The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

Obscura walked closer, her movements almost languid. She was obviously enjoying this. Dragons might have believed humans were less than them, but in this fight, she was happy to play the animal.

  “I won’t quit,” Kristen snarled, although it sounded more like a choked plea. Even she could hear her strength failing her.

  “I don’t want you to quit, you silly little girl. I want you to die.”

  The shadow dragon didn’t even have to move fast to take her. She simply snapped, bit her shoulder, and twisted until the pain overcame her failing strength. Kristen rolled over, on her back now. Obscura released her and instead, thrust a claw into the fresh wound.

  She writhed but she couldn’t escape.

  Her enemy moved to stand over her. “It is a complete and utter moral failure that you have been so brainwashed by humans, but in your last moments of life, I do find myself thinking of the silly apes and their petty traditions. Tell me, do you have any last words?”

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Kristen wanted to spit in Obscura’s face. She wanted to curse her name and tell her that she would be avenged but the pain was too much. The shadow dragon had her pinned and one clawed hand drove into her shoulder.

  It took most of her strength to stay conscious. Instead of saying anything, her head lolled to the side. Anything was better than having to face this beast who had haunted mankind since before history.

  Her gaze came to rest on a small black object. A gun. Her almost unconscious mind registered the weapon with surprise. What was a gun doing hiding in a pile of ash under a burned bush?

  Clarity seeped in and reminded her that it was Constance’s gun, the weapon that had shot her in the leg and doomed her to lose this fight and her life. More importantly, it had been loaded with bullets that could hurt dragons.

  Too bad it was empty.

  Except it wasn’t. She suddenly realized that it couldn’t be.

  The assassin had shot her in the leg because she intended to go inside to kill Amythist Skyjewel. That meant there had to be at least one more bullet inside capable of killing a dragon. Unfortunately, she couldn’t use it as it was beyond the reach of her claws. Maybe her tail could have pulled the weapon closer, but that was nothing more than a broken mass of flesh and dislocated bones.

  “This is disappointing,” Obscura purred. “I had hoped you would make some petty remark about hope or justice or maybe for you to simply shit yourself, but I see now that I pulverized you too completely for you to even understand this moment. Truly, you are a pathetic excuse for a dragon.”

  That was when she remembered that she wasn’t a dragon—or only a dragon, anyway. She was one who knew what it was like to be a human. She’d grown up playing with human kids and sharing human meals. Like them, she’d grown up afraid of the sky—as so many human children were—always watching past their parents’ reassurances and wondering if the dragons would turn on them and burn the whole world down. She’d played humans and dragons as a kid. One would be the dragon and chase the others until they could find somewhere they could hide, somewhere small to squeeze into and get away. Even as a kid, she had known that being small was the only defense against these fire-breathing terrors of the sky. There she was, facing a dragon larger than she’d ever met before, and once again, it felt like the only option.

  Kristen would simply have to try to be small.

  She transformed into her human shape. A cloud of silver glitter briefly exploded from her and collapsed onto her smaller form. Now, instead of Obscura thrusting a claw into her shoulder, she had Kristen caged under her claw. Fortunately, it was an inadequate cage. The dragon was so big that she could slip out between her claws.

  Her enemy could have killed her then—all it would have taken was one snap of her spiked tail against her head. She knew it too. When Kristen escaped, the ancient dragon merely laughed.

  “Truly, you understand your place. Perhaps Steel Runt is a better name for you than Bitch. I hate dogs, but even I know a good bitch should have plenty of fight in her.”

  Kristen ignored her as best she could. She moved doggedly toward the gun that Constance had dropped. Her leg burned, she still couldn’t see out of one of her eyes, and it was hard to breathe after the pummeling she’d received, but at least she could no longer feel her broken wings or paralyzed tail.

  “Your human form will be easier to kill than your dragon one,” Obscura said languidly and again reminded her of a cat toying with a bird. “Maybe there was a time where your steel skin would have protected you from me, but the oath I swore means that time is long past.”

  Kristen was so incredibly close. Her leg screamed in pain—finally done with walking—so she flung herself prone and grasped the pistol. She tried to roll and come up with the gun, but she couldn’t get onto her feet. Her injured leg hurt too damn badly.

  In the time it took her to basically fall over, snatch the gun, and push shakily to one knee, Obscura flew overhead and came to land directly in front of her. She sat on her haunches, wrapped her tail around her feet, and flicked the end of it ever so slightly like the world’s most powerful and pissed-off cat.

  With a deep breath to steady her arm—even that hurt—she raised the pistol to aim at her enemy.

  “Oh, you stupid little girl. Bullets cannot hurt dragons, especially a bullet fired from that kind of gun. Maybe if you had one your friends with their high caliber weapons close by, you could have slowed me—those big bullets can really sting—but that kind of weapon won’t do a thing to me. I’m immune to such petty worries. All dragons are. This is simply more proof that you have wasted any potential you might have had by growing up in one of those human rat nests.”

  “You know what?” Kristen said, her gaze locked on Obscura. “You talk too damn much.”

  She fired the gun at her broad chest at almost point-blank range.

  It blew a messy hole in the massive dragon. It didn’t explode but rather shredded her hard dragon scales and ripped her flesh to pieces.

  But even this wasn’t enough to kill the ancient dragon. Despite the massive, bloody hole in her chest that spewed blood, rage kept her alive.

  Obscura roared and lunged at Kristen with her jaws, fire already blossoming in her throat to finish her off if her teeth didn’t.

  She fired the pistol at her open jaws.

  The bullet went through the shadow dragon’s top jaw and she shrieked in pain. She now had an extra hole behind her nose and before her eyes. If she were to try to eat a human, they could simply step up and stand on her tongue.

  It was an insane wound, one that might prove deadly. Still, she didn’t stop.

  Kristen didn’t hesitate. She shot her once more in the head.

  That bullet caught her between the eyes and the top of her head was simply blown away like Kristen had popped a water balloon filled with blood.

  Obscura’s massive body—now lifeless—collapsed. The dead dragon’s wings flapped weakly a few times, her tail twitched for a moment, and all movement ceased, the corpse completely still. Kristen had seen dragons die before, but what happened next would prove to her that there was something to the oath Obscura had sworn.

  Black tendrils rose from her body, first from her heart, then from her tongue as if her belief plus the words she’d spoken had been what bound her to her course. She felt fear then. This was an oath meant for her. Would it peel off Obscura’s body and invade hers? Or perhaps bring the dragon back from the dead by healing wounds that nothing should have been able to live through? Would it simply kill her? If Obscura had failed sooner, perhaps she would already be dead.

  But it seemed the magic of this particular ilk wasn’t interested in doing its master’s wishes now that she’d failed. It seeped from Obscura’s body, first from her heart and tongue and then from her eyes and ears, and finally, between her claws. The mist coagulated into droplets that became tiny black worms that writhed and pulsated as they turned on the shadow dragon to devour her skin and her flesh. Soon, nothing was left b
ut bones and a shattered skull that Kristen had already destroyed with her pistol.

  It was over.

  Obscura was dead.

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  “Kristen, hey.” Her alarm clock was really annoying. “Hey, Hall, snap to it!”

  She opened her eyes to see Drew’s face in front of a cloudy sky. She lay in the grass, her entire body basically on fire with pain although she didn’t quite remember how she got there.

  “There’s my little dragon. Are you all right?”

  When she forced herself to smile, even that hurt. “We have to hang out more outside of work.”

  “It looks like you won’t be hanging out for a while,” Hernandez said. “Is any part of your body not broken?”

  Slowly, she pushed herself up and blinked to settle her vision. She could see out of both eyes again, although the one Obscura had gouged out was still hazy. Hopefully, she told herself, it would improve with time. She prayed that was the case and forced her mind not to dwell on it.

  “I’ll be fine. I only need time to heal and some food. Can one of you do me a favor and see if there’s a fucking bullet in my leg?”

  Drew nodded and helped her to her feet. Hernandez dropped to one knee and looked at her leg.

  “I have bad news for you, Hall. The bullet is definitely still under the skin at the back of your leg. It must have been stopped by your steel skin when it tried to go through. If you want, I can take it out.”

  “Get that fucking thing out of me,” she replied.

  “I would say this is gonna hurt,” the woman said, “but compared to everything else that’s wrong with your fucking body, this might not be so bad.”

  “Just do it.”

  Hernandez drew a knife, flipped it deftly in her hand, and stabbed her in the thigh. It hurt, there was no way to pretend that it didn’t, but she endured it. After all, it was only another flesh wound, one of many. When the tip of the blade slid past the bullet, that definitely hurt, but when the bullet was removed, she felt nothing but relief. It was like aloe on a sunburn or water after a trudge through the desert. She knew that her body could heal now, although it would take time. More importantly, she would live. Before, she hadn’t been so sure. The pain had been so intense, she hadn’t known if it would stop. Even the rest of her body hadn’t seemed to heal properly. Those bullets really were a force to be reckoned with.

  “Something tells me pulling a bullet out of her won’t do the trick,” Butters said and pointed at Obscura’s corpse.

  Kristen immediately saw what he meant. It was almost laughably obvious. While she was all scratches, bruises, and breaks, the shadow dragon’s body was nothing but clean, off-white bones. Only the skull was broken, shattered in two places from the bullets. The oath that she had sworn had taken everything else.

  The door to the manor opened and Jim came out with his gun in hand. “Amythist is locked up tight in her safe room and—holy shit. What happened out here?”

  She looked around at the blackened landscape and vaguely remembered that when they’d first arrived, it had been a verdant garden with bushes thick enough to hide security equipment.

  Now, it was a wasteland. Virtually every inch of the ground had been scorched. Here and there, a few blades of grass were still green but that only heightened the sense of desolation, a reminder that this morning, the entire estate was a garden. The plants were all blackened stumps and the weapons they’d concealed were either destroyed and bent out of shape or melted into slag. There was the greenhouse—or what was left of it—that she remembered plummeting into. Apparently, Obscura had also pounded her against the side of mansion as there was a dragon-sized crater in the brick.

  “It’s a long story,” she said.

  “I’ll say it is! When I went in, you confronted that human woman, Constance. A few minutes later we have a dragon skeleton out here? Based on the size of that, I’d guess Obscura? How the hell did you manage that? I was only gone a few minutes.”

  “Like I said, long story.” Kristen limped toward Jim with Drew’s help. “The kind of story that can only be told over a few shots if it’s to be told in its entirety.”

  “I’d buy the whole bottle of whiskey to find out what happened here,” Butters said.

  She tried to laugh but God, it hurt. Drew noticed and lowered her gently to the ground. He’d probably realized that he’d had to carry most of her weight. She had barely managed to walk.

  “Let’s get that leg patched up. It looks like you’ve lost considerable blood,” he said.

  Kristen nodded and stretched her leg out.

  He cut away her pant leg and gasped. “You know, I never cease to be amazed at your powers. You were shot and the muscle is already reknitting itself. What about your eye? It’s quite milky.”

  “Obscura punctured it with a claw. If it’s intact at all, I’ll count that as a win right now.”

  Drew placed a hand over her other eye and held up fingers for her to count.

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Close enough,” he said with a brief smile. Kristen knew it had to be hard for them to see her like this. Besides the grievous wounds in her leg and her eye, her neck felt absolutely ragged from when Obscura had tried to rip her head off. Her body was covered in wounds too, bruises and beatings that had transferred over from her dragon form, but she’d still won. She tried to tell herself that meant something. Maybe it would in the morning. Better yet, maybe it would once she’d had a beer.

  They carried her to the SWAT van and put her inside. Drew told her Stonequest had called and said he was on his way. He wanted to stay until Dragon SWAT got there and secured the scene.

  “How did Stonequest know you were coming here? Have you guys been in contact?” she asked.

  “No, nothing like that.” He looked kind of sheepish.

  “Dragon SWAT knows we are the knights of the Steel Dragon,” Keith shouted, cracked open a beer from a cooler, and gave it to her. “We didn’t make it in time to record your battle, by the way.” Now, he sounded sheepish.

  “It’s great to know I have my own cavalry,” she said. “Too bad you’re all so slow.”

  “So slow?” Jim looked incredulous. “I was inside for minutes—as in less than five.”

  “Like I said, too slow.”

  The Wonderkid merely shook his head as he looked around the destroyed estate. It really was an impressive amount of destruction. Obviously, the grounds had been burned and the greenhouse was a pile of twisted metal and glass, but they’d done damage to the mansion as well. Apparently, when Obscura had hurled her into the roof, she’d taken a chimney and a few ornamental spires, plus a skylight and what had to be close to a hundred bricks. Seeing so much that had all been basically destroyed by using her steel dragon body as a tool was kind of cool.

  “So, did Obscura show up before you could face Constance or what?” Jim asked.

  “I was able to talk to her for a minute,” she explained and sipped the beer with enthusiasm. Good Lord, it tasted good going down her bruised throat. Swallowing actual food would likely be a nightmare but fortunately, there was beer, ice cream, and milkshakes. She told herself she’d eat nothing but those until she felt like herself again,

  “And?” he prompted.

  That brought her back the present. She had a concussion or two as well, she reasoned, because the idea of taking a nap right now sounded really, really good. But not yet, not now. She had to tell her team what she’d discovered.

  “They’re making bullets out of dragon pieces.” She raised the gun which she hadn’t yet put down. Even when she’d awakened, she had clutched it in her hand, unable to release the weapon that had saved her life. No one had said a thing about it until now, which she found slightly funny but mostly terrifying. A few scant years ago, she’d been a young woman—a girl, really. She’d known how to handle a gun—her dad was a cop and father to a beautiful daughter, after all, so it wouldn’t do for her not to know how to handle
one—but she’d never have considered herself a gun person. Now, keeping her hands on one was like second nature.

  Kristen checked the pistol and found there were three more rounds in the magazine. Each of them was a creamy color like a piece of tooth or claw. She had known that Constance had told the truth. After all, she’d been shot in the leg with a bullet that had been able to punch through her steel skin like aluminum foil. Even so, seeing the unspent bullets was another matter.

  It made it all feel so much more real—and more dangerous and urgent. She didn’t like the feeling at all. Instinctively, she turned to look at the bones of Obscura. Would the assassin be able to harvest her bones to make weapons? Probably not. She had said they’d used teeth and claws, but the skeleton had those as well. Was this how a war between humans and dragons would be fought? Dragons would eat humans while humans would harvest dragons? It truly sounded like a nightmare scenario. She knew she wouldn’t have to explain it to Stonequest but suddenly, she didn’t want to go until she knew exactly what would happen to the dead dragon’s body.

  “But why make weapons to kill dragons at all?” Jim asked. “If they’re doing it to rebel against dragons, it seems like an arms race they’ll never win. And for some reason, I can’t see them trying to arm local communities to protect themselves, what with all the subterfuge and assassinations.”

  “This could make dragons turn on humans simply because they won’t know what else to do,” Kristen said. “It’s the Dragon Council’s nightmare.”

  “Now that’s something I don’t want to think about.” Butters tried to chuckle to break the mood. “My bad dreams are all either about falling, my teeth falling out, or showing up to work naked. What kind of nightmares does a dragon have if they can fly, regrow their teeth, and regularly fly around without so much as a speedo on?”

  “War,” she said, perhaps too cryptically as everyone in the van fell silent.

  “Do you care to elaborate on that fucking bombshell?” Hernandez asked.