“Clear!” Emerald said and earned an acknowledgment from Stonequest, who had led his team to an exit at the far side of the room. Although the hole in the cavern’s wall was large enough to frame a dragon, it had been carved to look like a humble villager’s house. As a result, Stonequest, Heartsbane, and Erin seemed to shrink as they left as if they stepped into a hut.
Kristen followed Emerald through another exit, this one disguised to look like a cave hidden in the forest. As they made their way through the opening, she saw that a bear—carved of stone, of course—hibernated in this connecting tunnel. Even more impressively, the ceiling had been carved into what must have been a thousand bats. Each one had two tiny rubies for eyes and as she moved beneath them, the sparkling red lights seemed to follow her.
It was almost too much to process. The bats alone must have taken hundreds of hours—maybe thousands—and they were only a fraction of the entire carved environment. She wondered how many people had labored away down there beneath the earth to carve life from stone, possibly for their entire life. Surely it had taken an army of sculptors and perhaps generations of them as well. The idea that a dragon might have done it never crossed her mind. They loved the intricate work of humans but they never did it for themselves.
They made it through the tunnel and into another room. This one still had its natural walls. Stalactites hung from the ceiling and stalagmites grew from the floor. Flecks of natural crystal glinted in the walls and ceiling as well. But it was the interior of this room that held her attention, not the walls. While the last room had been empty, this one was positively packed with stuff.
Although maybe stuff wasn’t the best word for what filled this smaller cavern. To her, it looked like treasure.
Little tables stood everywhere, each with an object of unimaginable wealth on its surface. One held a sword with a hilt crusted in diamonds. Another displayed a goblet made of gold. A sarcophagus leaned up against one of the walls as if to watch the room for who knew how many centuries. A few crowns rested on separate tables, some bedecked in jewels and some far humbler, but all of them heavy with the power of the people who’d once worn them, people who were long gone.
She could have spent an hour in that room. Her keen gaze drifted across daggers made of jade, strange tools carved of obsidian, and a porcelain mask of a beautiful woman’s face.
Brusquely, she reminded herself they had to clear the room and keep moving.
They proceeded through another tunnel to the next room. She prepared herself for anything—mountains of gold coins, lost paintings of Michelangelo, or even the skeletons of kings, but what she saw was far stranger.
The room contained Pez dispensers—thousands of them, all sorted by set. There was Batman, Joker, and all the other villains from Gotham. Nearby stood a few of the heads of cereal mascots, all ready to serve candy from their necks. She even noticed a collection of US presidents, although they were of substantially lower quality than many of the others. They appeared to be knock-offs that this dragon, in its centuries of life with and limitless wealth, had tracked down for some reason she would never understand.
The next room was different than the other two in that instead of a carefully curated collection or obviously intentioned sculpted walls, it was left entirely in its natural state. A similarity was the vast and garish display of wealth. Although unlike the other two rooms, the wealth on display here wasn’t organized in any kind of system she could discern. While the first room had gemstones embedded into the wall and the second and third had been carefully organized, this room’s glut of treasure lay strewn over the floor. It made her think of the aftermath of a boss battle in one of the online games her brother liked to play. And like the aftermath of one of those, a dead dragon sprawled in the center of the room.
“Shit,” Emerald said.
Kristen nodded and fanned out into the room.
Stonequest, Erin, and Heartsbane entered from another passageway and they joined their teammates in securing the area. While they did this, Lumos approached the victim.
It was immediately obvious to Kristen that the room contained no intruders, but she followed Emerald all the same and looked behind piles of gold and treasure chests that lay open to spill strands of pearls. While she checked these nooks and crannies for the killer, she watched Lumos tend to the dead dragon.
It was a supremely odd and strangely beautiful experience to see a dragon tend to another’s wounds. She had seen them check fallen dragons but always in human form. Lumos didn’t change, though. He simply approached the blueish dragon, stretched his long neck, and sniffed a few times.
This obviously satisfied some question the gold dragon had asked as he then reached out with his tail. He moved slowly and almost tenderly and touched the chest of the fallen dragon with the spine at the tip of his tail.
Finally, he spoke. The words were heavy and sank into Kristen’s mind like lead weights thrown from the side of a ship to drag her deeper and deeper. “He’s dead.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
Once they made sure the location was safe and that the dragon they had been sent to help was dead, Stonequest called backup in to help with Icebreeze. Apparently, that was the victim’s name. They didn’t have to wait long for others to arrive, but it still felt like a long time for her to be inside this strange dragon home.
“Do all dragons have places like this? Do you guys?” she asked her team. She’d wanted to examine the body but Stonequest and Lumos were adamant that none of them were to approach until the examiner had attended to it.
“I have a cave,” Lumos confirmed, “but nothing like this. Icebreeze was powerful and well respected. Most of us don’t grow this wealthy. That someone could get in here is…well, it’s troubling.”
“We came down the elevator with no problem,” she pointed out.
“But he would’ve heard us coming. These places are designed to have an easy entrance. It’s a way to trap your attacker,” Emerald explained.
As if on cue, the elevator rumbled to life. They could hear it rattle and echo through the entire chamber. There was no question that it was in operation and using it to sneak in would have been impossible.
“Could there be another way in?” Kristen asked.
“It’s not likely,” Heartsbane said. “Dragon lairs normally only have one dragon-sized entrance.”
“So there could be other ways in?” she prodded.
Heartsbane and Stonequest shared a look. In it, he seemed to try to make her shut up. She kept her aura hidden but she stormed away all the same.
“Kristen, we don’t need that right now. The examiner will be here at any second. Let him do his job, answer any questions he has, and for the love of roast sheep, don’t say anything to him about your…conspiracy theories.” He looked supremely annoyed.
“Asking about another entrance is not a conspiracy theory,” she protested.
“But pushing this narrative about humans somehow being capable of doing this is not helping anyone at all.”
“I’m not pushing anything.”
“You’ll keep your mouth shut when the examiner gets here. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she responded. It would be better for this examiner to come to his own conclusions anyway.
He entered in human form a few moments later, although it was obvious to her that he was a dragon and made no attempt to hide his aura. In a black hat and a long coat, he looked like every detective from every movie made before the advent of color.
“Stonequest,” he said by way of greeting the team.
“Senior Investigator Windlock, it’s good to have you here,” Stonequest replied cordially.
“Did you guys touch anything? Pocket any of these Pez dispensers?” Windlock asked.
“No, sir.”
“And Timeflash, did you do anything to the walls? I don’t see a scratch on them. I’d understand if you wanted to preserve a place so beautiful.” Windlock scratched his chin.
&nb
sp; “Sir, you know fixing something of that magnitude is well beyond my abilities,” Erin Timeflash replied with a small smile.
He chuckled and his professional demeanor cracked for the first time. “I know, I know. I’m merely doing my diligence. It’s funny though, huh? Not a scratch in the entryway and not a gem knocked loose. Nothing else has toppled over either. Maybe this room saw the scuffle but it’s hard to tell with all the coins strewn about like this. Do you mind putting this room back to where it was?”
“If you think it’ll help.” She shrugged.
“Indulge me.”
Erin Timeflash raised her wings and activated her bizarre powers. She was unable to turn back time and had made this quite clear to Kristen on multiple occasions, but it was hard to fathom her powers doing anything else.
She raised her wings, pumped them slowly, and flicked her tail from one side to the other as her magic went to work before her.
First, a pile of coins flew backward before a smattering of gems on the floor reassembled into the small pile they’d been in before. A treasure chest—shattered and hidden beneath a pile of loot—put itself back together and filled itself. A few necklaces reknitted and piles of coins reformed. Others were pushed one way or the other as if the victim’s had pressed against them.
Her dragon body began to tremble and shake, starting with her tail and wings but soon spreading to her entire body.
Windlock noticed this and waved at her to stop. “That’ll be fine, Timeflash. I didn’t mean to push you on that.”
“Sorry, sir. I had thought this room would have been like the others—organized and everything—but it wasn’t.” She released a deep breath. “Sorry, but it’s hard to use my power when there’s not an obvious pattern to put everything back to. Bricks in a building or the walls of a household respond well to this kind of energy, but piles of treasure are more difficult.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to push you.” Windlock seemed genuinely concerned for Timeflash but she was all right. She caught her breath while he approached the body. In all the movement of the treasure, the dead, blueish dragon hadn’t moved at all. Her powers didn’t work on the living or the dead, only inanimate objects.
“Lumos, do you see anything out of the ordinary?” the examiner asked.
“You mean besides a dragon dead in his home without any signs of a struggle?” the golden dragon countered.
“We’ll see about the struggle. The rest of the team is checking the place as we speak, but I was referring to the body.”
“Only the one wound, sir.”
Windlock approached the dead dragon, still in his human body, and pulled a rubber glove on. It was a supremely odd thing, Kristen thought, to see this dragon of unknowable age do something so sensible. She decided in that moment that she liked Windlock. He seemed practical.
“Brockton, are you ready with a scroll?” he yelled before he began to poke and prod at the dead dragon.
“Yes, sir!” replied a voice that sounded a little out of place. It didn’t have the careful, non-regional diction that most dragons had, nor did it have the midwestern drawl she had grown up with. The guy didn’t sound like a Detroiter either. He sounded like maybe he was from the Northeast to Kristen, but she couldn’t be sure.
Wherever he was from, he was obviously a mage. A scroll and a ballpoint pen floated in from the room of Pez dispensers and both hovered near Windlock. Kristen had never seen such a display of magic. She’d seen Atramento make pens write by themselves in the paper dungeon, but to see both tools float from the other room and hover in readiness was a whole other matter. It was like something out of a kid’s book. The examiner paid them no more attention than a coroner would a tape recorder.
“This is Senior Investigator Windlock. It’s May 29th. We’re here investigating the death of Sir Titus. We are in his gold room with no obvious signs of flight or battle. Some kind of scuffle, perhaps, but it’s impossible to reconstruct given the disorganized nature of the room. Titus is dead and the apparent cause of death is a broken heart. Scratch that—a puncture wound to the chest.”
When he told the pen to “scratch that,” it ran a line of ink through the phrase that sounded like Titus had been a scorned lover.
“There’s a single small entry wound slightly to the left of the center of the chest. Internally we have…dragon’s flame! We have a ton of internal damage. The heart has sustained massive injury and the lungs have also been shredded. The wounds are consistent with some kind of natural dragon weapon. Not teeth, obviously, as there’s only the one wound, but the reaction to whatever punctured the skin is the same as it would be with dragon wounds. I don’t want to draw any conclusions yet, but we’re looking at a horn, a spike, or maybe a tail sting. It might be worth investigating dragons who have a single protrusion morphology.”
Windlock waited for the pen to catch up. Once it did, he continued his assessment. “Furthermore, this is the only wound on Titus’ body. I see no other lacerations, abrasions, or bruising. It seems obvious that the wound itself was caused by a dragon, but there are none of the telltale signs of battle.”
He paused and pushed on the dragon’s body here and there. “I don’t even feel broken ribs or bruises from blunt force trauma. I think it’s safe to say this was a surprise attack, as his body suffered only the one injury and his lair seems completely undamaged.”
Again, he paused and waited for the pen to catch up. “Have I missed anything else? Do we have any other leads on what could have done this without otherwise marking our victim? Is there missing treasure or anything else besides the alarm?” Windlock asked.
“It could be a gunshot wound,” Kristen said, unable to help herself.
“Is that right?” He raised an eyebrow and gestured at the pen to write something down.
Stonequest was far less amused. He spun to Kristen, clapped a hand on her shoulder, and marched her to the edge of the room. “Did I not make myself clear when I told you to keep your mouth shut?”
“He asked a question,” she argued.
“Not the one that you answered,” Stonequest responded furiously. “This is not the time to throw these theories out there.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, rest assured, Lady Steel, I will go over the reasons in vivid detail before the day is up. But right now, we will let Investigator Windlock do his job and we will not offer any more theories of this nature.”
“Fine.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then.” Stonequest marched back toward Windlock and put himself squarely between the investigator and Kristen. She still couldn’t understand why he acted this way. They’d seen two dragons killed by humans armed with guns in addition to the motorcyclists who’d tried to rob another dragon’s treasure convoy during transit. They’d also been armed with weapons that could hurt dragons. Despite this, Stonequest continued to try to act like everything was fine and there was no explanation beyond dragon on dragon violence. It was beyond frustrating to her and it was stupid. Dragons were dying, and he refused to even do a full investigation. Hopefully, Windlock would prove to be less willfully ignorant.
Although she didn’t want to push Stonequest, either. She’d stay quiet—or as quiet as she could.
While the SWAT leader went to talk to Windlock about the body, her focus was drawn to the mage who’d sent the scroll to help the dragon investigator. He noticed her attention, walked over, and extended his hand to shake.
“Brockton, Larry Brockton. You must be Kristen Hall, the Steel Dragon. I’ve read an awful lot about you, but I guess you probably hear that all the time. Not many people grew up human and became a dragon. I won’t lie, when I was a kid, I thought that might’ve been me, but I’m only a mage.”
“It’s, uh…nice to meet you, Mr. Brockton,” Kristen said, took his hand, and marveled that he’d said all that without taking a breath. “You seem to have me at a disadvantage. I can’t say I know anything about you.�
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Brockton laughed. “No surprise there, ma’am, none at all. See, I used to work at a convenience store in Burlington. That’s in Vermont, by the way.” He laughed again and she almost had time to say something before he plowed on. “Until then, I’d always been able to do a little magic, but I’d never known it was magic, right? Like I’d be so hungry at dinner and my mom would be, like, wow, I don’t remember making all these potatoes, or I’d want to win at hockey and my puck would go in, that kind of thing, you know?”
She nodded, unable to interrupt the barrage of words.
“Anyway, there was a robbery and my magic came in. You know what I’m saying? Well, of course you do I read all about your big bust when those assholes—pardon my French—fired a rocket at you and you transformed into your steel body. How cool is that by the way? Steel skin? It must be wicked.”
“It’s great but… uh, you were talking about a robbery?”
“Oh yeah, sorry about that, yeah. Okay, these two guys point their guns at me and tell me to empty the register, so I did. I picked up every damn quarter in there and pelted the assholes with them. It made the local TV show and everything on account of it being on the security footage. I was famous for, like, a week and then Sir Windlock over there showed up and said he wanted my help. He said he could train me and I could join a security force if I wanted to.”
“And you said yes?”
“Fuck no I didn’t say yes! Oh, sorry about the French again. I said no, told him to get lost and even hurled some quarters at him for good measure. He left all right, but another dragon arrived the next day. This one gave me a second option. Death by incineration. I volunteered right then and there and boy, am I happy to work with Windlock. We have been at it ten years and he’s yet to threaten to light me on fire. I don’t know about you, but I like that in a boss.”
The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2) Page 40