Constance didn’t answer, though. She was done talking. In fact, she seemed to be done with the fight. She tried to bound over her adversary and reach the stairs out of the basement, but Kristen spun, caught one of her legs, and used her momentum to swing her forward and drive her into the concrete floor.
The woman grunted in pain but was back on her feet before the dragon was.
Still, she was up before the assassin could flee again.
There was no way she would let her lead the attack again. Although it hadn’t done much damage, she had the sense that Constance was testing her. For what, she didn’t know, nor did she particularly want to find out.
With that in mind, she pushed her opponent this time despite the woman’s blinding speed and ferocious attempts to fight back.
She tried to stay close, jabbed with her right arm, and kicked with her legs, but her target constantly managed to move toward her injured left and continued to force Kristen to keep her injured arm away from her. Even on the defensive, she controlled the fight. It was frustrating—no, it was downright infuriating.
“Just stop already,” she screamed and threw her full aura at Constance. It had no effect. In fact, she almost had the sense that her dragon abilities simply washed over the woman and like a boulder resisting high tide, it would take millennia to move her even a finger’s length. How badly she wanted to know if those powers were from human will or magic augmentation. She had no doubt that some of the assassin’s powers were granted by magic. Almost certainly, they were from mages, given the woman’s political feelings toward dragons. But that merely begged the question of which powers and how, and if she was magical at all. The implications of being able to confer magical abilities to regular humans were huge. Could dragons do it as well as mages? Was technology of some kind involved? Only Constance could say, and she seemed quite committed to not saying a damn thing.
“I can’t stop, Lady Steel. Not now, not ever—not until the power in this world flows down instead of up.”
“I can help you!” Kristen said and hesitated in her relentless approach toward her that had achieved absolutely nothing.
“Help me by letting me go,” Constance said.
She almost respected her resolve. The woman had the diehard belief of the devout, yet with a political mentality instead of a religious one. The hardest part of this battle was that she did believe some of what she seemed to be saying. Dragons did have too much power. They should be held accountable.
But murder wasn’t the way to achieve those goals.
“You killed Windfire in his own home. I can’t simply let that go. It’s as bad as killing a person.”
Something changed in Constance’s expression. Before, there was a trace of hesitancy, some kind of misplaced belief or trust that Kristen had hoped to ferret out but now, that belief was gone—or, if not the belief itself, the hesitancy that controlled her actions. In simple terms, she no longer held back.
The blows were ferocious and her hands held like knives pinged against the dragon’s steel skin with enough force to send shudders down her forearms. Between these karate chops of death, the killer threw in rocket-like kicks that alternated between trying to knock her adversary to the ground with another sweep of her legs and striking her hard enough in the crotch to cause some kind of stutter.
Kristen gritted her teeth and withstood it all, defended herself, and tried to attack. The woman would tire and she only had to hit her once more. She’d already hit her twice and was sure the final blow would do it. After all, she’d seen her almost collapse from effort before on the security footage. The woman was fast—obviously—and augmented with some kind of power, but it wouldn’t last forever. It couldn’t.
All she needed to do was to land one more blow.
Constance clearly had the same thought, and unfortunately, she was faster.
The dragon deflected what seemed to be an obvious elbow thrown at her temple, only to be struck in the throat with such a forceful karate chop that she couldn’t breathe.
She stumbled back and grasped her throat as she tried to drag in a breath. Constance vaulted past her and up the stairs. Her instinctive response was to pursue, but she didn’t have enough oxygen for her already exhausted body. She landed hard and her quarry vanished up the stairs.
Kristen felt her neck to find it was dented. The woman had hit her so hard that it had actually imprinted the steel that encased her when she used her powers. She hadn’t known this was possible. Her steel skin allowed her a full range of motion and she’d never encountered a situation in which it had inhibited her in any way. And yet, somehow, Constance seemed to have found a weakness in her defenses,
Unable to breathe, she transformed into her regular skin and immediately felt her lungs fill with air. It seemed that in regular form, her skin was as elastic as any human’s.
She took a deep breath and sprinted up the stairs in pursuit.
Constance couldn’t believe how powerful the Steel Dragon was. If she hadn’t hit her with that bullet, she had little doubt that she would not have survived that battle. She wouldn’t have said anything about her compatriots, obviously—which was what Kristen had wanted so badly—but she might have been forced to forfeit her life, a possibility she recognized the necessity of but nevertheless did not embrace.
Besides, death wasn’t quite off the table yet. She raced up the stairs from the basement, through the open door, and out through the snow. One of her allies immediately gusted wind to cover her tracks and sweep snow down the hall into the basement to further distract the Steel Dragon. The slivers of ice and snow stung her as she ran.
Within moments, the gunshots began.
The first one was obviously a warning. It came from the top of Windfire’s mansion and exploded a meter in front of her. Exhausted and unable to stop the reflex, she screamed and changed direction. She wouldn’t be able to take a direct path—which was necessary considering a dragon might resume the pursuit at any moment—but she couldn’t provide the shooters with an easy target.
Unfortunately, whoever else was in the building wasn’t so economical with their ammunition. Assault rifle fire rang out, and the snow all around her began to puff as a hailstorm of bullets stopped her every turn. She realized then that they were trying to trap her, no doubt on the orders of the Steel Dragon.
Constance couldn’t let them. The same mages who augmented her strength and speed and covered her with wind powers had the ability to end her life. She’d told them to do as much if she were captured, but she couldn’t let that happen. No one could balance other mages’ powers like she could. If she died, her movement would lose a mighty warrior. This was not arrogance, but fact. Still, they would not hesitate if they had no other choice.
The assassin decided to risk the fusillade of bullets and attempt to reach the fence. She was quickly reminded that one of these people was a better marksman than most when another shot landed directly in her path.
She changed course continually yet moved steadily closer to the fence behind which her people waited for her.
The next shot proved that the sniper was done with warnings. It caught her in the calf.
Hot pain flared through her body and crimson blood painted the brightly illuminated snow. Wind could no longer cover her tracks, but she had known that. She needed a good old-fashioned gas-powered car if she wanted to escape. Even then, the dangers posed by the Steel Dragon were real and she might have already called for backup. That was a chilling thought.
The Steel Dragon emerged from the basement and Constance’s heart dropped. She won’t kill me, she told herself again and again, even though it was antithetical to what most dragons did to most people. They were beasts who saw themselves as predators and humans as cattle. They had slaughtered countless people who’d wanted nothing more than their basic human rights. She had been raised to believe this—hell, confronted by the evidence, it was hard not to come to these conclusions. To now be hunted by one of the very beasts she’d
been warned about since she was a child was truly something out of a nightmare.
Still, she couldn’t believe that Kristen would kill her. She wouldn’t because she was still mostly human, biology aside.
These thoughts did nothing to calm her as she ran as fast as she could while she dodged bullets and felt her lifeblood course out of the hole in her calf. She was lucky the bullet hadn’t shattered bone and luckier still that the powers that gave her extra strength allowed her to run with the wound at all.
An ominous whoosh from behind her told her clearly that Kristen was airborne as the Steel Dragon. She turned, knowing full well that a human—even an augmented one like her—could never hope to outrun a dragon in flight. The only thing to do was fight.
Her focus on the dragon, she reached for her gun.
It was gone. The Steel Dragon had knocked it from her hands during their struggle in the basement.
For a moment, Constance stared at the massive, silvery specter of wings and teeth and claws that soared toward her, but a gunshot rang out and her brain resumed functioning.
There had to be a way out. There was always a way out for those who were attacked. Predators weren’t one hundred percent effective and prey often escaped when all seemed lost. She simply had to find a chink in Kristen’s armor and somehow exploit it before someone put a bullet in her brain.
As if on cue, the realization struck.
“Her wing!” Constance screamed into the night and hoped and prayed that someone heard her.
The response was immediate.
Great gusts of wind kicked up and slowed her escape until they were redirected into the sky. It blew faster and faster and she scrambled ever closer to the fence as the Steel Dragon fought against what had quickly become a gale.
She was so incredibly close, but none of it would matter unless they stopped the Steel Dragon. A car might be able to outrace a dragon, but not on the roads surrounding the mansion and not at night. If her team didn’t see what she had seen, they were all doomed. No, beyond doomed. They would be dead.
The wind velocity continued to increase and bent the pine trees that surrounded the estate more and more until branches began to break free and join it. Still, Kristen flapped through it and seemed to soar as easily as a hawk or an eagle.
A wet, sickening snap filled the night air. It was even louder than the distant gunfire and a moment later, the Steel Dragon plummeted with a roar of pain.
The assassin stole a glance behind her to see that the shoulder socket that supported Kristen’s wing had become dislocated. The appendage flapped uselessly at her side and every pump of the thin bones increased the injury. A dragon with more experience would have already become human again, but the pain probably made it hard to think.
It never would have happened—not in a thousand years—if Constance had not shot her in that same shoulder. The interaction between the human and dragon forms was a complex, poorly understood relationship, but some things were known. Injuries in one body roughly transferred to the other and kept their anatomical position.
If one chopped a hand off in the human form, the dragon body would also be missing it. They could regrow some of these missing parts because they were dragons, but in the short term, these injuries transferred with the bodies.
This was especially true of the special bullets. Dragons seemed to be able to absorb their clothes into their dragon bodies so when they became people again, they didn’t have to get dressed, but the same ability to magically hide certain items didn’t apply to dragon bullets.
She had shot Kristen’s human body in the left shoulder, so it would be roughly in the same place in the dragon body. It had still been a huge gamble, but that had been the only play she had possessed. Dragons had four shoulders joints—two for their wings and two for their front legs—so it could have been that a bullet there would have done nothing to the Steel Dragon’s flight and indeed, it hadn’t done much. She’d still been able to fly, after all, until the joint had been overtaxed.
Fortunately, seeing their mascot—or friend or however the Steel Dragon’s human entourage thought of her—wounded was enough to stop the gunfire.
Constance finally reached the fence where two of her allies waited, one already on her side and hidden in a topiary bush. He lifted her up and she cursed reflexively when he touched her injured leg as he pushed her over.
The man on the other side caught her and as soon as the first man had followed her over, the three of them ran through the woods.
“The gun—where’s the gun?” one of them demanded.
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll see…it doesn’t matter at all.”
And once again drained of the magic that had empowered her in battle, she passed into unconsciousness.
“Where’s the gun?” Kristen asked as soon as Jim was within earshot.
“How about we worry about you first? I don’t know much about dragons, but I know your wings aren’t supposed to go like that.”
Kristen grimaced. She was back in human form, her dragon body too injured for her to inhabit. “They aren’t. She shot me with another dragon bullet earlier and fucked my left arm up. That’s why their wind gusts were able to hurt me.”
“Is that what it was? Magic wind gusts?”
“Yes! Obviously. Do you think that was a coincidence? We’re obviously facing real professionals here—professionals who have mages working with them, not to mention engineers who can make weapons out of dragon parts. Which brings me back to the damn gun!”
“I have it!” Keith yelled as he emerged from the basement. “But you won’t like it.”
He tossed the gun to the Wonderkid with a cavalier grin on his face.
“For fuck’s sake, man, who taught you how to handle a firearm?” His teammate caught it but he looked damn pissed.
“The same guy who taught me guns don’t hurt people, bullets do.”
“What are you trying to say?” Jim examined the weapon for half a second before he realized what had happened. His face said it all.
“It’s empty,” Kristen said and laughed.
“What the hell’s so funny?” he asked.
“Seriously, Kristen, we could have run ballistics or something on the ammunition.”
“What’s so funny is that Constance had that gun trained on me for more than a minute, even though there wasn’t a damn thing in it.”
Keith laughed and Jim smiled. Drew came up and immediately took his coat off.
“You’d better stop laughing about all that,” he said and gave his coat to Kristen, who only now realized she still wore nothing but underwear and a bulletproof vest. She wasn’t cold, though. In fact, all the snow had melted around her, so she sat in a circle of steam.
“Why’s that?” She took his coat all the same because she was still human and her mother had taught her modesty.
“Because Stonequest is here and he won’t think any of this shit is funny.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Drew ushered his three teammates indoors. The team leader had called ahead on the radio so by the time they reached the door, Hernandez had located a pair of pants that more or less fit Kristen.
It was a good thing too, as by the time she pulled them on and made it upstairs to rejoin the sergeant and the rest of the team, Stonequest had arrived. His eyebrows were raised in amusement but his jaw was set in frustration. This definitely would not be a fun conversation.
“What the hell happened here? Actually, more specifically, what the hell happened to your arm?” he demanded as if that counted as a greeting.
“Lady Steel saved my life,” Sergeant Ridgespine said. “I came here to investigate a hunch. It was luck—extraordinary luck—that she arrived when she did.”
“Uh-huh.” The other dragon didn’t sound convinced. “And the arm?”
“I was shot by a bullet made from a dragon,” she yelled and raised an eyebrow at him.
“A what?” The sergeant had obviously not been privy to this
intel.
“Now is not the time, Kristen,” Stonequest warned.
“Really? And when is? Because this fucking thing hurts badly right now.”
Hernandez had found a shirt and they’d tied it into a sling for her arm but that, of course, did nothing to stop the pain caused by the bullet still in her body.
“Not now.” Stonequest looked at the wound and grimaced. He knew what these weapons had done to Windfire and he knew—as did she—how lucky she had been. “Timeflash!” He shouted and a moment later, the purple bedecked dragon in human form was there with two human mages in tow.
“Yes, sir?”
“I need Lady Steel healed. It appears to possibly be one of the new munitions I told you about.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to be clearer,” one of the mages said in a thick Kentucky accent. “Removing a bullet made of lead or a bullet made of dragon requires an entirely different form of magic.”
Stonequest scowled at the man but apparently, magic healers were as impervious to professional criticism from those who didn’t know the trade as human doctors were. He merely glared in response.
“It’s dragon,” Kristen said.
“Are you sure?” the mage asked.
“Yes, I’m fucking sure. It feels like someone poured gasoline inside me and is about to fire it up.”
The mage nodded, took her into one of Windfire’s many bedrooms, and went to work. First, he had her remove the bulletproof vest, then he cleaned the wound with alcohol—a practice she was familiar with. At that point, his treatment diverged from the norm. He stuffed the wound with some kind of dried flower petals that were incredibly soothing. That done, he took a snail, of all things, from one of his pockets.
At first, she thought it was only a shell but a moment later, a bright orange body emerged followed by four little stalks, two long and two short. The mage put the creature on her wound and it immediately began to suck at the hole the bullet had inflicted in her shoulder.
The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2) Page 19