stonequest on the phone.”

  “Still. If Obscura targets them, there’s nothing they can do.”

  “That won’t happen. If she moves openly against a police department, she’ll be back in jail. Right now, there’s a murder we have to stop.”

  “Are you serious?” Kristen stared at him in complete disbelief. Her family and his friends were in danger, and he wanted to protect a dragon? “You can’t seriously want to protect a dragon over humans.”

  “If there’s anything I’ve learned from hanging out with you it’s that not all dragons are bad. They’re like humans, with good ones and bad.”

  “But we know she’ll attack good people.”

  “We don’t know that. In fact, we don’t know where Obscura is. Stonequest has people trying to find her so there’s no reason to think that you rushing off at random will be more effective than two dragons trained at this. Plus, the conspiracy you’ve tried to unravel is about to get even more complicated. We can’t simply walk away.”

  “Still, it’s a dragon versus people. You know, they think of us as cattle.”

  “Some of them do, but some of them don’t. Hell, I happen to know one dragon who even lumps herself in with humans.”

  Kristen snorted. This was unbelievable. Jim Washington tried to convince her to save a dragon’s life. “Well, shit. I guess you’ve got me to eat my words twice in one day.”

  “Twice?”

  “
American Coney was damn good.”

  “So we’ll go in, then?” Jim asked.

  “Let’s go stop this probably ancient and unspeakably powerful dragon from being killed by a woman with a ski mask and a handgun.”

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Freedom was a sweet, sweet thing. The moment Obscura was released from dragon prison, she found the air sweeter and the grass greener, and even the smell of the dirt was something that she appreciated for once. She stepped from the prison and into the sun in the great outdoors. Perhaps the only thing sweeter than having the cuff removed from her ankle and once again having her dragon powers was knowing that the dragon who’d had her locked up in the first place was currently being beaten senseless.

  She hadn’t told her allies to kill Kristen, but she hadn’t told them to spare her life either. It had been quite a surprise that she’d been able to get the guard to abandon his position. She wasn’t so naïve as to think that her benefactor hadn’t played a role in that as well. Now, she could only imagine how the six dragons tasked with beating her enemy would have felt. As far as she knew from her time in prison, it was impossible to escape supervision. They might have really embraced the task she had given them in their moment of independence.

  Ah, but that was behind her. She was free and the Steel Bitch was still incarcerated. If she was honest, she didn’t think she would be locked up for much longer, which meant she would have her revenge and fulfill her oath.

  The oath she had sworn on the blood of her dead son once again coursed through her veins. She merely had to bide her time, wait for the Steel Dragon’s release, and strike. Her oath would be fulfilled and in executing it, she would drink of its power and it would be good.

  Obscura looked around the parking lot of the prison for her mysterious benefactor but saw no one. There were no idling cars or limousines waiting to take her away. That irked her somewhat. After all, she was one of the world’s most powerful dragons and deserved more than a brisk walk after being released from a punishment for bogus charges that a few centuries before would have amounted to playing with her food.

  Honestly, it was too much to accept that she had gone to prison at all. She hadn’t even killed anyone. The fat one—the Steel Dragon’s fake brother—had been forced to sweat a little and she’d intended to kill all of them, but none of those plans had come to fruition. How could she be charged with crimes she hadn’t committed? The entire situation reeked of human justice. Dragons—despite ostensibly still being ruled by the Dragon Council—had changed in ways that she didn’t like at all. They weren’t obeying humans, exactly, but it seemed they were listening. Their courts were shifting along with their sense of justice. It was as if being crammed onto this planet with so many of the filthy primates was enough to weaken the dragons. Her instinctive desire was to burn this entire continent like they’d been able to do in the old days.

  She took a deep breath and realized that she couldn’t really complain. The bitch who’d got her locked in that hole was being pulverized while she was free. Although truthfully, the prison hadn’t been that bad. Obscura—always one to network—had made friends there.

  Still, no one had come to get her, which was a disappointment. It would have been pleasant to ride away—perhaps while sipping champagne wrested from a dead king—but alas, she was old enough to know one didn’t always have their way.

  All those thoughts would vanish, she knew, the moment she transformed.

  To be denied her true form had truly been the worst part of the prison. As a human, she was a beautiful albeit slightly older woman. She could convince humans she was still in her thirties with her aura, but thousands of years had a way of aging a human body, even if it was merely a glove that a dragon wore.

  Dragons, on the other hand, aged magnificently.

  Obscura walked from the parking lot in her human form until she reached the edge of a forest. Once in the shadows, she released her power.

  First, dark clouds roiled from her body—she was partial to making the effect look as if it sprayed from her mouth, eyes, and fingertips as humans seemed to find that particularly terrifying—and enveloped her in shadow. She was one of the few dragons who could actually move in this transitive state but today, she didn’t want to. Instead, she let her dragon body rebuild after its time in prison.

  Her arms and legs elongated and ceased to conform to the simple single elbow of the human body. She grew claws as sharp as black crystal. Leathery wings extended from her back and a crown of horns grew from her skull. Her tail—hidden no longer—lengthened and sprouted a mass of spikes at its tip. While the changes followed in the instinctual shift that was so much a part of her, her body continued to grow.

  Even to her, after all these years, it almost boggled the mind that she could be so large in her true form and still so dainty as a human. As a woman, she was slightly below average for human females and a good deal shorter than most males but as a dragon, she was a true behemoth. She was larger than an elephant and easily as big as some of the beasts humans called dinosaurs.

  They used it as an insult when referring to dragons, but she didn’t see it as a problem. After all, dragons had been around—thinking, planning, and developing their culture—when humans were still huddled together in caves. They would still be there once the Dragon Council finally saw that humans had to be eradicated. Dinosaurs might not have survived an asteroid strike, but humans would not survive dragons.

  Obscura completed her transformation. She stretched her wings and her long sinuous neck and flicked her tail. The trunk of a pine tree exploded into splinters and it toppled, but before it could fall completely, she incinerated it.

  Ah! It felt so good to be back.

  She took to the air and soared higher and higher in the black, acrid smoke that poured from the tree she’d destroyed.

  For hours, she did little beyond ravage the countryside, although she wasn’t so foolish as to attack humans themselves. She had been arrested for that particular crime, after all, and humans—with their pesky technology—had a way of snitching that they simply hadn’t possessed in the past. She had embraced technology in a way most dragons hadn’t, but that mostly meant that she was wary of it. Humans had used their tools to pull themselves out of their own filth and mud. She thought it was a dirty trick, like beavers building a dam while destroying a forest.

  Still, she fed on the work of their labor. She found a flock of sheep and devoured them once their shepherd had put them all in their barn. Part of her—the part that had been imprisoned—wanted to burn the entire structure to the ground but she knew better than that. Instead, she transformed into her human body, crushed the lock with her bare hands, and let the sheep out into the late afternoon sunshine. Those stupid enough to emerge were swallowed whole. She made sure to open the gate to their pasture as well to leave no evidence of a dragon.

  A dairy cow made a poor second course as the damn thing was too bony. Obscura ended up dumping its mangled corpse in a pond. She killed a few horses, not because she liked the taste but simply because humans had been allied with the stupid beasts for so long that she didn’t like them. These she dumped in the deep woods to be eaten by bears, mountain lions, and any wolves that still lived. She hoped to give them a taste and desire for horseflesh once more. Long ago, before humans had mastered steel and then later gunpowder, the wolves and lions had been allies of dragons—not pets but fellow predators. That time had passed, though.

  She slaughtered countless barking dogs. Obscura hated dogs. All one had to do to earn her ire was to bark its stupid flapping mouth at her. Her dragon ears could hear the pathetic yaps from even above the clouds. She’d descend, take her human form in a cloud of shadow, and strangle them with her bare hands.

  It would afford her some pleasure to see how all this played out in the news. Despite humans living in the shadows of dragons, they still had superstitions. Sometimes, it was simply easier to play pretend in the dark than it was to turn the lights on and face
the true monsters.

  After a day of this, Obscura sensed another dragon approaching.

  She considered hiding but decided against it. After all, it was only one and she had never been beaten in single combat by another dragon. She was simply too large and the control of her powers too sharp. Even the Steel Dragon had needed the support of that old fool Lumos. If it had been a true duel, the upstart wouldn’t have been able to best her.

  The dragon approached in the evening and she landed on a bridge and took er human form to greet him. She didn’t wipe the animal blood from her teeth, although she’d long since learned to do this effortlessly while she transformed.

  The dragon—a light, silvery being—landed on the bridge, took his human form, and approached her. He wore a suit with preposterous tails, shiny black shoes, and a smug look on his face. With a formal bow—which she didn’t mind at all—he presented her with a gilded invitation. “The Masked One requests your presence in the Detroit Opera House in tomorrow’s evening.”

  Obscura nodded and took the invitation.

  The flamboyant little fop glanced once at her and a flicker of distaste flashed across his face. “And please, do make yourself more presentable.”

  She nodded and spat animal blood at the boy’s feet.

  He smiled uncomfortably, transformed, and left her.

  Honestly, the only thing worse than humans might be dragons who acted like them. This dragon could transform into a being of immense power and he wrinkled his nose at a little animal blood? It couldn’t work both ways. It was no longer considered politic to eat people, but eating animals also made this little cretin feel uncomfortable? Pathetic.

  The black dragon was no servant, but she was not without her social graces either. She had to at least give thanks to her benefactor, as it was he who had no doubt arranged for her release from prison and gave her freedom once more. If nothing else, she owed him a thank you for seeing through the lies that had imprisoned her so unjustly.