“You should be safe now. Most of the steam is flowing into the room below us. Get up top and get to safety.”
“We’re not leaving you,” Drew said.
To save time, she pulsed her aura to him so he would understand that he wouldn’t be leaving her but saving Keith and Jim.
He nodded as emotional understanding resonated with him far faster than thoughts could.
Kristen scrutinized the broken chamber below her, now filled with smoke, fire, and steam.
A fitting setting for the Steel Dragon to end the terror Shadowstorm had inflicted on the Motor City.
Satisfied that her friends were now safely on their way, she dropped into the steam and smoke and landed effortlessly with a pump of her wings.
Shadowstorm was waiting.
He emerged from the vaporous cloud in a whirlwind of claws. She tried to block his attacks with her claws but found his dragon body was simply too big to stop with her arms alone. His claws raked her belly, a sharp pain she felt even through her steel skin. He knocked her on her back and attempted to rip her stomach open.
She tried to push him off and discovered that her back legs were much stronger so she forced them under his bulk and shoved him off. Her tail darted out and nicked him as he staggered into the steam. She looked at her belly, fearful that she’d see her guts spilling out, but she wasn’t so much as bleeding and couldn’t restrain a grin.
“Hey, Shadowstorm. You’re fucked!”
Kristen righted herself and tried flicking her tail. It was much faster than her arms and legs. He attacked from the steam again but this time, she defended herself with her tail. It arced and sliced one of his forearms, then the other as he tried to get past the darting blade. It seemed her tail worked almost completely by reflex. She thought block and her tail blocked. She thought stab his eyes and her tail did its damnedest to stab his eyes with its pointed tip and ax blade. Seriously, she liked her tail.
Once again, he vanished into the steam but this time, she followed him. She pumped her wings, cleared the obscuring vapor, and revealed her enemy, who hissed like an animal cornered in its burrow.
Obeying a deep inner impetus, she leapt forward, used her wings to carry her even farther than her muscles could, and attacked him with both claws and her tail.
Apparently, that was how dragons were supposed to attack. He defended against her claws and her tail, but he couldn’t stop her jaws. She pushed through his swipes and latched her teeth around his neck. His flesh gave beneath her bite. This would be the end of the monster who tried to destroy her city.
Shadowstorm turned insubstantial and slipped out of her bite.
For a second, Kristen thought he’d vanished completely but saw that he’d simply turned into his human form and slipped through her jaws and claws.
So, his shadow power wasn’t that special, then. He had merely learned how to use his transformation in an unusual way.
She turned and followed him and was alarmed to realize that her instincts very much liked pursuing a human. That was more than a little odd and she’d have to remember it. But there was some kind of perfect justice to ending him while he was in human form.
Too bad he had other plans.
As soon as he reached the massive opening in the ceiling, he transformed into a cloud of shadowy smoke. Two dragon wings emerged from the cloud, pumped a few times, and elevated him into the tunnels above them.
Kristen followed. At first, she grinned at the knowledge that she’d put this arrogant dragon on the defensive—until she realized that her team was probably still trying to get out of these tunnels.
She landed moments after him but he was already gone, vanished into the gloom and the steam that still seeped through the subterranean passages.
Immediately, she called on her aura. She felt him already another level above her. The coward was trying to escape. She could feel the fear in his chest and the terror at facing another dragon.
There wasn’t enough time to race down the tunnel, transform into a human, and run up the stairs to the next level, so she simply powered through the two ceilings above her. She found him there, but he wasn’t cowering.
Instead, he was coiled like a spring. As soon as her body was in range, he struck. He was a master of his aura and he’d used it to trick her.
Her stupidity drew a loud curse. She was halfway through the floor so she couldn’t dodge. Still, her steel skin would protect her.
Or so she thought.
Seconds before his claws touched her chest, the tips turned into black clouds of shadow. Instead of merely raking across the surface, they penetrated her steel skin and somehow reformed inside her and raked at the muscles in her chest.
Kristen roared in pain and managed to smash her tail through the ground and slice him across the chest. Otherwise, she very much thought she might be dead.
He didn’t give her time to recover or pull herself free but attacked again and again. His relentless assault forced her to all but demolish the tunnel in a poor attempt to defend herself.
The latest assault had scared her. He could somehow get his claws through her skin. What was to stop him from stabbing her directly in the heart? A vision of him reaching into her chest and plucking her heart from her filled her mind. She felt a pulse from his aura and knew her death was his intention.
A volley of gunfire erupted from the end of the hallway, and Shadowstorm spun toward it. “Your friends die today!” he bellowed and ran down the hallway.
Something above them exploded, and the hallway between the two dragons collapsed. An avalanche of bricks thundered on top of him.
“Meet us up top, Red!” Hernandez yelled. The woman had obviously made it inside the facility.
The Steel Dragon pulled herself free and moved into the collapsed hallway. Hernandez had blown the bottom of the first tunnel they’d been in, so she could see lights from the facility now. But she didn’t go up yet. Her adversary attempted to extricate himself from the wreckage.
She pounced, landed on the bricks, and drove them into his wounded body.
“It’s over, Sebastian. Stop fighting now and I’ll take you in alive,” she growled and flexed her aura to show him that she had reserves of strength left.
Beneath her, the bricks shifted and collapsed as Shadowstorm once again became insubstantial and freed his body from the rubble.
Kristen swiped viciously and tried to catch him with a claw when he became human, but he never fully did. Instead, he took his mist form once again and attempted to boil past her.
He tried to flee down the hole she had created but before he could, light flooded the space and his shadowy form dissipated to reveal the human-like Sebastian.
Blinded by the light, he glanced around quickly and stepped into the shadow.
“It’s not a fair fight anymore, Shadowstorm. I have backup. You won’t get out of here.”
“This was never a fair fight,” he hissed, surged forward, and transformed into his dragon form once he was in the shadow. She was ready for him, parried his tired attacks, and pushed him toward the blinding light.
Shadowstorm tried to turn to mist again but this time, she was prepared. As soon as the edges of his form blurred, she called upon the furnace she’d felt in her belly since she’d transformed.
White-hot flames erupted from her to trap him in her hands in his human body.
But even being incinerated at close range wasn’t enough to kill him. He struggled against her grasp, unable to use his transforming ability in the bright light, but the flames themselves didn’t hurt him.
That might have frustrated her if she was alone, but she knew she had backup. She clenched her fist tightly around him, ran directly below the light, and hurled him up and into the facility.
The reports of assault rifles rang out. She could tell that Beanpole had made it back from the van with guns for everyone.
She paused beneath the hole, pumped her wings, and elevated through it. The team had fired at Shadowst
orm when he’d reached the top of his ascent. He’d transformed into a dragon and stayed low.
“Incinerate that piece of trash,” Drew yelled. He stood beside the hole she had come through and near one of the dozen massive lights that pointed into the aperture.
If that wasn’t code, she didn’t know what the hell was. She nodded.
In the facility, though, it was much harder to corner her enemy. She had the sense that this was how dragons truly fought—in the air.
He raced around the room and his slow wingbeats hardly explained his great speed. She followed and realized that up there, without walls so close around her, she could really move.
He was tired, while she was exhilarated, and she was gaining on him.
Kristen caught him and they exchanged blows from claw and tail. He managed to thrust her off and resumed his flight around the facility. As he altered his trajectory toward one of the windows, he began to turn insubstantial again. They were large but not so big that he could fit his dragon body through them.
“The lights!” she yelled, but her team had already understood the importance of them. Three lights illuminated the window and in his weakened state, Shadowstorm couldn’t transform. Instead, his head shattered the glass, his wings and shoulders impacted the brick frame, and he tumbled into a writhing pile of claws and black scales.
She swooped to land on top of him and pounded into his chest with her claws like a cat pouncing on a toad.
He cried out in agony as she ripped at his chest with her steel claws but she could tell that wouldn’t be enough to finish him. His aura showed pain but it didn’t weaken at all. His healing powers would keep him alive unless she destroyed his heart or his brain.
Or his throat, she thought grimly.
Her dragon form had few reservations about biting through an enemy’s jugular. She snapped but once again, Shadowstorm became insubstantial and squirmed out from her hold.
Down on the ground, the lights the team was using couldn’t penetrate every corner.
He slipped through one of the paths of shadow between the equipment.
It seemed the others were ready for this eventuality as well, though. Once he was in human form, a furious barrage of assault rifle fire once again drew more curses from the enemy.
“If I can’t kill you, I’ll have to settle for them,” her adversary yelled and raced toward the gunshots.
When she tried to follow, she was immediately stopped because of her size. She transformed into her human body in a flurry of silver dust and raced after him.
They sprinted between conveyor belts and towering equipment. She attempted to gain on him as he followed the gunshots to their source. Bullets struck him and drew more of his dark, shadowy blood from his body, but he didn’t seem to care. He merely raced forward, hungry for death.
The shadow dragon didn’t realize he was drawing ever closer to the incinerator, but then, why would he?
Kristen rounded a corner and saw the flash of gunshots from inside the incinerator.
Hernandez’s voice yelled from inside the tower of bricks. “Bring it on, you fucking lizard.”
Shadowstorm roared and raced forward, transformed into his dragon form once more, and extended his massive head inside the structure.
No sooner was his head inside than lights flared and the tower exploded.
She watched in awe as five stories of brick almost a century old collapsed onto his head in the cleanest demolition she had ever seen. It was even well-lit. The lights her team had used to limit his power illuminated every brick as they plunged onto the dragon to crush first his head, then his entire body under the destruction.
“Hell yeah! I always wanted to do that,” Hernandez shouted from behind her. She had a radio in one hand and a detonator in the other.
“Are you’re all right?” Kristen yelled over the clatter of bricks rather than the more appropriate, “How the hell did you get out of there?”
The other woman answered the unspoken question, though. “The dumbass really didn’t think nearly enough about tech. I left a radio strapped to a bundle of C4 in there.”
Kristen laughed and turned to the rubble and the defeated dragon.
The bricks moved and somehow, in defiance of the limits of what she could even understand, Shadowstorm pushed himself free.
He roared, his dragon form intact but broken. Both wings were hopelessly mangled. His tail worked and swished in fury, although there were kinks in it like a cat that had its tail slammed in a car door.
Although he was missing teeth and blood wept from many of his interlaced black scales, he wasn’t dead.
“Humans…death to humans,” he growled and inhaled in preparation to incinerate everyone in the room.
In an instant, she transformed into a dragon once more and raced forward to drive her full weight into his gut before he could release the flame.
With another roar, he collapsed onto the pile of brick. She body-slammed him again.
When they’d been in the air, there had been a kind of poetry to their fight—like eagles fighting over a fish or dragonflies over a pond, perhaps. What followed was far less elegant.
Despite possessing the body of a dragon, she felt more like an elephant seal as she and Shadowstorm pounded their bodies against each other again and again. They tumbled through the rubble and scattered it with their claws as they hurled their bodies together and each tried to find purchase on the other’s neck with their jaws.
“You could have ruled with me,” he hissed as she knocked him back.
“Why would I wish to rule nothing but the ash of the city I love?” she retorted.
“Love?” He said the word with the same disdain most people reserved for the words, “genocide” or “torture.” “You can’t love humans and be a dragon.”
His tail caught her, although he was too weak to knock her away. All he could do was slow her long enough to inhale and breath fire into the room. Garbage ignited, the paint on the walls burst aflame, and even bricks began to melt.
She considered pulling back. The flames were hot—intensely hot—but out of the corner of her eye she saw the fire started down in the tunnels had spread too. The flames had greedily followed remnants of trash and wooden scaffolding until they too had reached the recycling facility. Instead of only the center being on fire, every wall was.
“Kristen!” Keith shouted. “You have to get out of here.”
That steeled her resolve. “If humans can care for dragons, we can care for them.”
With new resolve, she pushed forward through his flames and felt the heat through her steel skin, feared it would melt, but no longer cared. She wouldn’t allow him to hurt her friends. She couldn’t, so she pressed forward despite the pain and the heat that threatened to pop her eyeballs like grapes. Finally, she reached him.
Kristen sliced his gut with a claw in the moment that the fire stopped, but he writhed, opened his jaws again, and breathed more fire on her.
The intelligence and cunning behind his eyes was gone. Instead of guile and false charm, she saw only hatred and rage burning hotter than the fire that spewed from his guts.
She lunged forward and used every ounce of her dragon speed to knock him back, but even then, the flames didn’t stop.
Left with no choice, she did what Shadowstorm had done to her. She had to if she wanted to save her friends. With whip-like speed, she uncoiled her long sinuous neck—the strike of a snake or a heron—and closed her steel teeth around his neck.
He didn’t try to turn insubstantial or fade into shadows or even attempt to escape. Instead, he twisted in an effort to position his mouth to spray flames at his adversary. When she closed her jaws and felt his windpipe crush and his jugular tear, she felt no guilt. She felt more like she’d put down a rabid beast than a human adversary.
But that had been Shadowstorm’s point until the very end. He wasn’t a human but something different.
Kristen stepped back and scrutinized his broken body.
He was dead. She’d almost severed his head and apparently, that was enough to kill a dragon. He lay amongst the brick and the flames, dead on the throne he’d tried to carve from her city.
“Hall! A little help!” She turned quickly at the sound of Drew’s voice. He and the team had climbed onto a piece of equipment and were now trapped. Flames licked at them from all sides. They’d probably be dead already except the broken windows and the hole in the ceiling where the incinerator had been let out the smoke that would otherwise have choked the room.
They had little time to spare. She pumped her wings and was there beside them in a moment. “Climb on my back,” she ordered and wondered how many times, if ever, this had happened. Did dragons use their abilities to save human lives? she didn’t care whether they did or didn’t. She was a dragon and she would use her abilities as she saw fit. Today, that meant saving the people who cared about her.
They complied, all six of them—Drew, Keith, Hernandez, Jim, Beanpole, and Butters.
“Butters, did you stop for a snack?” she asked. The rest hadn’t felt like anything, but he felt like someone had loaded her shoulders with sacks of grain. She smiled at the absurdity of the comparison she had made. A sack of grain would now be a trifle.
“You can come back for me,” the sniper said and shifted as he tried to get off. That was a lie, and he knew it. If she left him behind, he’d roast like the turkey he was named after.
“Sit still,” Kristen said and used her aura to calm her friends despite the inferno that roared all around them. They calmed—she could feel their emotions now as easily as she could see the heat of the flames all around her—and she pumped her wings to push herself above the flames.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t simply soar out. The superheated air wasn’t thick enough to support a steel dragon burdened with so many humans. But she honestly didn’t know what else she could do. She couldn’t simply bulldoze through a wall, not if she wanted her friends to survive.
“Can you turn off the steel, or what?” Keith shouted.
Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 1) Page 56