“How human do you think that monstrosity inside her belly is?” Rudolph didn’t get it. Sure, the dragon’s human form was beyond beautiful. But she was still an animal for God’s sake. “She looks ready to pop.”
“She is. A month, maybe less.”
“Well, tell you what. Whatever you’re going to do to her, I suggest you do it before she gives birth.” He banged the side of his fist against the closest reinforced wall. “I don’t know how long we can keep her doped up and unconscious. Her body is fighting back, even when she’s asleep. We must increase the dosage every time we shoot her up. If she gives birth, there’s nothing stopping her from transforming back into her dragon form. If that happens, no amount of reinforced steel will keep her in and us protected.”
Dr. Westmore straightened from where he’d been hunched over one of the television screens. “My problem. Yours is Armstrong Knight. He’s making things difficult for us. We couldn’t move her to another location even if we wanted to. Her human face is plastered all over the television and is in every major newspaper. He has public sympathy on his side, and the public wants their healing dragon found. Did you hear the president’s last campaign speech?”
“Yeah. ‘Dragons are our friends.’”
“Knight has managed, in a week, to galvanize the international community against us, even though he has no idea who we are. So far, the politicians we’ve paid off have kept silent. If Armstrong’s one-man campaign continues, I’m uncertain if they’ll stay that way.”
“How much to take care of the agent?”
“Three hundred thousand. Make it look like a suicide. We want him silenced but not seen as a martyr.”
“Consider Armstrong Knight already dead.”
“Good. I’ll let the others know.” Dr. Westmore licked his lips again; his eyes had returned to the screen and the dragon. “One of the x-rays revealed a hexagonally shaped object below her frontal bone. I intend to find out what it is.”
If anyone could, it was Dr. Westmore. The man wielded a scalpel like Rudolph did a gun. He left the mad doctor to his patient. Rudolph had a Secret Service agent to kill.
Two weeks and no kill shot. For that, he would have to get close to the man. Between the blackout curtains in every window of Knight’s house to the Secret Service agents that followed him everywhere, Rudolph either couldn’t get a clear shot or get away without being spotted and taken out if he did chance a bullet to the agent’s head.
Then, there were the dragons. Jesus, he had no idea there were so many of those monsters. Dozens of them had slithered from their hiding holes and taken to the skies in search of the gold dragon. They were relentless in their hunt. When one disappeared, it was replaced by another.
Even now, as Rudolph pulled the baseball cap low over his forehead, shoulders hunched to his ears and keeping to the shadows, he could feel their heated presence patrolling DC.
The green dragon his men first encountered when they almost caught the gold dragon thirteen years ago had been Rudolph’s biggest pain in the ass. Nightly, she’d perch her forty-foot body of menace on the roof of the agent’s house.
He never saw her shift into a human during her vigil. She watched and waited. So had Rudolph. Come morning, she’d fly away just as the first shift of Secret Service agents arrived. Rudolph could almost respect Knight and the battle he waged to find his doomed dragon lover and to keep himself alive while his plan played out in the streets and in the news.
Worse than the predatory dragons were the enraged public. Knight had given the gold dragon a name and bestselling story. The stupid public loved nothing more than a good hero-villain tale. Kya, the Bloodstone Dragon. Children’s Guardian Dragon. Diamond in the Sky.
The titles were endless and the reverence contagious. The men who’d helped Rudolph capture the dragon were in custody, thanks to anonymous tips. It would be a matter of time before a dragon-loving asshole spotted him and dropped a dime.
Which was why it had to be tonight. With the green dragon elsewhere and the last Secret Service shift gone for the night, Rudolph wouldn’t find a better opening than this one. There was also no way he could make this kill appear anything other than what it would be. Murder. Westmore was a fool if he thought anyone, least of all Knight’s boss, would believe the secret service agent, so broken up over the loss of his pregnant dragon, would take his life.
Nothing about the agent screamed suicide. Rudolph would end the man his way.
Pulling his powder coated stainless blade from his ankle sheath, Rudolph wedged the knife between a window and the lock. He’d slipped unnoticed around the back of the house. From this position, he wouldn’t be seen from the street as he worked his blade back and forth. A line of thick shrubs separated Knight’s backyard from his neighbor’s. Lights were out next door and the house quiet.
Snap.
Rudolph smiled, held onto his blade as he pushed up the window and crawled inside. Television, couch, bookshelves and floor lamps, Knight’s den. Rudolph remembered this room from the last time he was in the man’s house. He’d committed every room to memory. From the looks of things, little had changed in the intervening years.
To the right of the den was a short hallway that led upstairs. Three bedrooms and a full bath. At the end of the hall and to the right was the master bedroom.
On silent booted feet, Rudolph climbed the stairs. He had a gun at his waist, but he still held the lethal blade in his right hand. The gun would be quicker and clean. He could stand in the doorway to the man’s room, aim and shoot. The silencer would guarantee no one heard anything suspicious coming from the Knight residence.
But Rudolph didn’t want quick. A slow and messy kill, that’s what had him sneaking into Knight’s home and creeping into his bedroom. He’d begin with removing the tongue that had incited the nation and then the world. Then he’d take the deep-set brown eyes that stared into the cameras with a mix of sorrow, hope, and determination.
Finally, Rudolph would cut Armstrong Knight’s heart out. How dare the man love a dragon more than he did his own kind. Maybe he’d even take the bloody organ back to the dragon so she’d see what he’d done to her pathetic human. Then again, after weeks with Dr. Westmore, Rudolph doubted if any part of the gold dragon remained.
Stepping inside the pitch-black room, Rudolph could make out nothing. As quietly as possible, he pulled his night vision glasses from a deep side pocket in his cargo pants. Slipping them on, he saw a lump in the bed. Covers up to shoulders, the man in the bed snored, unaware his life would soon end.
Rudolph crept forward. The carpet absorbed the little sound he made. Yes, after tonight it would be done. He could fly the hell away from DC and the stench of circling dragons. He’d find a country where he could lay low until the dragon’s kidnapping and Armstrong’s death were footnotes in people’s memories. Soon enough, some other sensational news event would distract them and they would lose interest, forgetting all about Rudolph, Armstrong and the Bloodstone Dragon.
The handle of the blade felt good. It would feel that much better when he sank it into the sleeping man’s body. Rearing up, then plunging down, he drove the blade into Knight’s neck.
The metal shattered on impact.
Lights flickered on.
Rudolph held a broken knife pressed to the throat of a man. A man who wasn’t Armstrong Knight.
Click.
Eyes flew up. Standing inside a closet that hadn’t been opened a minute ago was the Secret Service agent. Dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a bulletproof vest, he held a SIG Sauer P229 sidearm in his hand. The silver-and-black gun was pointed at Rudolph’s head.
A clawed hand came up and circled his neck. In an effortless move, Rudolph was lifted off his feet and into the air when the man in the bed rose.
The dark-brown arm holding Rudolph rippled with muscles as did the massive neck that led to impossibly wide shoulders and a chiseled chest. The behemoth’s other hand plucked the handgun off Rudolph’s hip, the sound of crushed
gunmetal loud in the quiet room. That same big hand rose to his face. Off came his night vision glasses, tossed to the floor and then smashed under the giant’s foot.
The eight-foot man, eyes reddish-brown and narrowed to deadly slits, opened his mouth and roared. A wide snake tongue came out and smacked Rudolph across the face. Acidic saliva burned the skin where the wet tongue touched, and the mercenary screamed.
Knight stepped from the closet and lowered his weapon. “Meet the Aragonite Star Dragon.” The Secret Service agent looked from Rudolph and to the immovable hand clutched around his neck. “I told him you would come. I didn’t want to make it too easy for you or you would’ve suspected something. This is the thing, Winston Rudolph, we want to know who you work for and where we can find Kya.”
Another acidic tongue slash to his face, over his nose and around his left eye. The skin melted, and Rudolph whimpered his pain.
“Let me tell you a secret. One I didn’t reveal on the news. Very mature dragons, like Kya’s parents and her two oldest siblings, can shift into whatever human form they wish. You get what I’m saying, asshole?”
Yeah, he did. Every time he thought he saw a different set of agents arrive at Knight’s home they were, in truth, the same dragons in a different human form. He wondered how many times when he thought he had Knight in his sights if it was really the big beast choking the shit out of him.
“This is the thing, you’re going to die. There’s no way of getting around that. For taking Kya, I want to beat the hell out of you until you cry her location and wet your camouflage boxers. But I won’t because the Aragonite Star Dragon gets the honors. So, this is where you stand. He can take you outside, turn into a really big gold dragon and devour you in one pitiful swallow, or…” Armstrong sat at the foot of the bed. “I just remembered, there’s no or. That’s how you’ll die. He’s going to eat you. Plain and simple.”
“Ask again.” The dragon’s thunderous voice slammed into Rudolph.
“Where’s our Bloodstone Dragon? Why did you take her? And who do you work for?”
Even if he wanted to, Rudolph barely had enough air to breathe no less answer Knight’s snarled questions.
The Secret Service agent stood and walked up to where Rudolph hung from the dragon’s debilitating grip. “Where’s our Bloodstone Dragon? Why did you take her? And who do you work for?”
With a release of his meaty hand, the dragon dropped him to the floor. He scrambled backward until his back met a dresser. His face hurt like hell, and the last acidic lick had left him blind in his left eye. But he could breathe, which he did fast and hard.
“Do you have the information?”
“I do. The Circle of Drayke. They have my Kya underground, which explains my inability to scent and track her.”
“Did you pick up anything else from his mind when I asked the questions?”
From his what? What kind of magic was this? How had the dragon plucked those details from his head?
“Don’t look so shocked, Rudolph. Old dragons are special in ways you can’t begin to imagine. But our human minds are predictable. You ask us a question, even one we have no intention of responding to, the answer comes unbidden to our minds. It’s the way we are. There’s no shame in being human.”
The cold, smug gaze that had been on Rudolph switched to the dragon in human form. “Do you know where she is?”
“Yes, but he left her in vile hands.”
Captain Winston Rudolph, throat bruised and sore, laughed. It came out more like a desperate cough, but he didn’t care. He may be a dead man, but Knight and the Aragonite Star Dragon wouldn’t reach the Golden Fleece in time to save her from Dr. Westmore.
So he laughed and laughed and laughed. Until he gurgled up blood, a gunshot wound to his stomach.
“You’re going to pay for hurting my Kya.”
Rudolph felt himself being dragged out of the master bedroom by Knight, down a flight of stairs, through a kitchen and into the backward. He lay on his back, bleeding out and in excruciating pain. All overhead was black, not a star in the sky.
Except one. A bright gold star that got closer the faster he blinked and the louder he screamed.
The Aragonite Star Dragon, enormous teeth and—
Armstrong didn’t look away when Kya’s father consumed the screaming Rudolph. For what he feared had befallen Kya, the man deserved his fate.
You are a true diata, Armstrong Knight. I thank you for your courage and cunning.
Armstrong didn’t deserve this magnificent dragon’s gratitude. He’d taken too long to discover Kya’s whereabouts. If she and his child lived, it would be a miracle. For two weeks, he’d sat on his roof, the way Kya used to do, and gave himself a migraine as he attempted to contact Ledisi. Kya’s oldest sister was the only member of her family he’d seen often enough that he thought he might have a chance to link with telepathically.
When she’d first spoken in his mind, sounding so much like Kya, he’d nearly fallen from the ladder he’d been descending from the roof.
Gold-and-green forms filled the sky over Armstrong’s house. He guessed the Aragonite Dragon had called his family. A metallic gold dragon with green flecks was all that was missing from the group of resplendent flying beasts.
A dragon family. He should’ve never gotten between Kya and the world she loved. A world that could protect her. He’d done his best. Loved his dragon the best way he knew how. But it hadn’t been enough.
He waved at Kya’s family and walked away. His part of the plan was done. The dragons would rescue Kya and kill whoever dared to stand in their way. They didn’t need a useless human.
Where are you going, Kya’s diata?
Armstrong halted at his back door and then turned around to see a huge golden tail leading from his feet and to the Aragonite Star Dragon, who watched him with reddish-brown eyes.
I take it you know how to climb upon and ride a dragon?
“Um, yeah. I mean, Kya showed me.”
Then make haste, Armstrong Knight. I do not wish to keep the Bloodstone Dragon waiting any longer than she already has been.
Running back into the house to retrieve his gun, Armstrong wasted no time climbing onto the Aragonite Star Dragon.
The massive dragon took off, and Armstrong had never been so afraid and relieved in his life.
11
Armstrong had been prepared to go through anyone to get to his dragon, including an army of mercenaries. In winding tunnels underneath London, Armstrong found nothing but trashed empty rooms. Whoever had been there had left in a real hurry.
“Kya.”
Running from one room to the next, Armstrong yelled her name. Living quarters. Canteen. Bathrooms. He searched them all. Infirmary. He halted, and his stomach roiled at what he saw. OB/GYN Table, fetal monitor, exam lights, birthing bed.
How long had they planned this?
Oh, God. Dried blood stained the blue birthing bed. Swallowing hard, Armstrong approached the bed. Empty, like the underground compound of metal.
“Kya,” he screamed again. Where in the hell was she? Had she given birth? If she had, where was their baby? “Kya.” He bolted from the room. Frantic, he clutched his gun and ran down one corridor and then the next, Kya’s name and his thudding feet the only sound on this level.
“Kya.”
Gasira and Ledisi, in human form, searched the second level of the compound while Jahzara and her mate scoured the sewers that led from the compound and to the street miles above them. After reaching London, Kya’s father had given each member of the search and rescue party their marching orders, including Armstrong.
There are ten responsible for tracking and kidnapping the Bloodstone Dragon, he’d said in everyone’s mind. See their images, know their faces.
Pictures of ten men had begun to appear in Armstrong’s mind as well as information about each man the Aragonite Star Dragon had stolen from Rudolph. The captain had known quite a lot about the group known as the Circle of Drayke. In l
ess than three minutes, Armstrong and Kya’s family of dragons knew it too. Names, addresses, and faces.
When most of Kya’s sisters, six of them, had nodded at their father and flew away in different directions, Armstrong knew they were on a special mission. A search and destroy mission.
He’d left Kya’s parents topside. They would guarantee their safety from the outside, making sure no mercenary got in or left the compound.
Armstrong had no idea how much was left on this level. He’d gone into every room he encountered. No soldiers for hire, no baby, and no Bloodstone Dragon.
Rushing down another sterile corridor, Armstrong skidded to a halt when he reached a closed door. Gunmetal, like all the others. This one, however, leaked blood from underneath.
Holding his weapon steady in his right hand, he wrenched the door open with his left. He’d found the guards he’d expected to battle. Inside the small room, bloodied, twisted bodies littered the floor. Broken guns lay at their side.
It smelled awful. The foul stench of blood and death clung to everything in the room, including the putrid frigid air. He didn’t question what happened or who had been kept in this room. A gurney, wrecked and in a corner of the room on its side, straps ripped and sidebars crushed, did that for him.
“Kya,” he whispered her name. This had been her cell, but she’d turned it into a room of horrors for her guards.
Holstering his sidearm, Armstrong stepped over and between dead bodies. There wasn’t much room to maneuver or light to see by. Yet, he saw them. Footprints in the blood, smaller than the men’s and with the curve and toe prints of bare feet.
The prints traveled away from the men and to the other side of the room. Lifting his head, Armstrong saw, for the first time, a one-way wall-mirror.
Shattered.
Two footprints ended at the base of the wall that connected this room to the one on the other side. Taking out his gun again, Armstrong led with his gun hand, sticking it through the opening before climbing up and jumping down.
Sirens and Scales Page 315
