If only those idiots honking their horns could see this. Maybe then, they’d understand how insignificant their species truly was.
He started down a gorgeous winding spiral staircase that led to a ballroom with a marble floor. On the far side of the ballroom, the string quartet played beautifully for a room full of dancers. Men and women danced elegantly to music that had existed for centuries. Despite their fine clothes and graceful movements, he didn’t sense a dragon among them. He smiled slightly at the show of power. The Masked One’s power was such that he could conduct his business in front of all these people. They would obey his every whim and corroborate every story. The scene was a discomforting reminder that the thugs he had employed were little more than disposable muscle.
It was an irritating thought and he pushed it aside as he walked across the dance floor, looking for the man who had summoned him. He couldn’t be dancing, right? No. He looked at the clock on the far side of the room. 6:01. Technically, they should already be talking but he couldn’t find who he was looking for. Still, he wasn’t naïve enough to think that his superior wouldn’t hold that against him.
“Shadowstorm,” a man all but growled, a human dressed in a tuxedo with a pointed mustache.
“What?” he snapped in response.
“Do not speak to the servant of your master thus. You have failed. Do not forget this.”
“He’s summoned me.”
“The Masked One waits above. He likes to watch the dancers to see which of them does not fit into the choreography. Such carelessness makes a thing of carefully planned beauty into a flailing mess.”
Sebastian nodded. The parallels to his own situation were not lost on him. He followed the man up another staircase to find the Masked One seated on a throne.
Well, not a throne exactly, more like an overstuffed red velvet chair with gilded, clawed legs and elaborate armrests. The chair stood beside a small table on which rested a single drink in a martini glass. He wasn’t foolish enough to think he would be offered one until the dragon wished to make a point. Nor was he foolish enough to complain about the metal folding chair the servant gestured at him to sit on.
He ignored the human.
The Masked One wore a dark, blood-red robe with the hood up. His skin was middling-brown, although he could see little of his facial features as he wore the front part of a human skull over his face. This, of course, was why he was called the Masked One. Despite Sebastian’s disdain for mankind, it was still uncomfortable to see one of their skulls worn like a mask.
“Sit,” the Masked One ordered.
Sebastian sat.
“My lord, forgive me,” he begged, took the other man’s hand, and kissed one of the golden rings.
“I am not one to forgive, Shadowstorm. You know this. I occasionally give second chances, although I see little reason to do so now.”
“My lord, I beg you, one more chance.”
“And why should I do this? Detroit was supposed to be crumbling into chaos by now. They’ve had their little time in the sun, but for my plans to continue, this city must fall.”
“Yes, my lord, of course it must.”
“Then why hasn’t it?”
At that moment, the string quartet stopped playing. He hadn’t listened to the music enough to know if the song had ended or if this was some kind of code. Silence descended as he scrambled for things to say. What would the Masked One believe? The truth? But the truth was dangerous in that it was not what had been planned. It had been his own plan, and it had failed. But should he lie to the Masked One? What if the other dragon saw through his deception?
A burst of impatience pulsed from the Masked One’s aura. It was a powerfully uncomfortable thing to be swayed by another dragon’s aura, and rare too. He’d thought himself immune to such things and yet now, the words poured out of his mouth as quickly as the fingers of musicians in the string quartet when they started their new song.
“My lord, it’s all the Steel Dragon’s fault. I had the city on the precipice of chaos. Gangs were ready to raze the place and she appeared and… Well, I failed to anticipate her.”
“Failed. Yes. That is the word for it, isn’t it?”
He slid off his chair and knelt at the Masked One’s feet. Even bowed, he was massive and much larger than the seated dragon’s diminutive frame, but he knew there was far more to power than brute strength.
“Please, my lord, please. I beg you—only one more chance. One more. I will finish what I have started.”
“Can you even do such a thing? Now, Dragon SWAT knows who you are. They know your face. The identity of Mr Black is worthless You have masked your aura thus far, but they will find you in time.”
“No, my lord, not with the gifts you’ve given me, not with the powers you’ve opened up to me. I can evade them. I can finish the mission.”
“And how will you do that? Buy this pesky Steel Dragon a cup of coffee and try to convert her to your cause?” The Masked One laughed at his words. Clearly, he found them ridiculous.
“I was wrong, my lord, truly I was.” Sebastian spoke to the floor, not daring to look up and face the skeletal mask of the stronger dragon. “I thought I could sway her to our side, that I could get to her before the other dragons infected her mind with their laughable moral codes and humane principals. But she is too far gone—worse even than Dragon SWAT. She believes herself to be a human and I was not able to make her see the truth of the matter.”
“And could you find out where she was from? What made her?”
His heart began to pound in his chest—harder and harder, faster and faster, repeating the same message again and again. You failed. You failed. You failed.
“I…I did not find out that information, my lord.”
“We have spoken much of your failure today, Shadowstorm. Tell me now of how you plan to fix this mess.”
The pounding in his ears began to lesson. He would be given another chance. But he wasn’t out of the caverns yet. If he said something wrong, he had no doubt that his position of privilege in the Masked One’s organization would crumble and make his current lodgings at a cheap human hotel look downright decadent.
“Detroit will fall, my lord. There is a history of inequality here. The city is ripe for destruction despite the false wealth it currently displays. It was only the Steel Dragon who stopped me. I will stop her now, though. I underestimated her and thought I could manipulate her, but I see that I cannot. I have already found a tool capable of removing her. Once her work is done, the rest of the city will fall.”
“And if your tool fails? What then?”
“She will not, my lord. I assure you, she will not.”
“And if she does?”
“Then I will finish the job, my lord. I will kill the Steel Dragon with my own talons if I must, and I will light this city on fire.”
“That will have to do, then, Shadowstorm. And truly, it must. If you continue to slow my plans, you are useless to me—worse than useless. If you think this tool of yours will do the job, by all means, wield the tool. But if it fails, you will complete the task. If you don’t, I will show you how to deal with this steel dragon and it is not a lesson I have ever given twice.”
“Yes, my lord. I understand.”
“Do you? Let me be crystal clear. Failure is no longer an option for you, not if you want to keep your scales intact. Understood?”
Sebastian nodded.
“Good. Rise, Shadowstorm. Have a drink, and if you’ll excuse me, I must dance.”
There was nothing he wanted less than to sit in that uncomfortable chair and sip a drink while he watched the Masked One, but the alternative was far worse.
So, he sat and accepted a drink. He sipped it slowly while the Masked One walked down the spiral staircase to the ballroom floor.
He could at least admit that the drink was good. While he had never been one to get drunk and preferred to be in control, the taste of alcohol—that delicious burn—was something special.
Not that the dragon would have guzzled grain alcohol from the bottle like humans did when they reveled in their pathetic mortality. The drink in front of him was far from that, though.
It tasted of cinnamon, orange peel, and a hint of cherry. That combined with the whiskey was something heavenly. Humans did have their inventions that were worth keeping. It amazed him that the same creatures who let their grain rot into alcohol had also learned how to elevate the intoxicating poison to such levels of beauty.
The Masked One reached the bottom of the staircase and discarded his red robe to reveal a tuxedo of the same dark-red color beneath. The skull mask covered his entire head and looked like it had been cobbled together from different skulls over the years and fused with dragon fire. The horrible helmet of death was both garish and grisly, marvelous and macabre.
He approached a pair of dancers and gestured for the man to approach, which of course he immediately obeyed. Sebastian had felt the pulse of power. There was no way the man could have resisted the dragon lord’s power in that moment.
The dancer stood in front of the Masked One.
“Sixteen measures back, you had a misstep,” the dragon said to the human.
“Yes, sir, Alicia’s dress tangled on my shoe, and I—”
“This is when you stop talking, boy.”
The man wisely shut up. Perhaps boy really was a better word for him, though. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.
“When you are dancing, the man must be the dragon and the woman the cattle that is humankind. You are to lead her and steer her. Her clothes are your clothes, her body your body. A failure to properly control her is a failure of yours.”
“What should I have done, sir?”
“Shut. Up. Boy,” the Masked one snarled. “I was speaking. You should have slit the little whore’s throat and demanded better.”
“But, sir, it was only a mistake!”
“Enough,” the dragon said and waved his hand almost lethargically in front of the dancer’s face. At least it would seem lethargic to a human. Sebastian saw the hidden movements, the godlike speed, and the hand that transformed into a dragon’s claws and severed the front of the skull and face from the rest of the boy’s head.
The victim, though, saw none of this. One moment, he stood in silence and the next, his face was simply gone, a bloody hole where there had once been the young features of a boy, soon to be a man.
He fell back screaming and writhed in pain while blood poured from the wound and down his throat.
The Masked One peeled the skin from the skull as easily as a human peeled a banana, removed his own mask—he turned away when he did this, of course—and put the fresh skull to his face, connected it to his bizarre helmet, and gestured for the string quartet to begin playing again.
They complied as if nothing at all had happened. In fact, none of the dancers screamed or ran despite the dance floor now being slick with one of their group’s blood. Instead, they danced, and Sebastian understood that they had all seen this horrible display of brutality before. Yet they had returned because they understood that to not return was to die equally as horribly.
The Masked One reached out for the dead boy’s partner, Alicia. She swallowed, took his hand, and waltzed through the remains of her last partner. If she felt anything, she did a better job of hiding it than Sebastian did.
The ice in his hand clinked because his hand shook. He swallowed, wiped his brow, and downed the rest of the drink. Surely the Masked One had made his point. He possessed a level of power that he could not match and a level of influence that was almost absurd.
Throughout the centuries, ballroom dancers had consistently come from the upper class. They were typically a larger part of society than the thugs and cretins he had employed. His mind marveled at the boy’s death. Surely the child had family, friends, probably professors and classmates in a university, or contacts at work. To all those people, he would simply disappear. He knew this simply because no one talked about these things. People would go missing and go uninvestigated, and it was because of dragons like the Masked One and the power they held.
There were forces of power in the world that Sebastian Shadowstorm had always resented. The Dragon Council and their childlike morals and creeds. Dragon SWAT with their pathetic attempt to mimic human law enforcement. Even the Circle of Mages was an obnoxious force of rule-keepers.
But as he watched these humans waltz through the blood of their dead companion, he thought he would have preferred all their arguing and proselytizing to this wanton display of death.
And yet this was who he had thrown his lot in with. He’d made his choice long ago, and he couldn’t change it any more than a human could hope to become a dragon.
Sebastian snarled at the thought. For centuries, that phrase had kept humans cowed. Even their bravest leaders—warriors and kings, politicians and poets—had never dared challenge the power structure the dragons had built. They’d conducted their wars with each other, gobbled resources, and built their cities, all because they’d known that to do otherwise was impossible. Humans were not dragons and never could be. They understood that they were but rats.
Or they had.
The Steel Dragon’s emergence from the human population had changed all that. The Masked One was right about her. They needed to unravel her past and reveal it to the world. Then, humanity would see what had always been true—that dragons were born of dragons, and that humans would forever be beneath them.
He believed this with all his heart and yet, to see it displayed so grotesquely on the dance floor below him was beyond his ability to enjoy. Humans’ place in the world was to serve dragons with their clever little monkey minds. It was a waste to treat them as nothing more than dancing meat.
When he regained his position, he could restore them to their place as the preferred servant of dragon-kind, but not if Kristen Hall continued to live. Not if the world continued to think of her as a human with dragon powers who was capable of thwarting the true rulers of this world.
Terrified and more certain than ever of his mission, he left the boat when the next song ended. He would destroy the Steel Dragon. There was no other option.
Chapter Fifty-Two
“I wish I could do that when the nurse tries to give me a needle.”
Kristen Hall smiled at the eight-year-old patient in the hospital and turned her body back to skin instead of steel. The little boy gasped in awe. He’d obviously heard of Detroit’s famous Steel Dragon, but hearing wasn’t quite the same as seeing. “But then you couldn’t get your medicine.”
“My medicine makes my hair fall out. I hate it.”
She nodded and honestly didn’t know what to say to him as she’d never had a family member suffer from cancer. Her grandparents had all died from heart disease, so this was an ailment she wasn’t familiar with, and it seemed especially cruel to be affecting kids.
Even being in a hospital wing was relatively new to her. She’d been once when her brother had broken his arm, but her grandparents had died when she was little and her parents were still blessedly healthy—although her father would end up there soon if he didn’t change his diet and start exercising.
This room was weird. There were beds up and down the sides of the room and sheets with cute printed designs of animals, princesses, or spaceships. Beside each bed was some kind of monitoring machine. Most were turned off. Many of the kids in the room didn’t need them while they were there, but the message was clear—death is nearby, children. Never forget it.
The center of the room had a large, brightly colored carpet with the alphabet printed on it. Most of the kids sat on it, choosing some semblance of normalcy despite being stuck in the hospital. The little boy in front of her looked up and scratched his head. Before her very eyes, another patch of his buzzed hair fell out.
She was aghast. It was difficult to admit that such suffering still existed in the world. While she spent her time trying to help people, things like le
ukemia still took lives. It made her wonder if the mages the dragons controlled could use their magic to heal this little boy’s blood disease. She didn’t know, nor did she know what to say.
He touched her beautiful red hair and smiled wistfully as he did so.
That gave her an idea. “I wish my hair would fall out sometimes.”
“Nuh-uh,” the boy said, but he smiled.
“No, really, I do. The last time I fought a dragon, he pulled me by the hair. If my head was nice and smooth like yours, I might’ve won that fight.”
“Can’t you just transform into a dragon?” the boy asked. Despite his innocence, the words still hurt.
It was a barb under her skin that she hadn’t yet learned to transform into a dragon. At the same time, a part of her didn’t want to.
“I like being in a human body. It reminds me that I’m related to cool people like you.”
His face soured. “I’m not cool. I’m sick.”
Kristen nodded. She didn’t know what to say, only that she’d gone too far. She felt like this always happened. Fortunately, another kid chimed in before she had to justify herself.
“There’s no way you lose fights,” a girl with two broken legs said. She’d watched from her wheelchair and inched forward slowly when she thought the dragon trapped in a human body wouldn’t notice. Her dragon senses had detected each scoot forward, though.
“Oh, she most certainly does. She may be the Lost Dragon, but she’s still a slowpoke when it comes to the lounge.” Butters smiled. He currently allowed a three-year-old to climb over his massive belly. Of everyone on SWAT, the big southerner was by far the most comfortable with kids.
The rest of the team stood awkwardly around the visitor’s area of the children’s hospital. She considered it a small miracle that Lyn Hernandez hadn’t cussed out any kids yet. She was sure that she would, though, given enough time.
Currently, Hernandez stood silently in the corner, a long-sleeved shirt hiding her tattoos and a scowl on her face. It didn’t remain in place for much longer. A small boy had snuck up on her and thrown the paper wrapper from a straw at her when she hadn’t been looking. The two of them now conducted a clandestine projectile battle. The boy sat a few feet away from her with his back to her, but as soon as she raised a balled-up post-it note, he spun and giggled. She scowled at him and he only laughed harder and threw another straw wrapper at her. Kristen was impressed. She’d seen hardened criminals wither under that look.
Steel Dragon Page 39
