And then, as if that wasn’t already enough, something thin, green, and snake-like appeared behind him, as if it had been hiding. Quickly, though, it swelled until it was about the thickness of the Red Dragon’s arm, after which it suddenly sprouted yellow spikes that ran atop its length.
It was a nasty-looking tail. The creature reared his head back, opened his over-sized mouth, and let out a deep roar.
Then, lowering his head, he charged straight toward us.
35
WITH HIS LONG claws and newly-formed tail, the Red Dragon now looked pretty damn close to an actual dragon. Before today, seeing anything even remotely like a dragon in real life would have made me squeal with joy. But now, I had to stifle a different kind of squeal.
The Red Dragon charged forward, and as he did, I saw that his feet now sprouted long claws. I couldn’t let those claws—or any other dragon-y part of this creature—come any closer to Winnifred and me. So I sent my whip flying to fend him off, but he quickly flung part of his cape forward and knocked the glowing weapon off to the side, throwing me off balance.
In a flash, he leapt toward me as I steadied myself, covering the distance between us almost immediately. While in midair, he rotated his waist and swung his tail. I figured it would take another moment for the fearsome-looking tail reach me, but I forgot the appendage was actually alive (or the undead version of “alive”). Before I could brace myself, the end of the Red Dragon’s tail snapped against my wrist and pain shot through my hand, causing me to drop my glowing whip.
I screamed. Winnifred shouted something back, but the blood was beating too loudly in my ears for me to make it out. The sharp-clawed Red Dragon would be on me in an instant, so I had to think fast.
Once again, I imagined a medieval suit of armor around me in the blink of an eye, but this time, it was polished to a shine. And I added a large red Knights Templar-style cross to the chest for good measure. Hopefully, this would be enough to keep me alive.
The Red Dragon’s claws slashed at me, but somehow didn’t get past my layer of imaginary armor. He tilted his head to the side, giving me the moment I needed to drive a magic armor-covered fist into his face. He staggered backward, his foot-claws clicking on the ground. I swung again, but at the last moment, the Red Dragon’s arm shot up and deflected my attack.
With his other hand, he punched me in the stomach. My armor stopped his fist from connecting with me, but the incredible force of the blow knocked me backward. I could feel my armor weakening and didn’t know how much longer I could hold onto the image. Would it be long enough to survive?
The Red Dragon rushed to close the space between us, reaching out at me with both his clawed hands extended. But instead of trying to block them, I shifted my weight forward and looped my arms around his, locking them into place. His thick, dark brows slanted downward and he bore his teeth, just millimeters from my face.
So, I’d finally gotten a hold of a dragon. That was the good news. The bad news was, I had no idea how to train it.
As I struggled to keep him from breaking free from my arm-lock, I saw Winnifred drop her sword. She quickly jumped up onto one of the tables, then leapt onto the Red Dragon’s shoulders. She tore furiously at the place where his protective cape met his armor, while I struggled to keep his arms pinned down. His glowing red eyes narrowed and he gritted his fangs as he bucked from side to side, trying to shake Winnifred off his shoulders, while also trying to shake loose my grip.
I held his arms tight, trying to imagine a golden rope securing them to his sides, but no matter how hard I tried, the image just slid off.
He was too strong for me in the end. With a snarl, he flexed his arms and then pulled them downward, breaking free from my grip. He quickly brought his clawed hands up and shoved me backward. In the next instant, he reached up, grabbed Winnifred’s arms with his long talons, and flung her forward.
As she sailed through the air over my head, the crimson cape gripped in her hands fluttered behind her. She crashed with a grunt into nearby podium, breaking it in half and exposing jagged edges of splintered synthetic wood. I turned to run to her, but felt something solid slap against my boots, knocking my feet out from under me.
I’d forgotten about that damn tail.
As I fell onto my back, I felt my imaginary armor finally give out. The now cape-less Red Dragon stepped over me and toward the fallen Winnifred, who had finally gotten onto her feet. I rolled onto my stomach and, in an act of desperation, I reached out and grabbed the dragon by his tail. He jerked to a stop as I held on for dear life.
I scrambled to my feet, still gripping the tail tightly as he turned to the side and yanked back on it. My grip held, but after a second and then a third pull from the Red Dragon, the tail broke out of my hands. Rage burned across the mutated vampire’s face, and his mouth opened impossibly wide to show every single one of his long, pointed teeth.
If there was such a thing as vampire etiquette, I was pretty sure I’d just done the equivalent of cursing out one’s own grandmother in front of a group of children.
As difficult as it was to look away from the terror that stood before me, I glanced behind the Red Dragon to see Winnifred. She had just torn a long piece of synthetic wood from the broken podium. Interesting.
When she nodded at me, I suddenly knew what I needed to do. As the Red Dragon lunged toward me, I leapt toward him and brought both my legs forward, kicking him squarely in the chest. His forward momentum suddenly stopped as I fell to the ground. He raised a clawed foot and was about to bring it down on me when I heard a sickening thunk.
The Red Dragon’s glowing red eyes widened. He staggered backward a step or two, and when he turned around, I saw the long piece of synthetic wood sticking out from the middle of his back.
He dropped to his knees, his mouth moving as he tried to form words. I got to my feet and rushed over between the monster and Winnifred, who now stood with a look of horror on her fair face.
The Red Dragon looked up at me and said, “How . . . How could you do this to me?”
“You were a threat to the people of Triton,” I said, “and the entire United Federation of Sol. The Dominion will never conquer us—not as long as I still breathe.” It was the most heroic thing I could come up with on the fly. It could have been worse.
The Red Dragon bowed his head and coughed up blood. As he raised his head again, a thick, dark substance—vampire blood?—oozed down his angled chin. “I . . . loved . . . you.”
That definitely wasn’t the response I was expecting.
He coughed again, then slumped backward, going completely limp. The glowing yellow stone on his chest plate faded. As it went out, his nasty claws retracted, his tail seemed to shrivel, and his face regained its normal proportion—normal for a vampire, that is. His flat-topped head flopped backward, exposing his neck. There were strange, raised marks across his dark skin on both sides that each came to a point. Tattoos? I took a step closer and saw spiked ridges along the markings and realized they were stylized tails. Were those … dragon’s tails? But that would mean …
A wicked, lilting laugh sounded from behind me. I spun around to see Winnifred’s face, which somehow seemed more pale and angular than before. Her eyes were now glowing red, and her sinister grin revealed severely lengthened fangs.
Her fingers felt their way to her neck and she pulled free a thin metal necklace, revealing an intricately fashioned black vulture with a bright yellow gem in its center.
As she held it, the gem flared to life. There was a sickening tearing noise, and suddenly two large, red wings tore through the back of her black fatigues and unfurled from behind her.
I staggered backward, my mouth gaping open. What in the name of Iluvatar?
“I told you,” she said, her pointed teeth glistening. “Things aren’t always what they seem.”
36
I NOW LIVED in a world where the most shocking thing was not that a woman had just grown leathery red dragon wings. The most sho
cking thing to me at this point was that Winnifred—a woman I had strong feelings for—had been lying to me all along. And the rest of the Peacekeepers, for that matter. My heart ached. Yes, I hurt for myself, but I also hurt because it meant that, in my blindness, I had helped her to betray the trust of my team.
“None of the Court was a match for you—not even my poor lover,” Winnifred said in a strangely sympathetic voice.
“Just think of what you and I could do together! With your mastery over philosopher’s stones and with my knowledge of the Dominion, we could burn everything down and start anew.” Her eyes blazed. “Our very own empire!”
Dragon-mode Winnifred took a long step forward and reached for me. I took a step back.
“Not even the Ultimate Magus could stop us! What do you say?”
I wasn’t exactly sure who this “Ultimate Magus” character was, but I did know that there was no way in the nine circles of Hell that I was going to join her. I shot a glance to my side and spotted the whip.
I quickly summoned my orange stone’s power and the whip shot toward my outstretched right hand.
The moment I wrapped my fingers around its handle, the whip flared to life. I snapped it at Winnifred, but she quickly flapped her wings and slid to the side so that the whip only hit empty air.
She gave me a tight smile. “Come, now, darling. You will need to do better than that.”
I desperately summoned the heroic music of the purple stone’s power and imagined a catapult filled with crackling purple energy in front of me. I reached down and quickly pulled the lever, launching the energy projectile at Winnifred. But as I watched it speed toward her in my mind’s eye, I saw it disintegrate just before it reached her.
Dammit! I knew the orange stone didn’t seem to work when a vampire was its focus. Now I could add the purple stone to that list, too.
She stretched her leathery wings defiantly. “The Ultimate Magus rules worlds through the philosopher’s stones. And what have you done without someone to serve as your guide? Commanded a handful of misfits? Given false hope to peasants? You need me!”
I let out a wordless scream and snapped my whip at her. But instead of moving away from it, the large yellow stone on her vulture necklace glowed brightly. So did her hands. She raised an arm and caught the end of the whip. It crackled in her grip, but didn’t blast or burn her, as it should have. She wound the whip once more around her hand and gave a mighty yank, pulling it free from my hand.
“Well, I suppose I have my answer.” The whip’s glow quickly faded as she flung it to the side.
“I know it is bad manners to play with one’s food,” she said before looking me up and down for a long moment. “But for you, I’m willing to make an exception.”
She then ran a long, pointed red tongue across her lips. I shuddered.
“And after I set this anchor point,” she said, “I will savor every ounce of your life force. Who knows? Perhaps it will finally allow me to master other stones, too.”
The sphere. I’d almost forgotten about it—which is saying something, since it was still glowing brightly at the end of the room. I needed to destroy this winged beast before she could do any interplanetary damage. So I summoned the sinister marching theme. And this time, I really meant it—I wanted something sinister to happen to this bloodthirsty woman.
Inside my head, the static that had been there before when I tried to use the red philosopher’s stone had changed somehow—as if it had moved from the foreground to the background of my mind. I quickly raised my gloved hand and fired a bright red bolt at Winnifred.
The shot was powerful, but wild. It struck the large judge’s podium just behind Winnifred and exploded against the bottom of the soggy Santa mural on the wall. Pieces of synthetic wood and concrete and metal reinforcement came raining down on her. She raised her red wings above her head, protecting herself from the debris.
When she parted her wings again, she was no longer smiling.
I pointed my glove at her again, but she dove to the left, rolling once before springing into the air, where her wings unfurled and she hung there, grinning wickedly at me.
I fired, but aimed too high and missed her by several meters. I quickly aimed lower, but over-corrected and shot just below her. Both bolts hit where the waves on the wall met the mural, blowing two very large holes. Suddenly, the building rumbled, and the entire corner area broke apart and fell away from the building.
Winnifred’s glowing red eyes widened as she flapped in the air and spun around. The sphere’s red light shone through to the surrounding buildings, revealing a housing complex with a small crowd of its residents standing outside in robes and pajamas, pointing at the City Courthouse and yelling. The real Red Dragon spun back around in the air, but in doing so, she didn’t see the pieces of concrete that had come loose and were tumbling to the ground.
One of these ceiling sections hit her left wing, which sent her falling sideways. She flailed her right wing, which slowed her fall, but it wasn’t enough to keep her airborne. She landed with a thud on a pile of rubble near the giant missing corner section of the courtroom.
I took a few quick steps toward Winnifred, who was clearly dazed by her fall. My energy was fading fast, and I figured I only had enough juice left for one solid burst of red energy. Now that all of the other vampires were down, if I blasted Winnifred and her yellow stone died, there was a chance that I could undo all of the werewolf transformations the vampires had performed on Kovac and the others.
I would also feel really good about blowing up someone who had used me like a cheap toy for her own ends. But if I blasted the swirling red sphere, instead, I could possibly prevent oculi from opening somewhere else—on Neptune, and maybe even on other planets.
Here was my dilemma: Possibly save the closest thing I had to a best friend, a handful of insufferable soldiers, and several underprivileged civilians, or save hundreds of thousands of nameless, faceless people elsewhere, who I didn’t even know?
I raised my Power Glove toward the hovering sphere to my right, but then Kovac’s werewolfed face flashed in my mind. After all the damage I’d done to him and the rest of my crew, I had to try to make this right. So I swung my hand around and pointed it, instead, at Winnifred, who was just beginning to stir.
Then, over the hum of the sphere and the yelling of the crowd, I heard something else—something that sounded like crying. I glanced outside at the heap of rubble that lay just outside the City Courthouse, and toward the bottom of the pile, I saw a small child in a striped shirt, holding something shiny in her hand. Her foot was caught under a chunk of cement or something.
Dammit—the civilians had come too close to the building. I’d need to make this quick.
But just as I was about to turn my attention back to the fallen Winnifred, a flat section of the roof that had been balancing at the top of the pile shifted and began to slide downward along the rubble, directly toward the crying child.
37
THE PANICKED CHILD looked up at the sound of the roof section scraping its way toward her. She cried even more loudly, dropping the shiny object in her hand and reaching toward the gathered crowd. I glanced back at Winnifred, who was busy untangling herself from her own wings. She was going to have to wait.
I quickly formed an imaginary lasso in my mind and flung it at the sliding object. It snapped to a stop before I yanked it off the pile and to the side, where it landed on a fancy synthetic shrub.
I half-ran, half-skidded down the rubble pile to the side of the girl, careful not to knock loose anything else that could hurt her. The jostling reminded me of the bruised or broken rib I’d picked up from my fight with the real Dragon’s Tail earlier. But I could handle that kind of pain—this kid couldn’t.
As I got closer, I could feel my stomach growl loudly, and hoped that I’d have enough left in my tank to get the girl out of danger. I slid to a stop and hopped over to where she lay crying.
With what little energy I had lef
t, I grabbed the edge of the concrete slab that was trapping the little girl’s foot, summoned the brassy, heroic music, and used the purple stone’s power to help me lift.
I managed to raise the slab a few inches—just high enough for her to wiggle free. She got up and limped toward the crowd of onlookers, where an elderly couple embraced her. That’s when it hit me—these were the sort of people I could both hurt and help with my powers. I don’t think I’d realized that before, but as I looked at this little reunion, I promised myself I’d do everything I could to be on the helping side of things. No more using my powers to boost my own ego or to impress others.
I needed to dump my old way of thinking and become a real hero.
I looked down at where the child had been and saw that the shiny object she’d been holding was an open sleeve of Jupiter Jumbles cookies. Not my favorite, but they’d do. I snatched it up and poured the mostly-full container into my mouth as I scaled the pile of rubble, only chewing the soft buttery morsels enough to swallow them. When I reached the top, Winnifred was stooped over, just inside the building. Her left wing was bent at a weird angle—well, weird for a dragon’s wing, I guess.
She winced as she touched her limp wing. Then, cursing under her breath, she straightened, fingered the yellow stone around her neck and, once again, it began to glow. Her large red wings quickly withered and shrank into nothing.
I raised my glove to blast her with a red bolt before she could change any other part of her mostly beautiful body, but the continuing screams from the civilians outside reminded me that there were more than just a crazed vampire and a magic-wielding soldier around these parts. No matter what, I couldn’t risk any more civilian injuries with my reckless use of the red philosopher’s stone. I had to think of some other way.
While vampires seemed to have a resistance to my orange and purple philosopher’s stones, Winnifred had seemed genuinely worried about the red stone—afraid enough that she’d actually tried to dodge its blasts. Maybe I could limit the scope of my damage if I used that stone’s powers on myself, instead of firing it off into who knows where. But how?
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