Drake

by D M Gilmore

  Five drakes hid behind the tables, and all five of them dropped faster than any other before them. With Esther holding his shields up, he felt like there was nothing left to fear. He could take them all down, kill every single enemy that stood in his way, and once everything was said and done, he would be free to make sure Duncan Smog could never hurt anyone ever again.

  The moment Smog crossed his mind, Asher looked over his shoulder and his eyes widened in fear.

  Sangita was holding Ruth in a lock, his left arm twisted and broken by his side with his right held behind his back. He was on his knees, his face dripping blood from every hole, his crest flopping to one side, the soft membrane having been snapped. Duncan Smog was pulling himself up finally, groaning in pain as he did his best to saunter off the stage, shaking the daze out of his eyes. At the sight of Ruth being held down, he pointed a gun at the wounded fuldrake and took a few steps further forward.

  “Shall we try this again, Asher?” Smog panted, his breath coming sharp and heavily.

  “Let him go, Smog,” Asher threatened, turning to face him while Esther maintained the shield behind him. “If you touch him, God help me, I will kill you!”

  “I have no doubt you will,” Smog agreed, nodding to Sangita, and again towards the three remaining drakes behind the bar, “which is why we’re leaving, and just in case you try anything funny, I’m taking this thing,” he said with a hushed tone, brushing a careful hand up against Ruth’s head, running his talons over the swollen eye, which elicited a wince of pain from the larger drake, “with me. As insurance, you understand?”

  Asher tensed, but did not move. One by one, their guns still trained on him, the remaining drakes stepped around Asher and joined their boss and Sangita.

  “Here’s how this is going to work, Asher,” Smog continued, as he helped Sangita pull Ruth to his feet, his legs barely able to support his monstrous weight as they shook and wobbled, “if you follow us, he dies. If you try to attack us while we leave, he dies. If I ever see your face again, he dies. Do you get what I’m saying, scaler?”

  The shield that Esther was holding suddenly dropped, and she looked up at Asher with worried eyes. Asher did not look back, his eyes burning deeper holes straight into Smog’s chest. “Give him back, Smog,” he hissed, taking a nervous step forward.

  “Asher!” Ruth growled, his voice guttural and low, filled with a gurgling sound as he tried to squeeze the sound past the blood in his throat. “Come on bro, don’t make this weird,” he laughed, as Smog and his gang continued to drag him away, towards the rear end of the club, Smog still pressing the end of the pistol into his forehead. “I’ll be fine, bro, just take care of yourself.”

  “Ruth,” Asher wheezed, leaning forward to take another step.

  “Move again, and he dies!” Sangita roared, as the other drakes filed into the rear end of the club.

  Asher froze where he stood.

  “I’ve got people watching the club,” Smog sighed, pushing Ruth under the doorframe as the large drake grunted in pain, “if any of them see you leave in the next thirty minutes, Ruth dies.”

  As the back door to the club slammed shut, Asher dropped to his knees and screamed.

  Chapter 17

  Thirty minutes doesn’t feel like a lot of time, especially when one spends most of it trapped in their own head. To Asher, the time passed like nothing as his eyes glazed over and his mind drifted to all the terrible possibilities that could be happening to Ruth. At the end of every line of thought, Asher’s mind would conjure up the image of his brother’s body, twisted and broken, lying in a ditch or on the floor, the last drop of life beaten from his carcass. Those images were the kinder ones, the ones that didn’t hurt as much to witness. Every now and then, Asher could form the image of going to rescue his brother, but every time he did, his wandering mind again showed him the mangled body of Ruth, twisted and broken and barely standing, with Duncan Smog’s grinning form looming above it.

  “You were too late,” the image of Ruth would say, before collapsing into a heap, dying in Asher’s arms.

  Esther nudged at Asher’s knees, desperately trying to get his attention. As his mind raced and filled with images, she would look out into the distance and flinch, almost as if she too could see the horror behind Asher’s eyes. After a particularly frightening image, of Ruth’s mangled and disembowelled corpse being ripped in half by a monster, she redoubled her efforts to get his attention, clawing at his leg and biting at his ankle. Finally, she had had enough of his pity party. She opened her mouth to squawk angrily at him, and gathered the mana around her to imitate one of his spells. The resulting sound sent a ripple through the air, which knocked Asher off the floor and backwards a few feet.

  The shock of being knocked around was enough to pull him back out of his own mind. He looked around blearily as his senses came flooding back to him, remembering where he was and what he should have been doing. Esther scuttled over to him in concern, and met his gaze with a concerned squawk.

  “Sorry about that,” he muttered, dusting himself off and pulling himself to his feet. Esther quickly leapt into the air and alighted on his shoulders, assuming her favourite position around the back of his neck. “That happens to me sometimes, I just get stuck in my own head. Sorry.”

  Asher didn’t know why he was talking to the tiny dragon, it wasn’t like she could answer of her own accord. In some deep, dark recess of his mind, he felt like he should be mad at her. He wanted to blame her, to say it was her fault that he had been faced with the choice of join or die, that she was to blame for Ruth being beaten and taken, but he quickly shook the thought out of his head before it had a chance to grab him and pull him back in. He had nobody to blame but himself, it was his fault that Ruth had been taken. He should have taken another orb, or come clean to Smog in the first place, or robbed a bank or something, anything to avoid having to confront Smog. It was his own foolish arrogance that had resulted in Ruth being put in danger.

  No, Asher reasoned, Smog knew about dragons. If he had confessed to Smog about having a dragon instead of the orb, things could have ended up much worse than they ultimately did. And that Sangita woman, what was it that she had said about him?

  “You’re bound to me?” Asher asked Esther, carefully petting her head. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means you have stolen property,” a voice called, followed by the telltale sound of fine shoes clunking across the floor. The speaker had a distinct English accent to it, not quite so strong as to make its words indistinguishable, not quite so weak as to mask its country of origin.

  Asher whipped around and saw a dark skinned man in a long black coat step into the main club from the entrance hallway. To his surprise, the man in question was entirely human, with one purple eye and one turquoise. Asher immediately frowned in puzzlement as he tried to process what this meant, all the while fighting against his mind’s desire to pull him right back his own head. He mentally cursed himself, and wished he still had some of the pills he had taken as a child to hold his own mind at bay, but he had long ago given up on using them, believing he could control his own head.

  “Did you hear me?” the man said again, stepping onto the dance floor, maybe twenty feet away from Asher. “I said, that dragon is stolen property.”

  Esther hissed menacingly in the direction of the man, but Asher put a reassuring hand on her tail, and she quickly silenced at the touch. “I’m not in the business of listening to more assholes about dragons today,” Asher said, taking a few steps towards the newcomer. “Step aside, before you make me mad.”

  “Boy,” the man chuckled, and he began to roll up the sleeves of his jacket, exposing his thickly muscled forearms, “are you threatening me?”

  Asher’s eyes narrowed as he spied a watch on the man’s wrist. He knew what that meant without the man even needing to call up a single hologram display. He was armed with magic, and would be ready to fight him to get Esther if the need be.

  “I don
’t know if you know this,” Asher said, cracking his knuckles. He quickly checked his mana reserves. He was at 50 percent of his mana, which wasn’t a lot by any means, but should be more than enough to deal with one human mage wannabe. “But Esther here is a dragon, so let me give you a quick lesson on just what dragons can do.”

  Esther’s maw opened, and a blast of electricity arched from her mouth and spread across the club. Asher smirked as the electricity shot towards the man, but the grin faded as the lightning struck something in front of the newcomer, something that couldn’t be seen.

  “Ah, yes, a whelpling breathing her first spells,” the man chuckled, “I see you’ve figured out the trick to teaching her to be useful, I suppose that is commendable, especially given she can’t even be a day old. Unless I’m incorrect and you are not Asher Itzcovitch, and did not steal a mana orb from the Scarborough mana station during the early hours of the morning?”

  “How did you—,” Asher started, but his blood went cold as he tried to process what had just happened. He hadn’t seen the man erect a shield, he hadn’t seen anything else come in with him. Either this man was an incredibly good mage… Or he hadn’t come alone...

  Asher looked down at Esther, whose eyes were narrowing and following something around on the ceiling. He looked up, but could see nothing at first. Then a massive shadow flicked past his vision, and his eyes widened in fear.

  “Ah, that took you a bit longer than I was expecting,” the man said, his mouth splitting into a terrifying grin all his own. He took a few steps forward, kicking the charred husk of a drakhund out of the way, and the concrete ground behind him suddenly cratered as a massive, yet invisible form landed behind him. “Your dragon is small and cute, but allow me to introduce you to what a real dragon looks like.”

  The air behind the man rippled and shifted as a bulky form began to appear, the light pulling back to reveal a massive, four-legged torso. Its legs were a little stumpy for the length of its body, almost like a crocodile and not dissimilar to Esther’s snake-like length. It had fiery orange scales, with stomach scutes the colour of blackened charcoal. Where it truly differed from Esther, however, was that its collar split into two, long, serpentine necks that ended in a pair of massive heads, each one filled with dagger-like fangs and crowned with five horns each. The right head had eyes that glowed purple, while the other’s glowed turquoise, the same as the man’s. Asher swallowed nervously, taking this to mean that he and the dragon were bound, just as Esther’s eyes matched his own.

  “It’s interesting that you named your dragon after a queen,” the man said, reaching out and stroking the left head of his massive dragon, “I named mine after a god. This is Agni.”

  At the mention of its name, the twin-headed dragon opened its maws and twin gouts of fire shot at Asher, approaching at speeds faster than he could react. Esther, not to be outdone by this large, lumbering brute, sprung into action and conjured a shield just in time to absorb the majority of the flames. The rest were parted around them, and Asher looked over his shoulder at the stage that was now turning to embers in the heat of Agni’s fire.

  “You are meddling in power you clearly do not understand, Asher Itzcovitch,” the man said, as Agni’s flames finally died down, the twin heads returning to a resting position, “you have a dragon but you do not respect the responsibility of it. You have her bound to you, but you can’t even begin to comprehend what that means for her.”

  Asher’s fists clenched, and he readied his own lightning spell. If Agni tried to hit them again, he’d blast his stupid faces with a chain of electricity. “You know you’re the second person that told me I bound her, but I still don’t know what that means.” He raised his hand and pointed a clawed finger at the man, the tip crackling with mana as the spell waited to be cast. “How about you start talking before I fry you and your overgrown iguana?”

  Iguana?! A voice echoed in Asher’s mind, and his eyes widened in surprise. From the look on the man’s face, he must have heard it too.

  “Not now,” the man hissed.

  Nobody calls me an iguana! the voice said again, and Agni’s bulk wobbled and dragged on the floor as he dashed forward, his body moving at speeds that seemed unnatural given his sheer size. The man had to side step out of the way to narrowly avoid being crushed by the large dragon as he stomped his way across the dance floor, leaving massive cracks in the light up tiles where his claws punched through them.

  “It can talk?!” Asher exclaimed in surprise, as Esther quickly conjured a shield in fear.

  Agni simply ignored the barrier, reaching out with a massive clawed hand swiping at Asher faster than he could dodge. He was knocked aside like a toy, the shield doing nothing to protect him as he was knocked into a wall. Asher cried out in pain and felt something in his chest crack under the impact. Esther was knocked off his shoulders, and bounced off the wall, before tumbling to the floor next to him.

  The man suddenly raised his fist, and a chain of red energy formed between it and Agni’s two heads. With a grunt, he gave the chain a tug, and pulled the massive dragon away from Asher a few feet.

  Asher coughed and wheezed, the air knocked completely out of him, as he shakily pulled himself to his feet, using the wall he had hit as support for his body. He quickly checked his ribs for any damage, wincing in pain as his fingers touched one of them. The bone didn’t feel loose, but it definitely hurt. Bruised, maybe fractured if he was unlucky. Groaning a bit, he glanced down at as his dragon, who was quickly shaking off the blow, as if it had been nothing more than a daze. She winced slightly as she uncoiled her body, but otherwise showed no signs of injury. Wordlessly, Asher held out his arm, and Esther leapt into the air to alight on it, quickly resuming her favourite position around his neck and shoulders.

  “Why are you trying to kill me?” Asher called, while Esther conjured a mana shield around them again. To Asher’s eye, it looked as though the pulse rate was slower. A lower rate meant that it would be able to intercept slower moving objects, such as a dragon’s lumbering form.

  With a groan, he stepped back out into the centre of the room, while the man struggled to regain control of his massive dragon. He quickly cycled through his spells and pulled up one he hoped would be useful.

  “Since I plan on killing you, I suppose I could share with you that small tidbit of information,” the man said with a nod, as Agni returned to his side, not taking his two pairs of eyes off Asher’s slowly rising form. He spoke with such an air of finality, as though it wasn’t a question of if Asher would die, but rather a question of how quickly. “My name is Nicholas Jones, enforcer for the Centre of Magical Affairs, and I am here to kill you because you have discovered the existence of dragons.”

  Chapter 18

  Agni lashed out again, this time slamming his tail against Esther’s shield. The force of the impact caused Asher to take a few steps back, but otherwise he didn’t falter under the blow. The tail came around from the other side for another strike, but this time it was telegraphed by a shift in Agni’s weight. Asher was ready for the attack, and rather than take the full brunt of it with his shield, he lashed out with his ice spell, sending a surge of shimmering crystals running up the dragon’s spine. Agni blinked in surprise for a moment, and then flexed his lower body, shattering the ice as if it was nothing but papier-mâché.

  “What do you mean, ‘kill me because I know about dragons?’” Asher shouted, dodging out of the way of a third attack from Agni’s wrecking ball of a tail. As the larger dragon pulled the appendage away, Esther leapt into the air and fired a rapid volley of silver bolts at his heads. Two of them struck true, making the leftmost head falter in confusion, but the right head dodged each bolt effortlessly. Nicholas Jones grunted in pain and put a hand to the left side of his face at the impact.

  “COMA has existed in one form or another for nearly a thousand years, operating under a dozen different names. The true purpose of our organization is to protect humanity from dragonkind, while in turn pro
tecting the dragons,” Nicholas continued, not even losing that sense of finality in his voice. Asher realized that the man genuinely didn’t mind telling him this information, because he genuinely expected Asher to die. “We have long protected them from the terrors of mankind, and likewise protected mankind from the horrors they can produce.”

  “You mean aberrants?” Asher growled, conjuring his own shield again as Agni launched a pair of fireballs in his direction. Esther intercepted one of them with a smaller shield that extended only to herself, while Asher caught the second. “Esther, go for the eyes!” He shouted.

  “Agni, intercept,” Nicholas ordered calmly. Esther swooped in for her attack, her claws outstretched as she swiped at the leftmost head, which effortlessly ducked out of the way of her tiny body. Agni suddenly reached out with his own wing, catching her in it as though it were a net. “Not just aberrants, but they are part of the problem. Dragons breed all kinds of monsters, Mister Itzcovitch, the least of them being creatures such as yourself.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to—” Asher grunted, suddenly cut off mid sentence as Esther was knocked to the ground by Agni’s wing. He suddenly felt a little dazed, though it didn’t last more than a second.

  That was all the time Agni needed to slam a massive paw down on top of Esther, trapping her between his hind foot and the fractured concrete. Esther cried in pain and anger, gnawing at the foot with teeth that were simply too small to do any real damage.

  Asher tensed up as he suddenly felt a weight crushing down on his chest, the intense pressure threatening to crack his bruised rib. He looked down, expecting to see the red chain Nicholas had used earlier, or maybe even Agni’s tail, but saw absolutely nothing. He still had his full range of motion, but his entire body screamed out in agony, begging for release. It felt like he couldn’t breathe, like he was trapped beneath a fallen building, or being stepped on by—