Flames to Free (Dred Dixon Chronicles Book 1)

by N. A. Grotepas

  In spite of the lore about him—his decline, his madness, his inability to stick around and be a dad—the few memories I had of him were happy.

  I tucked the photo in a desk drawer far away from where I’d stumble on it again. That whole thing was a mystery. I wanted answers, but I also didn’t relish the feelings the dad package brought up. It unsettled me, reminded me of everything I didn’t know, of the dark shadows of my history that still had no answers.

  My mom had remarried, and my step father raised me. That was good enough for me.

  Most of the time.

  9

  The Aerial Tram at Snowbird, a ski resort located up the canyon fifteen miles from the city, was primarily packed shoulder to shoulder and bike to bike with guys kitted out in hardcore mountain biking gear, with a few badass chicks thrown in for good measure.

  Hank and I—in our Flameheart chic attire (street clothes, really)—stood out like werewolves in a sheep pasture.

  We exchanged a look, then Hank sidled closer to me and asked, in a hushed voice, “Have you noticed, Dred, that people here always look like they’re about to head to the mountains and do some hiking? Or biking, in this case?”

  “What do you mean? Here in this gondola or here in Salt Lake City?” I asked.

  “Like you, Dred. Look at you. You’re wearing pants that look like you could hike in them. Not like my jeans. See, they’re denim. I don’t know what you call what you’re wearing, but it’s not denim.”

  “Cargo pants. But, wait, hang on,” I said, gazing out the windows of the spacious gondola, then pushing through a bevy of mountain bikers and their enormous bikes to get a better view out the front window.

  We could see the top of Hidden Peak now. Half the rocky ridge had been eaten away by something that had to be massive. It seemed giant boulders had been dislodged, only to tumble down the slope, leaving gashes and scars in the tundra plants and scrub brush that dotted the side of the mountain.

  Something major had happened.

  That wasn’t news to us. It was the reason we were heading there. But this was my first look at the evidence that had brought us up to the tops of the cliffs. Two days had passed since the incident with the demon as well as my unfortunate failure to cast a flame spell.

  We’d gotten a call that something crazy was happening at the top of the Snowbird gondola lift and we needed to investigate. From here it looked like it might have to do with dragons.

  Like most supernatural occurrences, normal humans only saw half the picture. The damage to the mountain top would be visible for them. But the cause of it? Not usually.

  We knew that there was a clan of fire dragons living up here. They had roosts and caves and broods of babies, and for the most part, the creatures lived undisturbed. Who would dare toy with a dragon?

  “Look at them. Circling like vultures,” Hank said beside me, his voice hushed. For the first time, I really noticed the timbre of it. There was a gravelly tone to it, but it was rich and strong. Something stirred in me that I tamped down quickly.

  I followed his gaze out the windows of the gondola. Several dragons had taken to wing and were swooping above the top of the peak. Their scales glimmered in the sunlight as their bodies bobbed up and down between their broad wings. The flight patterns were almost peaceful to watch. Well, they would have been if not for the flames shooting out of their muzzles.

  Before I could respond to Hank’s observation about my attire, the gondola entered the station at the summit and passengers began to exit. We followed the crowd out, avoiding mountain bikes and their owners.

  The platform was large, like a plaza. Tourists and bikers milled around the edges and chattering groups of people went into and exited the lodge in a continuous stream. That lodge held several restaurants and small gift shops. I surveyed the platform, searching for someone official-looking waiting for us to arrive. No one caught my eye, so I led us to the stairs at the edge of the platform, our feet clanking across the metal decking.

  Normals couldn’t see the dragons, which was all the better, since, who’d take a mountain bike ride under the threat of pissed off dragons?

  My first inclination was that the unsettled dragons were related to the constant influx of mountain bikers. But the dragons would be used to humans infringing on their space. This was a busy peak year-round, with skiers in the winter and hikers and bikers in the summer.

  “Let’s stay up here, Hank,” I said, as my partner began to descend the stairs that would take him to the bald mountaintop.

  “All right, fine. But I think we should go investigate.” He turned and climbed back up and stood beside me. He leaned against the railing and gazed out at the valley below us. “Almost as good as standing on top of a skyscraper back home.”

  “Better, and you know it.” I gave him a sly smile when his aviators turned to face me. “From right here, we have a better view of the ridge. Let’s just give it a minute before we go exploring. Besides, I don’t want to get into a fight with dragons if we can solve this without it.”

  “Dragons don’t scare me.” He turned toward the peak and studied the mountain top with me. “Kind of hard to breathe up here.”

  “That’s your weak New York City lungs,” I said, smiling to myself.

  Call me a dick, call me what you will, but it’s kind of nice to have one thing over big city snobs like Hank. Altitude. That was the one thing. Ridiculous, I know, but also gloriously mine.

  “You’ll get used to it. It’s like a fish out of water, my friend.”

  I could hear his breathing straining as he struggled with the elevation.

  “I’d think after two months, I’d have adapted already.”

  “No idea. But I think it requires several days to get used to it with each thousand feet you add. We just added like six thousand feet to our altitude.”

  “Then why aren’t you having a hard time?”

  I cocked my head and grinned. “I’m mountain raised. Like the Brumbies in The Man from Snowy River. Like Jim Craig.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, woman.”

  “There,” I said, pointing. Something abnormal caught my eye. Far from where we stood, something stirred in the gray and black talus of a steep slope, at the shadowed mouth of what appeared to be a cave.

  It was a gaping maw, full of darkness, and inside that shadow stirred a mishmash of brilliant colors. Hank and I watched as the color materialized and formed into a man-shape. And the man-shape was carrying a large bundle. Within the bundle I caught the metallic glint of sunlight against dragon skin as it squirmed and struggled to get free. It took me a long moment of studying and piecing together what I was seeing to understand that some of the color was the fabric of what seemed to be a Hawaiian shirt.

  As soon as the figure emerged from the cave, the dragons circling overhead swooped for it, breathing gouts of fire that streamed behind them and turned to black plumes of smoke.

  As I watched, I realized I’d grabbed a hold of Hank’s forearm and was gripping it tightly in anticipation of something terrible happening.

  If what I was seeing was the same human I’d seen at Lagoon watching the demon, some part of me hoped to witness devastation like I’d never seen before. Like the dragons wreaking havoc on him.

  But, before the dragons that had taken aim at him could reach the figure, he’d straddled a mountain bike and had moved the package till it was on his back. Soon he’d begun to careen down the mountainside, coasting to a single-track trail, which he then slipped into and followed.

  All with a young dragon slung over his torso, hanging off his back.

  “Shit,” I cursed aloud, my heart racing.

  “Double shit,” Hank agreed.

  “We should go after him,” I said fighting off the sense of urgency swelling in me.

  “Why?”

  I blinked at Hank. I turned to watch the lone figure zipping down switchbacks. “He’s obviously got a young dragon. What the hell does he want with a you
ng dragon?”

  “Not that I’m disagreeing, Dred, but is our job to protect supers from normals, or the other way around?”

  “Good question,” I said, feeling stumped. “But if that guy is stealing dragons, and pissing off dragons, and the dragons make war on humans, then he’s the problem. Not the dragons.”

  “Hence, he’s our problem and we need to take care of him. OK, OK, I think I can get behind that.”

  Both of our cell phones rang at that moment, before we could spring into action and make our next move.

  “Let’s go. There’s no way we can catch him on foot. We’ll try to find him at the bottom. Hello?” I said, answering the call and heading back to board the tram. The one we’d arrived on was gone, but another was about to drift into the loading dock.

  “Dred. We got a situation down here. How’s it looking up there?” It was Fua.

  “Just saw someone running off with a young dragon.”

  “Ah, dragon-napping. Hmm. These might be connected.”

  I heard Hank in the background, talking to someone else.

  “What is it?”

  “Downtown. We got a full grown adult dragon sitting on top of the temple, burning everything in sight.” The temple was the Mormon edifice at the center of downtown Salt Lake City. It was a sacred building to the adherents and they wouldn’t be happy about it being under attack from a dragon.

  “Oh shit.”

  “That’s right, oh shit. That’s what I said.”

  “Get someone else there, if you can. Cristian and Bianca. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  But that wouldn’t be very soon. We still had to ride the tram down to the bottom of the mountain, then drive down the canyon, then get downtown from the mouth of the canyon. Altogether, it’d be an hour before we got there. If only we were dragon-charmers. I’d snag one and ride it down—that would be so much faster.

  10

  Normals couldn’t see the dragon, unless they stared until they went cross-eyed, like those Magic Eye 3D things that were popular when I was a kid. Their minds were under a powerful spell called the Veil (very creative!) that had been cast ages ago by an ancient druid sorcerer in the fifteen hundreds.

  But they could see things the dragon did.

  So, what they saw at Temple Square were trees and buildings suddenly and seemingly without reason bursting into flames.

  I laughed. It wasn’t the best time to do it, but it just sort of got away from me. In a way, it looked like the judgment of god being irrationally unleashed upon several religious and sacred edifices.

  I guess, probably, a person could easily decide that rather than god, it was simply the devil raising hell and making war on the righteous.

  Yes, that’s very much probably what they thought, I realized as I surveyed the scene.

  This was a gorgeous, blue fire-breather, perched right on top of the golden statue of the Angel Moroni, which adorned the center spire, holding a trumpet to his lips, facing east.

  One of the temple spires burned, as did a section of scaffolding erected around one of the towers to paint it or clean it, whatever experts did periodically to old buildings.

  I had a feeling that Blue’s presence here in the city had something to do with what we’d seen up on top of Hidden Peak at Snowbird. It didn’t take much imagination to put that together, but still, I’m sure Hank would argue with me just because he enjoyed challenging me on almost everything.

  Fire engines had parked around the walkways, fountains of water pouring from their hoses to douse the many, many fires burning across the two blocks that comprised Temple Square in the city proper.

  Bianca and Cristian met up with us just below the fenced off temple grounds, between the temple and the South Visitor’s Center.

  “What have you tried?” I asked as Hank and I joined them.

  “Cristian shot a tranq up at it, but we need a stronger gun.”

  “What about just a standard gun?” Hank asked, taking off his bomber jacket and unholstering his Glock 19.

  “Cast any spells?” I asked.

  Bianca was a witch, while Cristian was a wizard. I didn’t understand why between the two of them they hadn’t lured the dragon off the top of the temple, got it into a stasis spell, and transported it back to its home.

  “No,” Bianca said, glancing at Cristian as though something odd was up.

  “What’s wrong?” This was what we were trained for. It should have been taken care of already.

  “It’s a female,” Cristian said, coming to stand beside us.

  “So?” Hank said.

  “And she’s pregnant,” Bianca said, quietly, avoiding eye contact.

  I looked up, squinted and focused for a few seconds. Sure enough, I caught a glint of sunlight that betrayed a bulge in the dragon’s belly.

  We had rules about pregnant females. That may have sounded sexist or something weird, but really it was perfectly natural and right to protect creatures of all kinds that are carrying a baby. Basic evolution and instinct. And, even though this dragon was here raising hell, she was here raising hell because her nest had been invaded and she was protecting her brood.

  Damn. I had to hand it to the girl. I watched her, almost bucking up there on the golden statue, throwing her head back and forth, unleashing a bone-jarring roar and streams of flame in an awesome display of power.

  A surge of respect for this mother and her instincts flashed through me as I sorted through it all in my head for twenty seconds.

  I caught Hank running his hands through his hair as I lowered my gaze. A look of exasperation flashed across his face. He pulled out his tapered stylus—made of shaped and smoothed amethyst—and began using the tip like a pencil to create runes in the air. They left flickering traces of golden light with each shape.

  Around us the cacophony of fire engines and firefighters continued. I heard a news truck pull up behind us as I wrestled with what to do. The newscaster began barking orders at her crew.

  “Hank,” I said, “you’re not summoning your runic Glock, are you?”

  “I am, Dred. This town needs an enema,” he said.

  “OK, one, nice Batman 1989 quote—though I disagree with your prescription,” I said. “And two, we have rules about pregnant females.”

  “You’re just going to let two city blocks burn because of a pregnant dragon?” he asked calmly, taking a moment out of his air-runing to look at me.

  When he got calm and I felt like shouting, I’d so far learned that this meant I was escalating too quickly and needed to take it down a notch.

  I sucked in a deep breath and decided. It took a split second.

  “Yes, I will. To protect a baby? Hell yes.”

  Was I nuts? I almost wondered that, actually. Then I remembered what we’d seen up on the mountain. And this dragon down here, she was not happy.

  Hank stopped forming his runes and the purple-golden glow faded from the stylus gripped in his hand. He looked at me. “What are the rules with pregnant females, Dred?”

  “No tranqs, no damaging spells, if we do something that involves a spell, the first spell we put around the female is a spell of protection, then we can encase the female with another spell, for example, a stasis spell or a spell of binding to move the female to safety.”

  “So,” he said, glancing at the top of the temple. He ran his hand through his hair. “Sounds like a lot of rules just for rules. But, you’re in charge. I’ll be ready with my summoned gun.”

  I frowned, staring up at the dragon. She roared and threw her head side to side, “We’re out of range. None of us can cast to that distance anyway. No on the gun, Hank.”

  With a shake of his head that reminded me of a wild horse resisting breaking, he started making his runes again. As he worked he muttered under his breath. “I’ll just be ready. No firing it. I should be ready in case it gets out of hand, Dred.”

  “Don’t do anything rash unless I give the go ahead.”

  I waited for him to
acknowledge what I said. He finally did with a nod.

  If only I had a levitation spell. Or even that Bianca or Cristian had one.

  “You guys have a levitation spell?” I asked. It wasn’t unusual for one of us to have learned spells that the others didn’t know about, and Bianca and Cristian were much more experienced than me in terms of magic. They’d been practicing their craft for years, while I’d made do for quite a while with just a gun and Scott’s powers, before he died.

  “No,” Bianca said at the same time as Cristian.

  Hank nearly had his runic Glock summoned. Once that golden bad boy was lighting up in his hands, he’d be ready to shoot the dragon, sending her and her unborn baby to the Netherworld.

  We had different philosophies, but had been working out what it meant to meet in the middle on them as much as possible, which was giving a decent balance to our partnership. His was save and preserve people and the status quo of the material world at the expense of supers. Mine was save and preserve the material world while also being aware of how the supernatural world was interlaced with that of normals, and preserve as much as possible.

  It was a mouthful, and I wasn’t even sure I was right, but that’s how things were shaking out so far.

  I sighed, and realized I needed to act. Thinking had given me a few ideas, but now was the time to move. I broke into a run and vaulted over the wrought iron fence that separated the grounds of the temple and the rest of Temple square.

  I’d made a decision.

  I was going to climb that burning scaffolding to get close enough to the dragon to cast some spells on her.

  That or ride her. Now there was an idea: tame a dragon.

  11

  Taming the dragon was off the agenda. I wouldn’t be doing that, because I didn’t have delusions of secretly being a dragon-soul.

  Although, honestly, I’d kill to find that out. The image of my mentor, Orrin, flashed through my mind as I leapt onto the ladder on the side of the scaffolding structure. The thought of Orrin keeping secrets from me wasn’t outrageous, but I doubted that he’d just spring that on me one day, as cool as that would be.