THE BATTLE OF DETROIT

STEEL DRAGON™ BOOK THIRTEEN

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN

MICHAEL ANDERLE

This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

Copyright © 2020 LMBPN Publishing

Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

http://jcalebdesign.com / jcalebdesign@gmail.com

Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

A Michael Anderle Production

LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

LMBPN Publishing

PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

Las Vegas, NV 89109

Version 1.00, April 2022

Previously Published as part of the megabook Steel Dragon 5

eBook ISBN: 979-8-88541-507-1

Print ISBN: 979-8-88541-509-5

THE BATTLE OF DETROIT TEAM

Thanks to the JIT Readers

Dave Hicks

Deb Mader

Diane L. Smith

Dorothy Lloyd

Heidi Bauer

Jackey Hankard-Brodie

James Caplan

Jeff Eaton

Jeff Goode

Kerry Mortimer

Paul Westman

Peter Manis

Veronica Stephan-Miller

If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!

Editor

The Skyhunter Editing Team

CHAPTER ONE

The view from under the palm tree was stunning, Kristen thought as she burrowed her toes in the hot white sand of the beach. The sun had begun to sink below the horizon and was gradually swallowed by the crystal-clear blue water of the bay. On either side of their small private harbor, more huge-leafed tropical trees shaded flowers and exotic birds that called in excitement at the last rays of sun of the day.

She would have liked to be able to enjoy the scenery, but that wasn’t exactly possible when camping out in an enemy base. It was even more difficult when trying to prevent a group of technomages from escaping via magical means. Most importantly, they could not be allowed to access the huge cache of weapons they had stored there that could kill dragons as easily as lead could punch holes in humans.

It seemed ironic that people came to islands like this and paid top dollar to eat tropical fruit and fresh fish from the ocean. Her people did those things merely to survive.

Stonequest flew in from the ocean, a massive tuna in the claws of each of his hindlegs. She sighed with relief. At least they wouldn’t go without a meal later.

The night before had been sleepless as well as foodless. They had won a great battle but it wasn’t exactly reassuring to incarcerate a group of mages in their own cells. None of them had cooperated either. She knew there had to be food rations stashed somewhere in the World War Two complex of tunnels dug into this tropical volcanic island, but none of the prisoners would say where.

Despite Constance Vigil—the former leader of the technomages—advocating for them all to work together and helping them survive the battle when she could have turned it against them, she claimed she didn’t know where any of the food was.

“Any luck with getting intel from Eric?” Kristen asked Jim as they watched Stonequest butcher the tuna with his dragon claws.

“Nah. He’s not talking about a damn thing,” he said.

“Not even to the Wonderkid?” she teased.

Jim smiled his Wonderkid smile. “I don’t think they’ve heard that I have a reputation to maintain.”

“I have good news!” Keith said as he emerged from the jungle. He held a massive cordless phone.

“You’ve found a weapon we can use to kill the mages one by one if we need to?” Hernandez asked. She had spent her time off building sandcastles, filling them with explosives, and blowing them apart.

“No.” The Rookie was unshaken by the gallows humor. “But I do have someone who wants to talk to you, boss.” He handed the massive phone to Kristen and she put it to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Oh, dear God, Kristen. I am so glad to hear your voice!”

“Brian!” She shouted with delight, instantly encouraged by her brother’s voice.

“We’re on the job. Call me Zed.”

“You called me Kristen. Shouldn’t that be Lady Steel, Zed?” she replied.

“Okay, that’s a fair point. I’ll call you the queen of the dragons if you want. I’m only glad to finally talk to you. How did you manage? I saw the plane crash and the satellite feed made it look very bad. The water’s clear enough to see the damage. Are you guys okay? Are the technomages dead or gone?”

“One question at a time,” Kristen said, although she found his optimism contagious. She knew—logically—that they had been in far more danger than him, but it still felt good to hear his voice.

“Right, right, right,” Brian said and attempted to regain control of his composure. “Let’s keep it professional. What’s your status and how can I help?”

“The main concern is that we found more dragons who were imprisoned here and who need serious help. Lumos is trying his best with them, but they’re not doing too well. On top of that, we have captives as well.”

“The mages?”

She nodded instinctively before she remembered she was talking on a phone bigger than her head. “Yeah. Some died, but we ended up taking a good number prisoner.”

“And the leaders?”

“All shackled.” She couldn’t help but chuckle. “Constance, Katrina, Havington—who was the douche from Europe—and the local boss, Eric.”

“Not too shabby.”

“It’s not only them,” Kristen explained. “There are many rank and file mages too, plus regular human soldiers who were loyal to their cause. We have them all under guard but we barely have the personnel to do it. Plus, it’s their base. I’m scared shitless that they know back doors we don’t.”

“Okay, well, I have someone who wants to talk about getting you out of there and, believe it or not, has already started the process,” Brian said.

“How is that possible? We just started talking!”

“I sent your team to that island, remember? And I saw your plane go down. We’ve been watching from the skies and haven’t seen any boats leave, so we assumed you’d still be there.”

“Who do you mean by we?”

“Hello, Lady Steel, it’s Amythist. I’m glad young Zed has finally reached you through the telephones.”

“Amythist, unless this is something urgent, I need to continue my conversation with my intelligence officer.”

The old dragon sucked a breath in. “I fear we’re not the only people who know about your position and what transpired on that island. Things have…changed.”

“What things?” she asked, not at all liking that Amythist was being less than direct. Usually, she was relaxed and open, but she seemed jittery.

“Rumors…movements… Detroit seems…still. I don’t like it.”

Kristen frowned. “Is there something you need to tell me?” She hoped a direct question might compel the ancient dragon to simply spit it out.

“I have chartered a ship to come and get all of you. A yacht, in fact, and a fast one from a billionaire in Japan, but I feel it will still be too slow. Is there no way you can get home faster?”

“Amythist…” She tried to sound patient, “What exactly is going on?” She felt certain the old dragon was hiding something now. It was not a pleasant feeling.

“I don’t have anything specific…” Amythist admitted. “Merely a feeling that things are shifting, you could say.”

“You chartered a racing yacht because you had a feeling?” She took a breath and tried not to get frustrated.

“My duties have kept me at home with the dragons you have rescued, but as I said, there are rumors. Many dragons have left populated areas—some would say fled.”

“They might simply be nervous. They can’t know that we’ve finally captured most of the technomages. The last they saw of them was an attack on Detroit.”

“And if that was all I’d noticed, I wouldn’t be worried. But in the light of a recent attack, I would think Dragon SWAT teams would increase patrols, but this is not the case.”

“No?” A pit grew relentlessly in her stomach as if a demon of dread was scooping her insides out.

“No,” Amythist said flatly. “Most of them are no longer at their duty stations. I haven’t heard about any training exercises either. They’re all simply…gone. Someplace else. The whole thing stinks. I can feel it, thick in the air, like the calm before a storm.”

The demon in her stomach dug the hole even deeper, but she didn’t want to convey her concern to Amythist. “I don’t think you understand.” Kristen tried to sound firm. “We’ve defeated the bad technomages. It should be done now. There’s no one left to attack.”

“Believe me, my dear, I am quite relieved that you have finally managed to capture the brutes who performed these barbaric acts on the poor dragons who now call my estate home. However, I am not sure this is the kind of thing that ends so easily.” The old dragon sighed. “Although you and your team have done admirably, it cannot be denied and is now quite obvious that humans are a clear and present danger to dragon kind. There were many who wished to end your kind when you discovered how to build castles to defend yourselves against us.

“Later, there were dragons who wished to end your existence when you learned how to fly with your machines and others who saw the atomic bomb as the final straw. Truly, that would have been the end if not for your uncharacteristic restraint with the weapon. But for many, this is too much. With these bullets harvested from our own kind, any human can now kill a dragon. This has not escaped us.”

“But how can dragons truly think they’ll benefit if they have a war with humans?” she asked.

Amythist tsked, “Not all of this is about logic, my dear. Dragons are ruled by their emotions as much as humans—perhaps more so as we have auras to communicate and influence each other with. I agree with you, of course, that this must all be avoided. But it seems to me as if someone sees their chance evaporating. With every day that passes, the threat of humans rebelling will seem less as the news of your success will spread. That is why you need to be somewhere instead of the middle of nowhere as quickly as possible. Can you think of nothing besides the ship I have sent?”

Despite Amythist being much older than her and somehow even wealthier than she was with the money she’d inherited from the dragon Windlock, she was an investigator, so she did not need to answer. “Make sure the Dragon Council knows of our success here, and Brian—I know you’re still listening—make sure the media starts talking about what happened in Detroit as the last hurrah of these terrorists.”

“You got it,” Brian said.

“Of course, my dear,” Amythist said.

“I’ll see what else we can come up with on this end,” Kristen added, although she was unsure what they could do.

She hoped that news of their success would be enough to calm the factions of dragons who wished to slaughter humanity rather than be served by them. Sadly, she would be lying to herself if she thought it would be enough after all that had happened over the last year.

With a heavy sigh, she ended the call.

“Plans?” Jim asked.

“The old dragon’s right,” she said. “We need to get off this island and back to the USA ASAP.”

CHAPTER TWO

Although her private jet was currently damaged—perhaps irreparably so—and tangled in a coral reef at the bottom of the ocean, Kristen still had hopes that they could get home before anything too terrible happened.

It would merely require a little magic, and she had the perfect people to help.

She found Larry and Amy standing near one of the entrances to the network of underground tunnels that had been excavated into the island over fifty years before.

It looked like a scene out of a sci-fi movie. The girl levitated about ten feet up on her skateboard, while pebbles floated around her in complex whirls and spirals. One massive boulder was suspended too and Larry was seated on top of it.

“Am I interrupting a training session or something?” Kristen asked loudly.

The giant boulder jolted and plummeted and the mage tumbled off. “Jesus, Kristen. Don’t scare us like that!”

“Us?” Amy asked, rolled her eyes, and flipped into a series of kicks on the skateboard that would have been absolutely impossible if it had been bound by the laws of gravity. She landed easily and the pebbles that had hovered around her followed and created complex shapes or wobbly stacks on the ground.

“Sorry about that,” Larry said and dusted his robes off. “Amy was showing me how to increase my power and I had her practice some finesse drills. What can we do for you?”

“I want to get everyone home. Now, if possible,” she said.

“Well, why not simply click your heels together and tell your fairy godmother to whisk you away?” he asked.

“I thought maybe the snarky mage who works for me and used a teleportation spell to get me to this island might be able to keep earning his pay.”

It was Amy who answered. “I’m sorry, Kristen, but that’s not possible.”

“Sure it is. You got me here.” She tried to keep a smile on her face.

Larry nodded, “Sure, we got you here. Then the damn portal closed and left us all scrambling. And even that nearly killed me.”

“But Amy, you’re stronger.”

“It looks like I’ve reached my limits, though,” the girl said. “Seriously, these portals are difficult to make. I think the only way the mages do it is by working in larger numbers than we’ve realized. It took everything I had to stop that portal from snapping shut and chopping your tail off. Getting you through again might be possible, but getting everyone home? That’s not even in the realm of possibility.”

“Neither is sending you back alone,” Larry interjected. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s not like you want to go back to the Motor City because you’re worried about missing a show. You think something’s wrong, don’t you?”

Kristen didn’t bother to lie about it. “I do, yes. Amythist convinced me that something’s happening, and it makes sense that the Masked One would want to strike as soon as possible so everyone’s gut reaction is to blame the technomages. If only I can go back, fine.”

He shook his head and put his hands on his hips. “This is what I’m talking about. We won’t send you back alone. For all we know, the Masked One might have tortured Amythist into saying all that simply to lure you back there. If you get separated from us again, he won’t hold back. He’ll kill you and you know that.”

“And Amythist potentially being tortured is supposed to make me want to wait the weeks it’ll take for the ship to reach us here and get back home?”

Larry smirked. “Bad example.”

Kristen turned to the other woman. Despite the mage being younger, she was far more powerful. Truly, this decision would be hers. “Tell me you can do something.”

“Not gonna happen.” Amy folded her arms.

“Can’t you charter a jet?” he asked. “Windlock left you everything. It’s not like you can’t afford it.”

“I already talked to Brian about that,” Kristen explained. “We would still need to take a boat to the nearest island with an airport, plus hire the jet and a pilot. It would take days, at least.”

“So we have to enjoy a tropical paradise for a few days. Is that so bad?” He threw his hands up in frustration.

“It is when we’re understaffed, have dangerous prisoners, and the outside world is getting soaked in gasoline by someone who wants to play with matches,” Kristen snapped.

“We can’t do the portal, Kristen. I’m sorry,” Amy said. “Maybe we could do a series of jumps or something? Go from here to another island, take a rest, then do another jump? It would take a day at least, but we could do it. It’s too much for the two of us to make the jump in one go.”

“That’s it!” Larry exclaimed.

“I know that’s it. I was explaining that we can’t really do it,” she said and rolled her eyes again.

“No! Not that. I mean that two mages could never do it. But we don’t only have two mages.” He grinned like a fool.

“I know you got some mages to join us, but none of them are even as strong as you. No offense,” Amy added hastily.

“We can use them and we should,” Larry said. “But that’s not who I’m talking about. What if we get some of the technomages to help? They have more experience with the gates. It is their magic trick, after all. I only learned how to do it second-hand by watching the spells they had created.”

“But we can’t trust them,” the girl said. “They worked for Constance.”

“The fighting stopped because of Constance,” Kristen took a deep breath. She already knew what she would do, and she already didn’t like it.

“But if we could get them to help us, we could make a portal that could get us out of here.” He sounded hopeful. “They probably know ways to use less energy or something and might have a better idea of how to steer, so to speak. I would never have found the way to this island without that thread of magic Constance left.”

“It’s not worth the risk.” Amy folded her arms.

“That’s not your call to make,” he said, his gaze on Kristen.

She had already made her mind up. “Let’s talk to Constance.”

CHAPTER THREE

Kristen, Larry, and Amy entered the complex of tunnels and followed a winding route to the interior where the cells were. It was odd to have taken control of this enemy base that had obviously been in use by the technomages for decades. They walked through rooms where esoteric diagrams and mad scribblings covered the walls—new spells being developed, Larry explained. Their path took them past rooms that held munitions from when the base was first built.

Worst of all, they walked past chambers used to hold dragons captive so the technomages could harvest their body parts to use in the manufacture of their awful bullets. Close by were the work areas where they turned these parts into lethal ammunition.

It was extremely uncomfortable to think that if they were attacked, Kristen and her people were the ones currently in charge of all these horrible resources. Unfortunately, it could not all simply be destroyed—not yet and not if Amythist was right.

Finally, they reached the cells where all the captives were held. Even though they had actively tried to start a world war and all either had dragon blood or even human blood on their hands, she still didn’t like keeping them in these surroundings.

She’d been in one of the concrete-floored cells only a few days before, but at least she’d had one to herself. That was a luxury she and her team could not afford the captive mages. Behind rusty bars, seated on cold concrete or leaning against the stone walls, was the technomage army.

Almost every gaze stared at Kristen, Larry, and Amy as they passed. The only ones who didn’t stare at their captors were those who tried to conjure some trace of magic. Even with her right outside, some of the mages didn’t stop in their endeavors to harness the abilities that had been taken from them.

Larry had acted wisely when he prepared to come to the island to rescue Kristen. Before boarding the private jet that took them here, he had gone to Detroit SWAT headquarters and commandeered every anti-magic bracelet they had in their possession.

Now, each technomage was equipped with one. Their magic had been rendered useless and they couldn’t remove the restraint. Only Kristen could as she’d been the one to put them all on. One mage had managed to remove his forcibly and his lifeless body had already been taken from the cell and buried at sea. Since then, no one else had tried to break the bracelets.

Kristen walked past them all and ignored their attempts at magic, as useless as they were.

She finally reached the one person who had a cell to herself, stopped, and looked the woman in the eye. “Hello again, Constance Vigil.”

Constance smiled like she’d been invited to tea. “We have to stop meeting like this. Although I must say, the last time we met with me in a cell was a little nicer as the glass of that cell was more picturesque than these rusty old bars.”

“Forgive us your accommodations. They are the best we could manage. The last tenants here didn’t exactly prioritize the comforts of their prisoners,” she said as a dig at how the technomages had treated the dragons they’d kept there.

“It’s always a shame when new management doesn’t improve on the problems of the last owner, isn’t it?” The woman raised an eyebrow.

“Enough of this bullshit,” Amy said. “It stinks badly enough without it.”

“We need to know more about the portal magic,” Kristen said and nodded to Larry as he was the one who knew what he needed to ask.

“We want to know what kind of shorthand you use in those spells,” he said and sounded like he was talking about how to fix a carburetor with a fellow mechanic instead of interrogating a prisoner. “We managed to open one but it took a ton of energy. The way your people have used them shows you have a more efficient process. We want it, if you’d be so kind.” He gave her his most charming smile.

The smile the mage returned was as fake as his had been. “Why would the Steel Dragon need to open a portal? I was under the impression you had vast resources at your disposal. Surely a jet can be chartered?”

“Jets don’t go fast enough,” Kristen stated.

“But why must you travel so quickly?” the prisoner asked.

“That doesn’t concern you,” Amy said.

“Ah, but it does. Knowing the destination is incredibly important when opening a portal. If you are trying to go to a…say, a battlefield, for example, and you picture something that has already been destroyed, the results can be disastrous.”

“How do you know there’s a battlefield?” the young mage demanded.

“It was merely a guess, given the Steel Dragon’s history,” Constance told her. “Also, I can’t imagine what else would compel the three of you to come and ask us for help. Can you even trust us? I thought we were your enemy.” She let her gaze bore into Kristen, willing her to tell her what was going on.

The thing was, the Steel Dragon didn’t think of Constance as the enemy. Not anymore. The mage had called for the fighting to stop and left a thread of magic for Larry and Amy to follow. Plus, she’d removed the magic-dampening bracelet Kristen had been fitted with when she’d been captured. If any of those three things hadn’t happened, she had no doubt that it would be her team crammed in these cells instead of Constance’s.

Still, she knew she needed to tell her something, but she sure as hell didn’t want to tell her everything. “We have reason to believe there’ll be another attack and want to be in place to stop it.”

The woman frowned. “You’ve stopped all the technomages. There may be a few more out there, but I promise you there are no more major cells. If you think our people will attack, all I need is a cellphone to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

Kristen ground her teeth and tried to suppress her aura. She wasn’t concerned about mages. It was the Masked One who had her worried now and Constance had given her that name. The technomage leader had told her that her entire organization had probably been manipulated by this secret asshole since before it was even founded. She realized that if she wanted her help to stop the Masked One, her best bet was to come clean.

Her mind made up, she shared what information she had from Amythist with Constance and spared no details, as paltry as they were.

The woman nodded as she related what the old dragon had said and her frown deepened all the while.

“We’ll help you with the portal,” was the first thing she said when the explanation finished.

“Just like that?” Larry grinned.

“Why?” Kristen asked.

“Too many of those details sync up with what I thought was going on. If the Masked One is trying to cause the war—if a dragon has been behind everything going on from the very beginning—he’s not likely to stop because the mages were eliminated. He’ll push on with his agenda and simply use different actors for the various parts that must be played should he need to.”

“So you really will help us?” she asked again.

“Where do you wish to go?”

“The USA. Detroit, probably.”

“Why?” Constance asked.

“I already told—”

“Yes, you did, and I know your intentions and trust them, but this is the first time many of the mages here have laid eyes on the Steel Dragon, let alone heard her speak. Why should they follow you? Please tell me. If not for me, then for them.”

“Because we’re on the same side,” she said. “I know all of you fought to end the tyranny of the dragons. I disagree with your methods but not your reasons. I don’t want my parents to live in a world where the mood of a dragon could end their lives. Now it seems the dragons—or one of the bastards, at least—is ready to start the war he wanted you to fight.

“The best-case scenario is a decimation of the human population. Worst-case is complete annihilation. I know all of you fought against me because you thought I was upholding the status quo, but that is not why I fought. I did it only to save lives—the same thing I ask of you today.”

Many of the mages stared at her as she said this, but a precious few came to the front of their cells and asked how they could help.

It would have to be enough.

CHAPTER FOUR

Back on the beach, Kristen watched carefully while Constance explained to Larry, Amy, a few of the stronger mages from their team, and the two technomages who had agreed to help how to cast the spell.

Although she had tried to explain to both her dragon and human allies that the technomage leader wasn’t the threat she once was, they had insisted on precautions.

Stonequest was in dragon form, ready to incinerate all of them if needed. Drew and his SWAT team had guns aimed squarely at the mages’ heads. She was impressed that Constance didn’t seem to mind. Her two underlings were a little squirmy with the weapons but their leader acted as if being a trigger away from being blown to pieces was all in a day’s work. She assumed that for the technomages, at least, it probably was.

“The first and most important thing to understand is that this is by no means an easy spell to cast,” the woman explained. “Getting it started is the most difficult part, and my mages practiced it for many years before we ever dared to use it in combat.”

“So wherever we end up, that’s where we’ll be,” Larry translated. It was hard to imagine they could teleport somewhere calmer and more tranquil than the tropical beach they now stood on.

“Precisely,” Constance said. “Furthermore, when most of us go through, we will be drained. Our powers will start to replenish but we’ll need cover when we get through.”

“Consider that handled,” Stonequest growled.

“Quite.” She obliged the dragon with a tight smile.

“What do you mean most of us?” Amy said.

“That is the real secret of the spell and the only way we’ve been able to use these portals effectively.” The woman sighed, obviously less than pleased to divulge this secret. After a moment’s hesitation, she continued, resolute if less than excited. “Maintaining these portals for any amount of time longer than a few seconds requires that someone remain in place on the island as an anchor for the gate.”

“That’s bullshit,” Amy said. “We’ve chased all your forces through these more than once.”

Constance smiled. “You merely thought you did. Most times we escaped you, one brave soul stayed behind.”

“We would have seen them,” Kristen said.

“They don’t need to be right next to the portal, merely close enough to pour magic into it. I promise you, that is how it is done. But it does depend on the distance and the number of people who have to go through. Short hops and a couple of people can usually happen without an anchor. It depends on how long it has to be held open for. In the battle for Detroit, someone stayed behind in the Motor City and met up with us later. Even when they sprung me from prison, a mage stayed behind to get out on their own.”

“We never found them, though,” Drew said.

“Indeed. The mages who stayed behind were always skilled in a far simpler spell—self-immolation.”

“Unless you think otherwise, boss, I would guess that will not be necessary today,” Larry said.

“God, no,” Kristen said, aghast at the commitment her foes had to their cause.

“Excellent,” he said. “In that case, I’ll stay behind and serve as the anchor. I’d like to know how, anyway.”

“I can’t ask you to do that,” she responded quickly.

“Ask what? To hang out for a week or so on a tropical island and take a cruise on a yacht to Detroit? It doesn’t sound too bad to me.”

“It makes sense,” Timeflash said. Although she’d been with them, Kristen constantly almost forgot about her. She’d spent her time almost exclusively with the dragons who had been held captive on the island. “Someone needs to stay with the captive dragons anyway. I don’t think it would be smart to haul them through a portal when the alternative is a nice calm cruise where we can practice fishing and basic socializing.”

“I don’t know…” Kristen said.

“Ah, come on, Lady Steel. It’ll be fine.” The mage smiled cheerfully. “I’m more of a lover than a fighter anyway, and I have the skill to do this. There is a damn good chance you’ll need Amy's firepower more than my finesse. Plus, Timeflash and I can keep an eye on the prisoners until the yacht gets here.”

“About that…” The technomage turned to Kristen. “I already mentioned that when we pass through the portal, we will be drained of our powers. I do not know the particulars of what will be on the other side of this gate, but I have never liked going anywhere unprepared. It would be useful to have a few more troops available to help. If Lady Steel would release the rest of my people, they could bolster our force.”

She was not thrilled with the idea of simply freeing the people she’d worked to capture almost since she’d known she was a dragon. “How can I trust them?” she asked and not completely rhetorically. “Frankly, Constance, I barely trust you. The others are not high on my list of people I would trust to babysit.”

“We’d trust you with our lives as well,” the woman pointed out.

“You’re already trusting your lives to us,” Stonequest stated. “Letting you free would change that.”

“There is a way to make sure they can’t betray us.” Larry rubbed his chin and looked at the technomage leader.

Constance eyed him for a moment before realization flashed in her eyes. “No.” She said. “No way. It was not a good idea back then and it’s not a good idea now.”

“What are you talking about?” Kristen asked, quite sure she was demonstrating yet again that she had grown up as a regular human and spent less time in the world of dragons and mages than everyone around her.

“There's a type of rarely used magic called contractual magic,” Larry explained.

The woman scoffed. “Rarely used? More like archaic and outdated.”

“What is it?” she asked and ignored the snide comment.

“It’s a binding spell,” he explained. “Once cast, it creates a bond between two people that cannot be broken. Both sides are forced by the magic to fulfill their end of the bargain in question.”

“Those who don’t are incinerated by the magic if they don’t comply,” Constance said sourly.

“What’s the big deal?” Amy asked. “You said your mages were all trained to light themselves on fire if they were captured. How is this different?” It was a snarky, impolite thing to say—Kristen knew that—but there was also something to it.

“The difference is that no one else would hurt those mages. That was their choice. And we always knew some of them might choose to be captured rather than end their own lives.” There was a deep bitterness in Constance’s tone that Kristen needed to understand.

“But if both parties agree to this…contract,” she began, “how is it something they’re forced to do?”

The woman chuckled darkly. “Oh, sweet Kristen Hall. I wish all dragons were as trusting and naïve as you are. Sadly, mutual agreement is not the history of contractual magic.”

“Can we cut the mystic crap and tell me how the hell it works?” she snapped.

Larry shrugged and forced a weak grin. “Unfortunately, she’s right. It’s been used in ages past by dragon lords on their dragon vassals, by human mages to control other humans, and by dragons to control captured mages, among other things.”

“But how could it be bad if both parties agreed?” Keith asked.

“It’s good to see it’s not only the leader that’s naïve.” Constance sneered. “Obviously, many people will agree to all kinds of things if the alternative is being eaten by a dragon.”

“Or being ripped apart by a mage,” Stonequest added.

“They’re not wrong,” Larry concurred. “It has a particularly nasty history since this type of magic has been abused many times in the past. It fell out of style when the magic dampening cuffs were invented. For most situations, those have served the dragons fine. But…well, Windlock and I discussed all this once or twice. I would have agreed to it to be free of my bracelet, but we decided it might ruffle too many scales, so to speak.”

“You know how to do it?” Constance asked, obviously incredulous.

“I do,” he said simply and for once used less words than he might have needed instead of more.

“How does it work?” Kristen asked.

“Well, the basis of it is a paper contract. You write out the terms, read it out exactly as written, and sign in blood. Once you do that, you cannot break the vows you make or… Well, like Constance said…” He mimed an explosion with his hands. The gesture made her suddenly nostalgic for when she first met him when her world had barely begun to get as complicated as it currently was.

Kristen wasn’t sure what to do. She could definitely understand Constance's objections. It wouldn’t do for her to bring the mages out one by one and force them to agree to fight for her or be devoured. And it could be used for far worse than that. Now that she knew it could be agreed to under duress, she understood how horribly it could be—and probably had been—used. But it could also be used for good, couldn’t it?

“What if everyone who signs is not under duress?” she asked. “What if everyone agrees to it willingly?”

“There are precedents for that,” Larry was quick to point out. “When the United States tried to end its slave trade, a few dragons sided with the abolitionists. They convinced landowners to set their slaves free by agreeing to one of these contracts. The slaver—er, former slavers? Future former slavers?—agreed to it because the dragon signed as well. It meant that if a dragon took a slave, they’d be killed by the spell. Back in those days, that was impossible to even think of.”

“Those cases are the exceptions, not the rule,” Constance spat.

“But what if Kristen wrote it?” Larry asked, grinning like a fool. “If the contract were written in a way that forced her to be a proper liege and leader, it might make it more palatable to your mages. Hell, I know you might not believe it, but if we could write one of these in terms we all liked, I’d be happy to sign it. I trust her with my life as it is. I’d put it in writing.”

“I don’t know.” Kristen wasn’t fond of the idea. “It reeks of mind control. Too many people would lose their free will.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” he was quick to say. “Dragons have far more formidable mind control powers with their auras.”

Heartsbane—who had the most powerful aura of anyone Kristen had ever worked with—scoffed but she didn’t deny what he said either.

“I’ve thought about this often over the years. I think that—if done right—it’s the way forward. It is more powerful and could be abused, but Kristen, you’re the Steel Dragon. You won’t abuse it because we won’t force anyone to sign. This could be a real move toward equality—a document to prove that everyone on this planet can work together.”

“Work together or die, you mean,” Constance said.

“Well sure, yeah, but we didn’t exactly suffer zero casualties capturing this base, and I know some of your mages died too. This way will be better if everyone agrees to it.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin to write a contact that we could all agree to,” Kristen said and fixed him with a pointed stare.

“Let me see what I can do,” Larry said. “Like I said, I’ve thought about this for much longer than only the last few minutes.”

“Fine,” she said and he vanished into the tunnels of the complex to locate paper, pens, and possibly something to prick all their fingers.

“Is this how you always work?” the technomage leader asked. “Letting whoever on your team do as they wish?”

“I don’t have a problem with democracy,” she retorted. “But I’ll read this as carefully as your mages will.”

“So you will offer it to them?” Constance asked. She seemed both surprised and interested.

“You’re right that we could use the additional help if war is about to break out. If there is any way to get your people’s help in a way I can be sure I can trust them, I think it’s worth a try.”

“Even if it means your death if you fail to uphold your end of the contract?”

“I’ve risked my life every day since I became a cop so might as well get that shit in writing.”

The woman chuckled and rolled her eyes. “We’ll start working on the portal spell. It will take a little practice for us all to do it efficiently. I look forward to reading this contract.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Larry managed to produce a document that was surprisingly impressive.

Kristen read the parts that pertained to her first—the liege was the language of the contract—with particular interest. She was not to ask the signees to do anything that violated their ethics. It didn’t mean that if she gave them an order they didn’t like, she would explode, only that if something felt wrong to them, they could protest. She wasn’t concerned about this. These people had done horrible things to dragons, killed humans, and who knew what else? That clause basically meant she couldn’t kill them indiscriminately or hurt their families. That was fine with her.

She also had to treat their lives as if they were as valuable as her own and honor a commitment to keep them as safe as possible during a time of war. The contract would expire when the risk of war between humans and dragons was over or the war itself ended, whichever happened first. That was to be agreed to by Kristen and at least half of whoever signed it.

In return for these assurances, the signees were to swear to follow her orders in the spirit in which they were issued. More specifically, they were to dedicate themselves to preventing as many deaths of both dragons and humans as possible. They were to do all they could to prevent war between humanity and dragon kind, and if war did break out, they were to work to end it with as few lives lost on both sides as possible.

It seemed reasonable to her and also like a good way to find out if any of the mages there were actively working for the Masked One. There was no way a mole would sign something like this. Not that it meant anyone who didn’t sign was working with the Masked One. Surely qualms could be had with the verbose document. It only meant that those who did sign truly could be trusted.

Larry finally managed to achieve the correct wording on his third attempt. Once Kristen liked what it said and Constance grumbled only minimally, the dragons and human fighters were instructed to unlock the cells and bring all the mages out onto the beach.

Part of her wanted to use the hollowed-out heart of a volcano the mages had used for the center of their operation, but she thought the beach was ultimately more fitting. It was a place of freedom and open horizons, where you could practically see into tomorrow. She hoped the mages saw it that way too.

It took a while for everyone to gather. Kristen stood with her people—the dragons, mages, and humans who had fought alongside her. Across from them, a line of technomages waited with their leaders—Constance, Eric, Havington, and the Iron Dragon Katrina—in front.

Everyone watched and listened as she read the document and the blue sky gave way to the rich colors of a tropical sunset. When she finished, she pricked her finger with the quill of a bird—this was apparently essential to the spell and had cost Emerald an hour of time spent hunting a pelican merely to snatch a tailfeather—and she signed.

She immediately felt some of her energy flow into the paper—it had come from a ream with perforated edges that had been used by printers that were practically obsolete even when she was a kid. Her blood seemed to course through the document to make the words Larry had written seem to burn into the paper. She also found that the somewhat fragile paper seemed to strengthen with it.

Larry stepped forward to sign next, a grin on his face as he read through the half of the document that pertained to him and all the other signees. Stonequest and Drew were already fighting to be the second signee, and the rest of her friends—human and dragon—were in line behind them. They chuckled and pulled faces at each other as they prepared to prick their fingers.

Suddenly, Drew and Stonequest were lifted off their feet and moved a few feet back before Amy landed beside Kristen. “You saved my life. I always intended to serve you but like you said, we might as well make it official.”

The girl signed and Drew and Stonequest followed. Jim wanted to sign next but those remaining wouldn’t let him, so they ended up reading it as a group.

Kristen couldn’t help but shed a few tears of pride as her friends fought to agree to help her with their very lives. They had all suffered so much for her. Each one of them had spent tears, sweat, blood, and hours and hours of their lives and still, they wanted to give more. It was too much, more than she deserved and more than anyone deserved. She was honored by them and was almost glad to have something to bind her to them—a reminder that their lives were worth as much if not more than her own.

Finally, they had all signed except Hernandez. “You know I might try to make you break this shit simply to watch you blow up, right?” the woman said.

“Anything to make you finally shut up.” Kristen laughed and wiped tears from her eyes.

“You can’t tell me to do that. It’s against my ethics to stop talking shit,” Hernandez smiled as she signed and the blood from her signature coursed through the paper and strengthened it further.

Now that her people had signed, Kristen turned to the assembled prisoners. “I want to offer all of you a chance to redeem yourselves. Let’s not pretend your actions in the past didn’t hurt people, but you’d been fooled—tricked and betrayed.

“Each one of you endeavored to end the machinations of dragons intent on controlling human lives, but Constance has made it clear to me that in fact, your movement was coopted by one of the very dragons you sought to destroy.

“The Masked One has used all of you to stir up a war that neither side will win, simply so he can become more powerful. Everything he has had you do—all the dragon bullets and all the killing—was to hurt humanity, not save it. It was all to give that dragon an excuse to steal more power. The way to peace is not through violence but through peace. Join me!”

Her words drew grumbles and whispers from the prisoners. Looks were cast from one to another while heads shook in subtle disagreements and some jaws hardened. No one looked exactly eager to swear themselves to the dragon they’d worked so hard to destroy for so long.

Kristen had hoped for better, but she couldn’t exactly blame them. It couldn’t be easy to have a long-time enemy tell you that you had a choice to join her side—and, oh yeah, you’ve been tricked for ages and your mission is phony and you’re not even smart enough to realize you’ve been had.

Still, she’d hoped for at least a few defectors to join sides with her. She really did believe in the terms Larry had written. Maybe she was simply optimistic, but she had thought the mages might believe too.

“I know how it sounds,” Constance said. She stepped forward and away from the technomage leaders before she turned to face the others with her back to Kristen. “I know it’s hard to think we’ve worked to fulfill someone else’s dream, but we’ve all known that dragons are capable of this kind of deception. How many of you know a mage who wished to join our fight but couldn’t because a dragon had already thrown a shackle on their wrist and denied them their power?”

A fresh round of mutters and grumbles followed this. Kristen had never thought of that aspect of their organization—that these mages might be fighting for more than merely the idea of equality and might be fighting for people they knew who had done nothing wrong besides having the same powers they had. Powers that—if they were dragons—would have been celebrated but—because they were human mages—were nothing but liabilities.

“We all have,” Constance went on. “Every one of us knows of the persuasive powers of dragons. I’ll be the first to admit they tricked me. I thought I was in control, but the Steel Dragon is right. All our agitating, all these bullets, and all the dragons we have killed haven’t made the world more peaceful but less so. Humankind is closer to being attacked by the dragons than ever. And it’s our fault.”

“That doesn’t make dragons innocent!” Havington hissed. “One lizard tricking us doesn’t mean we should sign up with another one.”

Kristen made a note of this. Perhaps it was he who often contacted the Masked One. Although she had begun to think that if any of the mages had regular contact with their mysterious puppet master, they probably didn’t even realize it.

“I’ll join forces with Kristen Hall not because she’s the Steel Dragon but because she’s still Kristen Hall. She’s telling the truth about the Masked One, exactly like I thought she would when I told her about his existence.”

Gasps indicated that none of the technomages had any prior knowledge of the mysterious dragon and that their leader had not only known but had kept the information from them.

“I know,” she said to the tight-jawed, frowning mages, “I should have told you but I didn’t. I thought we would be safer if this information wasn’t spread. That’s the kind of leader I was and that’s why I failed you. I’ll sign this document because Kristen doesn’t lie to her people. She’s open and honest and has always fought for the same thing we have. I’ll sign to help undo the damage we have done and save as many people as possible before it's too late. That is, if you’ll have me,” Constance said and directed the last to Kristen.

“If you’ll agree to the terms of this contract, I would proudly have you at my side,” she said.

“That’s better than I deserve.” The woman’s head was held high with pride, despite her words saying she didn’t deserve it. She read the contract aloud, her voice strong and full of emotion, shed a tear when she pricked her finger, and signed. The contract sparkled when she wrote her name. The contract somehow knew she was a powerful mage.

“Once again, I offer all of you a chance at redemption,” Kristen said. “There’s no shame in acting as you did if you didn’t know everything, but now that you do, it has to stop. You can still be heroes if you’ll only help us to stop the Masked One and the war he’s pushed us all toward.”

“I don’t see why we should trust you lizards,” Havington said. She had no doubt his fists would be wreathed in flame if only he had the power to do so. “Dragons are the problem. This Masked One is a problem. The dragons we’ve killed were problems. You’re a problem. I have no faith that beings who held onto their power for ten thousand years will relinquish it simply because we stop one of their more cretinous members.”

“Then don’t sign,” she said simply. “If you truly believe I’m evil, don’t sign. If you think I have caused more damage to humanity than the forces and attitudes I have fought against since the day I learned I was a dragon, then by all means, try to break your restraints and fight us. I won’t let you go to kill me, exactly like none of you released the dragons you held in captivity. I won’t begrudge you this choice if you make it, but this contract is your path to freedom and equality.”

“The terms are fair,” Constance said. “I hope you join me but if not, a yacht is on its way. It should be here in a week and you’ll be able to cruise home in luxury with the dragons we imprisoned for so long. I know even looking them in the eyes would be too much for me, but if that’s what you wish, so be it.”

It felt like forever before the first mage broke ranks, but once she did, more than half of the others followed. To Kristen’s surprise, the other technomage cell leader, Eric, was willing to sign and even led a group in chorus to recite the contract together as her team had done.

The only notable mage who refused was Havington. He scowled and said he was concerned that if he looked at Kristen the wrong way after signing, he’d explode. She didn’t press him. While she thought he was a fool, she didn’t want to turn this contract into something that bound people against their will. It would then be nothing more than another weapon. The world had enough of those.

There was one more notable encounter, though.

The Iron Dragon walked up with a scowl. Without her iron skin, Kristen could tell how closely they resembled each other. They had the same red curly hair—although Katrina’s was slighter darker—the same freckles, and the same figure. She even thought they had the same shoe size.

“It’s hard to look you in the face,” the woman said to her.

“I thought the same thing,” she responded.

“It’s tough because you’re a reminder of how weak I would be if I hadn’t been raised by Constance. I don’t like being reminded of that.”

“It must be even worse to have those cuffs on, then, given how I put them on you after I kicked your ass.”

Katrina smirked. “Only because we couldn’t use our dragon forms.”

She offered a mirrored facetious smirk. It was the exact expression she wore when she was trying to one-up someone. “Maybe,” she said. “Are you going to sign or what?”

Katrina looked surprised at that. “Wait…you’re okay with me signing this? You’d fight with me? Even after all our battles?”

Kristen shrugged. “I won’t ask you to be my roommate or anything, and God knows I wouldn’t take you out for beers anytime soon. But if you can agree to this contract, I’d be glad to have you on our side. You’re a strong fighter.”

“You got that right,” the woman snapped.

“There’s no weakness in admitting you’re strong,” she continued. “I’ve seen you fight. I know what you can do. Plus, I’d like to learn more about you. Together, we might be able to unlock even more of our powers.”

“If this is some kind of trick—”

“You can read the contract again if you like,” she said. “But if you think I’m smart enough to trick Constance and your leader Eric, how can you hope to stand against me?”

The Iron Dragon snorted at that, although she looked at the two mage leaders with wide eyes. Kristen saw the same bare trust in Katrina’s eyes for the two mages she had as her parents. How hard that must be, she thought, for your parents to also be your boss and for your job to be a terrorist. She had no doubt that Katrina’s life had been far more difficult than her own. Although they seemed to share much of their DNA, they did not share experiences and they would likely never see eye to eye. She hoped that would be enough for her sibling.

“I still don’t trust you,” Katrina said finally after she’d stared at the contract for what felt like forever. “But I trust them. If you’ll have me, I’ll sign.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“My word is as strong as iron,” she said with a cheeky smile.

“That’s impressive. It’s almost as strong as steel,” Kristen replied, unable to help herself.

Katrina snorted again but she read the contract aloud, pricked her finger—obviously shocked that a simple knife could hurt her at all because of the cuffs—and signed it as well.

The mages who refused to sign were escorted to their cells. Kristen looked at the people who’d accepted this bond with her as their liege.

“I guess it’s time to take those bracelets off.”

Despite them not wearing them for very long, when they came off, it was evident that the mages had wilted under the stifling effects of the magic dampening cuffs.

Immediately, they perked up and flexed their magic powers by making dervishes of sand or shapes in the waves. She was pleased to see that none of them tried to test the contract by attacking any of her allies. It seemed a peace had been found, at least for now.

“All right. The first order of business,” she said and clapped sharply like all this was perfectly fine and completely normal. “It’s time to open that portal.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Where to?” Constance asked.

It was a fair question, and one that Kristen didn’t have an answer to.

“We need to operate under the assumptions that the Masked One is on the Dragon Council and that he’ll try to push for war as soon as possible,” she said.

“So we should find the Council and tell them not to listen to whoever the hell is pushing for war,” Keith said as if it were so obvious.

“The problem is the Council doesn’t exactly post their whereabouts,” Stonequest explained. “Even when the world isn’t on the precipice of a dragon-human war that could exterminate one or both lifeforms, they’re extremely secretive. Do we assume the Masked One is on the North American Council?”

“We do,” Constance confirmed.

“Then we can essentially narrow it down to the entire continent of North America,” he finished.

“That doesn’t exactly help,” Hernandez complained.

“We will prepare the portal,” Constance said with a nod and excused herself. “Tell us as soon as you have a destination.”

“What about someplace like Kansas?” Jim asked. “That’s the middle of the continent, give or take. If we go there, we’d be a few hours away from shit hitting the fan instead of days.”

“I don’t like that,” Kristen said. “Hours is more than enough time to raze a city. We need a better plan.”

“I think we should go to Detroit,” Stonequest said. “Amythist said the SWAT forces have left and since we know the Dragon SWAT forces in Detroit, we can probably determine where they’ve gone to.”

“Where do you think they’ve gone to?” Beanpole—normally so quiet—asked.

“If I was the Masked One—and I’m not,” Heartsbane said, “I would try to mass all the fighting dragons. If he can build a force and convince them to fight together, it wouldn’t matter where they’re located. If he can make the SWAT teams a cohesive unit, that would be a force more than strong enough to wipe humanity out.”

The massive satellite phone in Kristen’s hand rang and she answered immediately. It was Brian. “This had better be urgent,” she said sharply.

“It is,” he said so loudly it caused the old device to feed back. “We have all kinds of activity in Detroit—and not good activity. Dragons have arrived and they’re attacking the city! They’ve already torched Tiger Stadium and it looks like they’re moving to the rest of downtown.”

“Brian, this is important,” she said. “Are they flying in formation? Can you tell?”

“No…no, I don’t think so. Does anyone have a phone there? I can send video.”

Keith dug one out of his pocket. “Am I the only guy with a waterproof case? Seriously? What do the rest of you do at water parks?”

“This is not the time, Keith!” Kristen snatched the phone from his hand. Brian had already patched a video feed through to it. Dragons swooped and attacked her city—that had been attacked by the damn mages only a week before. If this wasn’t the work of the same architect, she would eat her tail.

“Stonequest,” she said. “Do you know any of them? Are they Dragon SWAT?”

The dragon watched the screen carefully—far too carefully for her as he took forever—but he finally shook his head. “No. No, those aren’t on any SWAT team I’ve ever met. In fact…” He paused as one swooped low and torched the camera that was recording them. Brian immediately switched to another. His sister guessed that he’d commandeered the city’s traffic cameras.

“I’ve busted that one before—unauthorized duel. He’s a lowlife named Coal. Or Char. Something like that. I’ve sent that asshole to prison twice.”

“So it could merely be lowlifes causing trouble,” Heartsbane said. “When the cat is away, the mice will play and all that.”

“It’s possible,” Stonequest said.

“I don’t care why they’re attacking, only how we’ll stop their asses,” Kristen said and scowled when she recognized a dragon as well. It was one of those who had tried to beat her up in prison and who had worked for Obscura. “I guess Stonequest was right. We need to get to Detroit. Timeflash, you’ll have to come with us as I think we’ll need your abilities. Two of the younger dragons can stay with Larry.”

“On it!” Keith shouted and ran down the beach to tell Constance, Larry, and the mages who were working on the portal.

She looked at her assembled team. Although battle-weary from fighting the mages, not one of them looked like they weren’t ready for this fight.

“What are our orders?” Stonequest asked.

“We’ll believe what Constance said about this being most of the technomages,” she said with no better reason to do so other than what her gut told her. “It means I want dragons going through this portal as dragons. Once you’re in Detroit, take to the air and try to give the rest of us a few minutes to get through and get clear. From what I saw of Zed’s footage, the city’s already in trouble, so every second counts.”

“What are we waiting for?” Hernandez asked as she clipped grenades to her belt.

Kristen smiled. “I’m waiting for you all to grab your guns and get to that portal. The last one through has to stay here with Larry and listen to his jokes.”

A few chuckles followed but mostly, people simply retrieved their gear. The dragons transformed and flew down the beach to where a ring of light was already forming in the red light of the sunset.

Kristen wanted to fight, but she knew she had to stick with her people to issue orders when they first went through.

A little frustrated, she watched as the mages snapped the portal open and there on the beach was Grand River Avenue.

The first thing she noticed about the city was how bright it was. Obviously, if it was sunset in the pacific, it was a different time of day in the Motor City.

The next thing she noticed were the flames. They were everywhere. Already, half the windows in the Michigan Building poured smoke, and the bottom floor seemed to be totally consumed by fires.

Her blood boiled as her city burned.

Any plans to watch as her dragons rushed through went up in flames.

“Come on! We fight today with new allies but that doesn’t mean we fight any less hard! Now, what are we waiting for? Chaaaarge!” She transformed into her steel dragon body and led her forces through the portal.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The enemy dragons did not fail to recognize the magical gateway as a threat. As soon as Kristen came through it into downtown Detroit, she felt the heat of dragon flames on her back.

But she was the Steel Dragon. It would take more than a glancing jet of fire to harm her metal scales.

The heat did compromise her aerodynamics, though, so rather than soaring through and above the skyline of Detroit, she was forced to land.

The enemy dragons were poised to take advantage of this turn of events.

One of them drove into her back and she grimaced against the now familiar pain of dragon talons cutting through her steel scales to pierce her flesh.

The wound wasn’t deep, fortunately. Her scales could be sliced by dragon talons but they blunted most of the damage. She still had sufficient strength and presence of mind to whip the dragon off her back with the ax-blade on the tip of her tail.

The force when her steel-covered tail pounded into her attacker was enough to launch him violently through the bottom floor of the Michigan Building. He leapt out, grinning and silhouetted by flames.

He was a runty little creature and perhaps a little bigger than half of Kristen’s size. Something about his face triggered her memories.

“Didn’t I kick your ass in prison?” she asked.

The dragon roared at her—thus proving that yes, she had indeed kicked his ass—and he tried to scramble past her and get to the portal she’d come from.

His foolish defiance had cost him precious seconds, however.

Already, the other SWAT Dragons were coming through. Stonequest knocked the attacker aside with a swipe of his claw and catapulted him into a car that he crushed with the force of his impact. Although he was somewhat diminutive compared to his fellows, he was still more than big enough to deliver that kind of damage. It was a reminder to Kristen that the fight would not be an easy one. Her forces had to protect the city and defeat the dragons. The attackers only had to burn them all.

“Stonequest, cover that portal!” she ordered.

He led Heartsbane, Emerald, Lumos, and Timeflash into a tight circle above the portal. The other less experienced dragons emerged next.

“Choose a target and stick to them. I want dragon on dragon to keep them focused on you and not the city,” she ordered.

Despite the strange request—strange to them, anyway, as they were not used to protecting anything but themselves—the dragons obeyed. Each of them targeted one of the marauders and surged with claw and tail as they released blasts of fire that did little except annoy their opponents.

“Stonequest, they need support!”

He nodded and broke away from his other SWAT team members. It was great to have more dragons on their team, but none of the new recruits had much combat experience. Their lack meant they wouldn’t be able to do much besides distract their opponents for long.

And much needed to be done.

All over, the city was on fire. Police and firefighters raced frantically to rescue people who were trapped in buildings, cars, or simply frozen in fear. Every human had always known this could happen. Living in a world with dragons meant you lived on their whims. It was a constant reminder that you were mortal but still, it didn’t exactly prepare anyone for six dragons to simply rain fire on a city like it was the end times.

“Holy shit!” Drew shouted as he led the human forces through the portal. “What exactly are we supposed to do about this?”

Kristen was terrified that the question was way too big, but she also knew that as a leader, she had to answer it. “You know some of the cops here. Call your old captain and tell her you’re here to help to get people to safety. We’ll handle the dragons. I want you to get as many people as you can out of here.”

He looked at the smoke-choked, fire-filled sky. “Yes ma’am,” he said without batting an eyelid.

As more and more humans came through, Drew issued orders. He’d put everyone in squads long before and now sent those groups to help evacuate buildings and clear escape paths. Any of the enemy dragons who tried to veer away from the battle were met with a storm of bullets.

Kristen hadn’t ordered her team to equip with dragon bullets. She probably should have, but she was too concerned about friendly fire problems. Still, the enemy were far more wary of the guns than they would have been a year before. They hesitated when they approached the human forces, which of course gave her dragons time to catch them.

Stonequest in particular was able to seize the opportunity created by one of these hesitations. He powered into the back of a dragon who looked like his skin was made of gravel and held him tightly as the two spun above the city. His adversary couldn’t escape but he wasn’t about to give in without a fight either. He slashed at his attacker’s chest and drew blood. Stonequest didn’t flinch. Instead, he kept his dive carefully controlled so they avoided any buildings. Then, at the last moment, he transformed his entire body into marble and landed on top of his opponent.

The force drove the dragon into the street below him, created a massive crater, and left the raider utterly motionless. Whether dead or unconscious, Kristen didn’t know and Stonequest didn’t seem to care. With one threat neutralized, he launched once again to give chase to another target.

Kristen turned to the portal as the mages—many of them former enemies—came through. Finally, Constance, Katrina, and Eric entered Detroit. Larry waved from the other side as if he were disembarking for a vacation instead of being left in charge of a group of prisoners. The gate closed a moment later and he was gone.

“Mages, I need you to put out as many of these flames as possible.”

“You heard the dragon!” Constance said and led her forces away to attack the fires.

Only one didn’t follow the order—a man with a mustache who had only begrudgingly signed the contract.

“This is what we were fighting to stop!” he screamed. Electricity crackled from his temples, down his arms, and wound around his knuckles in the shape of barbed wire. “Dragons kill people and we’re supposed to serve you? This is fucking crazy! Crazy, I tell you.”

Rather than following Constance, he turned on Kristen, no doubt confident that his electrical powers could get through her steel skin.

He managed only about five steps toward her before he exploded. One second, he was a man crackling with power and in the next, he was nothing but a sooty stain on the street.

“Nice job, Steel.” Katrina sneered at her, still in her human body. “The first of our mages to die and it was because of your contract.”

“Do you want to be next? You promised you wouldn’t try to kill me. Do you want to see what happens if you do?” she asked.

Katrina made no response and apparently honored her word far better than the dead mage had. In her moment of hesitation, Kristen took one last opportunity to assess the battle before she decided where she would enter the fight.

The mages were making real progress against the fires. Constance used her power over the winds to smother the flames. Rather than blow wind at the fires, she could use it to keep fresh air away from the flames. This turned raging infernos into smoldering embers that firefighters were then able to extinguish with their hoses.

Eric also seemed to have a favorite kind of magic and used it to extinguish fires. When they’d fought him, he’d thrown a thousand tiny needles at them. He used a similar technique now to rip flaming boards apart and send the embers high into the sky so they burned away as nothing but fireworks washed out in the early morning sun.

Other, less powerful mages worked together to extinguish burning buildings. Those with augmented strength asked firefighters what walls could be punched through to give their hoses better access to the flames. Those with elemental abilities either doused flames or tried to contain them.

It looked like the city would survive if the dragons overhead weren’t allowed to do anything else to it.

“Dragon SWAT!” Kristen roared.

“Yes, ma’am?” they replied from wherever they were in the chaos.

“Are you ready to take out the trash?”

They all bellowed an affirmative except Heartsbane, who shouted, “I thought you’d never ask!”

“What about you?” Kristen asked Katrina and watched her reaction carefully. She was still far from trusting the Iron Dragon fully. The spell was in place so she knew she couldn’t attack her directly, but she didn’t seem as ready to fight with her as Constance was. She still felt like she needed to get to know her sister better before she could offer her real trust.

Thankfully, it seemed that Katrina was more than willing to prove her reliability this time around. “I’ve spent my entire life protecting humans against dragons who have overstepped their bounds,” she growled, looked at the sky, and assumed her dragon shape. “I’m more than happy to stop a few more.”

The two took to the air together.

As they gained height, Kristen watched the former members of Dragon SWAT bring the fight to the rogue dragons.

It was an amazing sight.

Before, it had been like watching gulls fight each other. Her new recruits could fight well enough, but so could the rogues. Neither had been able to gain much traction or advantage over the other side.

Now, it was more like watching peregrine falcons hunt pigeons.

The members of Dragon SWAT had been trained for years to fight against dragons and better yet, they knew the tactics of some of those they now fought.

Heartsbane closed in on a long, sinuous dragon who turned in midair and tried to spray her with some kind of viscous sludge. The SWAT dragon clearly had experience with the expectorant as she closed her wings around her face so they were coated in the gunk rather than her face.

She landed to clean the crap from her wings, annoyed but not hurt. “When you said trash, I didn’t think you meant literal slime,” she groused.

Kristen didn’t mind that she was temporarily grounded. It gave her an opportunity to attack a target with Katrina at her side.

“The slimy one is ours,” she ordered.

The Iron Dragon nodded.

Together, they pumped their wings between skyscrapers and gained altitude until they were above them. Although they’d never worked together before, there was instant grace to the way the two dragons flew as a unit. Both could turn their bodies to metal but knew not to unless they needed to defend themselves or until they were above another dragon and could use the additional weight to aid in a dive assault.

This meant they moved the same way, tried to gain altitude, and turned their metal skin on and off intermittently to block blasts from the other dragons that battled all around them.

“You use your skin well,” Kristen shouted at Katrina as they drew closer to the slime dragon.

“You too. I can almost forget that you have hardly any experience with it. You need to guard your back legs better, by the way. That hip joint can be brutalized if you let it—”

“My back?” Kristen asked and felt the teeth of another dragon sink into her thigh.

It seemed the rogue dragons weren’t particularly keen on fighting the law enforcement dragons that some of them had faced and failed against multiple times. Not when there was a dragon present who many had a personal grudge against.

“You coward! You’re the piece of shit who tried to shiv me!” she yelled at the dragon clinging desperately to her leg with its teeth.

“Mfuufm moo!” he snarled in return, his mouth full of her flesh that rendered the words unintelligible. Still, it didn’t take a linguist to realize that he had used that simplest of all human curses against her—the f-bomb.

She couldn’t shake him, though. The bastard had sunk his teeth deep in her leg and her efforts to dislodge him proved futile.

The Iron Dragon plummeted and pounded into his back.

The air was knocked from his lungs and he fell, Katrina on top of him, until she crushed him into the pavement below, her iron body multiplying the force of the blow to lethal levels.

Kristen was thankful. It was always good to have someone stop a dragon from ripping your leg off, but she also realized that it meant Katrina would be out of this for the next couple of minutes. It took time for a metal dragon to gain height, and while she did so, she and the four dragons harrying her were already high above the city.

They attacked with about as much grace as they had in prison. She couldn’t be sure if these were the same ones who had attacked her with makeshift prison weapons when she’d been falsely accused and incarcerated without her powers, but she decided she’d go ahead and fight them like they were.

“Metal pipe!” she yelled as if greeting an old friend when a gray-scaled dragon with black, broken-looking teeth led the charge.

She called on the training Lumos had given her, struck out with her tail, and swung it into the joint connecting his wing to his body. Her adversary shrieked in pain when the ax-blade tail connected, then plunged like a bird with a wing broken by a jet plane.

Emerald dove after him and sank his claws into the dragon’s back. His talons caused pain but also spared his life when he guided him to the top of a building and forced him to transform.

Three more remained and none seemed inclined to retreat.

“I’m sorry, it’s been such a long time. How did I kick your ass?” Kristen asked a red dragon who left trails of smoke from his wings in his wake.

“I almost choked you to death with a chain, bitch.” He directed great plumes of smoke at her. It didn’t hurt but it left her blind in a cloud of gas that made it hard to breath and therefore do all the other things breathing made possible. “Now you’ll choke for real.”

Kristen would have felt bad about her dragon SWAT teammates attacking him if not for two reasons. The first was that the dragon engaged her with as much help as he could get, so why should she do differently? The second was the horrible pun.

Because of these two reasons, she didn’t feel bad when she heard a shriek from her formerly smug adversary.

She pumped her wings and finally moved clear of the smoke cloud. Lumos had torn a huge hole in the dragon’s wing, captured him with his claws, and now guided him to the top of another building.

The last two dragons didn’t seem so keen on a reunion.

With a glance and a pulse of their aura at each other, their intentions became clear.

They wanted to get the fuck out of there.

Unfortunately for them, they decided to do that together. Kristen, Stonequest, Heartsbane, and Timeflash were able to pursue them without having to go in separate directions. It didn’t take long to catch up with the first. He must have been injured at some point as one of his wings flapped more sluggishly than the other to slow him sufficiently for them to overtake him easily.

Stonequest took hold of him and said something in the dragon’s ear that must have been quite persuasive, because he stopped trying to flee and attempted to glide as he was led to the top of another building.

That left only one dragon. Despite the odds stacked against this one, he continued the attempt to flee and pumped his wings furiously to increase his speed.

Amazingly, it began to outpace Kristen and her team. Maybe his power was quickness or his slighter frame simply allowed him to move faster. Whatever the cause, she thought for a moment that he would elude them and she muttered in frustration.

Moments later, the dragon appeared to simply make impact with an invisible wall.

To her, it looked like something out of a cartoon—like someone had painted a fake sky and the dragon had thought it was open space when in fact it was a decoy colored with ACME paint.

To the dragons—she discovered later—it was far more obvious what had happened. A mage had stepped in.

Kristen saw it too when she thought more clearly. The air had a blue shimmer—the same color of the shields Amy and Larry used to block bullets. The dragon had powered into this barrier and Timeflash grasped him in her talons as he began to fall. The battle was over.

The Steel Dragon coasted Earthward and was met by Amy. This was only a little odd because the girl met her a hundred feet off the ground. She rode her skateboard, which was weirder than if she had been flying. A quirk of the young mage’s enormous power was that she couldn’t lift herself. She had to stand on other objects or use her clothing.

“I’m sorry it took so long.” The girl smirked, fully aware that she had stopped a dragon in its tracks without breaking a sweat. “Constance wasn’t kidding about that portal sapping my strength. It took me a full minute to build enough power to stop that asshole.”

Kristen soared past the mage and marveled at her power. “Come on. We have a city to put back together.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The chaos of the battle was over and Kristen issued orders to restore the city where they could. The mages had already proven useful in battle but truly seeing them help mend things in the aftermath was an even more inspiring reason for them to be on the side of a peaceful humanity.

Those with telekinetic powers used them to patch brick, stack damaged cars, and move rubble so construction crews would be able to get to work immediately.

Timeflash moved among them in her human form, giving tips to some and asking for help from others. Her power was unique in the dragon world as she could put objects back together in their original condition. She focused on the Michigan building, and Kristen watched in delight as windows mended themselves and smoke billowed into the building to reconstitute itself into chairs, paintings, and furniture.

None of the mages had this skill, but they could augment Timeflash’s abilities, and those who helped her looked about as thrilled as Kristen did. It was pure magic to see something completely destroyed returned to its former glory.

Unfortunately, the dragon’s powers were anything but limitless. After fixing the Michigan Building, she was almost spent. She helped get a fire station in working order—although she was unable to remove any of the soot stains there—and could do no more.

Still, between her abilities and the power of the mages, the city returned to something resembling normalcy. Windows still had to be mended and many insurance claims would be filed for wrecked cars, but at least the streets were navigable.

Kristen left the clean-up crew to check on their four prisoners. The two dragons who had been pounded into the ground hadn’t survived the impact, but the other four had been taken into custody. They now all wore bracelets that only hours ago had been worn by mages who had tried to kill dragons. Despite the turn of events, none of the four seemed particularly thankful to be captured by mages instead of killed.

They all stood sullenly on the roof of Dragon SWAT headquarters in the old Capital Square building in downtown Detroit. Kristen landed and looked fondly at the rooftop. She couldn’t count the number of missions that had begun there, nor how many times she’d been reprimanded by Stonequest when he’d been her boss rather than the other way around.

“Stonequest, is there a reason why we haven’t started processing these dragons? I seem to remember some fairly uncomfortable cells they might all find familiar.”

“Actually…” He looked alarmed. “There is.” The stone dragon gestured toward the rooftop entrance to the building where Atramento stood. The mage looked more exhausted than she had ever seen him. He was master of the Paper Dungeon, the bureaucratic center for Detroit’s Dragon SWAT team, and managed much of the paperwork of the Midwest as well.

Kristen couldn’t imagine what could have compelled him to leave the station he had always seemed almost obsessed with, especially with the mountain of paperwork that would be needed. They had to process these four dragons as well as the two dead ones, and all the damage they’d caused to the city.

“Atramento?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”

He looked at her, his robes a little limp, and the tattoos on his head, face and hands still made him look otherworldly despite the expression of defeat on his face.

“They said they let me stay because of my service,” he said weakly. “Like it was a reward to be left in the wreckage.”

“Wreckage?” she asked. It wasn’t like him to talk about his well-oiled filing cabinet of a floor as anything but perfection.

“That’s all they left. They destroyed any records that had to do with dragon imprisonment. Already, requests have begun to come in for dragons who have been ‘falsely imprisoned without paperwork.’ It’s disgusting.” The mage shook his head as if there were no affront worse to society than that of false bureaucratic claims. “Even those I would process. There’s a procedure, of course, for missing documents, even if they were…burned. But I can’t even do that.”

“Why not?” she asked, although she feared she already knew the answer.

Atramento choked out a sob as he raised his wrist. On it, he wore a heavy cuff. “They put this on me. After all I’ve done, they put this on me.” He uttered another sob and did not seem to be doing well at all. She didn’t think he’d even noticed that the city had been attacked.

“What is it?” Amy asked and glowered at the cuff in distaste.

“It’s a cuff like they use for prisoners. It blocks my magic—all my magic. They came here and ordered every mage to put one on, the brutes. We were already fitted with cuffs that wouldn’t let us move against them. They didn’t need to do this.”

“Who?” Kristen asked.

“Dragons,” Atramento told her sharply, his tone venomous.

“Where is everyone else?” Kristen asked.

“They took them all away. I asked where so I could update forwarding addresses, but they wouldn’t tell me. Do you know what a nightmare this is? Even with my powers, this would have been difficult to fix, but without them, I…I fear I may be held accountable for a dereliction of duties.” He looked more concerned about this black mark on his record than the dragons were at the prospect of being imprisoned. Maybe they knew something she didn’t.

“But why take the mages? They can’t hurt dragons. That’s the whole point of the cuffs,” she said. “Do they think they can be used as weapons against people?”

Stonequest shook his head. “I doubt that. It's probably the opposite. They are rounding up every known mage because dragons don't trust them, not because they do. They'll keep the mages out of the way so they can't decide to switch sides and fight with the humans during the culling.”

The word “culling” made her blood run cold. She knew Stonequest had only said it because he’d heard it used in this context before. He’d endeavored to keep the dragon bullets secrets because he feared this exact outcome. Part of her wished he’d been successful, although the wiser part of her knew the mages had to be stopped and that they were on the only path they could be on.

“But mages can’t hurt dragons,” Kristen said.

He shrugged. “That used to be the case, but the technomages have proven that some can escape detection. No doubt the other dragons think this means these mages could escape. They must be holding them somewhere to keep them out of the action.”

That was a sobering thought. What kind of holding place were all those mages in? If they were detained, was it humanely or had the dragons thrown them in a cell and simply planned to do away with them as well?

She was certain of one thing. This was bigger than the six dragons who had openly attacked the city. While she had expected it to be, she had held out hope that they were simply dragons acting out because SWAT was gone.

“Do you think they’re being treated well?” Kristen asked.

Stonequest’s expression said very eloquently that he thought this very unlikely. “There’s always been talk in the Dragon Council and demands that all the mages be exterminated. They’ve led two rebellions before this, after all, and were damn close to winning them even without dragon bullets. Now, with the bullets plus Amy’s insane power, I’m sure they’re taking the threat of mages even more seriously.”

“But this is crazy. We finally have the technomages on our side so the dragons move against the other ones?”

“You must remember,” Lumos said, “that for centuries, we worked to come to terms with the threats of mages. Ever since the rebellion, dragons were wary. It took considerable time to get past that and suddenly, every living dragon has seen Amy defeat multiple dragons with her power on TV. It’s not exactly comforting.”

Kristen didn’t know what to do with that other than work to find where the mages were so she could ensure they weren’t being treated cruelly. Or worse, that they had already been killed. “Do we have any ideas where they could be?”

“Perhaps they took them to the prison where I was held?” Constance stepped forward and asked. “I know the technomages…dispatched the guards, but that prison was both ample in size and well-enchanted. I was not able to escape on my own. Other mages would be unlikely to be able to do so either.”

Lumos waved his hand dismissively at the idea. “That location is compromised now. It’s been a long time since a dragon prison was publicly discovered, but I can assure you the Dragon Council will have ordered it abandoned or demolished. Now that they are aware that it’s known to technomages, they’ll treat it as a liability, not an asset. Plus, with the dragon bullets, they’ll have to assume some of the human governments know about it as well and that has to be treated as a threat.”

The woman looked shocked. “But it must have taken decades to build it and put in all those magic fortifications.”

“Centuries, more like,” Lumos agreed. “But you have the right of it. It represents a substantial loss to the North American Dragon Council. I’m sure they have at least one other prison on the continent, and it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility to consider that the mages were sent overseas to another prison. I know there are at least a half dozen like this built around the world. The one in Antarctica is particularly difficult to access.”

“So you’re saying we have no idea where they’ve been taken?” Kristen demanded.

“They could be tracked,” Atramento said sadly. “If only their magic wasn’t completely blocked. Like dragon auras, every mage has a particular…style of magic much like a fingerprint. I know those who were taken well enough to track them but not with them cuffed like that. It’s so cruel.” He shook his head. “Like putting earplugs and a blindfold on a person after years of loyal service.”

Kristen’s phone rang and the screen flashed with the secure number of the Dragon Council. She cursed, then answered the call. “This is the Steel Dragon speaking.”

“You and your dragons are requested to report in person immediately.”

She knew Brian had already verified the number, the voice on the other end, and the encryption on the call, so she could trust this was someone from the Dragon Council. It fit with the general rudeness anyway.

After a grimace of irritation, she couldn’t resist a little rudeness of her own. “Where exactly am I supposed to rush off to?”

Her phone beeped and she pulled it away to see that they’d sent her a location. It would be annoying if it weren’t impressive. She told herself that the dragon on the other end probably had a team of techies helping her.

“Is this in response to what happened in Detroit? Because I assure you that situation is under control,” Kristen said.

“We wish to speak no further over this telephone connection,” the dragon said disdainfully. It might have been the leader of the Dragon Council herself, Shimmerclaw, but she couldn’t tell because they obviously felt uncomfortable talking on the phone.

“We’ll leave immediately,” she said.

The line went dead.

Kristen sighed and rubbed her face. She was heartily sick of jumping whenever the Dragon Council said so, but she saw no alternative. If all Dragon SWAT had been called away somewhere, it could only be the Council’s doing. They would likely know something about the mages and then there was the issue of the Masked One to consider.

This was likely all his doing if—as Constance and Lumos both suspected—he was a member of the Dragon Council. Hopefully, she could find some clue to his true identity.

“All right, dragons, we’re up!” She told the members of Dragon SWAT on the roof. “I want you to round up the rookies, get them circling, and for the love of dragon’s fire, I want tight formations. The Council needs to see we’re as professional if not more so than any of their other forces.”

“For how long?” Stonequest asked.

“We’ll leave in ten,” she said, realizing what she had to do. It was time to put her full trust in both her new allies and the contract that bound them. “I need to talk to Drew and Amy before we go.”

She found Drew in the streets below, helping rescue people from half-collapsed buildings. It pained her to pull him away from the work but managing a group of former enemy mages was a task too important to leave to anyone else.

“So if anything goes wrong, contact Brian and he’ll let me know. The contract should hold them, but I don’t want to put all my faith in it,” she said as she finished explaining the situation.

“Yes, ma’am,” Drew said. “Although between you and me, I think we lost the only one who wasn’t committed to the cause. Most of the technomages seemed more than willing to defend regular folks from dragons.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said before seeking Amy out.

She found the mage clearing rubble as easily as a regular person might sweep the floor of crumbs. “Amy, I’m going with the dragons. They asked for only dragons to come, but I’d feel much more comfortable if you’d come too.”

“Are you expecting trouble?” the girl asked.

“Not really, no, but I would much rather that you come with us to give me peace of mind. It would be better than you staying here and pissing these mages off any further. Remember, that contract binds all of us. That means you too.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t do anything but show a couple of them how much stronger I am.”

“Please don’t,” she said.

“Fine,” Amy replied, her expression sulky.

The necessary orders given, Kristen retrieved her phone and called Brian.

“Zed here…go.”

“I need you to keep working on the mage problem,” she said. “We need to discover where they’re being held.”

“Whatever you say, boss, but isn’t that why you’re going to the Dragon Council?”

“I hope so,” she answered, “but they ordered me there. That doesn’t necessarily mean they want to give me answers. If they’re not forthcoming—”

“We need to find them ourselves,” he finished for her.

“Right. I want to trust the dragons but this mage-dragon rivalry is way older and far bigger than I realized. I want a location on these mages before the dragons decide to do something horrible to them.”

“You mean if they haven’t already,” he said.

“Just find the mages,” she ordered.

Rather than dwell on the uncomfortable point he’d made, she changed into her dragon form and took to the skies to lead the other dragons on their trip to the Dragon Council.

CHAPTER NINE

Despite Brian checking and rechecking the location the Dragon Council had sent to Kristen, he still couldn’t make sense of it. He told her as much as he spoke into an earpiece they’d devised for dragons to wear in flight so they could still use the magic that was cellphones.

It appeared—and she could now confirm this in person—that the location was in the middle of Hudson Bay, north of most of Canada and definitely north of the warm part. The problem was that it wasn’t an island. It was merely a position somewhere in the northern part of the bay, far enough offshore that as they flew across Hudson Bay, they saw nothing but glaciers. No land and no coasts were present to indicate anything that might suggest a dragon meeting.

It was so cold that Amy, despite having the magical power to use her skateboard as a levitation device that flew as fast as any of the dragons, asked Kristen if she could ride on her back to warm herself on the hot scales of a dragon beneath her. She didn’t mind and thought it was probably smarter to have her riding instead of flying anyway. This entire war had become about mages, after all, and Amy—despite having served her loyally—had killed two dragons at her home and fought off a couple more with her telekinetic powers in Canada. Much of that had been captured on camera and all of it had made international news.

“Is it possible they want us to meet on a ship?” Kristen asked her dragons.

“I doubt it,” Stonequest said, although he didn’t sound confident. “Dragons aren’t particularly trusting of tech and boats totally count as tech.”

“I’m sure there’s an island,” Lumos said.

“But how could there be?” she asked. “Brian scoured the entire area via satellite. He found nothing.”

“Human and dragon eyes can be fooled by means both magic and mundane,” the old dragon said. “Do you think your electric eyes are different, even though they’re much farther away?”

She snorted a laugh. “I think it’s a little ridiculous to think that dragons—beings who you said hardly trust tech—have managed to stop the entire planet from seeing—”

Kristen never finished her sentence as they flew into view of an island that—according to modern science—should not be there at all.

As far as a location to hide on went, this one seemed a good candidate. It was tiny, hardly any larger than the squat, thick-walled castle that covered almost every part of its surface. Truly, more of the island seemed to be towering cliffs than actual land. Seabirds in great numbers clung to the cliffs, no doubt counting the days until they would depart for the south once more. Ice and frost coated the castle’s walls, while snow dotted its ramparts.

For a moment, it was lost in a mass of clouds.

Kristen emerged from the clouds to find wings of dragon guards flanking her team.

“Hold your course!” a dragon with a broken horn bellowed at her.

“No problem,” she responded as that seemed like the only reasonable thing to say given that so many dragons were now in the sky around them. Changing course would seriously risk a collision with at least one of them.

Four wings—each with a dozen dragons—escorted her force of close to a dozen. They flew on both their left and right, above and below, so her team was boxed in. If the others chose to attack, she knew it wouldn’t go well, especially since most of her force were dragons who had signed up to help fight with little combat experience.

“Land at the gate to the castle and take your human form. Any breach of the airspace above the castle will be taken as an act of aggression and will result in retaliation. Do I make myself clear?”

Again, Kristen answered with the obvious, “Yup,” and maintained her course. She couldn’t help but feel relieved that she’d told Katrina to stay behind. Her thought was that the Iron Dragon might stay true to her word in Detroit where she was surrounded by her allies and Kristen’s shit-talking and endearing human friends. Here, though, she couldn’t imagine her cooperating so easily.

She descended slowly and landed at the gate in front of the castle, where she transformed into her human form once Amy climbed off her back. It seemed the young woman was wise enough to know to not use her magic powers at this particular juncture. The huge crossbows and massive javelins aimed at them made it quite clear that the dragons prowling the ramparts were more than ready to attack.

One was there waiting for her. “State your name and purpose,” he said and his voice boomed despite being in his human form.

“Investigator Kristen Steel.” She held her badge out to prove it.

“Ah, it’s so nice to see a fellow investigator,” he said, examined the badge, and extended his hand for a human-style greeting. “They call me Sharpeye in English. Lady Shimmerclaw is expecting you. Your dragons are expected, of course. If you would all please follow me into the courtyard, refreshments will be provided for your human bodies to eat. We know the flight across the bay is a cold one.” His accent sounded like it was from the other side of the Arctic. He studied Amy. “Your…servant is welcome to eat in the courtyard too, although the food is cooked to dragons’ taste.”

Sharpeye smiled but she understood the implicit threat. Come inside. Stay in your smaller, weaker body while all these big tough dragons in their dragon bodies watch you from the ramparts. If one of your people sneezes without permission, you’re dead.

“Thank you,” Kristen said, not sure what other choice she had. It was obvious they couldn’t fight their way out of there, not without casualties. That left talking, which meant that yet again, her people’s safety was on her shoulders.

“Excellent.” He nodded and gestured for them to follow him inside.

She darted one last look at her team. They seemed wary, but Stonequest gave her a small nod to tell her to continue. They had her back, whatever was coming.

The gate was hauled open by two of the most enormous dragons she had ever seen. It was made of iron at least a couple of feet thick.

“I’ve never seen so many dragons in one place,” Kristen said to Investigator Sharpeye once they’d left the rest of her dragons eating grilled seal and fish.

His eyes twinkled. She wondered what he could see with a name like Sharpeye. “Indeed!” He sounded excited. “What you see is a gathering of all the fighting dragons of this continent! Every—well, nearly every—member of the Dragon SWAT teams from across the country are here as well as every investigator, plus a few informal militias as well. We even have a few dragons from the other continents to help balance our forces globally and better coordinate.” He sounded like he was describing a convention instead of a warband.

“Why are they all here? I would think they’d need to be in their stations,” she said as they moved farther into the castle. The courtyard being open to the air made much more sense. Much of the structure was dug into the island and grew colder as the icy waters of Hudson Bay pressed in on the stone all around them.

“Gatherings like this are happening on every continent except Antarctica,” Sharpeye boasted. “Soon, the dragons will strike and wipe out humanity’s militaries and infrastructure. You and your forces have been summoned to join the fight. We still have dragon armor here from the last war. You’ll be given first choice, and once you see the selection you can choose other dragons who have served you well enough to have earned the right to wear it.”

Kristen stopped dead in her tracks. “I’m not here to enlist in a war against humanity.”

“Enlist?” His excitement gave way to confusion. “There is no enlisting in a war like this. You are dragon. You will fight with us. If you do not…” He left the sentence unfinished and smirked as if he knew full well there was no need to complete the threat. She didn’t need him to tell her that her people would be killed.

Knowing this would not be solved with Sharpeye, she took her badge out again. “I demand to be brought to the Dragon Council.”

He looked wary. “Do you refuse your orders?”

“I do not refuse them, but this cannot proceed as planned without the information I must share with the Council. That is my right as an investigator, is it not?”

For the first time since they’d been talking, Sharpeye scowled at her. “That is your right, of course. Follow me. This way.” He spun on his heel and took her up a staircase and down a hall they had already walked past.

“Here we are,” he said once they arrived at a pair of massive wooden doors inlaid with gold in the shapes of dragons laying waste to a town. “I will be outside, listening and watching.”

She wanted to know how much he’d see from behind closed doors, but she didn’t say anything. While she didn’t much like this Sharpeye, she also didn’t want him to regard her as a threat. Asking about the specifics of his powers seemed like a good way to make him suspicious. His name implied that he might have some kind of ability related to sight, though.

With her shoulders back and her head high, she opened the doors and entered, ready to present her case for stopping—or at least delaying—war with humans. She was ready to face the seven members of the North American Dragon Council as well as members of the other bodies that governed other continents and provinces.

But when she entered, most of the members of the Dragon Council weren’t present. Only three dragons were there and the first was the platinum dragon Shimmerclaw.

The second was a dragon by the name of Lord Boneclaw. Kristen didn’t know much about him other than that he was one of the oldest dragons on the Council. He was easy to recognize because of the scars on his face. He and Shimmerclaw were both old enough to be The Masked One, according to Lumos anyway.

While she had never met the third, she’d seen him before. He was massive—bigger than Shadowstorm, who’d been huge. She guessed he was more than seven feet tall, with massive shoulders and arms as thick as most bodybuilder’s legs, although it was hard to tell since he was seated in an ornate chair. Despite being in his human form, crystalline spikes protruded from his shoulders. He turned to face her and his scowl was made cruel by eyebrows and a thin beard that seemed to both be made of crushed diamonds.

“Greetings, Council…” Kristen said and used her aura to communicate her confusion at only seeing three members when over a hundred dragons were outside preparing for war.

“You still speak to the Full Council,” Shimmerclaw said and gestured to a wide monitor and a camera set up on a tripod that was linked to the computer via a cable. It was extremely disorienting for Kristen to see a web camera and a group of attractive human-faced dragons looking at her in this ancient castle. Communicating via carrier pigeon seemed more appropriate for their setting.

“Investigator Steel, it’s a pleasure to see you, even given the circumstances.” Shimmerclaw greeted her with a slight bow.

“Thank you, my lady and lords. You honor me,” she replied and bowed deeply. Lord Boneclaw nodded in appreciation. He had a simpering, weak mouth that looked like it mostly wanted to agree with whatever had been said. The spiked dragon hardly moved his chin in greeting.

“I must say I am surprised. I thought I was coming to find out about the whereabouts of the Dragon SWAT members and the mages who were abducted from my city,” she said and focused on keeping her aura from making her seem accusatory.

“No one was abducted,” Lord Boneclaw said quickly with a glance at the other two dragons. “They were taken into protective custody. If the humans were clever, they could have bombed that building and all those mages would be dead.”

“I still say they should be executed now,” the other dragon said.

“That would be an act of war, Diamontus,” Shimmerclaw said.

“We are at war,” Diamontus retorted. “The vote is cast and you and the other cowards lost.”

“Now, Diamontus, this is no time to gloat or name-call,” Boneclaw said through a plastic smile.

“You voted for war too, Boneclaw. You no longer need to play the ambassador,” his colleague growled.

“Forgive me,” Kristen said and tried to sound like she meant it. “But why would the Council vote to go to war now? My team was successful on our mission. We finally stopped the technomages.”

The scowl on Diamontus’ face somehow grew ever darker. “You’ve delayed the vote long enough, Shimmerclaw. The numbers are against you. We fly, and they burn. What value is democracy if a vote is not honored?”

“What say you, Lord Boneclaw?” Shimmerclaw inquired of the weak-spined Council member.

“You know I didn’t support rushing into this war,” Boneclaw said and Kristen felt a wave of relief wash over her until he continued. “But…the vote has been cast. I am concerned about setting a precedent of overturning a vote. Even if it seems the right thing in this particular situation, I don’t think it would be wise to undo centuries of tradition.”

“A vote can be cast again if new information is available,” the woman said rather stiffly. “Lady Steel, how does your mission fare?”

“We don’t have time for this!” Diamontus raged. “Our dragons are massing into armies and preparing for war with humanity. We cannot stop what has already been put into motion.”

Shimmerclaw clenched her teeth at this but rather than saying anything, she cast a look at Boneclaw.

The thin, bony man with the scars on his face kept his gaze locked on Kristen. He still had the same agreeable smile on his face but something hard was visible in his eyes. “I would like to hear what the investigator has done,” he said.

It was the opportunity she had been waiting for. She exuded confidence with her aura and addressed the Council, mindful that others watched her via the camera. “We have defeated the last of the mage cells. Their weapons have been confiscated and we’ve recovered the dragons they had raised in their labs and used to make the dragon bullets. The fighting is over and the technomages are finished. We don’t need to go to war!” She couldn’t help but sound excited at the last part. Hopefully, losing her composure for the sake of preventing war would be acceptable to the stiff-backed Dragon Council.

“Well, this is excellent news, indeed!” Shimmerclaw beamed.

“What of their leaders?” Boneclaw asked. “If even one of those at the top is free, they can simply retrain more mages.”

“Three of them, including Constance Vigil and the Iron Dragon, entered into a magical contract with me. They can no longer move against dragons unless they’re defending regular humans.”

“That’s poppycock!” Diamontus roared, although he looked intrigued. “No one has convinced a mage to sign a magical contract in centuries.”

“No one had, sir. I left the document in Detroit, but I assure you their leaders won’t move against us.”

“And there were only the three?” Boneclaw asked.

“One of them, a mage by the name of Neil Havington, refused to sign. He will be transported via ship with the other mages who wouldn’t sign the contract.”

The almost skeletal dragon nodded—as if he somehow expected this of Havington—but a moment later, his weak smile returned. “My congratulations on your successes and efforts. I know those mages must have greatly valued their dragon prisoners. I wonder at the wording of this contract if you convinced them to agree to it despite taking their source of weapons away from them.”

“The weapons are nothing to them. They simply used them to stand against a force they saw as unbeatable,” Kristen explained quickly. “They won’t use them again. They can’t, not with the contract I bound them to.”

“How marvelous,” Boneclaw said. “The investigator we put in charge of stopping these mages has now enlisted them for her…what exactly is the point of your force now that you’ve stopped the mages?”

“Apparently to stand against an unbeatable force!” Diamontus roared as he pushed to his feet and displayed his full height. The massive human suggested how big he must be in his dragon form.

“The Steel Dragon has never moved against dragon kind,” Shimmerclaw said placatingly. “She stopped the technomages to protect us. Truly, this is a boon, Lady Steel. I move to vote again based on this new information. This completely changes our calculations.” She turned to the camera and the other dragons who’d stopped whatever preparations they were making to watch the exchange.

“But we have voted,” Boneclaw whined. “Perhaps this can change our tactics, but does this change the threat the mages have created by distributing the weapons to regular humans?”

“Not. At. All.” Diamontus punctuated each word with a step toward Kristen. He towered over her and his inhuman eyebrows and beard made him seem all the more intimidating. “Even without the terrorist cells, those bullets are still out there. They make humanity into a deadly threat that must be addressed.”

“I agree that the bullets are a threat, my Lord,” Kristen responded. “My team has made the recovery of the dragon bullets our top priority now that the mages have been stopped. We’ve already recovered most of the bullets, and we’re diligently working to find more.”

“They won’t simply leave them where they would be easily located,” Boneclaw muttered.

“Of course not, sir.” She studied him cautiously. He had seemed neutral when she’d first come in, and he was less overtly in support of war than Diamontus was, but he continued to make points that fueled the hulking, pissed-off dragon. “But I have my best people examining the records the mages left with a fine-toothed comb precisely so they can learn where those bullets have already been distributed to and recover them. I have mages working on this as well as humans skilled in computers. I assure you that within the week, my team will have recovered all the bullets so they can be destroyed.”

Shimmerclaw looked relieved. “Well, this changes everything. This information completely alters the status of our relations with the world and warrants new discussion and a new vote.”

“No more bureaucracy!” Diamontus raged and kicked a chair with enough force to hurl it against a stone wall to shatter like kindling. “The vote is cast. You cannot undo it!”

She shook her head and her expression reminded Kristen of her mother chewing her brother out for raising his voice at the dinner table. “We have rules in place for reasons precisely like this.”

“But you can’t simply wield them—”

“I can and I will,” she said and addressed the camera behind her. “I was elected as head of the Council by all of you. We will recess to consider this new information for a few hours, then reconvene. If all of you still feel we should go to war, we will of course honor the majority as we always have. But let me remind you that this could well kill many dragons. The previous times we went to war, we lost many of our greatest fighters. If there is no need for that now, must we still do so? I ask all of you to remember the Steel Dragon’s record and consider how she has already helped us. I will see you all in three hours.”

Diamontus looked furious at this decree but most of the dragons on the screen didn’t seem as enraged. Maybe it was merely that she could read the large dragon’s aura and not theirs, but they seemed ready to discuss this turn of events.

Kristen was thankful for that.

She tried to look respectful and obedient as she watched the camera while all the dragons turned their connections off. They winked out one by one and left her alone with the three Council members of the group that governed her continent.

“Lady Steel, you have done well,” Shimmerclaw said. “I am sure that some dragons will not see the prudence of changing their mind to avoid this conflict—”

“Exactly like some dragons didn’t see the prudence of voting to stop these humans long before they achieved the capabilities they now possess,” Diamontus interjected with an obvious dig at the Council leader.

“But,” she continued and her aura revealed no annoyance at being interrupted by him. “Some will surely see this as the blessing it is. I hope your cutting off the head of the enemy will change the minds of those dragons who still use theirs.”

“Thank you, my lady,” Kristen said. “You honor me.”

Shimmerclaw gave her a slight bow. She recognized that for the gesture of respect it was supposed to be.

Neither of the other two Council members said anything immediately so—never one to be good at waiting for any amount of time—she started to talk. “With the Council’s blessing, I’ll take my team to Detroit. We’ll get to work uncovering every last bullet we can and devise a way to destroy them.”

The Council leader looked surprised by this and Diamontus looked downright belligerent.

It was Boneclaw who spoke, however. “Please correct me if I’m wrong, Lady Shimmerclaw, but I would imagine it would be better for Lady Steel and the dragons on her force to remain here on the island with us.”

“We voted to go to war,” Diamontus growled at Kristen. “Lady Shimmerclaw can delay the outcome, but unless the next vote is different than the last one, we are still in agreement to attack humanity. That means you and your dragons will fight alongside the rest of us.”

“And if the Council decides to go ahead with this war—despite this recent happy news”—Boneclaw didn’t sound like he was happy at all—“it would be beneficial to have that mage you brought with you here. She’ll need to be shackled, of course.”

“You can’t be serious,” Kristen stammered.

Lady Shimmerclaw sighed as she nodded. “Lady Steel…Kristen, if the Dragon Council votes to continue with war, you must fight alongside us. If you refuse to do so, you and your team must be executed. That is the bond we all share as dragons. We can have our squabbles and duels but when faced with a threat as grave as this, we must stand together. To do otherwise would be suicide.”

“But—”

“Relax, child. The news you bring is good. I am sure many will change their mind and see the foolishness of going to war against the very beings who have made our lives so good for so long. However…” The word felt like a sword in Kristen’s chest. “If we decide to go to war, the lords are correct. You and your dragons must serve. Any attempt to leave will be seen as an act of desertion. You are free to enjoy refreshments and one or two of you may stretch your wings at one time, but for your own safety, do not fly to Detroit. Not when we may very well need your abilities and your fighting force to help us stop the threat the technomages have given to humanity.”

She nodded, her eyes wide as she walked into the hallway to begin the return journey to the courtyard. The corridor seemed far colder now than it had before.

CHAPTER TEN

Kristen felt physically ill as she left the chamber of the Dragon Council. She could not believe it. Every fiber of her being screamed that this couldn’t be true. The Dragon Council had voted to go to war? After everything she had done, they’d still decided to go to war against humanity?

Given that she had stopped the technomages, that was what this amounted to. A war on regular human beings. People like her mom and dad who had done nothing their entire lives except try to go unseen by the dragons who trampled the world as they saw fit. In that moment of anger and despondency, it was hard to focus on those dragons who didn’t regard humans as expendable tools ripe for culling.

She wished she had extraordinary power now but before she could still her mind and consider the problem calmly, Sharpeye saw her. He lurked in an alcove outside the Council chamber with a knowing look on his face. She felt another wave of nausea flood her stomach and wondered how much he had heard...or seen.

“Then it is settled?” he asked with a northeastern European accent.

“No.” She choked around the word and cleared her throat. “No. They’ll have another vote based on the information brought.”

He deflated visibly. “After so many years I thought… Never mind. It is best to have information, yes? Do you still wish to see the armor so your team can be ready when they vote?”

As she glared at him, she realized for the first time that the dark-green jacket and slacks plus the cropped haircut made him seem ready to fight in a military force. How had she not seen that before?

Kristen pushed the thought aside. She had come to find out about the mages who had been kidnapped from the Dragon SWAT Headquarters building. When she’d set out from Detroit, she’d had no idea that they were this close to war, not with all her recent successes.

“Are you feeling well?” Sharpeye asked. “Your aura is…troubled.”

“It’s nothing,” she snapped and clamped down on her aura. She didn’t want to give anyone in this damn place any more information. Not now that she knew what they would do with it. “Can you take me to my force? I need to…uh, brief them.”

“Of course, my lady!” He smiled and led her through the halls of the castle to the courtyard on the surface.

Now that she knew the Dragon Council had voted to go to war, it was obvious what all this was about. Those weren’t defensive formations but dragons practicing offensive maneuvers. The massive scorpions weren’t for her and her paltry band of dragons but for any humans who dared to sail close to this hidden base. The food they’d offered her people hadn’t been a kindness but a necessity of war. Well-fed troops could fight harder and longer.

Her stomach lurched and she clamped a hand to her mouth. She would be sick and throw up in front of all her people and these other dragons. She would—no. No, she couldn’t be anything but the steel-willed woman they all needed her to be. Now was the time for decisive action.

She transformed into her dragon body and leapt skyward.

“A good idea to survey the other platoons!” Sharpeye shouted at her.

“Where are we going?” Stonequest asked and took his own dragon form to launch after her. It seemed he’d made fast friends with the soldiers there, and why not? He had likely told them about the technomages he’d captured. To the dragons, that probably sounded like the first skirmish of the war to come.

“I want to take a look around. Stay with the troops. I don’t want anyone else to go airborne yet,” Kristen ordered. She spoke quickly when she recalled what would happen if it so much as appeared that she and her people were deserting.

“Troops? You mean our team?” he teased but he obeyed and made one quick lap before he landed in the courtyard—precisely where the scorpions could shoot him if she messed up.

She knew she couldn’t go anywhere, so she simply ascended. She pumped her wings faster until she was able to find the posture that Lumos had taught her. With ease, she caught a thermal that rose above the island—likely caused by the heat of all the damn dragons preparing for war—and soared upward.

When she reached the top of the column of hot air, she didn’t stop. She continued to flap her wings until all the dragons below her were no larger than bees in a hive. Her ascent continued until they were gnats, the island was but a beetle on a blue blanket, and all that was beneath her was clouds.

Finally, she levelled out and pumped her wings, but frost had accumulated on the scaled limbs that served as the scaffolding for the leathery membrane which kept her aloft. The spikes on her tail and back had also frosted. The air was thinner up there. She had to focus on the air currents to stay aloft more than she had to at lower elevations. This was possibly a good thing since it kept her attention off the war.

Kristen looked at the clouds below her, knowing what lurked beneath. More dragons than she had ever seen and all of them preparing to kill the human world she had grown up in.

So high above everything, she took a moment to consider her powers. She could transform to steel and dive toward the castle. From this height and with the postures Lumos had shown her, she could gain enough speed to strike the ground with the force of a meteor. She was the Steel Dragon and might survive it—she was impervious and invulnerable. Maybe if she managed to blow them all up, she’d finally be what she felt like—utterly alone.

She took a deep breath and the cold air stung her huge dragon lungs before she sighed. This far down the line, she’d thought she had more or less resolved the conflict about who she was. It hadn’t been easy, but she had grown to be proud of the fact that she was a dragon raised by humans who valued both sides of her. She treasured humanity, but her dragon nature had allowed her to be bold in a way that being a human simply couldn’t—not in this world anyway. Despite the challenges, she had taken both parts of her identity—the way she was nurtured and her own innate nature—and brought them together into the person she was, a dragon investigator who fought for peace.

But now, a war was brewing and at the drop of a hat, the dragons expected her to fight humans for them? She had thought that dragon society finally recognized her for who she was, not an outsider but someone who had a foot in both worlds. But no. They had merely humored her, apparently, and let her gather a force of her own so they could have a few humans to help them understand the weapons that might be used against them.

It was her personal nightmare.

All this time, she had fought to prevent a war from breaking out between the dragons and the humans they ruled. It felt like she’d been at it forever and war would still come to pass despite everything she had tried to accomplish.

Had she done something wrong? Had she focused too much on her human upbringing and ignored the dragon side of her nature? Perhaps joining the war effort would be a good thing. If she could provide intelligence, she could—

Kristen couldn’t even finish the thought.

She could not and would not do this. It was impossible for her to even consider the idea of fighting against humanity. No matter what, she would have no part of the slaughter of an entire species. There weren’t two sides to this problem. The dragons, in this instance, were wrong. They wanted to slaughter people because humans might attack them? That was insanity and it flew against every human right there was. Not that the dragons cared. It seemed even those who might have a more liberal approach had been swept up in the paranoia that currently drove the Council.

No, dammit. She couldn’t serve them. There was no way to help a cause that was evil at its core.

Regrettably, that only meant her path forward would be a damned hard one. If she refused to help the dragons, she would turn herself and everyone on her team into targets. She’d have to protect herself, her dragons, her mages, her friends from the Detroit SWAT team, and the humans Jim had persuaded to join them. Nor could she stop the list there. She’d have to protect her parents too, of course. Plus, there were her friends from before she’d joined the police academy. One of them had recently had a baby. She couldn’t let little Daynerys Williams get incinerated any more than she could let it happen to her parents.

But was she supposed to stop at the people she knew? What about everyone else with parents in Detroit? What about everyone else with kids? Hell, what about single people without families who merely wanted to get through their day and drink a beer or three with their friends? Were they supposed to burn simply because some old rich dragons had voted on it?

The reality, though, was that she knew she couldn’t protect them all. Not from a force as large as the one on this island. Worse, Sharpeye had said there were forces like this gathering all over the world.

Kristen was knocked from her dark thoughts by a glimmer of light rising through the clouds.

The shining scales, gorgeous wings, and mane of platinum blonde hair were immediately recognizable as Lady Shimmerclaw. The old dragon drew alongside her, matched speed with her, and said nothing for a moment. She simply looked at the clouds below them. A flock of gulls or pelicans or something—Kristen didn’t know much about birds—flew in a V. Their leader moved to the back of the formation to rest while another took the most difficult position—the point.

After a moment of silence, she gave in to her impatience. “Shouldn’t you be deliberating on your decision?”

Shimmerclaw laughed, a sound like wind chimes in the thin air. “I had made my decision before you arrived and your success changes nothing in my calculation.”

Kristen couldn’t help it and her aura flashed with unease.

That made her companion laugh again. “Relax, Lady Steel. I still feel as I have for centuries. The idea of culling humanity is a morally bankrupt one. The technomage threat was a concern but one you handled. Now they are gone, there is absolutely no reason to go through with this war.”

“Do you really feel that way?” she asked.

“You can sense my aura. Can’t you tell that is the truth?”

It was her turn to chuckle. “I’m not exactly the best with those.”

“Well then, let my tongue echo what my heart should have already made clear to you.”

Kristen studied the other dragon as they coasted in the frigid air, high above the clouds. Her aura and her demeanor seemed to indicate that she was telling the truth.

“I will be honest with you because honesty is something I value, even if it is not a trait that all of our Councilors always practice. I see humans as an inferior species to dragons.”

Her aura spiked reflexively with anger at this.

“Now, now,” Shimmerclaw said mildly. “I told you I was being honest, didn’t I? The way I see it, it’s obvious. We live for thousands of years and they are lucky to last a hundred. While we can change shape, all they can do is age. We can fly, breathe fire, and sense each other’s emotions.”

“But that doesn’t mean we should exterminate them,” Kristen retaliated.

“Of course not.” The Council leader clicked her tongue. “Humans are undeniably sentient and unbelievably innovative creatures. Their rights and wants deserve far more attention than they receive. I voted against this war before I had your report, and I’ll vote against it again. And since I’m being honest, I feel the notion that humans could somehow be exterminated like a particularly serious infestation of roaches is complete nonsense. They have proven themselves to be fierce and powerful when they work together, and if dragon kind attacks, I am sure they would rally against us.”

Kristen could agree with that. “I’m sure people would do more than rally. The force here is impressive but it’s hardly enough to wipe out a continent in a few days. Humans will band together, go into hiding, and find ways to hurt dragons if they have to. I’ve seen some of the anti-dragon weapons that have been developed. It won’t be the quick war some of the Council seems to hope for.”

Shimmerclaw sighed at that. Her aura made it quite apparent that she felt exactly the same way. “You see, then, why we called for you.”

She clenched her jaw so tightly that smoke started to pour from her scaled nostrils. How could Shimmerclaw possibly think that she could do anything to hurt humanity? She believed in humanity! She was humanity.

“Something is bothering you,” her companion said.

“How can you tell?” Her tone was raw and rough.

“You practically slapped me across the face with your aura.”

It was true and she smiled. It also might be the last smile she would show to Shimmerclaw. She took a deep breath and tried to calm her nerves so she could say what needed to be said. “I cannot and will not be a part of this…this slaughter. It goes against everything I’ve fought for and everything I believe in.”

The other dragon inclined her head to get a better look at her. “Are you telling the head of the Dragon Council that you intend to deliberately go against the orders and commands of the Council simply because you don’t like them?” she asked pointedly.

Kristen took another deep breath and answered the only way she knew how—honestly.

“Yes.”

She was afraid but said it anyway. Shimmerclaw hadn’t attained her position on the Council simply by her oratory skills. Despite Kristen’s steel skin, she knew full well that her companion could likely shred her long before she could land safely. And even if she could somehow defeat her—as unlikely as that seemed—there was no way her team could escape the massive force of dragons she had seen.

But she still had to stand up for what she believed. It was the only part of who she was that had always been there. No matter what other parts of her identity shifted—human, dragon, student, cop, investigator, sister, or even sister of an estranged dragon—that core had always been there. Standing up for what she believed in drove her, and she wouldn’t join a war that would hurl the world into a doomsday catastrophe.

Even if it meant she might be eviscerated above the clouds.

But Shimmerclaw didn’t attack like she feared.

Instead, she laughed. “It’s good to see you are speaking honestly, exactly as I said I would.”

“Do you mean you won’t…eviscerate me?” She couldn’t help but smile at the grin on the other dragon’s face.

“Eviscerate you? With steel scales across your belly?” The Council leader laughed again, harder this time. “I’d break a claw. No, sweet child. If I wished to end your life, you’d never even see me coming.”

Kristen tried to stay calm. The Masked One had fought from the shadows. He’d never let her see him coming. Was Shimmerclaw baiting her? Was she the Masked One and this was all an act?

If it was, the platinum dragon did a damn good job of it. “I’m merely glad to see a dragon thinking things through rather than randomly following orders. You’d be surprised what kinds of things a dragon will agree to if the consequence of not doing so is to lose some of their treasure horde.”

They flew on in silence for a moment and she glided beside the old dragon. She didn’t honestly think she was the Masked One—Diamontus seemed far more likely in spite of his age—but compared to leading dragon kind in a war, being the Masked One wasn’t that bad.

“Can’t you do that, then?” she asked finally. “Threaten to take their treasure away if they attack humans unprovoked?”

“Yes. I can and I have,” Shimmerclaw said moodily. “I will again too, I suspect. But this is bigger than reparations for hurt humans. A vote to go to war is beyond even my abilities to do more than exert mild influence. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want this to happen at all. Nothing good will come of it for any of the beings on this planet. Dragon, human, and mage, all will suffer. Quite honestly, the monkeys, voles, dolphins, and everything else will suffer too. Those humans have unlocked the powers of destruction with their weapons.”

“So tell that to the rest of the dragons. Blood will be shed on both sides if they continue down this road. Oceans of blood!”

“That is why so many have felt compelled to go to war.” It didn’t sound to her like Shimmerclaw had been the one to compel them. “Even with the mage terrorists all stopped, it’ll be very close. It could go either way, which makes this entire situation all the more volatile. At this point, I almost wish I knew I would lose so I could at least prepare. But we won’t know until the time has elapsed. Before then, I want to identify as many variables as I can.”

“Which is why you’re up here with me,” Kristen said. It wasn’t a question. The answer was obvious.

“You are the biggest variable at the moment, so tell me…if the dragons do elect to pursue war, what will you do?”

“Do you mean personally?”

“Let’s start there,” Shimmerclaw agreed.

Even though she tried to set aside the topic of what to do with her fighting forces, she didn’t know what to say. Part of her—the part of her that signed up to be a cop and accepted the investigator badge that Windlock had given her before he died—wanted to say she would fight. The rest of her knew with certainty that to fight a force like the one below would merely be suicidal.

“I suppose…” she began hesitantly. “I suppose I’d try to help people. I can’t let my parents or my brother die by dragon fire. I simply can’t. And I can’t let my other friends die either. Some of them,” she added and thought about Amy, “would fight back but some would need protection. You have to understand that these are the people who have fought with me to make the world a safer place for humans, dragons, and even mages. I can’t abandon them.”

“Well, that’s not much of an issue,” her companion said and sounded more like an ancient arrogant dragon as so many of her kin were. “Your…ahem, adopted family you could keep, of course. According to dragon law, they belong to you. I would advise calling them servants, or your butler, or some title besides mother and father as those are somewhat….inaccurate. But the law is clear. A dragon is allowed as many humans as they can support. As long as you provide good conditions for them, the law will protect them, even in times of war. The same applies to your little police force. Dragons have hired human guards for centuries. No one will argue against that.”

“So my humans will be spared from your slaughter?” she snapped.

Shimmerclaw either didn’t notice her frustration—which was unlikely—or she chose to ignore it. “You won’t be the only one to retain humans. Dragons have long seen the value in them, even if only to maintain our grounds and cook our food. The course of action that was previously agreed to was not one of total annihilation but of complete subjugation, at which point, new terms and rights would be assigned to the survivors.

“I would expect that as the war rages on, many human countries will simply surrender. Those humans would be allowed to live as long as they agreed to whatever the terms of the surrender were. Your friends and family would be fairly simple to keep.”

Kristen looked at her. The dragon looked glum as if she’d only now realized how bad her offer had sounded.

“How many do you think would die?” she asked.

The Council leader looked at her with cool eyes. “As I said, that can only be known once the fighting has begun. I assure you, I’d push for a quick surrender from the major human militaries.”

“Millions? Or billions?”

Shimmerclaw took an uncomfortably long time to answer. “I don’t think billions is out of the question,” she said finally.

Kristen took a deep breath. That was it. She had her answer. It was no longer even a choice, not with numbers like that on the table. “That’s very generous of you, but it’s not enough. I can’t stand idly by and only protect a handful of humans who happen to be precious to me while I allow billions to be slaughtered. I could never forgive myself.”

“So then…you would fight against your fellow dragons?”

“No! I didn’t say that.” She roared in frustration. “More than anyone, I have seen what the weapons the technomages have designed can do to dragons. Humans would not hesitate to use those bullets, especially since they are made from dead dragons. Every kill would equate to a new pile of ammunition. And I’ve met the people who are willing to make and fire them. I’m not so naïve to think that if I sided with the humans, I wouldn’t get a bullet in my brain when it was all over.”

“You trust the beings who raised you so little?” Shimmerclaw enquired.

She snorted a laugh. “And to think Lumos calls me naïve. Surely, Lady Shimmerclaw, you don’t trust every single dragon with your life?”

“Surely not,” the old dragon conceded. It was clear that she had simply baited her to see what she said. “But if you will not fight on either side and you would not feel comfortable waiting at your base with your loved ones for the war to end, what will you do?”

Kristen sighed. She had an answer but not a solution. “I need to find a middle road, a path we can all walk. Dragons, humans, and mages. Hell, I might as well make sure the dolphins are good with it too. I know that sounds optimistic or hopeful or whatever but that’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s been working. I wish I could show you and the rest of this Council the contract I got the mages to sign. It’s a path for peace!”

“Well, let us hope others see this path while the world is still a place we wish to travel. Come. We’ve been gone long enough.”

She nodded and the two started toward the island. They swung into a spiraling descent toward the castle through the clouds, their vision obscured exactly like their future.

Shimmerclaw didn’t dare speak her hopes aloud. The Steel Dragon was already looking for a way out of this, even if it meant forsaking dragon kind itself. She knew the youth were unpredictable, and she’d hate to say something and make her think she was being manipulated.

Not that she thought she could successfully manipulate the girl any more than Windlock had been able to. The Council leader had always been friends with the late investigator, and his death had been a blow—especially since most of their conversations in the end had been about the enigmatic Steel Dragon. He always declared her to be a dragon of considerable power and true grit with the most unlikely of upbringings.

She had agreed with him that she might very well be the person capable of shifting the status quo that had held the world in its vice for centuries. Kristen was undeniably a force of enormous unpredictability and chaos. She had the powers of a dragon but the sensibilities of a human. Despite the two species existing together on the planet for tens of thousands of years, it was the first time such a thing had ever happened. She was unique.

Perhaps the girl might be the one to finally shine light into the shadows the Masked One had cast for all these millennia. Shimmerclaw still didn’t know why all her most cunning plans never worked out. She also didn’t know the face of the culprit responsible for undoing every push she’d ever made for equality and every plan she’d ever had to truly share the planet.

Over the millennia, she had investigated almost every dragon Councilor there was. She knew the Masked One had to be on one of the Councils. In all her searches, she had discovered a few veiled truths. He always hid his face behind the skull of a recently slaughtered human. Part of his power was that he could move through darkness. He was a fearsome and ruthless fighter. And he enjoyed watching others suffer.

Unfortunately, she didn’t know how to catch him, let alone beat him. She knew he was behind the war and that his rumors passed from lips to ears to yet more lips, flowing even without their speaker’s knowledge of the damage they did. No one knew where these rumors began like no one knew exactly who was at the center of the movement to go to war.

She had long believed that the Masked One understood dragon culture too well to be undone by it. He—like her—had written many of its rules. Shimmerclaw no longer believed he could be beaten by conventional dragon means. If he could, she would have done so already.

But now, she saw a chance. As soon as the Steel Dragon had emerged from under the hood of the Motor City—one thing she loved about humans was the way they played with language—she had hoped that she might be able to turn the girl on the Masked One.

She’d approved when she’d left the human police force to join Dragon SWAT under the wise guidance of the dragon Stonequest. On Windlock’s recommendation, she’d been more than happy to allow her to become an investigator. It had even been satisfying—she’d barely been able to hide her smug amusement from the investigator—that she had waited for him to come to her with the idea.

And now, with Kristen closer than ever to removing the wedge the Masked One was driving ever deeper between humans and dragons, it looked like the Steel Dragon might fail.

Even though she had succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest expectations, the vote had already been cast. Dragons would have to believe in the chaos she caused if they were to change their vote, and Shimmerclaw knew very well that the only chaos dragons liked was that caused by their own flames.

But still, there was a chance. With her, there was always a chance.

And right now, Kristen was the only chance the old dragon had.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lord Boneclaw retired to his private chambers. As he walked, he kept his shoulders slightly hunched and his gaze fixed below eye-level. He had perfected this posture. To the casual dragon observer, he looked like a slightly disapproving superior. To a fellow Council member, he appeared as a dragon intent on making compromises to keep his place of power.

He had hidden in plain sight like this for thousands of years—the weak-willed, eager to compromise, simpering Lord Boneclaw, whose connections were worth more than whatever dragon powers he had.

When he reached his chamber, he opened the doors, entered, and asked a servant politely for a cup of tea.

The beverage arrived in moments and he proceeded to call every contact he had on any of the other Dragon Councils. Telephones were one thing he could admit were a useful contraption the humans had designed. They were almost as useful as the weapons they’d made with the dead bodies of dragons had proven to be. Those dragon bullets might be what tipped the scales and pushed dragon society to war.

While he certainly hoped so, he didn’t say that to anyone he called. Instead, he played a tediously careful game of poker. He bluffed some of the most brash and war-hungry Councilors into thinking he didn’t approve of the war, knowing they’d only double-down on their positions in response. Those that were committed to peace, he assured of his wholehearted support once the war broke out.

But in each conversation, he reminded them the consequences of failing to serve. To some, he made it clear that this was a threat but to most, he made it sound like something he also feared.

Those who were on the fence were the most difficult to talk to, of course. To them, he told the truth. Over the last hundred years, humans had developed fighting capabilities far beyond what evolution had given them. He reminded them of dragons who had been gunned down with Gatling guns or shredded by landmines. He brought up dragons who’d been exploded by missiles and even one particularly unfortunate dragon who had been killed by a steam engine.

He always knew of a dragon who the Councilor in question had once known—an ex-lover, a friend, a family member, or similar. He’d bring them up and join them in their sorrow. Then, once he could hear the grief in their voice—not an easy thing to do for a being who was used to communicating emotionally via auras and not tone of voice—he told them what Kristen had told the Council.

She had rescued dragons these mages grew from the egg to harvest for bullets. Even though the horrible, despicable, monstrous mages were now in custody, they had already sold who knew how many crates of these bullets to militaries around the world. He didn’t mention that he oversaw a fair number of those transactions, of course, as that didn’t help his cause.

Boneclaw told them the Steel Dragon had then done exactly as she had said—she had befriended these technomages. No, worse than that, he seemed to realize every time he spoke with one of these undecided dragons. She had taken them under her wing.

That particular argument was a good one, he thought. He had long felt humans had grown too powerful, but he had been willing to wait for things to develop and now they had. Humans were capable of creating weapons that would allow a child to kill a dragon by simply squeezing a trigger. It was time for action.

The old dragon hoped the others agreed. It was hard to be sure how they would vote given that he couldn’t sense their auras or subtly tweak them in the way he wished. This was one of the downsides of being able to talk to so many dragons all across the world. It was a price that had to be paid.

By the end of the three hours, he had done all he could. He had the assurances he needed and could only hope for the outcome to be in his favor. As little as he liked the emotion humans seemed so obsessed with, there it was.

Boneclaw stood and entered his sleeping chamber, his hand to his forehead like all the conversations had given him a headache. There was truth to this. He didn’t feel like himself but he never did, not when he had to show his pathetic, scarred face to every damn soul he saw.

What none of them understood was that the flesh and bone of his actual face was the mask. He felt far more comfortable behind a human skull. Although the one locked in a chest in his private chambers wasn’t fresh, it was still a great comfort to slip it over his head. The feel of human bone on his bald head and the way the human eye sockets framed the world when he looked through them was inspiring and comforting.

These were the feelings of the Masked One, and he relished finally being himself, even if it was for only a short time. He leaned back in a chair, his headache already washing away with the touch of human bone.

He had won. It had taken work but he’d finally got that insufferable Diamontus to push for a vote for war. Due to all his carefully laid plans over the past decades plus the flurry of activity in the last year and managing the technomages to try to eliminate the Steel Dragon, the vote had gone in his favor.

Of course, he had expected it to. He would never have convinced Diamontus to call for the vote if he’d thought there could have been another outcome. The Masked One had enjoyed the sweet taste of victory.

But now it had been dashed from his mouth.

The cursed Steel Dragon might ruin everything. He’d had an inkling of that when her power first appeared. It had been because he’d been aware of her potential that he’d tricked her to go into Mammoth Cave and almost killed her. That was why he’d pushed for the vote to happen while the technomages were still a threat. As long as they were out there, her effectiveness could be called into question. Now that the mages were gone, things had changed.

A little disgruntled, he took a deep breath and savored how the air whistled slightly past the nostrils of the skull he wore. He had to be careful with the selection of his masks. His head was not large and was slightly compressed by years of wearing the skulls—it was where the marks on his face came from too—but still, he had to choose humans with skulls large enough to fit over his head.

The Masked One didn’t know how the dragons would react to the Steel Dragon forcing the technomages into contractual magic. He was only glad that she hadn’t brought the damn contract. The chances were, if anyone read it, they’d side with the stupid runt.

Although maybe it would have been better if she had brought it. Knowing what he did of her, he did not doubt that she had written rules that would stop her as firmly as they’d stop the mages. A contract like that might be ideal—a noose capable of burning Lady Steel alive or at least bringing her to heel.

But the vote had been called for and he was not about to recommend that the Steel Dragon leave with all her people before the vote was returned.

He had many allies on the Council—or more accurately, Boneclaw knew many people and had convinced a fair number to follow Diamontus. But he wasn’t the only dragon with a major power block. He had been playing politics with Shimmerclaw for centuries. Her block was larger than his, at least on the surface.

It would come down to the dragons who were too stubborn, arrogant, independent, or all three to ally themselves with another’s leadership.

And he truly did not know which way they would vote.

That meant he could lose and the Dragon Councils might not agree to war.

He could not have that.

The Masked One took out another cellphone. This one did not legally belong to the dragon named Boneclaw and in fact didn’t legally belong to anyone. It was like the human skull he now wore. It did not exist, at least not in the consciousnesses of the people who thought they knew how the world worked. There was a time long before when even bringing such a thing to one of the dragon bases had made him nervous, but those fears were long gone.

This entire fortress was made to be secure. It had both dragons defending it as well as magical protections. The point of strongholds like this was to give members of the Dragon Council a refuge they could retreat to and make their decisions in private. Boneclaw and the others seated in their private chambers, attended to by servants and protected by hidden guards, were seen as the epitome of dragon democracy. By sequestering himself before the vote he was, in theory, making his final deliberation.

Lord Boneclaw had a reputation for always waiting until the very end to decide. Even his aides sometimes let rumors slip—all of which the Masked One approved in advance, of course—that he rarely sounded certain of his decisions when he called the other dragons and often emerged from his private chamber with his mind changed.

It was all part of the act and the web he had spun to take power from the dragons foolish enough to give some of it up.

He dialed a number quickly. This time, the voice on the other end of the line didn’t belong to a dragon but to a human. A pawn, was how he thought of him, although if he used the terms of the human game of chess he adored so much, surely the man who answered the call wasn’t a pawn but something more interesting. A knight perhaps, or a bishop. Pieces that could strike unseen, their paths hidden from all but the sharpest of eyes.

“Your honor,” the man said, his voice caught somewhere between fear and amazement. “Did the dragons vote to go to war?”

“Alas, they did,” the Masked One said. “And it seems they know of your base as well. It’s been set as one of the first targets.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t kid, Major,” the Masked One replied and infused a little umbrage into his tone. “They know the Third Wing out of Alaska is the closest military base with the force needed to damage their army. There is talk of a preemptive strike.”

In truth, the only talk of a preemptive strike had been what he had started as Lord Boneclaw. Of course, Major Miller didn’t need to know that.

“This is the worst-case scenario, then,” the man said. “We don’t have the anti-dragon emplacements fully finished yet. If they attack now, the consequences will be dire. I can scramble jets, but we can’t keep enough of them in the air at all times to fight the force of dragons you told us was massing there—that our intelligence has confirmed.”

“Your intelligence? Oh, you mean those pesky satellites you placed up where dragons can’t reach.” The Masked One had expected the major to check on the base once he gave him its location, but he found that he often participated in his plans better if he thought he was outmaneuvering the ancient dragon. He didn’t mind the deception, however. “Then you know the size of the force here.”

“We do. I guess… I guess this might call for the use of nuclear capabilities—”

“I don’t think it needs to come to all that,” he said quickly. Even he knew it would be best if the humans were not pressed far enough to use their most powerful weapons. “The dragons have learned that the Steel Dragon has allied with the mages. They are holding a vote now on whether to join forces with their former enemies so they can run over humankind and your armies. They feared the mages, but they do not fear you. A strike now—a lethal strike—would prove that you will not be defeated so easily.”

“You’re talking about a preemptive strike on dragon kind,” Major Miller said.

“The alternative is to let the dragons attack you first—something they’ve already voted to do. You can win this war but not if you give them time to destroy your airfields. I think you can see that letting this conflict escalate too far when you and your soldiers could prevent it is the wisest course of action.”

“And I have your assurances that my soldiers—”

“Yes, yes, of course. Strike here before the dragons can reach your base and I will send Diamontus himself to claim it as his property. As long as your troops swear allegiance to him, they will not be harmed by the members of my alliance. Those dragons who wish to ally with mages to attack humanity will not defeat us.” He hissed as if to emphasize his claim.

“Yes, sir,” the major said, although he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I still can’t believe the mages changed sides after all the munitions they provided us with.”

“That is because we underestimated the hunger the Steel Dragon has for power,” The Masked One replied. “It is my fault, Major. My fault entirely. I have followed her ascension to power, as you well know, and I should have moved sooner. When she took control of a powerful mage and refused to shackle her or release her to anyone else, that should have been the clue I needed to act on.

“She must have aura powers far beyond any dragon I’ve ever faced,” the Masked One let his voice tremble. He knew that Miller would interpret that as fear because that was the persona he had given Boneclaw for all the years he’d used the man in preparation for this moment. In truth, it was rage that made his words shake like a tree in a storm. “She could have killed the leader of the technomages many times but instead, she wore her down and now has made her swear fealty to her. Earlier, she took a mage from another dragon. Worse, she has persuaded humans to fight alongside dragons against both their species. She is a monster, one I should have stopped long ago…” He let his voice trail off.

“We’ll stop her now, sir,” Major Miller said, his faith in his power restored.

“Thank God for that,” the Masked One said and hung up as he heard the major start to give orders to his base.

Military men were so predictable.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kristen returned to the courtyard, where her dragon friends were training with some of those on guard duty.

It was oddly disorienting after the conversation she’d had with Shimmerclaw. The leader of the North American Dragon Council had made it quite clear that if there was a vote for war, she wouldn’t be able to stop these dragons from implementing the decision of the Council.

It meant that in less than an hour, the guards who had given Lumos a spear to practice with against one of their swords might turn their blades on their sparring partner. Those who were now in their dragon shapes, using their breath weapons against Stonequest so they could see how effective or ineffective they were against his stone skin, might turn those same tactics and attacks against him.

It was almost unthinkable to see them all there, joking and eating charred meat, when the decision to eradicate humankind might have already been made in the minds of Council dragons who were not even there.

“Is something on your mind, Lady Steel?” Lumos asked. He stopped beside her, breathing hard from his training session, and leaned on his spear. The old dragon still favored one arm after taking a dragon bullet on the tropical island during the final battle with the technomages.

Still? Kristen shook her head at her choice of words. It had only been days since he was injured, and they now tried to stave off a war so they could hunt a dragon more powerful than any they had ever faced. The whole situation was insane.

When this was all over—and if it didn’t end with her and all her friends six feet under—she would give everyone two weeks off and a huge bonus, provided they all spent the time napping.

“Everything’s on my mind,” she said. “I think I could use something to take my mind off it.”

“I have an idea about that.” He spun the spear as easily as a drum major might twirl a baton.

Five minutes later, she was engaged in a training session unlike any she’d had before. She had practiced with Lumos whenever they could but thus far, the training had focused primarily on how she could hurt other dragons. He’d taught her early on to target their joints—the armpits, the joints on the wings, and places near appendages where dragon scales were thinner and less tightly packed to allow greater range of motion.

She had done well. Now, when she sparred with him, she won more often than not, although she knew part of this was because he was so old. He wasn’t as fast or as strong as he once was, but she hadn’t been able to even land a strike when she’d started training with him, so she’d progressed. Also, the Masked One was supposed to be even more ancient than Lumos so hopefully, he’d be a little frail in the hip as well.

Kristen had made that joke to Lumos once, only to have him take her legs out from under her.

He did so now when he struck at her from within a ball of light.

She landed hard and scrambled to her feet. Immediately, she lashed out with the spikes on her tail but the attack sliced through empty space.

“Focus!” Lumos said from somewhere inside the sphere of light he’d created. He used it to hide the outline of his human body. She felt like she was fighting a dragon, but the glowing version of one that stood before her was as ethereal as the wind. The only way he could strike her was if he lashed out with the diamond tipped spear he still wielded.

As if he had somehow read the thought, he thrust the spear forward and between two of her talons, and she yanked her dragon claw away.

Kristen took a deep breath and tried to concentrate. She lashed out at where his strike had come from, but he’d already moved somewhere else inside his bright cocoon. She snorted in frustration. “Can’t you hold still?’

“He will not hold still,” Lumos said. He’d refused to speak of the Masked One directly since they’d been there and feared the enemy’s eyes would be everywhere.

“But you can.” She took another swipe and her claw connected—she was improving—but the old dragon scrambled away before she could catch hold of him.

He retaliated with a swift blow to her brow with the butt of the spear. “But I won’t!”

Her opponent vanished into his light cloud and she gave chase halfheartedly.

Lumos reappeared and looked concerned. “Is everything all right, Lady Steel? Your heart does not seem to be in this session.”

Kristen looked at the guards, who all either watched the horizon or sparred with each other. No one seemed to care that she was training with Lumos, which made what she said next ring false even in her own ears. “He could be watching. I’m worried he’ll see our methods.”

“Let him see,” the old dragon said confidently. “If he knows this is training against the powers he has kept secret for so long, he will know he has finally met his match and will taste fear. But that is not what is bothering you, not if your aura can be believed.”

“You’re right.”

“Do you wish to talk about it?” he asked. “If something clouds your heart, it would cloud your strikes in battle.”

She nodded and saw the wisdom in it. That, after all, was why Constance had never killed her. It was also why she had never killed Constance. “But not here.”

A few minutes later, they walked outside the castle and threaded along a high ridge that had the castle walls on one side and a sheer drop down the other. If they were to fall, many seabirds would see them plummet toward the sea before they took their dragon shape and flew out across the frigid water.

The wind blew fiercely and great waves pounded upon the rocky shore far below. She would probably have found it miserable if she were a human, but as a dragon with blood as hot as fire and skin as hard as steel, it felt wonderfully refreshing—as if the wind and the waves could wash everything that was troubling her away. Of course, a glance at the sky proved that to be impossible. A large number of dragons were still airborne. No wind or waves would be able to stop them once they were sent to attack humanity.

“I think even dragons cannot hear our words, now,” Lumos said.

Kristen agreed, so she told him of the strange conversation she’d had with Shimmerclaw. How it seemed the Council leader trusted her even though she’d said she would disobey orders and how she’d told her that her family and friends could be protected in the event that the war became reality.

“She’s quite right about that, at least,” he agreed but seemed to be at a loss as to what to say about the rest of it. “Humans who belong to a dragon will be on the ‘do not kill’ list, for sure. Your wealth is substantial so you could take a great many humans under your protection. I’m sure Amythist would agree to protect some on your behalf as well, and—although my resources are smaller than the great wealth Windlock left you—I too would be more than willing to protect anyone you wish me to.”

“That’s very kind,” she said and felt like she was repeating herself—or worse, like she was reliving the moment. Only this time, the old dragon she respected had been replaced by another who—despite what she had previously thought of them—seemed more than willing to sacrifice billions of people so that a small handful could survive. “But that’s not enough for me. Even if I could protect all of Michigan or the Midwest, or the entire United States, that is not enough. I can’t let countries with people—entire continents—be slaughtered so my mom can be safe and still go about her life like nothing is happening. None of the people I love would want that. No decent human being would want that.”

“Some of your politicians seem more than willing to—”

“I said no decent human,” Kristen was quick to point out. “Obviously, certain politicians don’t count.”

“Of course. Forgive me,” Lumos said. “I was only trying to lighten your spirits.”

“Yeah, well, the potential slaughter of billions has a way of dampening my mood.”

The old dragon cleared his throat and sounded uncomfortable. “Do you plan to help the humans, then? I know their weapons have advanced tremendously, but I still cannot imagine them being able to stop the dragon forces before millions of lives are lost. Even with you—with us—helping them, it would not be easy to stop thousands of dragons. It may not be possible.”

But she was already shaking her head. “Shimmerclaw asked me that as well, and I’ll tell you what I told her. I am dragon now, as much as I am human. Sometimes, it feels like I’m more dragon than human, and it certainly feels like the dragon part of me is still growing. I can’t take up arms with human beings who are willing to use dead dragons to slaughter our kind. That’s as unconscionable to me as setting fire to human cities. I feel like I need to choose a side, but I also know I can’t. Both sides would ask me to identify with a cause I can’t believe in.”

Lumos nodded and turned to look at the ocean. The droves of seabirds had joined forces with a whale to eat a shoal of tiny fish. The water teemed with creatures as the enormous whale forced the fish to surface, where the birds then forced them down again. Caught in the chaos, the fish had nowhere to go but into the bird’s gullets or into the whale’s mouth. Those that did escape were snatched up by happy seals.

Kristen felt like she was a sardine being attacked from all sides.

“I have lived a long, long time,” he said, his gaze locked on the proliferation of sea life before them. “Over all those centuries, I have come to realize a few things. One of them is that beings don’t have multiple pieces that are at internal war, even if it feels like that sometimes. Even those creatures below us, although they may feel they struggle to decide between air and food, have made their mind up. Each of us are driven by a singular force of self that drives our decisions going forward.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I understand that at our core, all living things want to survive, but I think there’s more to it than that. Our opponent isn’t operating merely for self-preservation. He has larger goals than that.”

“You are correct, of course,” he said and tossed his spear to her. She caught it deftly and regarded the ancient dragon expectantly. “We are driven by more than our selfishness.” He transformed into his gold dragon form. “We are driven by who we are at our core. That person might change or shift over time, but they are always the same self. The struggle of identity you speak of comes from facing a choice where there appear to be only wrong decisions.”

Kristen uttered a weak little chuckle at that. When she did, he lunged at her.

She lifted the spear and pointed at the dragon’s neck. He’d taught her a thing or two about fighting dragons in her human body. Over the years, of course, he’d fought humans with the skills to kill dragons. Long before the dragon bullet, the weapon of choice had been a spear tipped with a diamond. She would use it not to attack him but to impale him through the heart or the brain if he came too close.

Her gaze focused on him, she spun the weapon and wedged the butt in the ground so that if he brought his weight down on her, he’d gore himself.

Lumos—training her and thus obviously not willing to risk his life to prove a point to a student—pumped his wings and launched off the cliff. A large flock of seabirds that had already eaten their fill of fish fled from their stone perches when this greatest of all aerial predators flew over them.

“But that’s not how life works,” he said after he’d come about and now readied himself for his next attack. “Decisions are not a simple choice of yes and no. On and off, as your brother says.”

“You mean binary?”

“Exactly.” He tried to catch her with his tail, but she was able to get the point of the spear into his golden scales. With a yowl of pain, he snatched his tail away. “Very good! You are becoming much better at anticipating the movements of dragons. That will serve you well.”

“Thanks, I guess.” Kristen became steel as Lumos tried to blow her over or knock the spear from her hands with a great gust of wind. “But that doesn’t tell me which side to join.”

“You don’t have to fight for the humans or fight for the dragons. You could opt to not fight at all, for instance. Or...” He left his next observation unspoken as he surged into a raking dive at her. The maneuver was impressive but he had underestimated her. She rolled onto her back and drove both legs up into the golden dragon’s chest in a powerful kick. “Oof!” He grunted as he flew up and away from her.

“Or what?” she asked him sharply.

The old dragon shrugged. “Or whatever your heart tells you is the right thing to do. I don’t know what the best choice will be for you. I wouldn’t think to make such a judgement for anyone’s life. That’s another thing I’ve learned over my many years on this planet. It’s impossible to walk the path of another. I would not dare tell you how to walk yours. However…”

“However, what?” Kristen asked and parried his advances with a few thrusts of the spear when he took to the ground and tried to get past her and deliver a swipe with his claws.

“However, you are the Steel Dragon. One with formidable powers that approach invulnerability, it seems to many of us. Yet you were raised by humans and thus understand their fragility and short lifespans better than we do. You are so very special and no matter what happens, I will continue to follow your lead.”

“That’s merely a nice way to say you don’t know.”

“I am sorry to say that indeed, you are correct. But I trust you more than I’ve ever trusted another. We all do. The decision of what to do with that trust is yours.” Lumos took to the air again, caught the wind with his golden wings, and screeched like one of the birds. “Do you want my advice? Forget about everything, live on a cliff face like a seabird, and enjoy some fresh fish!” He elevated to a height at which he could focus on the great shoal of fish that continued to fuel the feast below.

He never got to his meal, though.

Before he could begin his dive, a missile rocketed out of the wispy clouds and pounded into the top of castle. The battlement crumbled into an avalanche that threatened to bury her.

She had barely enough time to throw herself from the cliff and transform into a dragon before another missile struck where she had been moments before.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kristen pumped her wings to catch the air before she plummeted into the frothy sea below. “Lumos!” she screamed.

“I’m fine! Lady Steel, we must get to the others!” he shouted and banked toward the castle and away from another missile that streaked past. This one made it over the castle wall and into the middle of the courtyard. A great ball of fire erupted as it detonated. All the training equipment, cooking fires, and supplies were incinerated in the horrific blast.

The screams of the wounded started almost immediately—no less difficult to hear because they came from dragons.

Two more attacks rocketed toward the stronghold. One of the dragons on a still-standing rampart had the good sense to fire his scorpion at it. She had no idea how a dragon would ever have been able to dodge the impossibly fast crossbow bolt, large enough to skewer an ox, but the old fashioned projectile simply passed the missile and made no impact at all.

As if angry at the dragon for daring to fire upon it, the ordnance drove into the wall immediately below the guard manning the scorpion. The heat and force of the explosion was such that his skin, muscle, and finally bone burned away before the orange ball of flame was gone, leaving only destruction behind it.

“How could they be blindsided like this?” Kristen yelled, shocked to see such death in a place of such power.

“Dragons aren’t exactly up to date on tech,” Lumos said. His gaze peered in the direction the missiles had come from, looking for more. “They have radar here, but probably not a device with the precision to track incoming missiles. Humans must have fired them from a long way out.”

“Keep your eyes open for more,” she ordered. “I’ll check on our team.”

She gained enough elevation to clear the wall and landed inside the courtyard. Her team gathered in a corner, protected by the faint, blue shimmer of Amy’s defensive magic. A quick head count confirmed that everyone was fine. That was more than could be said of the rest of the assembled dragons.

With all the smoke from the blasts and the chaos of debris everywhere, she couldn’t be sure but thought she counted at least a half-dozen dead dragons.

Six dragons had been killed in the blasts at their own base.

To humans, that might have been manageable losses. To dragons, it was a devastating blow.

“I counted six missiles. Did anyone else get a count?” she asked.

“That sounds right,” Emerald said. No one else seemed to have any idea how the blasts had happened.

Six missiles, one per dragon slain. There were probably more dead than that, as the broken stone walls could have easily crushed a dragon to death. It was insane that humans could do all this without even being seen.

Three fighters rocketed overhead, most likely to survey the damage.

“They come to drop more fire!” a dragon yelled, and those who had survived—far more than those who had died—all transformed and leapt skyward.

“No!” Kristen shouted. “That was only a pass to see what they’ve done. They’re too fast to chase. By the time we see them, it’s too late.”

“Catch them!” a dragon roared and many obeyed, but it soon became obvious that a dragon was no match for the jets. The aircraft most likely traveled faster than five hundred miles an hour. Dragons could maybe go a hundred if it was the right dragon in the right wind. She was damn sure she couldn’t go anywhere near that fast.

It seemed she wouldn’t have to.

“They’re coming back,” Amy said, her eyes closed and hands held at her temples. “They’ll make another pass.”

“Everyone get to safety!” Kristen said as Amy flew to her.

“Where the hell are you two going?” Stonequest demanded. He normally took orders well, so she didn’t fault him for his incredulity. She was sure she looked insane and certainly felt it.

“We’ll try to stop those planes.”

Amy levitated herself onto her back and looked like a doll being snatched up from the ground via invisible strings as she used her clothes to move herself.

“Can you sense them? And can you guide me into their path?” she asked the young mage.

“Keep going up. I’ll tell you when we’re at their level,” the girl shouted over the wind. “Or…you know what? How about we simply stay here?”

“Why?” Kristen demanded but then saw them too. The trio of F-22s each fired another pair of missiles. The ordnance streaked toward them and the rest of the dragons still trying to assemble themselves into some form of useful defense below. “Do you think you could protect the whole island from those missiles?” she asked.

“What? Like if they all blew up? No way in hell,” Amy replied.

“Then we’d better stop them before they blow,” she said. Without the mage to shield them, their friends were in mortal danger, but she was also the only one who might be able to stop those missiles before they made impact. It was a catch-twenty-two, one that would only be solved by quick thinking and fearless action.

Kristen moved toward the approaching missiles but had no idea how long it would take to reach them. She had no experience battling this type of attack, but she didn’t think it would take long.

While she focused on flight, the mage reached out with her powers. Two of the missiles began to tremble and a moment later, nosed toward each other, collided, and exploded. There was no time for celebration, though, as they were instantly outpaced by the other four missiles.

She felt like she’d blinked and the ordnance was upon them. Acting on instinct, she turned and lashed out with the spikes on her tail. She managed to whip a missile with one of her projectile spikes and promised herself she’d thank Lumos for the training later.

Amy had short-circuited the second or caused its fuel to run out or something. It rapidly lost altitude and vanished into the ocean.

Two were left but they were both beyond Kristen and she knew she wouldn’t be able to catch up.

“Amy!”

“I know!”

“Amy, they’re getting close!”

“Dammit, I know!” the mage screamed and a blast of energy radiated from her. It caught the rear of one of the missiles and tumbled it end over end before it crashed into one of the high cliffs that framed the island. Kristen was shocked by how relieved she was that it wasn’t the cliff with all the baby birds on it.

That relief soon turned to horror as the last missile pierced the airspace above the base.

“Amy!”

The young mage’s aura slipped into unconsciousness. She’d pushed herself too far and passed out.

It meant it was up to Kristen to— Too late.

The projectile struck home in the center of the courtyard and exploded to swallow the dragons in a great ball of flame. She cursed when she realized that it had potentially transformed a rally point for a war she was desperate to prevent into its first battleground.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kristen roared as the destruction below her unfolded. She’d been too slow. If she could have taken to the air a fraction faster, maybe she would have been able to stop all the attacks. In the face of such a calamity, her hopes for a peaceful resolution began to slip away. The dragons would want vengeance for this assault. They’d want war, one which could only end in far too much blood spilled on both sides. She banked to return to the castle, hoping to lend help to those injured within.

Before she could reach the wounded and convince them that retaliation wasn’t the way forward, she was attacked.

The three fighter jets raced toward her. Two of them remained high above her and the mage on her back, but the third lowered altitude and spun as it did so. She turned her body to steel, ready to slash one of the wings with her tail, but the pilot opened fire.

Thank goodness, all she had to do was roll to put her belly to face the bullets so Amy would be safe on her back. If they were made of dragon scale, they’d tear through her, which meant she’d fall into the frigid ocean below and the girl might drown. If they were normal bullets, she could protect her friend long enough to wake her.

For a few terrifying seconds, they felt like dragon bullets.

Intense pain erupted where she was struck in the belly. She looked down and each bullet felt like it had punched through her gut but surprisingly, she wasn’t bleeding. They were not dragon bullets, fortunately, merely regular lead but fired from a military-grade rapid-fire weapon mounted on a jet that was already traveling hundreds of miles per hour.

Despite having steel skin and being a dragon, the fire from a 30mm cannon hurt. If they had been dragon bullets, she would have been shredded but she was still in one piece. For the moment, anyway.

The fighter fired again. He missed her body this time and instead, caught her wings. Although being made of steel, the bullets ripped through the membrane.

Kristen screamed in pain and began to plummet toward the icy water below.

She pushed with her aura in an attempt to wake Amy.

With a groggy, “What the fuck happened?” the mage regained consciousness and was back in the action.

“A little help, please!” she screamed, knowing she sounded desperate from the pain but beyond caring. Amy was one person she could allow to see her fear. “My wing is torn.”

“Right!” the girl shouted and Kristen felt her chest lifted by an invisible force. It was odd being lifted by magic because there was no aerodynamics to it. Rather than using momentum to help carry her through the fall and out across the water, Amy simply slowed her fall, reversed its direction, and raised the Steel Dragon once again.

That was all the time she needed to heal her wings. The 30mm bullets had hurt but they were still merely bullets. Because they weren’t made of dragon scale, they didn’t affect her healing abilities. She didn’t know if it meant the missiles that had struck the castle were filled with pieces of dragons or if the explosives inside each warhead were simply powerful enough to kill a dragon outright with a direct strike.

It was not something she wanted the pilots to test any more than they already had.

She looked up as the two fighters raced overhead. The one that had shot her attempted to catch up to the others.

Those in the lead dipped their wings, no doubt to look out their window and make sure the Steel Dragon had found her watery grave beneath Hudson’s Bay.

Instead, they saw her flying toward them with Amy on her back and magic swirling around them.

All three fighters increased their speed, either to make a retreat or to get far enough away to come in for another pass.

“They’ll get away!” Kristen shouted.

“Not on my watch,” the mage replied and gritted her teeth.

There was no recognizable color or shape to the magic she currently used, but its effects were very evident.

The two fighters that tried to sneak away began to nose toward each other. Over such speeds and distances, Amy didn’t have the level of control she’d had over the missiles. Both pilots fought her manipulations and each of them went into a series of maneuvers to stop her from taking control.

They had to stay alive, keep moving, and keep away from each other, while all she had to do was push their controls. Inevitably, they overcorrected.

That was all it took. In one moment, three planes struggled to hold their formation and in the next, one of the leaders clipped the other’s wing.

Kristen didn’t see the actual collision as she was too far away and the fighter jets moved too fast, but she saw the effects.

It reminded her of when Brian had played a game with spaceships that blasted lasers at each other over planets. She—in a fit of rage—had snatched his controller and thrown it down their front steps. The spaceship he’d been controlling tried to move in about a dozen different directions before it exploded.

The jets did the same thing. Their elaborate loops and spins no longer seemed so controlled. One of them spun increasingly fast until the pilot ejected and the plane crashed into the bay. The other never had the chance. The pilot tried to increase speed, but the wings of the craft were already shaking too much and the jet simply exploded.

The third and final fighter who had fired on Kristen did not want to remain any longer. They activated the afterburners and the jet surged forward until it cracked the sound barrier and released a sonic boom that made the shape of a parabola splash on the surface of the bay below them. Acceleration continued until it reached Mach 2 and vanished into the far distance where even Amy couldn’t follow it.

“I could try to make a portal,” the girl said, but she sounded doubtful. “But I don’t know where he’s going and even if I did, I would probably pass out. You’d have to take him and any of his friends on alone. You know what? I’m not gonna open that portal.”

“There are more important things to worry about right now anyway,” Kristen said and circled toward the island that had taken the brunt of seven missiles in less then six minutes. She spared one more glance at the pilot who had ejected and now parachuted into the bay. The freezing water would do him in, and she thought he should probably be brought in for questioning. She pushed the idea aside when one of the dragons who hadn’t heeded her advice to take cover flew to where the man was falling and ate him.

Appalled by what she’d seen, she soared over the castle. The last missile had struck in the center of the courtyard. From the looks of it, about twenty dragons had not heeded her advice and remained in the open. They’d all been in mid-transformation when the missile detonated, their energy focused on changing their body instead of healing it.

All twenty of them were dead now.

Most had made the transition to their dragon body before they succumbed to the injuries from the heat and force of the blast, but a few had only half-changed. They’d died part human and part dragon. It was like something out of a horror film she would never dare to imagine.

“Stonequest!” Kristen shouted down at the destruction. “Emerald, Heartsbane, Lumos!”

There were many more names of her dragons, but she was most concerned about her old friends.

A pile of rubble shifted and the off-white of Stonequest’s marbled skin emerged. Flecks of green and orange gleamed here and there as he pushed the rubble off his back. The rest of her team emerged from beneath his wings, all in human form so they were able to shelter under him.

“Is everyone all right?” she shouted and immediately regretted the absurdity of the question amidst such a grizzly scene.

“Our team is,” Stonequest said, his jaw agape as he studied the carnage. Not every dragon had died, however. Those who had been airborne remained on the wing, circled overhead, and alternated between looking for more planes and taking in the destruction below.

Some had taken shelter like her people had. Not all, obviously, but more than those who had died. They now streamed from the ground beneath the castle and entered the desolated courtyard through trapdoors that were no longer hidden. Beyond these apertures, tunnels that had stood for centuries were now little more than ramshackle spaces between shattered piles of cut stone.

“This is all those technomages’ fault,” a dragon with a huge red neck frill shouted and pointed his talon at Amy.

“They couldn’t have done this without the weapons they harvested from our bodies,” another yelled, this one with many more talons on each foot than Kristen had.

“These were not dragon killing missiles,” she told them sharply. “If they were, the loss of life would have been far worse.”

“You don’t seem to be hurt badly,” a third dragon said and retrieved a spear from amongst the debris. In his human form, he still had his dragon wings.

“That’s because we have experience fighting these monsters,” Stonequest interjected.

“More like because you have a mage to protect you,” the dragon with the frill who had spoken first shouted. “How are we supposed to know you didn’t orchestrate this attack?”

“I saved you!” Amy shouted, her voice magically enhanced so it echoed off the crumbling remains of the castle and caused many of the seabirds to take to the air, screaming as if to accentuate her anger.

“I guess so…” a dragon muttered loudly. “But I still don’t see why you’re not cuffed.”

That drew a chorus of grumbled protests, hear-hears, and unnecessary verbal crap. Kristen had changed into her human form but she donned her steel skin reflexively at their accusations.

“She’s worse than any of the mages!”

“My representative called and said that the Steel Dragon made some kind of contract with all the technomages, not only this one.”

“What if she frees them all?”

“They could build more of these dragon missiles.”

There were too many misconceptions to correct at one time. She couldn’t clarify them all, not while some of the dragons in their human forms snatched weapons while others changed into their dragon bodies.

“She’s supposed to be cuffed,” one roared.

“Those are the rules,” another added. It seemed they had found a rallying point at last.

“If she won’t be cuffed, there’s a price to be paid.”

“She saved all of you. If she’d been cuffed, you would all be dead,” Stonequest said and moved to stand in front of Amy. The rest of Kristen’s forces surrounded the mage as well. Some took dragon form while others remained as humans. All of them looked like they knew damn well that a fight in the ruins of this castle and in the wake of all this destruction would not be a good thing.

But they also knew that they might have to fight, and they put their shoulders together to protect the woman who had saved them all.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

One of the agitators growled as he blew smoke from his nose. Another lashed out with his tail. Still another sent a small ball of fire at them.

Kristen’s dragon fighters held their position. They ignored the smoke, dodged the tail strike, and deflected the fireball. They knew to not break ranks but they also knew the dragons would continue to test them.

“What the hell is this?” Diamontus bellowed as he emerged from the catacombs beneath the ruins of the castle and took his dragon form.

He was absolutely huge, so big that she thought he should be measured in elephants. It was the only conceivable standard. The big fucking dragon was at least as large as three elephants.

Worse were the blueish, crystalline formations that covered his entire body. She wanted to think that the spikes jutting from his shoulders, the backs of his elbows, and the ridge down his back and his head were as strong as ice. But the dragons’ name—Diamontus—spoke of stronger stuff.

“This mage is going about without a cuff,” a dragon told him. “We were working to fix that.”

“She’s in a contract with her master,” Diamontus said and nodded at Kristen. He looked pissed about it but he was a Council member, after all, and knew the laws better than most dragons.

“But, sir, no one on her team—no one—was hurt,” a dragon explained. “What if they were working with the humans who shot their missiles at us?”

“It’s an interesting thought,” the large dragon growled. “That would of course make them traitors to dragon kind. Where were you prior to the attack?” he demanded of Kristen.

“She was with me, you big buffoon.” Shimmerclaw appeared from the clouds, her platinum scales glowing as brightly as the sky itself. “She’s tried to stop this war, unlike you, Diamontus. She’s not allied with the humans any more than you are.”

He grumbled but before he could say anything, she spoke again. “This is not the time for bickering. A real enemy has revealed itself. It is time to rethink our defensive capabilities before we are struck with such devastation again. We ought to thank Lady Steel’s mage for our lives, not threaten her.”

“Not everyone made it out with their life,” the dragon with the neck frill pointed out gruffly.

“None of us would have made it out with our lives if not for the Steel Dragon and her team. I was in the air when this all happened. I saw it play out. She and her mage offered sage advice—take cover—which those of you who survived all heeded. Thereafter, the mage stopped five of the six explosive projectiles the humans in their airplanes launched at us.”

“Do you speak the truth?” Diamontus asked. “She stopped five of the weapons that did this?”

“Well, Lady Steel might have helped with one,” Shimmerclaw said wryly.

“All this death was caused by only one of their missiles?” he demanded.

“No, sir,” Emerald said. “There were two volleys and six missiles each. The second time, only one hit but that was when we suffered the most casualties.”

“And how many casualties did your team suffer?” Diamontus asked.

More calls of “Cuff the mage!” and “Traitor!’ followed his thinly veiled accusation.

“Enough of that!” Shimmerclaw roared and made her rage plain with her aura. “We will not exact vengeance on the mage who saved us. Plus, what exactly do you idiots think you can even do to her after what she did to those human weapons?”

“With all due respect, my lady, that’s not the right question,” Kristen said and watched the dragons still surrounding them cautiously. “They should ask what she can do to them.”

Most of them growled at this, but Diamontus only laughed a big, hearty guffaw more suited for a tavern than the aftermath of a slaughter. “I like you, Steel Dragon. You have balls of steel, as the humans say.” With another laugh, he took his human form and returned to the underground portion of the castle.

“And the rest of you, we need scouting parties in all directions to warn us via aura if more of those jets appear. We all saw the blast radius of these bombs of theirs. I don’t want another attack to hurt more dragons. If you have ideas on how to defend ourselves, talk to your commanding officer. Now, people!” Shimmerclaw ordered.

The assembled forces obeyed. Some began to stack stones into some semblance of fortifications. Others took to the sky. Still others—the youngest of them—turned their attention to the damaged radar dish that had protruded from one of the turrets of the castle.

“Lady Steel, I thank you for your protection.” The Council leader bowed.

Her heart fluttered in protest. She’d been in dragon society long enough to know a bow like that was a sign of great respect. Too bad she didn’t deserve it.

“You honor me, Lady Shimmerclaw, but what victory we had here, as small as it was, belongs to Amy.”

“Ah,” the old dragon said and turned to the mage with a curious expression on her face. “But of course. If I wish the Steel Dragon’s alliance, I should honor her ways. You did well, mage of Lady Steel. We all owe you a great deal. If there is something I can do for you, simply ask.”

“You could start by calling me my name instead of the Steel Dragon’s mage.”

“Very well, Amy,” Shimmerclaw nodded. “And you may call me my given name as well,” She uttered a long trumpet from deep within her throat. Kristen had been around dragons long enough to know it was the ancient guttural language dragons spoke before they took to the more complex human tongues. Whether she had meant it as a joke or an insult she couldn’t tell, but she elbowed Amy to remind her to show some respect.

“Gee, thanks, but, uh… I’d feel awkward calling the leader of the Dragon Council anything but Lady Shimmerclaw.”

“Of course, child. Now, Lady Steel, although this young mage—rather, Amy—was quite useful in this defense, I think it might be wise if she and some of your force went…elsewhere. That strike was quite…unfortunately timed.”

She nodded. That was the damn truth.

“I fear the vote may not be reversed, not now that your work on the technomages has been overshadowed by this carnage. With tensions being what they are, it might be wise if the mage especially were somewhere else.”

Neither Kristen nor Amy complained at Shimmerclaw not using her name in this particular rationalization. After all, dragons still scrutinized her and glowered at her naked wrist.

“She’s right. Amy, I want you and all the dragons to get out of here. If this vote doesn’t go well…”

“Lady Steel, with respect, I won’t follow that order,” Stonequest said and stepped closer so he could lower his voice.

“Too bad it’s not up to you to question it.”

“And if you’re taken prisoner when they declare war because we left you here alone, will I be giving orders then?”

“He’s right,” Heartsbane said. “Most of the dragons here are trying to hide their fury because Shimmerclaw and Diamontus were both against attacking us, and we’d be crazy to leave you here.”

Kristen wanted to tell them that they needed to go precisely because it wasn’t safe there. The Council might very well vote for war and if they did, she had made it much too clear to Shimmerclaw where she stood. But, of course, she couldn’t start talking about mutiny with so many dragon ears listening.

When no alternative presented itself, she accepted their advice. “All right. Emerald, Heartsbane, Stonequest, Lumos. You’re with me. Timeflash, I want Amy on your back. The two of you lead the recruits to Detroit.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Timeflash said, growled something at the younger dragons, loaded Amy, and launched into a southward heading away from this place of pain.

But despite the carnage, the dragons handled it well. Kristen assumed they had been preparing for war so perhaps saw this is as part of the price of the battle they were ready to fight.

She had decided to start helping set up the defenses and perhaps recommend places to shelter in the event of another bomb strike when Shimmerclaw gestured for her to return to the castle.

Her demeanor much calmer than she felt, she followed and traversed the hallways beneath the island again. Once more, the chill from the cold of Hudson Bay seemed to permeate the stone.

A few side halls had collapsed from the explosions above but the main route was clear, except for a little debris here and there. They only came to one place that looked like it had caved in and blocked the path, but someone—likely Diamontus—had cleared the rubble to either side of the corridor.

They entered the Council’s chamber. Even there, she could see evidence of the strike that had rocked the castle on the surface. A few stones had fallen from the wall and a layer of dust had drifted to coat every surface. Worse, the camera that had recorded them had fallen and its lens had cracked, so the video they were sending to the other Council members spread across the globe clearly showed the battle damage. It would be impossible to downplay the strike.

Although it seemed that any hope of downplaying anything was long gone.

Diamontus leaned over Boneclaw’s shoulder and looked absolutely furious. “I told you we were too slow, Shimmer! Don’t say that I didn’t!”

“What are you talking about Diamontus? I only asked for a few hours to deliberate.”

“He’s right, my lady,” Boneclaw whined.

“Right about what?”

“There was another attack exactly like this one! It seems humans can war with each other for centuries, but when presented with a threat from us, they band together like ants,” the massive dragon raged.

“Boneclaw. Explain,” Shimmerclaw ordered.

“It is as he said. There has been an attack by humans at the European rally point. Three Russian fighters struck their base with twelve missiles. They had no mage to stop them, though.”

“The time for deliberation is over!” Diamontus bellowed. “We go to war—now!”

“That is not our call,” Shimmerclaw said and her aura overflowed the hall.

“She’s right, Diamontus,” Boneclaw said. “Which is why I already called for the vote. The time for deliberation is over. Everyone is voting now. We’ll have our decision in minutes.”

The Council leader sighed, obviously disappointed by this turn of events, but it was clear her hands were tied. “If you’ll excuse us, Lady Steel. It is time to do our duty.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Kristen felt like she barely had time to catch her breath before the door to the Dragon Council’s chamber swung open.

She had positioned herself against the opposite wall so she looked directly into Shimmerclaw’s eyes when the doors opened. Although the platinum dragon’s aura betrayed nothing, sadness was very clear in her eyes—sadness, disappointment, and dread. She shook her head subtly only once but to Kristen, who waited for the outcome of the vote, and the meaning was as clear as day.

The result had not gone their way. Despite her and her team capturing the last of the technomages, the strikes from the fighter jets had done their job. The dragons had voted to go to war.

“There are preparations to make,” Shimmerclaw said to Kristen, although she avoided eye contact. “I need to address the troops. I will not allow a slaughter.”

Before she could so much as think of a reply, Lord Boneclaw stepped out of the chamber and walked toward her. Something was different about him. Before, he had seemed spineless—or if not spineless exactly, more like an eel than not—as if he could contort into any shape he wished if only to hold onto his power as long as possible. Now, however, he seemed more like a shark that had smelled blood in the water.

“Lady Steel,” he said, his voice not as weak as it had been mere hours before. “I wanted to personally congratulate you and thank you for your service to dragon kind. First, you stopped the technomages and now, you spared this base from most of the destruction.”

“Not enough to stop the war, though!” Diamontus said gleefully over the old dragon’s shoulder. Kristen studied the hulking brute for a minute and wondered if he was the Masked One, but she dismissed the idea outright.

She had fought that particular dragon. In the dark and in his shadow dragon form, yes, but she had fought him all the same. She felt—no, she knew—there was no way she had faced Diamontus with his crystalline shoulders and abrasive personality. No, the dragon she had fought had been a master of deception. He had not only literally been of shadow but had operated from the darkness, using her lack of knowledge against her. His strategy had been to avoid the light at all costs. To skulk, to creep, to hide, to wait, and to bide his time.

None of those seemed to be traits the massive dragon was capable of. As if to prove her point, he punched a stone wall, cracked it, then ran up the stairs, screaming for battle.

That left her alone with Lord Boneclaw.

“Pardon the interruption,” he said. “Diamontus has always been excitable. I’m sure he’ll be an incredibly valuable asset in this war, although I see you as a far more useful asset to our team. In fact”—he smiled viciously—“I have already prepared a reward for your service. It will need to be approved by the North American Council, of course, but I have no doubt they’ll see things my way. They often do.”

“What are you talking about?” Kristen asked and barely kept her disgust from her tone.

“Oh, pardon me. I’m getting ahead of myself,” Boneclaw said in his simpering little voice she now saw for the lie it was. “The Council has voted for war. Well, war isn’t the term we used, of course. More precisely, we voted to exterminate ninety percent of the human race so as to better remove the threat they represent to dragons.”

She gasped. Even though she had already heard it from Shimmerclaw, it still felt like a punch to the gut to hear such horrors stated in such simple terms.

He continued, either oblivious to her stress or reveling in it. “These new weapons they have and the vast number of humans isn’t something dragons can tolerate anymore. Their infernal breeding and wanton consumption of resources has been a problem for the last century, of course, but these weapons… Well, let me thank you once more for removing the creators of such things from the equation. That helped settle many minds, you know. Where before, dragons had feared the technomages, they now see an opportunity to wipe out the human militaries and destroy or exhaust what supplies of the infernal weapons they have.”

“How can you possibly talk of rewards in any of this?” she sputtered.

“Oh, silly me and my tangents!” Boneclaw smiled. “Well, you are one of our most esteemed investigators and already experienced in combat against these dragon bullets and guided missiles. You also know what other strange weapons the humans will devise so I’m pushing to make you a captain in the North American Dragon Army. You will help me lead our people to victory. Isn’t that wonderful? And if you do well, who knows? Perhaps you’ll have a seat on the Dragon Council one day once these humans have been properly put in their place. You could even oversee their treatment. I know their habits are of unusual interest to you.”

In a split-second, everything clicked into place for Kristen. She knew who the Masked One was—a Council member of great age and a man who worked from the shadows with hidden powers. There was no doubt in her mind that she looked her nemesis in the eye.

The Masked One was Lord Boneclaw.

The dragon who had told her he would kill her friends and wear their skulls for masks stood directly in front of her. Worse, he’d tried to give her a promotion to fight in his force.

“How did you know that guided missiles were used against the base?”

For the first time since she’d seen him, his careful visage slipped. “What did you say to me?”

“You said I had experience against guided missiles. How did you know that? For that matter, how did those fighters know about this base at all? There must be a dragon informant. I had thought that maybe there was a mole or something but now, I worry the rot goes far higher than that.”

“I was neutral,” Boneclaw—the Masked One because now that she’d thought it, she couldn’t unthink it—growled.

“Of course, my lord,” she said, although her aura made it obvious to him that it was a lie. “But someone told those fighters’ commander about this base. Someone told them they had to strike now or the war wouldn’t happen because I had already stopped the technomages. The funny thing about them is that they say a dragon pulled their strings too. Do you think it was Diamontus? He seems to be the smartest of the Council besides Shimmerclaw, and she’s obviously soft.”

“Diamontus is a fool,” he hissed but seemed to realize what he was saying. “Maybe you can throw accusations around in the human justice system, but dragons will demand evidence for these impossible claims. What evidence do you have?”

“Nothing,” she acknowledged. “Circumstantial at best but even those are weak.”

“What are you accusing me of, exactly?” He narrowed his eyes.

“Nothing at all, my lord,” she was quick to say. She knew dragon law well enough to know that if she outright accused him of wrongdoing, he could challenge her to a duel. If that happened, especially there in these dark tunnels with cracks in the walls that led to unknown places steeped in shadow, she had no doubt that the Masked One would obliterate her, even with all her training from Lumos. She couldn’t give him reason to challenge her—not yet and not without evidence.

But Kristen also couldn’t let him go without making him sweat a little either, not if she wanted to be able to continue to think of herself as a Detroiter. “I have no idea who could be behind all this, but I promise you this, my lord. I will do everything in my power to bring the truth to light, no matter how deep underground the cave it’s hidden in might be.” It was a reference to when she was trapped underground by the Masked One and it didn’t go unnoticed.

Lord Boneclaw didn’t flinch or even so mutch as twitch an eyebrow, but understanding flickered behind his eyes, followed by malice. She knew for certain, then. He was the dragon who had trapped her down there. It was he who had pulled her strings, controlled the technomages, and had pushed for war long before she had joined the Dragon SWAT team in Detroit.

It was him she had to stop.

“I’ve looked into that investigation—something about being misled to South America and tricked into a cave? Not your greatest work, I must say.” His tone had taken on an oily edge and he seemed ready to pull another card out of his sleeve.

“I’m sure you’ve looked at the facts quite closely,” she said.

“Oh, indeed I have. And there’s nothing there that will be at all beneficial during a war. This conspiracy theory about a traitorous dragon must end. There will be time enough to ferret out those disloyal to dragon kind when this war is over. For now, Investigator, we need warriors, not detectives. And I happen to know—from extremely close sources—that you are indeed a proficient warrior. I can’t wait to see what you can do against the humans.”

“Yeah, the thing is, I won’t stop. I won’t sit idly by when injustice is done.” Kristen shrugged. She couldn’t believe what a relief it was to finally know the face of her enemy. Although she knew the Masked One could kill her as easily as she could kill a mouse, knowing who he was made her feel like she’d won a victory over him.

“I’m a cop, not a soldier,” she said simply. “I never signed up for the army. I signed up to be a cop. My job is to bring the criminals to justice. Whoever they are.”

“Well, I must say your commitment to your ideals is admirable.” He patted her on her shoulder.

She noticed his hands were bony and his knuckles looked like thin leather pulled tightly over too-big bones. How had she not recognized him sooner? All she’d known of the dragon in the cave was that he was bony. His claws had seemed to almost lack flesh and his tail had been more like a spine than anything else. She’d seen Boneclaw take his dragon shape before too. When Constance had tried to blow the Dragon Council up, he’d fled when so many others had chosen to stay. Probably—she now realized—because he had known about the bomb. Hell, if Constance could be believed, this was the asshole who convinced a dragon to allow his offspring to be grown as clones and harvested for weapons.

“But,” the Masked One continued. “Even a captain cannot disobey a direct order from a Council member. Neither in peacetime, nor in war.”

Kristen rolled her eyes and pushed his hand off her shoulder. She knew he could destroy her in Dragon form, but in their human bodies, she certainly had the strength edge. “Then I’ll talk to Shimmerclaw. I’m sure she’ll see things my way.”

“I’m afraid not. Guards?” He snapped his bony fingers and the guards who stood near the door all moved toward her. “Take her into protective custody. I will not allow you to pursue an investigation that might very well get you killed. If you don’t wish to fight, it’s not my place to order your execution, but I will not let you accidentally do something to endanger our forces.”

She was about to spring into action—she could land some blows and kick him a few times before she reached the safety of the sunshine on the surface—when a guard put a diamond tipped spear to her neck. Her teeth clenched in suppressed fury, she was forced to watch her enemy walk away to direct the war he’d started.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Willing herself to remain calm, Kristen looked at the dragon who held a spear to her neck. Another stood to his left , his hands balled in fists and wrapped in what must have been magic-blocking shackles with a long chain. He looked pissed. She could hear the other two dragons step up behind her. All of them were in human form as there wasn’t space in these tunnels for dragon bodies.

“Sorry about this, my lady,” the spear-wielder said. “I’m a big fan, honestly, but orders are orders. You can’t disobey any more than we can.”

“You’re right,” she said and raised her hands high above her head. “It’d be foolish, especially with four of you. I imagine you’ve seen all kinds of action.”

“You got that right, Steel Bitch,” said the dragon with chain and cuffs wound around his knuckles. “We’ve apprehended rogue dragons, blown castles up, and stopped dragon murderers. You name it.”

She noted that he didn’t say anything about people. It was a tiny detail, but she took note of it, nonetheless. Sometimes, small snippets of information made all the difference.

With them distracted, she dropped her hands abruptly and grasped the tip of the spear. The dragon holding it tried to stab her but she pulled it toward her, turned her skin to steel, and leveraged her superior weight to drive the spear-tip up and out of the way. After a quick twist, she now held the spear. The dragon’s eyes widened in surprise as the weapon slid from his hands.

“It’s always nice to meet a fan.” She swung the spear—exactly like she’d practiced with Lumos—and caught him across the temple. He fell heavily. If he were a human, he’d be dead, but his dragon healing powers would likely revive him in moments.

Kristen sensed movement at her back and continued to twirl the spear to use it as a tool to keep her attackers away as much as a weapon for attack. She managed to catch one of them across the face. He yelped in pain and clutched his head. The diamond-tipped spear had cut him across the forehead and blood poured in his eyes, blinding him, if for only a few more moments.

The dragon with the shackles lunged at her. She stabbed the spear at him, but he wrapped it deftly with the chain connecting the two manacles. It was precisely what she had hoped he would do. She tightened her hold on the spear, dug the back of it into the stone floor, and used herself as a fulcrum so she could lift him and thrust him into the ceiling.

He impacted with the stone but seemed to be made of harder stuff than the other two she had already disabled. Instead of collapsing, he grasped the spear and wouldn’t allow her to move it again.

Rather than struggle to regain it, she let it go, ran forward, and snatched the cuffs to wrest them away from him.

The dragon obviously knew the strength of the cuffs and didn’t release them. Instead, he tried to snap one of them around her wrist.

No matter how many centuries this dragon had to snap handcuffs on people, he didn’t have as much experience with them as Kristen did from her time as Detroit cop. She blocked his attempted arrest and managed to get one of the cuffs around his wrist instead.

He wilted immediately, denied access to his dragon powers. She put a boot to his chest and shoved him hard against the far wall.

The last guard rushed her from behind and wrapped her in his arms. She was still steel, however, and he couldn’t move her. Instead, she lifted him off the ground and threw him into the wall next to his comrade with the shackles. With a burst of dragon speed, she darted forward and cuffed him. Fortunately, each cuff had the anti-magic enchantment, so both guards could do nothing but nurse their wounds that failed to heal.

Kristen turned to check the two dragons she’d disabled earlier.

The one with the spear fixed her with a calm look. He had taken a bronze horn from his belt. “I like you and I’ve always liked you. That’s why I’ll give you to the count of five before I blow this horn.”

She didn’t even consider taking it from him. Whether he blew it or not, she had to get out of there and she had to do it immediately. Plus, it wouldn’t do to further injure a potential ally. “Thank you,” she said as she raced down the hall, up the stairs, and into the courtyard, moving as fast as dragon speed could manage.

Before she was even all the way out of the stairwell, she began to change into her dragon form and dropped her steel skin at the same time as she knew she’d need the speed. That didn’t stop her from simply exploding what was left of the stone that framed the doorway into the tunnel.

She vaulted skyward as Diamontus yelled to other dragons to bring her down. The Masked One had already seen the possibility of her escaping, then—of course he had—and set the massive dragon against her.

As she pumped her wings to gain height, she set her aura to “get the fuck out of here so you don’t fucking die” and bellowed at her friends to follow her. In a blink, Stonequest, Emerald, Heartsbane, and Lumos were airborne and beat their wings furiously to catch up to her.

“What on earth have you gotten us into now?” Lumos inquired as if she had ordered them a particularly unusual appetizer.

“It looks like we’re aiding and abetting a fleeing prisoner,” Stonequest said as a horn blew from inside the tunnels of the dragon base.

“What the fuck did you do?” Heartsbane demanded.

“No time! Fly!” Kristen shouted as she tried to gain even more speed. Even beating her wings as quickly as possible, Lumos was able to outpace her.

“If you get caught, we should know why we’re helping you. Did you kill someone?” Emerald asked.

“I wish!” She gasped. “I found out who the Masked One is—he’s the Councilor, Lord Boneclaw. He was behind my abduction, probably the technomages, and maybe all the other bad shit too.”

“Well, let’s fuck him up, then!” Heartsbane replied.

“I don’t know if that would be prudent,” Lumos said and glanced over his shoulder.

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Kristen said. “He has most of the Council in his pocket and ordered me to be taken into protective custody.”

“So the vote—” Stonequest started to say.

“Went the wrong way,” she finished for him.

“And we’re running because you refused to join the war effort,” Emerald surmised.

“Flying, but yes,” she admitted shortly.

“Kristen, there’s no way we can outpace them,” Stonequest pointed out. “None of us have speed powers, and those six scouts closing the gap between us obviously do.”

“And then there are all the other dragons behind them,” Lumos pointed out pragmatically.

“I can’t ask you to fight,” she said, still breathless. “If you do, you’ll all be fugitives until we can stop the Masked One and break up the faction he controls. And that’s assuming we can even escape.”

“Lady Steel, with respect, you don’t ask us to do anything,” Stonequest said. “You give us orders and we obey. Tell us to abandon you, and we might listen. Tell us to help you, and we definitely will.”

She darted a glance at her old Dragon SWAT team. She could see on their faces and feel from their auras that their minds were made up. Not one of them wanted to see her arrested for refusing to go to war.

“In that case,” Kristen said firmly. “We’re leaving and they can try to stop us.”

“I think they might do that very thing,” Lumos commented dryly and gestured at the scout dragons who had caught up to the team.

When the fight began, it was obvious that the six dragons who attacked them were primarily trained as scouts. They were faster than anyone on her team. They pushed in, darted out of range, and raked the fugitives with their claws before they retreated.

The problem for the scouts was that their blows weren’t particularly strong. One of them tried to slice Kristen’s wings, and she caught the attacker in the armpit with her ax-blade tail. He tumbled away.

In the time it took her to deliver that strike, both Stonequest and Emerald had each dispatched another scout. They had injured them enough to slow their flight but not badly enough to knock them into the frigid waters below.

Heartsbane tangled with another one. She left her stomach exposed, and the scout took what he thought was an opening. Her powerful aura made the trap convincing and as soon as her adversary moved within range of her claws, she slashed him across his face and he screeched in pain as he flew away.

The two scouts who remained tried to double-team Lumos. They were faster on the wing than the ancient gold dragon, but his strikes seemed to move at the speed of light. Kristen felt like she barely had time to blink before one of the attackers held its eyes, blinded, as it fell toward the water below. The other was covered in scratches and had one especially grievous wound across his back. He pulled away, screeching for reinforcements.

It looked like he would get them, unfortunately.

Although Kristen and her team defeated the scouts easily, she couldn’t exactly count that as a victory. They had outnumbered the fugitives but were smaller dragons who were built for quickness and trained for speed.

Her team was all former SWAT. They were strong, muscular dragons who were used to throwing themselves into the middle of fights. She had known they would win.

But it wasn’t a win, not really, given that the combat had slowed them enough to let another forty or so very pissed off and very combat-savvy dragons catch up to her force of five.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Orders, Lady Steel?” Lumos prompted as their pursuers hurried to close in on them.

“Retreat!” Kristen ordered. It was the only sane choice. They were vastly outnumbered and her team was scratched and bruised from the fight with the scouts. No one had been seriously injured, but she knew that in a fight with odds like this one, every tiny little wound would be a factor. They all had too many to even try to defeat the force that approached.

“They’re gaining,” Emerald said.

It was true and it would only take a couple of them to catch up to them to the end the fight. She wouldn’t abandon even one of her dragons, not willingly. But if one of them was caught up in a fight, they’d need to stop and help and the other dragons would be upon them.

It wasn’t a fight they could win but what choice was there?

Suddenly, Kristen had an idea. She thought it could work in the short-term but it could have long-term implications. Then again, it seemed that if they didn’t get out of this, long-term implications might never be an issue. They usually weren’t for the dead.

With no other options, she decided to try it. “Stonequest, catch!” she shouted as she changed from her dragon form to her human one.

Immediately, the wind caught her and she lost her forward momentum. The gusts ripped at her clothes and for a moment, she could see herself splashing into the icy waters below.

Within seconds, Stonequest caught her in a claw and tossed her deftly so she landed gently on his back at the peak of her ascent in a perfect landing. She hoped she didn’t piss him off too badly with what she intended to do next.

“What’s the plan?” he asked, pumped his wings, and fell into formation behind Lumos, who led their mad rush southward. They still couldn’t see the shore, not that it would make any difference to their pursuers whether the fight was over land or water.

Kristen didn’t answer as she’d already moved onto the next step. She pulled her cellphone out and called their base in Detroit.

Brian answered on the first ring. “What’s going on? Did you avert another world war?” he asked with complete confidence in his sister.

“Not this time!” she replied. “Put Constance on now.”

He didn’t ask for details and less than three seconds later, the technomage was on the line. “Kristen, is everything all righ—”

“I need a portal to Detroit ASAP. We’re heading south from a base over Hudson Bay. Brian can tell you where we were.”

“I knew they had a base in Hudson Bay!” The woman sounded triumphant.

“Bad shit is going down. I’d like to explain later but will not be able to do that unless you open a portal and get us the hell out here!”

“Okay, okay, but I can’t simply open a portal in the middle of nowhere. I need a location to ground me. Somewhere I’ve been before.”

“Just open a damned portal!” Kristen raged.

“I can’t! Not without a destination. If I get the location wrong, it could tear you to pieces smaller than atoms.”

“There’s nothing but water. I…I can see land far off to the…uh, east, I guess,” She tried to stay calm while their pursuers unleashed a volley of fireballs. They were still out of range but some of the faster dragons were catching up.

“East is good!” Constance replied quickly. “Before we knew our contact was on the Council, I was looking for dragon bases. I thought there might be one there so I—”

“Can we cut to the chase, please?” she demanded.

“Head to Akulivik Airport! There’s a billboard there—God knows why because hardly anyone lives there—for smoked salmon. We’ll open the portal right behind it to give you cover. Give us three minutes. Maybe five.”

“Behind it?” she repeated in confusion.

The line had already gone dead and a second later, the phone buzzed. Brian—listening as always—had already sent her a location.

“To the left slightly!” she shouted to Lumos. He obliged and changed course while the others followed his lead.

Of course, their pursuers changed direction with them. It would be a close call whether they made it to Constance’s coordinates in time or not.

“What’s the plan?” the gold dragon asked from the front of the formation.

“Head toward a billboard for smoked salmon at a tiny airport. Constance will open a portal there in about three to five minutes.”

“I don’t think we have three, let alone five!” Heartsbane said.

“Go!” Kristen shouted.

“We would be faster if you’d stayed in dragon form,” Stonequest said and dread crept into his voice. “Zed set you up with a headset. You could have called him from that—”

“I didn’t transform to use the phone,” she said and drew her pistol.

What she didn’t say was that it was loaded with dragon bullets. She took a deep breath. The weapon felt heavy, which was probably only her reluctance. She didn’t want to do this. Despite practicing with the damn things, she had never wanted to do what she was about to do. But what choice did she have? If they didn’t escape, she had little doubt that they’d either be killed or imprisoned and forced to watch as the world burned.

Not today, she told herself resolutely.

Kristen waited for one of the fastest of their pursuers to get into range, took aim, and fired. Her shot was true and she tagged the dragon in the shoulder at the wing joint. Exactly like Lumos had taught her, she thought with bitter regret.

She had been shot there—in her human form anyway—by a dragon bullet. Her comfort was that she knew the dragon would survive the injury as long as they got the bullet out fast enough.

Unfortunately, she also knew the scream of pain was real because being shot by a dragon bullet hurt beyond anything else.

The dragon shrieked and tried to clutch its wounded shoulder as its wings flapped uselessly in the wind. It plummeted, alive but unable to do anything to preserve its life.

Five of the other dragons who had been the closest of those gaining on her and her team all tucked their wings and dove after their wounded comrade. She didn’t know, though, if they did so primarily to save his life or because they didn’t want to be the next dragon to take a bullet in the shoulder.

Still, more pursuers were trying to close the gap.

Kristen opened fire on them as well. She landed a hit and another dragon fell.

The gunshots and the dragon falling out of the sky seemed to click in the minds of her pursuers. They broke their formation, desperate to avoid being caught by a bullet. At this point, she was aiming to miss. She didn’t want to hurt more of them, not with these weapons and not when she didn’t have to. And she certainly didn’t want to kill.

But the dragons didn’t know that. They all took wild evasive maneuvers every time she fired.

Between shots, she checked her watch. Three minutes had passed, and they were above the coastline. The dragons still followed but less enthusiastically than before. None of them wanted to come close enough for her to hit them with one of the terrible bullets.

“What now?” Lumos asked, still in the point position of their formation.

“Look for a salmon sign.”

“Got it.” He corrected their trajectory and headed toward the lone billboard at the tiny Akulivik airport. It was horrendous and displayed a skinned salmon over a smoky fire, but its head still had its scales and it smiled with human teeth.

“Fly us through!”

“But what if Constance didn’t finish opening the portal?” Emerald asked.

“Then we’re fucked,” she replied.

“Very well,” the old dragon replied. “But I must say, I’ve never been a fan of smoked fish. I prefer it to be cooked through.” He roared the last word and launched a great blast of fire that punched through the billboard like a bottle rocket blasting through a piece of paper.

Beyond it, a glowing blue ring made up the edges of the portal and the blessedly familiar sight of her Detroit base was visible in the center.

Lumos went through first, then Heartsbane, Emerald, and finally Stonequest with Kristen on her back. She continued to lay down covering fire to keep the pursuing dragons at bay. They vanished from the frigid air of Akulivik and emerged in the much more temperate climate of Detroit.

The portal was lower at ground level, though, so instead of soaring through and into the skyline of her hometown, Stonequest barely managed to avoid colliding with Emerald’s tail. He got tangled in Heartsbane’s wings and fell to join the pile of dragons who’d all come to a stop in a tangle of claws, tails and wings.

They were safe—or would be once they closed the portal.

Kristen pulled herself out of the tangle and began to squeeze rounds through the gateway to dissuade the dragons from following them.

Their pursuers seemed to have finally realized that only two of them had been shot and that this was their last chance to catch the Steel Dragon with the odds stacked so firmly against her.

They made no attempt to halt their pursuit.

“Close it! Close the damn portal!” Kristen ordered.

“You heard her, seal it.” Constance added her commands. “And make sure it’s a clean break. We don’t want them to force any mages to follow us.”

She had never seen a portal close from this side and had assumed they could simply be released. It seemed there was more to it than that.

The mages chanted and waved their hands as the portal shrunk.

In the last second before a dragon reached it, the gate finally vanished.

They were safe for a few hours at least.

“Uh, Kristen?” Brian said. “I know you’re the boss and all, but I think you have some explaining to do.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Once safely at their base, Kristen ordered everyone inside. They had a very short window in which to plan and prepare and couldn’t waste a minute of it.

It was a little nerve wracking to realize that Amy and the dragons she traveled with were still moving south across Hudson Bay, potentially with a force of pissed-off dragons who might locate them, but there was nothing to be done about it. Brian said he was in contact with the mage and that she hadn’t sensed any dragons with her magic, nor had any of the dragons accompanying her sensed other dragon auras in pursuit.

After finally discovering who the Masked One was and realizing that she had been in the same room with him quite a few times—as well as shared a cave with him while he hunted her—she knew he could hide his aura even better than Heartsbane. Still, she doubted his powers extended to the other dragons, so she forced herself to stop thinking about them and focused on formulating the plans they’d need going forward.

Still, she glanced constantly out of the northern windows of their base as if she might catch a glimpse of Amy and the young dragons before the scouts on the roof and the drones Brian had patrolling the skies of Detroit.

“What did the Council decide?” Constance asked.

She took a deep breath and hoped that the magic contract the mages had all signed was still fresh enough in their memory to prevent anyone from doing anything rash. “The Dragon Councils voted to go to war with humanity. Their plan is to eradicate ninety percent of the population. If they’re not pursuing Amy already—”

“They aren’t,” Brian said from his bank of monitors hooked up to his surveillance sessions.

“They will be soon,” she finished and regarded the technomages warily. No one freaked out, but why would they? They had joined their organization precisely because they feared that dragons might attack humanity and inflict even more pain on humankind than they already had. This probably didn’t seem like a surprise to them but more like an eventuality or even an inevitability.

Kristen’s old human SWAT teammates seemed far more surprised.

Hernandez summed up their emotions the most succinctly. “Well, that fucking sucks.”

“But…we stopped the mages,” Keith said and his voice quivered and made him sound like the rookie nickname he hated.

“There was an attack,” Stonequest said. “Fighter jets tried to assault the dragon base with a dozen missile attacks.”

“Thanks to the Steel Dragon and Amy, they only hit the base with seven of the missiles,” Emerald added.

“Needless to say,” Kristen went on, “the dragons are fucking pissed.”

“Why the hell would the military attack a dragon outpost?” Jim fumed. “The first rule of the armed forces when I served was ‘don’t make the all-powerful dragons and their legions of mages angry.’ What the fuck changed that?”

“The Masked One,” she said and explained how she’d finally found out exactly who he was. She described how he’d pushed for this war from behind the scenes and how she was damn near certain he’d ordered the strike but of course, had no proof. “Which is our first priority right now. I need people here at this base to receive Amy and the dragon recruits and make sure this city isn’t burned while I’m gone, trying to prove that Lord Boneclaw was behind this.”

“That can’t be our only priority right now,” Constance said, and Kristen felt a pulse of magic between them. It was the contract, flexing its proverbial magic muscles at their disagreement. The technomage felt it too and she seemed dismayed before she continued. “If we want to protect humanity, we need the mages they took prisoner from Dragon SWAT HQ. With this war kicking off, the dragons might decide that having a group of mages locked up isn’t as good as simply killing them.”

“I can help with that one,” Emerald said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the woman demanded. Kristen could tell by the fire in her eyes that she thought he meant he could help slaughter the mages, which of course couldn’t be further from the truth. He had personally worked with the mages they were trying to rescue, and—being younger than most dragons—didn’t have his prejudices so deeply ingrained under his scales. It was a small reminder that even though they were a team, it would still take time before everyone meshed.

“I think Emerald means he has intel.” Kristen tried to clarify, although she had to admit she was also slightly confused. He’d returned to the base at the same time as her.

“That’s right.” He nodded. “While Kristen was pissing off one of the most powerful dragons alive, I was shooting the shit with the other dragons in the ranks—the general fighters. I found out from them where the prison is. It’s a human-style prison in Nebraska. Tecumseh.”

“Spell that,” Brian responded quickly and the dragon complied.

“How can you trust that?” the techie asked, his fingers in rapid motion to uncover everything he could on the prison. Kristen knew from experience that he’d have floor plans, visitor logs, and even camera security feeds if the prison wasn’t as good at security as he was at breaking through it.

“Call it a feeling,” Emerald said. “But I’m telling you the guy wasn’t lying. He said he took the mages there and talked a whole ton of shit about how crappy and pathetic the facility was, how it could never hold a dragon, and how it probably wouldn’t be able to hold the mages for more than a day. He was working some of the other dragons for laughs. I don’t think it was a trick.”

“Okay, that’s good,” Kristen said. “Constance, I want you and your team to formulate a plan with Brian for how to get the mages out of there without any loss of life. When I get back from the base that launched these planes—”

“Alaska!” Brian answered the unasked question. “It was the 3rd Wing out of Alaska. They flew above the clouds so the dragons wouldn’t see them coming, but that left them visible to eyes in the sky.”

“Right,” she continued. “That will be our next move after Alaska.”

“Boss, I don’t want to disagree but I don’t know if the mages can wait,” Emerald said.

“I don’t think the dragons would execute them in a human prison. The publicity would be bad.”

“The time for caring about publicity is over,” Katrina said. “The dragons will strike with impunity now.”

“It’s not that,” Emerald said. “Although the Iron Dragon probably has a point on appearances meaning much less than they once did. This guard said they would move mages ASAP. Either that or…” He sliced his fingers across his neck.

“We can’t let that happen,” Eric said, the leader of the technomages cell that had been on the island base.

“Of course not,” Kristen sighed. She didn’t want to split up but knew that the time for her being able to do what she wanted was long gone. “We have two missions, so we’ll need two teams. Plus, I won’t leave this base empty, not with that force in Hudson Bay. Shimmerclaw made it clear my people would be safe—and I assume that still applies given all that’s happened—but it means I need dragons and humans on patrol to make it very clear that this whole city counts as my people.”

“That will spread us very thin,” Drew pointed out.

“Not anymore. We have a bigger force than we used to, remember?” she said and glanced at Constance, Katrina, and Eric. “Constance, your people already busted you out of an ultra-secure magic prison. Do you think they can pull it off a second time?”

“In Nebraska? We’ll have to be careful with the armed guards, but yes. If you give me a team of mages and either Katrina or Lumos, we can get those mages out.”

“Take Katrina,” she said and wondered if she had made the biggest mistake of her time as an investigator or the smartest move ever. The magic contract should bind them all together, but what would happen if someone went against it? They’d seen one mage explode, but would the Iron Dragon take that for the obvious threat it was? Or did she see herself as stronger than that? Kristen sighed. Despite the experiences that might suggest otherwise, she believed in trust and that people could change. She also believed she didn’t have much of a damn choice.

“I’ll come too,” Eric said.

“No, I don’t think so,” she replied. “I need a powerful mage here. As soon as Amy gets back, I’ll bring her with me and Larry is still traveling by boat. The dragons know we used unfettered mages to fight—hell, that’s why some of them hate me. We can’t leave this base without someone who can give them a show if they decide to come take a peek.”

“Understood.” He didn’t look happy about it but she didn’t care. Being happy was not a prerequisite for following orders.

“Butters, Beanpole, I want you two here as well—on the roof and armed with dragon bullets at all times. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” both men answered. She was happy to see the sniper’s leg had finally healed thanks to the mages’ help. He was back at one hundred percent.

“Keith, you too. Brian might need your help.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Rookie replied. He didn’t look any happier about being left at the base than Eric had.

“Hernandez, I want you to go with Constance in case they need demolitions.”

“You’re asking a former cop to help blow people out of a prison?” the woman asked.

“Is that a problem?”

“More like a dream I never thought I’d live to see fulfilled,” the demolitions expert retorted and flashed her a grin.

“With me, I want Lumos, Stonequest, Heartsbane, Jim, and Drew. We’ll need Amy, too. Brian, I need you to set up a rendezvous location for her and the jet we’ll hire.”

“No problem. She will love that,” Brian said.

“If it’s all the same to you, boss, I’d prefer to stay here,” Emerald said. “I know more of our dragons should arrive soon, but Timeflash isn’t much of a fighter—no offense—and I think our green wings might need someone in charge.”

“Okay, that’s a fair point. You’ll be in command,” she agreed. “Do we have any questions?”

“When do we start?” Constance flashed a smile.

“Five minutes ago.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Not long after, Kristen’s team arrived at the airport in Anchorage, Alaska. Taking a portal wasn’t a good option because none of the mages knew the area very well, which meant getting out might be a problem. A private jet could fly faster than any dragon could and they might need it to escape, so she chartered one. They could have flown directly into the base, but she knew that could be seen as either aggressive, arrogant—what with the private jet—or both. Kristen decided the ugly brown van they rented would look far less threatening.

They all clambered inside with Drew at the wheel. Amy insisted on riding her skateboard outside the van, however. She used the vehicle to pull her around and give her momentum to do tricks, which she of course augmented with her insane magical powers. Kristen had already seen her accomplish feats she’d only ever seen in videogames. She was currently grinding a pipeline.

Brian’s rendezvous point with the mage had worked perfectly. They had flown the jet north, put down on a highway that was under construction and slated to open in a few days, and waited about thirty seconds for Amy to meet them. In mere moments, they were airborne again.

It felt good to know that the dragons the girl had traveled with were already on their way to Detroit. They’d seen no dragons behind them, so at the very least, Emerald would be able to allocate all the dragons to defensive stations and prevent a rout if the enemy was in pursuit.

The enemy, of course, was now—legally—all of dragon kind. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

It was also the reason why Kristen was in a dingy rental van at the entrance to an Air Force base and talking to a guard who looked like he’d swallowed a grenade.

“Hi. My name is Kristen Hall. I’m a dragon investigator and police officer from Detroit. I’d like to come in and ask a few questions.”

“I’d like you to put that van in reverse and get the hell out of here, ma’am,” the soldier replied and his voice cracked as he raised it to almost a shout. He took deep breaths, obviously aware that he wasn’t supposed to yell at people arriving at the gate. “We are on lockdown, ma’am. That means no one comes in. Especially not a dragon and a magic skateboarder.”

“Amy!” she snapped.

The young mage shrugged. She’d been doing flip tricks nonstop since they’d arrived—kickflips, heelflips, impossibles, and shove-its, all at blinding speed—and made no effort to stop.

Kristen examined the guard. The poor kid looked very young—like he couldn’t drink beer yet young. Plus, he didn’t sound like any of the Alaskans they’d met and his accent suggested he was from a city in the east coast like Philadelphia or Baltimore. She was better with midwestern variations. The kid looked like he’d been on the job for all of a day when someone on his base had commanded someone else to start a world war. She could understand why he looked stressed.

“I need to talk to the general here,” she explained calmly. “I’m trying to stop people from getting hurt. Can you help us do that?”

“No, ma’am. I’m sorry. Lockdown means lockdown. No exceptions.”

Heartsbane leaned forward from the back of the van. “Do you want me to do something about him?”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she said until the soldier noticed the other dragon.

“Do you have more people in there?”

Kristen nodded politely. “We do. That’s why we have a van. To fit more people.”

“Like I said, you need to back the hell up. No, wait,” the boy said, his expression suddenly one of puzzlement. “You…you want to help?”

She glanced at Heartsbane. It seemed the dragon had already used her mastery of her dragon aura ability to affect the guard’s mood. She didn’t blame him for following orders. His emotions were already controlling his thoughts so was this any different? It didn’t matter, she decided, not in the face of a world war.

“We do,” Heartsbane affirmed encouragingly. “And you can be the one who helps.” She winked, an enchanting gesture from the beautiful blonde that was her human body. “And you can help me—I mean us.”

“I can,” the guard said.

“Call your base commander and tell him to have you open this gate.”

From the tone of voice coming from the other end of the guard’s phone, the base commander didn’t sound too happy to have dragons arrive on his doorstep. When the guard hung up, however, he opened the gate and let them proceed, albeit with an armored car escorting them as they drove their dilapidated vehicle deeper into the base.

They proceeded directly to the main headquarters. It didn’t take a veteran to see that the facility was on high alert. Pilots stood near their fighter jets and tried not to fidget. Others manned anti-aircraft artillery that Kristen could only assume was equipped with dragon bullets. Everyone moved quickly and no one was smiling. But at least they weren’t celebrating.

They stopped at the headquarters building and were escorted inside.

“General Peralt, this is the…uh, dragon who came to the gate to see you,” the officer who’d guided them through the hallways said. “Kristen Hall, Steel Dragon and Investigator, this is General Samuel Peralt.”

The general was fairly short and quite thin, with a narrow black mustache and thin grey hair on his head. Kristen shook his hand cordially. “You’re more than welcome to take a seat but maybe your friends want to wait outside?” he asked. She could see fear in his eyes and taste it on his aura.

“That would be fine,” she agreed and nodded at Amy and the dragons who had accompanied her. If he tried anything against her personally, she would simply turn to steel and move with the speed her dragon powers granted her. Even if he was armed with dragon bullets, he wouldn’t stand a chance. The real threat would come from the others on the base, in which case it was better if her team was already outside. They could more easily eliminate the most immediate threats, namely the jets and the anti-aircraft weapons.

It made her nauseous to think that she was half-subconsciously planning how to disarm an entire military base, but this was her life now.

As her team filed out, Kristen made a quick survey of the general’s office. There was a smattering of medal certificates on the walls, including a purple heart, plus photographs of him smiling broadly with different groups of people. Many of them looked like the survivors of wars, possibly people Peralt had liberated or helped in some way. There were no pictures of him with politicians or dragons. That was something she appreciated. Based on his office, General Samuel Peralt seemed like a good, decent officer with a long career doing the best work the military did.

So why had he ordered his jets to fire on the dragon base?

“I know you’re here because you’re wondering why my jets fired on your base,” the general began and cut to the chase.

“We’re not here for a whale tour, that’s for sure,” she said.

Peralt uttered a loud, hugely awkward laugh. Immediately, his aura shifted from one of barely controlled terror to one of lingering fear and a substantial injection of hope.

“Did you give especially bad tours, General?”

“No, no. Nothing like that,” he said, took a perfectly folded handkerchief out of a pocket, and dabbed the sweat that had appeared on his brow. “I merely assumed that if you’re here to roast me alive, you probably wouldn’t lead with a joke.”

“A number of dragons would certainly support me if I did that. Is there a reason why I should not roast you alive?” she asked and tried to make it sound like a joke.

He forced a chuckle. “Well, for starters, you’d be getting rid of the guy knee-deep in his own investigation into why the hell three of his pilots went off and attacked an island in dwarf territory with live fire.”

“Didn’t you order that strike?” Kristen asked.

“Hell no!” Peralt declared. “My job for the past decade has been to make sure no one pisses the dwarfs in Canada off and that the dwarfs don’t piss anyone off either. That includes dragons, by the way. The last thing I want is to be the head of the snake that was thrown into the barn and started all this mess. Honestly, those idiots fired on dragons. It’s a disgrace.”

“It’s good to know you didn’t command it,” she said. Although she wasn’t the best when it came to sensing auras, his was very straightforward. She didn’t think he was lying about this. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been so scared when she’d arrived.

“Of course I didn’t command it. And I’m willing to do what I can to make things right.”

“You can start by handing over the surviving pilot for questioning.”

His aura clenched along with his jaw. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am.”

“And why not?”

“Because that knucklehead broke orders on my base with my jets. My people are mine to punish, and their actions are mine to investigate. I can’t simply turn them over to you, even though they probably deserve to be fileted and roasted. It’s against protocol.” He tried to make it sound like he refused dragons to their face all the time, but she could tell from the sweat on his brow that he didn’t.

Kristen could have told him that dragon law trumped human—it was true, after all—but she didn’t. Her goal there was, as always, to build bridges between the two cultures, not walls. Still, she wouldn’t simply walk away empty handed. “I’d really appreciate your cooperation, General Peralt. That strike was used to justify war against mankind.”

The general paled. She didn’t blame him and had felt the same way when the vote had crushed her hopes to avoid conflict.

“I have reason to believe a dragon may have been involved in triggering the strike,” she continued. “This is a fact-finding mission, not a punitive one. I need answers about this dragon, and I need your help to get them. If you refuse, the blood of billions could be on your hands.”

“Jesus, no pressure,” Peralt said and rubbed his thin gray hair. “I only… You think a dragon did this? Why on earth would a dragon get my fighters to attack their own people?”

“Dragon politics,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to be involved.”

He chuckled again. “You got that right! I hate the monsters in American politics—some of the things they make our men and women in the armed forces do is plain horrible—but dragons? Their politicians must be a whole other level of…” He trailed off. “You’re…you’re not a dragon politician, are you?”

“Not willingly,” Kristen grumbled. “But I am trying to stop this war from breaking out, which means I need to be able to show a number of them evidence that is convincing enough to call this off.”

Peralt still looked pale but he nodded. “Look, if I knew one of my people was taking orders from a dragon, I’d gladly hand them over to you. That breaks about every military law we have. How about we talk to the pilot together? He didn’t tell me much but you seem to be more…persuasive, Investigator.”

“You can call me Kristen,” she said. He had an honest aura and she liked him. She also knew she needed every ally she could get.

“Then please stop calling me General. Sammy’s fine. That’s what everyone calls me when I’m not in uniform and since you’re a dragon investigator, you must outrank me in almost every way possible. Now, shall we?”

“That’d be great, Sammy.”

They exited through the same entrance the team had used and stepped out onto the grounds in front of the base. Sammy frowned at the beat-up rental van they had and offered to let them all ride in the back of an armored car. The dragons jumped at the opportunity a little too quickly. She realized that Jim must have told them to keep their eyes out for dragon munitions and this was the perfect opportunity.

As they drove through the base, every inch of their journey was watched by tense soldiers. They no doubt wondered if the commander of their base was about to be executed in front of them to teach them a lesson.

They found the pilot who escaped in a military cell, which helped calm Kristen’s nerves somewhat about the entire situation. She trusted Sammy, but she also knew that auras could be misleading. Finding the pilot under actual arrest and not merely confined to his quarters helped convince her that he and his people were taking everything seriously.

“Jeremy,” General Peralt said stiffly, “this is Investigator Kristen…uh, Steel. She’s a dragon and is here to find out what I wanted to know. What in the hell could compel you and your two late comrades in arms to go against orders and fire on a dragon base in dwarf country?”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Wait a minute, I know her!” The pilot pointed at Amy. “Holy crap, you are the woman who made Don and Marissa crash, aren’t you? I didn’t know mages could be that strong. You really scared the shit out of me back there, you know that?”

“Did I?” the girl asked, stepped forward, and made the bars of his cell shake. The dust rose from the floor of his cell as if she were powering up to make him explode.

“Hey, look, I only followed orders!” Jeremy said hastily, moved away from the bars, and tripped over a floating tray of food to fall on his ass.

“Whose orders?” Peralt pressed.

“Yours, sir. Or I thought they were yours. My flight commander gave them to us. He said we wouldn’t like it but that our job was our duty, not likes. Miller is always like that.”

“And you didn’t question the order?” Kristen asked.

“Are you kidding? This is the most dangerous base in the United States,” The pilot practically spluttered. “We have Russia on one side, dwarven Canada on the other, and the West Coast to the south of us which is crawling with dragons as everyone knows. General Peralt has trained us to follow orders because questioning them would cost lives. And I’m telling you, these orders looked official.” He pushed to his feet and seemed to take in his surroundings again. His gaze looked through the bars to his frowning general, the dragon investigator, and the mage who had stopped both his friends from killing any more dragons. “I can see now that I messed up.”

“And who did you say gave you these orders? An officer named Miller?” Kristen asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s no good, Investigator,” the general said, no doubt defaulting to her title in front of his soldiers so she’d do the same.

“And why’s that, General?”

“Because we already asked Miller about it. He said they came from me. I was trying to determine if he was bullshitting me or if someone had wormed into our computer systems when you arrived.”

“This wasn’t done by someone with a good understanding of computers,” she said, more to Amy and Stonequest than to anyone else. “We need to talk to Miller. Is he also under arrest?”

“No, ma’am,” Peralt said and a trace of worry worked into his voice again. “Standard protocol dictates—”

“We’re so far past standard protocol that it hurts, General,” she said. “I need to talk to Miller, and now.”

“Sure. I didn’t arrest him, but I had him confined to his home here on base. We can be there in less than ten minutes.”

Ten minutes later, they finally found a soldier who hadn’t followed orders.

The man’s house was empty and his car gone.

The general tried him on the phone, but he was apparently both too guilty and too smart to answer.

The other officers began to examine his computer for clues about where he was headed, but they made no progress.

“I don’t see anything that could give us any leads,” Drew said. He’d jumped into the hunt, hoping to show these military folk what a good old-fashioned police officer could do to locate a criminal. But he’d come up empty handed, exactly like everyone else.

“It’s all right,” Amy said and held an extremely loud Hawaiian shirt up. “Is this his?”

One of Peralt’s soldiers chuckled. “You’re damn straight it is. Miller’s always going on about moving to a tropical island when he’s done here. He hates the cold.”

“I can feel his aura on this,” the mage said. “And I can feel him… He’s…south… Yes, south of here and moving.” She opened her eyes in alarm. “He’s moving damn fast!”

“Can you lead us to him?” Kristen asked.

The girl nodded. “Try to keep up.” She tossed her skateboard into the air and made it spin effortlessly and twist to land in front of her. Without a glance at the team, she stepped on and accelerated.

“Let’s go, people!” Kristen shouted at her dragons, plus Drew and Jim. “Follow that skateboard!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Constance had to admit there were advantages to working with the Steel dragon. The facilities, for starters, were much nicer than the old barns and abandoned ranches most of the technomages had come to think of as home. The tech was also notably better.

In less than twenty minutes, Brian had used the most advanced computer she had ever seen to give her everything she’d ever wanted to know about Tecumseh.

It made planning the snatch and grab of the mages feel like child’s play.

Based on the security feed he had hacked into, they knew the captives were held in a wing of the prison filled with solitary confinement cells. In a troubling omission of accountability, there were no cameras in that particular part of the prison. Faced with this, they had gone through the video again and confirmed that the mages had been taken into that wing and had never left, so it seemed a reasonable assumption that they were still there.

If they were still alive.

“All right, we’ll port into the shower area at the solitary confinement cell block,” she told her team. “If anyone needs any more photos to properly understand where this portal is going, check in with Zed.”

She found it odd that the prison had cameras in the showers and not in the solitary confinement area, but she had many problems with human society as well as dragon society.

“We’ll port in and close the portal behind us. Katrina will get us into the solitary wing. There should only be one guard at this time of day, so we’ll have Keisha put him to sleep. Once we release the mages, we can be on our way. Any questions?”

“How long will you be gone?” Emerald asked.

“If all goes according to plan, ten minutes,” Constance said.

“Great. Eleven minutes means the shit has hit the fan. that’s good to know,” he said grimly.

The woman nodded. He had the right of it. “If there are no more questions, let’s begin.”

Two minutes later, the portal was open and created a rip in the fabric of space that connected the inside of their base in Detroit to the showers in the Tecumseh prison.

Three men with the shoulders of those with nothing to do but push ups and pull ups and tattoos that looked like they belonged in the prison were there to greet them.

“What the fuck?” one of them asked, but the other two shushed him as the Constance led her team of mages, military personnel, and a couple of the young dragons through.

“Guard?” she asked and guessed that these prisoners were not fans of the people who kept them under lock and key.

The prisoner pointed to a bank of toilet stalls, all without doors. “Last one on the left.”

“I’m on it,” Katrina said.

“Katrina, wait,” the technomage said.

But the Iron Dragon didn’t listen. She marched to the stall at the end which happened to be the only one that would give the person inside any privacy from the rest of the bathroom.

In a moment, everything went to shit.

“You’re not supposed to be in here!” was punctuated by the sound of gunfire. Of course, it meant little to Katrina. Even if she had been a normal dragon, it was unlikely that bullets fired from a pistol would have been able to do more than slow her somewhat. Given that she was the Iron Dragon and had reflexively turned her skin to iron as soon as the man had raised his weapon, she didn’t even blink when the bullets struck her.

Instead, she raced forward and vanished into the stall.

The sound of bones breaking, porcelain shattering, and tiles cracking followed and suggested that Katrina had kicked the man through the wall. After a moment, the dragon called to her. “He’s still breathing. Orders?”

“Leave him,” Constance said. “The Steel Dragon doesn’t want fatalities. We don’t kill if it’s possible to avoid it.”

“Have it your way,” the dragon said and returned with a ring of keys and a keycard.

“We don’t want any trouble,” one of the inmates said.

“We won’t give you anything but a choice,” the technomage said calmly. “You can have these keys and try to lead your fellow inmates in an escape, or you can go back to your cells and stay the hell out of our way.”

“Are y’all here to get those magic motherfuckers them dragons brought in?” the man asked, surprisingly cool and confident given that he was butt naked.

Constance nodded.

“Fuck that!” one of the other prisoners said.

“Y’all have at it,” said the first one. “We’ll be in our cells.”

“Very well.”

“And lady?”

“Yes?”

“I’d hurry if I were you. Them dragons came through not too long ago and made a ton of noise. We was worried we was gonna miss out on all the excitement, but looks like they’re about to get more than they bargained for.”

She nodded her thanks and led her team in the direction Zed indicated through her earpiece. They exited the showers into a general-purpose holding room.

“Schematics say the door to the solitary hallway should open with a good old-fashioned metal key,” he said in her earpiece.

Constance tossed the ring to one of the Steel Dragon’s soldiers who came with them. “You’re up.”

The man caught it and began to try them one by one.

A scream came from the other side of the door. She recognized it immediately. It was the sound of someone being burned alive by dragon’s fire.

“We don’t have time for this shit,” Katrina said and put her iron foot through the door in front of them.

It shattered completely like a pane of glass that had fallen from the top floor of the Fisher building in Detroit.

On the other side of the door was the type of scene the technomage had never seen but had always feared.

Mages were lined up on either side of the hallway, shackled wrist to wrist and in nothing but their underpants. She only recognized them as mages because some of the men had the elaborately shaved beards and heads that most people thought augmented magic power. Both men and women had the swirling tattoos that many shackled mages got in an attempt to reclaim some of the powers the dragons took from them.

Normally, merely seeing those tattoos bothered her but right now, she could see the dragons had already taken away much more than magic powers from some of the mages.

Beyond the prisoners and at the far end of the hallway was a group of dragons in their human forms. Like all of their kind, their human forms were extraordinarily handsome or beautiful and they were dressed exquisitely. In keeping with their habitual attitudes, they seemed high on their power.

In the middle of them stood a small dragon in his reptilian form. In front of him lay a charred pile of corpses. From the height of the pile, she knew that at least a half-dozen mages had died already.

She wouldn’t let one more suffer that fate.

“Your blood is impure and tainted with magic,” one of the human-shaped dragons said to a mage in front of the firebreather. “For that, you must burn.” He didn’t seem to have noticed that the door to the cellblock had been kicked open. Constance assumed he had too big an erection at the thought of murdering people to focus on much else.

The dragon inhaled and its eyes and many of its scales glowed as it prepared to incinerate the whimpering mage.

Constance used her power over wind to blast a tornado of swirling air down the hallway. It divided around the mage and struck the inferno launched from the dragon’s throat before it could immolate the target.

The flames scattered and quickly ignited the fancy clothes of the dragons at the end of the hall.

“How dare you!” one of them shouted.

“Permission to use lethal force, ma’am?” One of the human troops—not a mage, she was thankful to see—asked.

“Oh, fuck yes.”

The battle was quick and its conclusion decisive.

The human soldiers laid down covering fire with dragon bullets. They aimed over the head of the mage who now crouched in a huddled mass on the floor. While they might have killed all the dragons with ease, with the mages lining the hallway, the soldiers couldn’t take the risk that someone other than the enemy would be wounded.

Still, their bullets savaged the dragon who had incinerated mages like they were nothing but hotdogs. He died, bleeding out from his neck, and his blood soaked the corpses he’d left of the mages who had sworn to serve dragon kind.

As soon as the human soldiers stopped firing, Katrina raced forward. Her iron body made the hallway shake, and the mages who had still been on their feet fell to their knees or their butts and protected themselves as she stormed through. She reached the other dragons and unleashed a concerted assault. One after the other, they were hurled into the walls of the hallway with enough force to crack the concrete.

But these were dragons, not men. Those she didn’t strike retaliated and fought with as much speed as her, plus the ferocious edge granted by terror. Even the few she had flung into the wall quickly recovered.

They all attacked the Iron Dragon.

“Forward!” Constance shouted at her mages. They obeyed, moved down the hallway, and positioned themselves as close to the dragons as they could to eliminate them with blasts of magic.

The two young dragons helping them rushed forward as well. Because of their dragon speed, they reached the fight before the mages did. They managed to draw a few away from Katrina, but that only entangled them in their own fights and made it more difficult for the technomages to target the dragons effectively.

Still, Katrina had been with Constance her entire life. She was a ferocious, powerful fighter, but she was also a tactician. A dragon lunged and she caught his neck in one hand and his groin in the other and threw him over the heads of the two younger dragons who attempted to help her.

He landed heavily directly in front of the technomage team.

In an instant, a bolt of lightning pierced his heart and he was no more.

The Iron Dragon threw another one at them and they dispatched it as efficiently.

“That’s enough!” one of the dragons yelled. “Stop or we kill this youngling!”

“Hold up, hold up!” Constance shouted.

The dragon had one of their young dragons by the neck. She could tell by the gleam in his eyes that he knew very well how to kill the dragon if he so desired.

“You’re here for the mages?” he asked.

“That’s right. Set them free and no more of you dragons have to die.”

“You’re a real stupid bitch, you know that? A war is on. I’d rather die and bring all these mages with me than let them go.”

As if on cue, the alarms blared.

The enemy dragon flinched at the sound, mistaking it for more gunfire or who knew what, and his captive squirmed to loosen his hold.

Katrina sprung into action. She raced past the enemy she had been battling and vaulted forward with a flying kick that put her iron toes through the skull of the dragon who had tried to threaten them.

“I guess I was wrong about that guard back there,” Katrina said. “If I had killed him, he wouldn’t have activated the alarm.” She said this as she focused on dispatching the other dragons.

It didn’t take long for her to complete her purpose.

With a younger dragon on the sidelines and the other one holding his neck where he’d been hurt, Katrina and the technomages were able to isolate and kill each of the remaining executioners.

Constance had barely given the order to unshackle the captive mages when gunfire erupted from the doorway.

“Shields!” she ordered.

“But the mages—” one of her mages protested.

“Will be freed. Shields, now!”

They obeyed and threw up a shimmering barrier at the entrance to the hallway through which they had entered.

The bullets of the regular prison guards stopped abruptly at the magic shield, much to the surprise and relief of the human soldiers who had been about to be mowed down.

“Don’t let those shields down,” Constance ordered.

“But if we don’t let the shields down, how are our mages supposed to open a portal?” one of the young dragons asked.

“It’s simple,” Katrina answered and stepped toward the magical barrier that shimmered as it absorbed the force of the bullets. “Let me through and I will kill every single one of these kennel masters.”

“No!” their leader replied. “These are human guards whose job is to prevent the escape of prisoners who have broken human laws. We will not slaughter them needlessly.”

“Then what? We wait until that gunfire exhausts the powers of our mages, then I watch you all get gunned down in this hallway, and then I kill them?” The dragon snorted. “Because that way, even more people die.”

“I can blow us out!” one of the Steel Dragon’s people said. She recognized the Hispanic woman who seemed to be obsessed with bombs.

“It’s too risky,” she replied. “And besides, you’d merely get us to another part of the prison.”

“No, I can—”

“We can help,” one of the captive mages said and pushed to her feet. She was a mess. Both nostrils were bloody and her body was covered in bruises. She still had underwear on but it looked like her bra had been ripped off by dragon claws. “Take these cuffs off and we can help.”

“You’ve never opened a portal before,” Constance stated. It was true. No mage outside her organization had except for a few of the Steel Dragon’s mages.

“Then we’ll hold the barrier against those guns. I don’t know if we can do that either but we can try. We’ll buy you as much time as we can.”

Constance looked at this almost naked bruised woman with respect. “You understand that your jobs at the Detroit dragon SWAT are gone? We’ll take you to the Steel Dragon, but she’s allied herself with a group of unshackled mages instead of dragon kind.”

“I have no problem with the Steel Dragon!” One of the mages coughed. “She used to bring us donuts.”

“It sounds better than being slaughtered in here like a herd of pigs,” a mage who looked remarkably like a pig ready for slaughter said. He had no clothes on at all. Constance didn’t know if his fat gut hanging over his small penis did him any favors or the opposite.

“We’re wasting time,” Katrina said. “And I will not let you get shot by a team of security guards.”

“Get their cuffs,” she said to the Iron Dragon, the soldiers, and the dragons and they hurried to comply.

The mages had listened to the exchange. Once released, each of them went to join the mages blocking the door. As the shield was augmented by their magic, the technomages fell back and began to cast the spell to open a portal.

Constance had to help with the portal, of course—she was the most powerful mage present and the most adept at this form of magic—but damn if that fact didn’t piss her off. The shackled mages were too battered and too used to having their power inhibited to be of much use. Although they greatly outnumbered her force, they were far weaker. Each of her mages needed three or four of the prisoners to provide the same amount of protection.

Time was against them, and it became a choice between creating the portal and rescuing as many as possible or reinforcing the shield, which would ultimately fail anyway when they wearied and could no longer maintain it.

It was a difficult decision, but she pulled her team away to help with the portal and it wasn’t long before bullets began to penetrate the barrier.

There weren’t many—one in a hundred or maybe less—but when standing in a large group in a narrow hallway, that was enough to be devastating.

By the time they opened the gateway, another half-dozen of the imprisoned mages were dead. She yelled for the barrier to be taken down and for everyone to run to the portal.

Katrina stepped in to block every bullet that entered the hallway with her combination of dragon speed and iron skin. Still, another mage fell with a bullet in his back. Constance knew the dragon would blame herself for the death.

“Katrina! We’re through. Come quickly!” she ordered.

The Iron Dragon roared at the humans—a supremely unnatural experience as the roar of a dragon came from her human throat—before she sprinted through the magical gate. Once in the base, Constance ordered the portal closed and her mages didn’t need to be told twice.

They let it shut and sagged to the floor from the exertion.

“How did it go?” Emerald asked. He tried to sound calm but looked flustered at the condition of the mages. And why not? He had worked with these mages and had probably known many of them for years. Now they were in his office, bruised, almost naked, and weeping for their fallen.

“We didn’t lose any of our people,” Constance said. She’d paid careful attention and not even a regular human soldier or mage had been killed. “We rescued close to eighty mages, although maybe ten or twenty perished there.”

“Damn,” the dragon said and shook his head in disappointment. “Those are good numbers but this sure doesn’t feel like a victory.” He turned to the human soldiers in the base as well as some of the dragons. “Get these people clothes, food, and water. We need a medical team in here too, stat.”

The technomage leader began to assist the captured mages. She reassured them when she had to and told the others what was happening when she could. All of them agreed to help stop more of the atrocities they had lived through. She knew that they would need time to heal, but if they agreed to the same contract Kristen had convinced her and the other technomages to agree to, these mages would represent a big difference if the Steel Dragon failed on her mission in Alaska to stop the war.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Sammy, I hate to be this way but you’ll need to climb on my back if you want to continue to be a part of this investigation,” Kristen said and transformed into her steel dragon form.

“Are you saying my choices are to ride a dragon and help prevent a war or keep trundling along in our vehicle?”

“Basically, yes. Choose now. Amy’s way too fast on that damn skateboard.”

Heartsbane had already taken to the sky. Lumos and Stonequest had transformed and Drew and Jim were in the process of climbing onto their respective backs.

“It’s not much of a choice for an old pilot like me,” the general said and scrambled out of the vehicle they’d traveled in. He marched up to her flank and paused. “Is there a saddle or something or do I—”

“I apologize, General, but there’s no time,” she said, scooped him up in one hand, and vaulted skyward. When she was about a hundred feet up, she tossed him high enough to be able to do a quick loop and catch him on her back.

“Wooooo-hooooo!” Sammy shouted and sounded like a kid on a rollercoaster.

She raised an eyebrow at that. “You don’t mind a little speed?”

“Are you kidding? I haven’t flown anything bigger than a Cessna turboprop in years. Have at it.”

Kristen obliged, pumped her wings with great vigor to gain height, and switched to the rigid flying style Lumos had taught her in their training sessions. She raced forward but took the time to do a few loops now and then since Lumos, Heartsbane, and Stonequest were in tight formation with Amy and her skateboard.

“This is amazing!” the general shouted.

“If dragons had done this for people for the last hundred years, we might not have a war brewing,” she mused as she began to level her flight path to catch up with the others.

“You’re not wrong about that,” he said. “The most important thing about building long-lasting relationships is both sides seeing that the other has something to offer, even if that is only entertainment. It’s not a chore for you to fly?”

“No, not at all,” she admitted. “Most dragons love it, actually.”

“See? That’s even better. It makes it like sharing food. If both sides enjoy the same thing, it doesn’t take long before we see each other as us instead of others.”

“I like that.” She didn’t have time to say much else on the topic as she noticed a vehicle speeding down the highway.

Kristen stopped her aerial acrobatics and increased her speed again to join the tight formation that Stonequest, Lumos, and Heartsbane were flying in. “Amy, do you think that’s him?”

“Oh yeah,” the girl replied from her airborne skateboard.

“All right, then,” she said. “Let’s keep this tight and clean. He might be spooked but he doesn’t need to be, not if he cooperates. Heartsbane, can you make sure he doesn’t fear us too much with your aura?”

“I tried boss, but it’s too late for that.”

“What do you mean?” she asked even as she saw the answer to her own question.

Miller had put his foot on the accelerator. Before, the car—an American made truck with fairly high clearance—had cruised at a fairly safe fifty miles an hour. Now, it accelerated dramatically.

Fifty-five.

Sixty.

Sixty-five.

Seventy.

Eighty.

Ninety.

In moments, the vehicle traveled at a speed of over a hundred miles an hour.

It appeared that Miller was more concerned with speed than caution in his effort to outpace and escape his aerial tail. Kristen might not have been concerned except this was a highway in Alaska. The road was pockmarked with strips of tar where it had been patched year after year. Even with this evidence of maintenance, there were still numerous cracks, fissures, and potholes where water seeped into the grooves of the road every year, froze, and damaged the surface.

The truck hit a slight bump and briefly went airborne. It landed again and the driver managed to keep it from fishtailing too badly and rolling. She knew it was as much from luck as it was from the man’s driving skills.

“We can’t let him get hurt,” she shouted to her team. “If he gets knocked unconscious or worse, we won’t find out what we want to know. I need plans and I need them before the road bends in a half mile.”

“If you swoop down at him, he’ll dodge, I promise you that,” Sammy said from her back. “Miller’s an accomplished pilot, which is merely another way to say he’s arrogant, reckless, and good enough in a jet that the first two don’t matter. If you approach him, he’ll try to stop you, even if he’s driving a truck and not an F-22.”

“I can stop him,” Amy offered. She looked at her boss from her skateboard and frowned at her skeptical expression. “What?”

“I’ve seen you ‘stop’ moving objects. I want this guy alive, not a pancake.”

“I don’t have to simply stop the truck. I could lift it off the ground and shake it until he falls out like the prize from a pinata.”

“Negative,” she replied.

“Oh, come on!” Mock offense permeated the girl’s voice but she turned to Miller and Kristen could tell from her aura that she was taking this seriously. “I’ve been working on my precision with Larry’s help. I can do this without hurting him.”

She took a deep breath when she realized they had very little choice. Besides, she trusted Amy. “Okay. Do what you can.”

The mage swooped down on her skateboard, grasped the nose of it, and extended her other hand to direct her magic. There was no way to tell how she was directing it, though, and Kristen frowned as she watched intently.

The first thing she noticed was a flurry of leaves on either side of the road. It looked like a great beast had rushed through the forest on either side of the highway and kicked up the pine needles and decaying leaves in its wake. It was unlikely that Amy was making some type of puppet to scare Miller into stopping as she certainly didn’t make it visible and there was no indication as to what had caused the vegetation to flurry. It looked like two creatures had taken parallel paths through either side of the highway and met in front of the truck, except nothing was there.

Her frown became a scowl when the engine began to get even louder. This was despite it not increasing in speed. In fact, rather than accelerating, it seemed to be slowing. Kristen didn’t understand it until she saw one of the leaves from the woods fly past the truck, then turn and come right at it. Everything became clear. Amy was throwing a huge amount of wind at the vehicle. More than that, she was thickening the air itself so the force of the wind would work against it and the thicker air would do more of the work to slow the mass of gasoline-powered steel.

It looked like the truck was driving through a hurricane made of molasses. The air was so thick that it no longer picked leaves up and simply pushed against the vehicle while its engine strained louder like it was trying to get out of the world’s most elusive mud puddle.

Kristen could feel Miller growing more agitated with her aura. She could feel him pushing harder on the gas and the engine rose in pitch until she—a girl from Detroit who knew a thing or two about cars—could practically hear it redlining.

Something snapped and the engine tried once more to please its lead-footed master before it died.

“I stand corrected,” Kristen said as she swooped past Amy and toward the truck. “You’re much better at stopping cars now.”

She landed and lowered one shoulder to the ground so General Peralt could climb off her back. “I’ll take it from here,” he said. “I’ve known Miller for years. He’ll listen to me. You guys… Well, I won’t lie, you guys will simply freak him out.”

His request was reasonable and she nodded. If Miller cooperated, it would make things easier. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to run from four dragons and a mage given that they were in the middle of nowhere, miles away from Anchorage or anywhere else.

“Miller! It’s General Peralt. I want you to step out of the car so we can talk. You hear me? Go ahead and open the door.”

The man complied and lowered one leg to the ground, followed by the other. Before anyone could react, he stepped out with his pistol in hand and aimed it at the general. “You can’t stop what we started, sir. The dragons have to go.” To punctuate this statement, he leveled the weapon at Sammy’s face and pulled the trigger.

As soon as she’d seen the firearm, Kristen had whispered “gun” to Amy, who had nodded in understanding. When the man pulled the trigger, she simply encapsulated him in an orb of shield magic. The bullet struck the shimmering blue wall in front of him and dropped uselessly.

Sammy, not accustomed to magic-wielding mages, dove aside all the same.

Miller’s eyes widened as his bullet crumpled to a misshapen lump not three feet from his face. Not one to be dissuaded, he fired a few more rounds before he finally accepted that he wasn’t doing anything except giving the girl on the skateboard practice with her skills.

The general pushed to his feet. He’d grazed the palm of one hand and cut a knee on the road when he evaded the shot. Kristen began to understand why this short, skinny general was called Sammy. He was much like a little kid, despite his age and rank.

Miller—now understanding that his chances of survival if he tried to fight were nil—chose the other tactic of the criminally desperate. He tried to run.

“Dragons,” Kristen ordered.

In the blink of an eye, Stonequest was in the man’s path in his human form.

The soldier skidded to a halt and tried to run in another direction, only to find an old man twirling one of the tips of his mustache in his path. “Going somewhere?” Lumos asked cordially.

“You bastards can’t stop him. No one can stop him!” Miller shouted, his voice loud with desperation.

“Boss, is it all right if I make him more agreeable?” Heartsbane asked.

“Yes, please. I thought you tried when he was in the car.”

“Even with my skills, it’s hard to make someone’s emotions change completely. He was scared. If I made him more scared of us, he would only have driven faster. But now…” She fixed her gorgeous blue eyes on Miller and stepped toward him with the perfect posture of dragons. “Now, I want him scared.”

The man looked at her in horror. His eyes were wide and sweat pricked on his brow. If he wasn’t a trained officer of the US military, Kristen thought he might have pissed himself.

“Please, please…don’t hurt me!” Miller pleaded. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know but please don’t do anything to me!”

“Why did you give those orders to attack to those three pilots?” Kristen asked.

“I was told to. I was scared that if I didn’t do as he said, the dragons would attack first.”

“Didn’t do as who said?”

“I don’t know his name,” he said quickly.

“Did you meet him in person or speak on the phone?”

“Both,” Miller shuddered. “He delivered these orders over the phone but I have met him before.”

“What did he look like? Did you see his dragon form or his human one?”

“I…neither.” The man looked utterly mortified. Despite Heartsbane using her aura to make him fear them, he was still terrified of whoever had given the orders.

“What do you mean by that?” Stonequest asked.

The man studied the four dragons who had him surrounded, the mage who had stopped him, the two humans with handguns trained on his chest, and his general. He decided to come clean. “He wore a human skull on his face and he…he said if I didn’t do as he said, he’d wear me next and that he liked the look of my skull. It has space inside despite me not having much brains…that’s what he told me.”

“Did he give you a name?” Kristen demanded.

Miller shook his head. “I’m sorry. I…I didn’t ask.”

It was predictable and expected but still frustrating. Boneclaw was unlikely to go around telling everyone about his secret identity, but she didn’t expect him to meet people while wearing a skull mask either. She had hoped the soldier had seen a middle man—someone like Diamontus who she could have readily identified.

As it was, they didn’t have the smoking gun they needed. Still, it might help. She retrieved her phone and dialed Shimmerclaw.

The platinum dragon answered after a single ring. “Where are you?” she asked as if she’d made the call instead of the other way around.

“I’m on a highway in the middle of nowhere, Alaska,” Kristen said, being honest without making an attempt to send her GPS coordinates like a fool.

“Oh, thank goodness.” The old dragon sounded relieved. “Lord Boneclaw and Diamontus have their armies on the move. You’ve been labeled a traitor and Diamontus has issued orders to capture or kill you. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. When the dragons brought back the dragon you shot… You didn’t really shoot him, did you? With a dragon bullet?”

“I’m sorry, I had to,” she said. “But he’s okay, right?”

“He was shot in the wing,” Shimmerclaw said. “He won’t fly for days!”

“But he will fly,” she insisted, frustrated that even though the Council leader was on her side, she still had the biases of an ancient dragon. Didn’t she see that she could have killed not only one but many of the dragons who had followed her? Hitting one in the shoulder was the least harm she could have inflicted on her pursuers.

“So you’re not at your base, then?” Shimmerclaw asked.

“No…not currently.” Kristen felt a pang of worry in her chest. But I need to get back there as soon as fucking possible. “We went to the base where the jets that attacked the dragon rally point came from. We were looking for their motive. A dragon was behind it. I have the general from the base with me right now, actually. He has paperwork to prove that he didn’t authorize the strike.”

“Do you know who the dragon was? Do you have video?”

“No.” She sighed. “No, I don’t have anything. The officer who ordered the strike said it came from the Masked One.”

“Damn it,” Shimmerclaw growled. “That doesn’t surprise me, but I can’t bring that to the Dragon Council as evidence to stop the war. That damned Masked One. Any time I’ve brought up his existence, half the Council argues that he’s merely a myth, an urban legend as the humans say.

“Would it help if I told you who the Masked One is?” she asked.

“Yes, of course!” The old dragon sounded excited at the prospect. “If we could prove his existence once and for all and demonstrate that he’s been working behind the scenes, that might sway the Council.”

Kristen took a deep breath. “It’s Boneclaw. Lord Boneclaw is the Masked One.”

For a much too long moment, Shimmerclaw said nothing. Finally, when she spoke, her voice was painfully doubtful. “That’s a very serious accusation, Lady Steel. I’ve worked with Lord Boneclaw for hundreds of years. Still…I suppose it makes as much sense as anyone else. What kind of evidence do you have to prove this?”

“I don’t have anything concrete but I’m certain that—”

“I’m sorry, but that won’t be enough to help. He’s already labeled you a traitor. If you make any statements about him being the Masked One, most dragons will think you’re simply trying to turn the tables on him. Dragons have used the name of the Masked One for exactly that purpose before.”

“I’m telling you, it’s him.”

“I’ll look into it,” the Council leader said a little stiffly. “In the meantime, you need to take care of yourself. The base… I can’t tell you much, but you should get home and quickly.”

“Got it, thanks,” Kristen snapped and hung up. How could Shimmerclaw not believe her? Lord Boneclaw had all but admitted he was the Masked One. How could Shimmerclaw simply—

But now wasn’t the time for that. The old dragon had said she needed to get home. She didn’t fail to see the significance of that and called Brian to tell him to get her an extraction point. Taking the plane all the way home would take too long.

“I’m on it,” he said. “I’ll call you when we have something.”

She hung up and turned to General Peralt. “Sammy,” she began, “I don’t think I need to tell you how serious things are about to get.”

“I know.” The general nodded. “If it’s not too much to ask, I’d appreciate being dropped off at the base. I need to get fighters in the air. If dragons intend to attack humans, we need our boys in the sky and ready to fly.”

“Please don’t,” Kristen implored. “I need you to stand down as long as you can. I need time to see if there’s anything I can do to stop this. Your base has already caused dragon casualties. I’m hoping to make it clear that it wasn’t the decision of a human, but that will be impossible if your people are fighting more dragons. We need peace, General. That’s the only path.”

He nodded but didn’t look like Sammy any longer. His expression was grim and determined. “I can’t make you any promises. I have an oath to uphold.”

She nodded. “Fair enough. If we give you a ride back instead of forcing you to walk the entire way with Miller, will you at least wait to receive orders before you scramble your jets?”

“I have to do what I think is best.” Peralt sounded conflicted. “If you give us an ultimatum like that, I guess I’ll fix the truck.”

“Will you?” Amy said as the vehicle flipped upside down, tumbled off the road, and rolled into a tree. She proceeded to pulverize it until both the tree and the truck were nothing but splinters and scrap.

“Well, I still have my phone.” Peralt took it out and fixed the mage with a resolute look. The device crushed in his hand as if it were nothing but a beer can. “Well, dang. I guess there’s nothing to do but ask for that ride. I’ll have to tackle this paperwork too. Miller’s account of a dragon interfering in our operations needs to be documented.”

“Thank you, Sammy,” Kristen said and transformed into her dragon body. Her dragons did the same, loaded the humans on their backs, and returned to the base.

No sooner had they dropped the general and his disgraced officer off than her phone rang. It was Constance.

“Tell me you have a portal ready for us,” she said, needing some good news.

“I do. It should be near the Anchorage City Hall. Is that close enough for you?”

“Yes, it is.” It was much better news than she had even dared hope for. “I thought you could only open portals to places you had been to or risk tearing us apart at the quantum level.”

“Fortunately, we have many new mages with us at the base. One of them lived in Anchorage for a few years. He’s more than willing to help.”

“Well, that’s great.”

“Sure.”

“Then why don’t you sound great?” she asked when she detected bitterness in the woman’s voice.

“We successfully saved most of the captured mages.” The hard edge to her tone focused on the word “most,” which made it abundantly clear that it was not as good as the use of “all.”

“What happened?”

“Some of the mages had already been slain. Kristen, it was brutal. They had them naked and on their knees, begging for their lives before they roasted them alive.”

“I understand.”

“No, I don’t think you do.”

“Constance, your mages did horrible things to those captive dragons. You might be able to compartmentalize that, but my dragons cannot. Yet we’re all working together. There will be a time to grieve and a time for justice when this is all over. But if we don’t all work together right now, there will be justice for no one. Do I make myself clear?”

“You always do,” the woman said bitterly. “We’ll have the portal open soon. It will be big enough for the plane to fit through.”

“Can you do that? I don’t want you all drained. We can leave the plane for now.” Kristen was relieved that Constance seemed to have put aside her bitterness, if only for the time being.

“We have many new mages on our side to help power it. Most of them won’t be any good in combat as they were trained for their entire lives to never harm a dragon or practice offensive spells, but opening a portal is something they can help with. We’ll see you in ten minutes. Tell your pilot to fly above city hall. You’ll come out near the airport.”

“Great, see you soon.” She hung up.

They boarded the plane and flew through the portal. It was above City Hall and bigger than any she had seen thus far, exactly as Constance had promised. The pilot barely blinked and they flew through it without fanfare.

Kristen and her team returned to Detroit. They disembarked from the jet and flew immediately to their base.

She had just poured herself a cup of coffee when Brian ran up to her, breathless. “We have incoming. A force of dragons bigger than anything I’ve ever seen is coming to Detroit!”

“What? When will they be here?”

He tried to smile and failed horribly. “I’d say about forty-five minutes.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“What do you know about the dragon force en route?” Kristen asked. She didn’t want it to be true and thus confirm the warning Shimmerclaw had given her.

Brian hurried his station and brought up a number of screens of radar data. Great, she thought. My brother has either hacked into the US weather service or every military base in the United States. Given the quality of the data they were looking at, it was probably the latter, which of course would make her a traitor to both human and dragon kind. Great, just great. This was turning into a seriously crappy day.

He explained the data quickly. “They’ve divided their force into three units. One is headed to the west coast, one to the east coast, and the third directly to Detroit.”

“Gee, I wonder why they’re coming here,” Heartsbane said and barely contained her sarcasm.

Kristen rubbed her face and ran hasty mental calculations of how many dragons, mages, and soldiers she now had in her force. “How large is each of these forces?”

“Radar isn’t one hundred percent clear, but I’d estimate each one at around a hundred dragons,” Brian said and tried to keep his voice neutral. “We can’t stop them all,” he said more softly. “We simply can’t.”

“No, no of course not,” she agreed, although admitting that broke a part of her. “We don’t have the manpower to handle all three, especially since the mages we rescued aren’t combat-trained.”

“So we merely roll over?” Heartsbane demanded.

“No.” Kristen straightened and reminded herself that how she behaved was important not only for her mental health but for her team. She was a leader and needed to act like one. “But the one aimed at our hometown? We can do something about them.”

She took a deep breath and what seemed like a thousand battle plans ran through her head in an instant. One thing kept distracting her, though. She knew it wasn’t fair. It was selfish—more selfish than she wanted it to be. People would die and there were no ifs about that. She should have been willing to let her people die too, but she couldn’t risk her mom and dad remaining out there to get incinerated. “Stonequest, can you go get my parents and bring them here?”

“Uh…hold up, Stone,” Brian said and looked both proud and guilty at once.

His sister darted him a look from the corner of her eye. He had never directly contradicted her, not since she’d brought him onto her team. Why did he do so now?

“You’re…uh, not the first person I told about the dragon force,” he admitted.

“Who the hell would you tell before your commander and your sister?”

“Mom and Dad?” He looked past her. She turned to see Frank and Marty Hall coming down the stairs from the top level of their base.

“Oh, Krissy!” her mom said, ran toward her, and threw her arms around her daughter’s neck.

“Hi, Mom,” she said when she finally pulled away.

“We were trying to look at the skyline before your little dragon friends show up for this scrap of yours. Did you know this used to be a shoe polish factory?”

Kristen didn’t know what was better—that her mom tried to school her on her own base or the fact that she’d described the coming first true battle of a potential world war as a scrap.

“It wasn’t a shoe polish factory, Marty. They made bicycles. The best bicycles in the city.”

“Hi, Dad.” She threw her arms around the man who’d inspired her to become a cop. He’d inadvertently convinced her to get into all this, become involved with the law, and eventually become a dragon investigator so obsessed with justice that she was willing to go to war for it.

“Hey, Krissy,” he said and wound his arms around her. “We’re proud of you sweetie, we really are. Now go stop these dragons before they trash our city again.”

“Sure, Dad,” she said, fighting back tears. One escaped and slid down her cheek.

“I told you two to get down below!” Brian shouted at them.

“We know, Zed,” Marty said, using her brother’s code name like it was the coolest, most inspiring thing she’d ever heard.

“We merely had to see the Steel Dragon before we went into the bunker,” Frank explained. He said “Steel Dragon” like he was naming the title of a superhero movie.

Kristen hugged each of them again before she turned to her assembled team and wondered if they’d be enough to save the city. They had to be. The people, dragons, and mages around her were all Detroit had to defend it.

She sighed. It made no difference that she never wanted to be in the middle of this mess. Her personal mission had been to stop common criminals, thieves, child abusers, rapists...the scum of society. Not in a million years would she have thought that signing up for the police academy would bring her into a direct confrontation with an ancient genocidal maniac of a dragon.

Fortunately, she had not only some of the best fighting dragons out there but also scores of mages and other humans with guns. They could do this. It wouldn’t be easy, but they could do this.

“All right, everyone.” She addressed her team calmly. They’d all crammed into the main building of her base. Human, dragon, and mage waited for her orders. “I want mixed teams. Guns need to be loaded with dragon bullets. We don’t have an unlimited quantity but remember, even wounding a dragon with them should knock them out of the fight, so be careful and aim well.”

“Lady Steel,” Constance said when she took a breath before moving into the more inspirational part of her speech.

“Yes?” Kristen asked. She tried to not be flustered and told herself that the technomage likely had a reason for the interruption.

“There are huge stockpiles of dragon bullets on the island, along with tons of special weapons like anti-missile systems filled with dragon bullets, dragon-plate grenades, and more. That would be a huge help.”

Kristen nodded. That was a damn good reason for interrupting. “Okay. That’s good to know. We won’t have time to set up anti-missile systems, but I want everything else.” Something suddenly occurred to her. “Including the chains you used to bind the dragons. I want every single link of those.”

“Why?” the woman asked.

“Trust me,” she responded.

Constance nodded and began to work on the portal.

Looking through the gate to the tropical island was almost enough to calm Kristen. It was so damn beautiful. Flowering plants and steamy jungles and pristine beaches hid the fact that the island housed the largest stash of anti-dragon weaponry ever assembled.

Plus, Larry was there, smiling like a fool and wearing nothing but swim-shorts and a flower necklace. “Well, howdy.” He beamed. “I wondered if I would get a visit. Did someone have trouble opening a jar of pickles or is this the start of World War Three?”

“The second one,” she said.

“Damn. I guess play time’s over, my friends!” He shouted to someone they couldn’t see through this particular angle of the portal—some of the captured dragons, no doubt. “Do you want me, the guns, the dragons, or all three?”

“All three—” she said before Amythist stepped forward. Given how full the base was, Kristen hadn’t even seen the old dragon amongst everyone else.

“I think it might be better if I go there and help these dragons on their voyage home,” Amythist said.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “We could use you here.”

“I know you think that, but I already fought in one war. I killed so many people. I can’t do that again. I want to help and those dragons need help. I’ll bring them back with the ship, assuming there is somewhere to bring them back to.”

“Y’all fucked up that bad, huh?” Larry asked, shucked his flower necklace, and donned his mage robes. “It’s a good thing you called ol’ Larry Brockton.”

“Old is right,” Amy quipped as he stepped through the portal.

“Ah, come here, you lil’ squirt. Are you still blasting things or did you learn some self control?”

“If you can’t control your tongue, why should I control my magic?” she asked cheekily.

Everyone was glad to see him. Kristen had forgotten how good the mage was for her team’s morale. He joked even as he got to work transporting the dragon bullets and munitions to Detroit and giving the newly unshackled mages—most of whom he knew quite well from his time working at the Detroit Dragon SWAT building—tips on how to best use their full potential. It was immediately clear he was a better teacher than Constance as the newcomers suddenly seemed far more useful.

They got the supplies through just in time.

“We have maybe five minutes,” Brian said. He’d given them reminders which Kristen had only subconsciously registered, but she focused immediately on his warning. “They’re over the suburbs to the north.”

“All right. I don’t like this at all but we’ll have to play the hand we were dealt. That means I want every soldier armed with dragon bullets and every mage working defense.”

“What about us dragons?” Emerald asked.

She lifted one of the chains Constance’s mages had brought. “We need to get dressed.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“I’m sorry, but I won’t do it.”

Kristen regarded Emerald with growing exasperation. They had to do this if they wanted to survive, and she also knew that she didn’t have time to argue with the dragon.

“It doesn’t hurt if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said and moved through various actions to show that the chains she had made the mages shackle to her body gave her free range of motion.

“It’s not that. It’s the damn principle of it. Those chains kept your brothers and sisters—our brothers and sisters—in bondage. They’re symbols of slavery—and worse than slavery, of dragons beings used as cattle.”

“And now they’ll enable us to survive a force that’s far larger than our own,” she argued, but he remained obdurate.

She shouldn’t have been surprised, all things told. Emerald didn’t have any special powers like her, Stonequest, Lumos, Heartsbane, or Timeflash. He was a regular dragon, which meant he’d worked damn hard on his aerial combat skills. The others were used to dipping into their unusual powers when they needed to. To them, wearing the chains so human soldiers and mages could ride them without risk of falling off was probably another opportunity to gain an advantage. To Emerald, it meant he wouldn’t be able to fly the way he’d trained to.

“Fine. But be careful out there, okay? You won’t have a mage to protect you.”

“Then it’s a good thing I won’t need one,” he retorted and vaulted skyward.

Kristen watched him go but she didn’t have time to worry about him. They had scant minutes before the invading dragons reached downtown Detroit, and she needed to engage the enemy force over Lake St. Clair to minimize damage. Time had run out and they had to launch immediately or lose the chosen battleground.

“Are you sure about this?” Drew asked as he climbed onto her back and clipped himself into the chain harness.

“Hell no,” she replied. “But it’s our only chance. Are you coming, Jim?”

“I wouldn’t dream of missing this.” The Wonderkid clambered onto her back and settled comfortably.

Amy levitated using her magic powers on her shoes and took her position near the base of Kristen’s tail.

They were ready.

“Dragons, your job is to keep moving. I don’t want you to engage, only keep the enemy from destroying this town. The mages and soldiers on your back will keep you safe and eliminate the enemy. Let’s show them what it looks like when we join forces.”

Her team cheered but it was too quiet because they were so few.

Brian had confirmed via drone that the other force had damn close to a hundred dragons and was led by Diamontus himself. Against that massive force, Kristen had her core team of Dragons from SWAT, plus another twenty of the young dragons who she thought were competent enough to handle being a mobile battle platform. Constance and Eric would be on Katrina and would no doubt make a valuable addition to the battle, but that was the sum total of the defenders. Beyond that, she had soldiers and mages guarding her base from its roof as well as some of the tops of Detroit’s tallest skyscrapers. But if her plan to engage the dragons over the lake worked out, they wouldn’t see action.

While that was a good thing, it also meant her airborne forces would be even more outnumbered.

“For equality! For a world we can share with everyone!” Kristen roared.

“For the Steel Dragon!” Heartsbane bellowed and pulsed her powerful aura so strongly that everyone cheered as loudly as ten men.

They took to the skies and she led her twenty-five mobile assault teams over the lake to engage the enemy. She could already see Diamontus, so massive that he seemed to cast a shadow over all of Eastpointe. He saw her force launch and ordered his dragons over the lake.

“Hold tight to your formation!” Kristen bellowed. “We have one chance at a targeted and unimpeded volley. After that, we need to be careful of friendly fire. Make it count.”

The dragons closed on the defenders, and when they were about a hundred yards out—so close they could feel the enemy’s auras and smell their dragon breath—Kristen ordered her soldiers to fire.

The crack of a hundred guns rang out over Lake St. Clair.

Perhaps three dozen of Diamontus’s forces plummeted. It was difficult to count because once the bullets tore through them they broke their formation and scattered in all directions.

The few who maintained a direct course toward her and her people were rebuffed by magic shields. Their claws couldn’t find dragon flesh and their breaths of fire, poison, or whatever other unearthly powers they possessed met the shimmering blue shields of defensive magic.

“Keep moving!” she ordered. “Try to come around for another pass.”

Her dragons made it through the enemy ranks without issue or fatalities.

The enemy simply wasn’t prepared. They had thought they would fight a group comprised of dragon whelps, younglings, runts, and cowards, plus the Steel and the Iron Dragons. Instead, they were met with a force never seen in history.

Kristen wished she felt better about this, but she didn’t.

Watching a quarter of the enemy’s forces fall was an indisputable early victory, and yet it felt only like death. She didn’t want to kill dragons any more than she wanted dragons to kill people. This was a stupid fight, a pointless battle orchestrated by someone who wasn’t even there.

Unfortunately, the reality was that they were forced to fight.

Diamontus had rallied his troops—although he’d lost a third of his force, they still outnumbered hers two to one—and they resumed their assault. This time, they came from different directions. They were already learning how to face the new threat her combined arms approach had created.

“Fire at will!” she shouted and dodged as a dragon tried to rake her guts with its claws.

“Holyyyyyy shiiiiiit!” Drew yelled from her back as he was tossed about and reached the end of the chain that connected him to her harness.

Jim managed to keep himself planted securely and fired shots at the retreating dragon.

The action was almost impossible for her to follow. Gunshots rang out all around her. Dragons exhaled flames that were extinguished by magic with a few exceptions. Many of the screams she heard were far too human. In less than a minute, one of her dragons was struck by friendly fire. He plummeted into the lake below and drowned the mage and three soldiers who’d been strapped to his back. She would forever remember the look in his eyes as the young dragon was swallowed by the lake.

“Where’s the Steel Bitch?” Diamontus bellowed.

“Behind you, fool,” Kristen responded and located the giant, diamond-encrusted dragon easily in the chaos. He was twice the size of any other dragon present.

He spun to face them but was slow to do so because of his bulk. While he came about, Jim and Drew peppered him with shots. Even one of them should have been enough to disable his powers, but his scales seemed to truly be as hard as diamonds and the bullets shattered uselessly against his back and flank.

“We have to hit him in the joints—armpits, hip joints, that kind of thing,” she ordered, mortified that she had to use Lumos’ training to teach her soldiers how to slaughter dragons.

That meant she had to face the dragon head-on. She gained some altitude and dove. Seconds before impact, she slashed her claws to strike at his face.

Before the attack completed, a great volley of bullets caught both her and Diamontus. They recoiled instinctively, but she knew she was only bruised, not bloodied.

Kristen looked toward the direction of the shots, ready to see a young dragon who’d made a mistake. Instead, she saw twelve fighter jets rocketing toward the dragon battle.

“Defensive positions! Defensive positions! All mages, block those bullets!” she yelled as more rounds from the fighter jets streaked through the battlefield.

The fighter jets seemed to have a very clear battle plan. Kill. Every. Dragon.

They made no distinction between Kristen and her forces and the dragons under the command of Diamontus.

She ordered her people to fall back, but the jets seemed indifferent. They simply banked, circled for another pass, and fired at anyone who tried to leave the airspace above the lake.

One of her dragons died, then another and another.

The mages were being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of incoming fire. It was hard enough to stop one bullet or the breath of a dragon. Now, they were supposed to stop hundreds of rounds a minute. If she didn’t do something, she knew this battle would become nothing but a slaughter. It wouldn’t take many bullets to overwhelm a dragon’s healing ability if they didn’t have steel skin.

“Katrina! Constance! With us!”

The Iron Dragon flapped her wings and followed her up and out of the battle to the level of the jets.

The fighter aircraft fired at Katrina, but she spun between them and dodged as effortlessly as if this were a videogame. She really does know how to fight in her dragon form, Kristen thought.

“The plan boss?” Jim yelled. “I don’t have the arsenal to eliminate a fighter jet.”

“I do,” Amy said and used her magical abilities to nudge two jets into each other.

The Iron Dragon simply got in the way of a third, which collided with her. She survived but the jet did not.

Constance wasn’t as quick as Amy but she also used her abilities, although more subtly than the younger and more powerful mage. She seemed to thicken the air around one of the aircraft’s engines until it overheated. The pilot pulled away, no doubt to find somewhere to land while they still could.

That left eight. It was too many.

“I don’t think I can do that again!” Katrina shouted.

“No shit, you can’t do that again,” Constance reprimanded her and reminded Kristen that the technomage saw Katrina as a super-powered adopted daughter.

“I don’t know if we need to,” Jim said. “Look—they’re pulling away!”

“Oh, thank God,” Kristen said, although God didn’t seem to have any place on the battlefield.

She tucked her wings so she could return to the fray. As she descended, she looked at the battle playing out beneath her. It was not a pretty sight. While her mages had focused on protecting their dragons and everyone else on the battlefield from the lumps of lead the jets delivered to destroy every dragon they could, Diamontus’ force had regrouped and adjusted their tactics.

They fought in tiny groups of only three or four dragons now. With ruthless efficiency, they moved from dragon to dragon, harried those who still had soldiers on their back to retaliate, and savaged those who didn’t. Kristen watched in horror as Diamontus led a force of three dragons to slaughter yet another of her young dragons.

The greatest frustration was that she was still too far out to stop him.

“Amy, can you—”

“I’m trying! Those jets weren’t easy to destroy, and Diamontus is strong. Something about his scales seems to block my magic.”

She was about to brace herself to witness the enemy leader kill yet another of her people when Emerald appeared. He was considerably faster than the rest of her allies because he didn’t have a harness on.

Without slowing, he came out of nowhere and drove into Diamontus’s back. The bigger, stronger dragon laughed off the blow until his attacker caught hold of and sank his teeth into one of his wings.

The massive creature roared in pain and swatted him away with his tail, but Emerald didn’t give up. He swung into another attack and this time, struck at his face.

His adversary blasted him with fire. It charred his green scales but he remained undeterred.

“Get clear!” Lumos shouted at his teammate. “I’ll blind him.”

“It won’t work!” Emerald responded. “You’ll blind the whole damn battlefield.”

“Fly away, little sparrow!” Diamontus roared at him. “You have bothered me quite enough.”

The smaller dragon roared and surged forward again. His enemy was ready for him and slashed with his diamond tipped claws to open a deep gash across the chest. Kristen could see bone and shuddered.

Despite his wound, he still refused to pull back. Instead, he powered into Diamontus and grasped his throat with his jaws.

“Little sparrow thinks he can bite my neck? My scales are as hard as diamonds, you fool. I cannot be hurt by the likes of you.”

Emerald pushed off when he confirmed the truth of this, but he still made no effort to retreat. He couldn’t. Everyone else was still fighting. If he let the leader of the invaders rejoin the fray, the momentum of the battle would shift. To keep him occupied, he swooped and circled and finally clamped his tail in his jaws.

“Was that supposed to hurt?” Diamontus laughed. “My tail is pure diamond. It’s the hardest part of my body.”

His attacker made no reply. He couldn’t as he had the other dragon’s tail in his mouth. Instead, he spun around the massive body and plunged the tail into Diamontus’s chest. A look of shock suffused the dragon’s face and he scowled in disbelief.

But still, he wasn’t defeated. Emerald had come close to his face, and with the last of his failing strength, Diamontus caught the smaller, younger, weaker dragon’s neck in his teeth and bit down.

Emerald didn’t stand a chance.

He was merely a normal dragon, after all.

His neck was crushed by the diamond teeth, and he died wrapped in the claws of the foe he shouldn’t have been able to defeat. Kristen watched, broken-hearted, as the two of them plummeted into Lake St. Clair—two gems that would forever be buried beneath its waters.

With their leader dead, the opposing force seemed to lose its direction. One of them bellowed an order to retreat and the others hastened to obey.

Her forces gradually resumed their formation and fired a few more shots at the retreating dragons to make sure they understood that they had ammunition to keep fighting. Finally, they were gone.

“Talk to me, Brian. Where are they going?”

“It looks like they’re headed to the Upper Peninsula.”

“How did we do?”

“Detroit wasn’t harmed. But we lost nine dragons, plus more soldiers and mages.”

“Goddammit.”

“I know, Kristen, but it gets worse.”

She took a deep breath and signaled her people to return to base. “How?”

“The other two forces are still heading toward their targets. They had farther to go, but I don’t know…I thought if we defeated these guys they’d give up.”

Rage and sorrow vied within her and she tasted nothing but blood and ash in her mouth. Cities would burn this day, and there was nothing she could do about it. Worse, it was only a matter of time before the dragons they fought regrouped and returned. Diamontus had been defeated but he wasn’t the head of this serpent. The Masked One was.

And then there were the human fighter jets who had intervened. Now that dragons and humans had both engaged in open combat, it was only a matter of time before the entire world fell into war. After all, this had happened over a major city. It meant every damn news outlet there would have footage of the battle. They were surely already doctoring the video to further their own political agendas.

It was a dark day and it would only get darker.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Kristen flew over Lake St. Clair. The wind was picking up, so the water was covered with the white peaks of the waves churning across its surface. She couldn’t see into its depths. The dragons, humans, and mages who had died on both sides of the battle were hidden from view. It was like it hadn’t happened, but it didn’t feel that way.

She headed toward her base in Detroit and wished she felt more triumphant given how little damage the city had suffered. Her gambit to draw the invaders out over the lake had been successful. The city was unharmed and many of the people there probably didn’t even know how close they’d come to complete annihilation.

Although they would soon because it looked like every news truck, camera man, social media influencer, and human being who had been outside with a cellphone had recorded as much of the combat as they possibly could.

An idea pushed through her reflexive irritation.

She knew it was utterly impossible for her team to win this fight alone, but maybe she could make a mass appeal and change the tone of this whole mess. How far she had come, she thought wryly. In her early days as the Steel Dragon, she had detested meeting the media but now, she thought this was her best option. Although, in her early days, she hadn’t been faced with twin dragon forces heading to major metropolises with a grudge and fires in their bellies.

Once above the base, Amy floated herself, Jim, and Drew down to the roof. Kristen continued although she removed the chains she’d used as a harness and dropped them into the base parking lot.

Resolute, she glided to the crowd of reporters gathered nearby hoping for a statement. They wanted a sound bite? She’d give them one, in spades. She landed near them and transformed into her human form. Deliberately, she took her time with the transformation and controlled it with a level of precision that had also been impossible when she’d first discovered her abilities.

She walked forward as she changed, stood upright first, and shrank while a maelstrom of silvery flecks swirled all around her. Cameras clicked as people tried to capture the perfect shot. Within a few steps, she was human-sized, at which point she transformed her arms, legs, and torso into her human body and her dragon head to her human one. Now, she walked forward, a human with a steel tail and dragon wings, a creature of beauty and power.

The reporters were ecstatic. The two vans she was closest to kept their cameras focused on her, while the reporters working with the camera operators spoke excitedly. Other people, bloggers, creators of video diaries, and simply plain regular folk who weren’t afraid of dragons came forward too.

A dark-skinned reporter in the front with large sideburns who she knew well from her days on the Detroit SWAT team moved toward her and held his microphone closer to her as he asked, “Kristen Steel, what on Earth is going on? We’re getting reports of dragon attacks all over the world.”

“I want to tell you everything, Chuck, but not here. I’ll hold a press conference outside my base in thirty minutes. You can have the front row aisle seat if you call as many reporters as you possibly can and get them all there before I start.”

“I want three questions.”

“You can have two.”

“Three questions or I don’t call the conservative news network. They’ll merely spin anything you say to make it sound like you want war anyway.”

“You can have your three questions. Call them—everyone. And while you’re at it, talk to your boss. I want this on every set in the United States and as many screens as we can get worldwide.”

“Four questions,” he said but he was smiling, an old joke of theirs.

“I’ll see you in thirty minutes.”

That gave Kristen a half-hour to stew about what precisely she could say that could make any difference. She wandered through the streets of Detroit toward her base, enjoyed the comfort of her hometown familiarity, and let herself think. When she walked along the river and her gaze lingered on Belle Isle across the water, she considered what to say.

The human fighter planes they had fought had every right to be there engaging the dragon army, of course. They were defending human lives or attempting to, anyway. She couldn’t begrudge them that.

But at the same time, she thought as she turned right past the GM Renaissance Center, they weren’t helping. Human pilots didn’t know how to recognize dragons. She knew that to be true from her days as a dragon. In trying to defend themselves, they became a threat to her force as well as the attacking dragons and cost unnecessary lives. So much could have been avoided.

She wandered past the Guardian Building—knowing she didn’t have time to enter and enjoy its amazing interior—as she continued north. An uncomfortable truth settled in, one she’d prefer to ignore. She would have to fight both sides if either one moved toward further unprovoked aggression.

It was a daunting task.

To make it happen, she only had a small force of dragons, mages, and humans. They were incredibly outnumbered by either side—humans or dragons. Against both at the same time? They were toast.

Kristen glanced down Michigan Avenue and smelled the familiar odor of dueling Coney Island venues, but she kept walking. Her stomach was already tied in knots and now wasn’t the time for food. She couldn’t fight both sides. It was impossible and yet, that was exactly what had to happen.

War was not an option, not with the forces on either side so ready and capable of annihilating one another. An all-out war would devastate the planet. But what about a police force? That was a necessity. Someone needed to police everyone—humans, dragons, and mages. None of them would have true justice until all three of them did.

She understood damn well that none of the three factions would particularly like that—especially the dragons who had spent so much time as top dogs—but it was the only way forward that she could see.

Justice had to be applied equally for all or it would fail as it had done for hundreds of years.

Absorbed in her thoughts, she’d already passed Comerica Park and now veered off toward her base. She checked her watch. Time was up.

Sure enough, outside their stronghold, reporters were grouped closely together and more were arriving while she approached a lectern someone on her team had set up—probably her brother. He must have noticed all the reporters and assumed she had something planned. Or he had been preparing a speech. Either way, she had to step up there and speak. Her stomach twisted as she carefully considered what to say. Everything she’d done so far might crystallize in this moment. No words she’d ever uttered were more important.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for coming and thank you for tuning in all around the world. I’d like to start by thanking Chuck Wallace from WXYZ for getting everyone here.”

Chuck beamed at that, although he also held up four fingers.

Kristen continued. “I don’t have much time so I’ll simply cut to the chase. The Dragon Council has voted to go to war with humankind.”

The reporters—despite years of covering every kind of case imaginable—lost their shit at this. A slew of questions were fired but Kristen only answered Chuck’s.

“But why?”

“There are many factors. The technomages I’ve been working to stop and the proliferation of human weapons, but mostly, it’s because they were preemptively attacked by human fighter jets.” She held three fingers up to Chuck to show him that counted for one.

“The first thing I need to make absolutely clear is that my force here in Detroit, Michigan, had absolutely nothing to do with that. We lost many of our dragons, humans, and mages in a battle to protect this city from a dragon attack. We will continue to protect peaceful citizens from any aggressor, be they dragon, mage, or human.

“War is not the answer. It will solve nothing and accomplish nothing but ending lives. I will not go to war with anyone. I will, however, call myself the new sheriff in town. Any force of humans, dragons, or mages that attacks any civilians of any kind will be considered criminals by my team and will be stopped by any means necessary. Those of you who haven’t had a chance to watch the battle that happened earlier, or who haven’t seen what I and my team have done in Canada, Florence, or here in Detroit, do yourself a favor and watch a few videos. We’re not to be taken lightly.

“I will repeat myself in saying that we will not go to war. Humans have learned to coexist over the centuries. It’s time for everyone else to do the same.”

“How can you say that when there are still armed conflicts?” Chuck asked, burning another question.

“It’s true that there are still battles being fought between humans around the world, but since World War Two, we have managed to avoid global conflict. Even the Cold War never devolved into all of us simply killing each other. Still, fewer people are involved in conflict now than ever before, which proves that humans can coexist with dragons.

“However, coexistence requires equality. Justice must be the same for all. Laws must be equal for all. Punishments must be equal for all. And war between the races cannot be allowed. It will only end in destruction for all.

“We will not join this war but we will stop those foolish enough on either side who think a war can be won. Wars only make death. Going to war is always a losing scenario.”

“How do you propose to do all this from here?” Chuck asked and waggled a finger to indicate that he knew he only had one more.

“That’s a good question, Chuck. Our force is not large enough to police the planet, nor do I wish to be judge and jury for the entire world. Right now, I invite all beings of good heart who want to work for a better future to come together in Michigan to stop this war before it gets out of control.

“Join me here and together, we will build a better future. I think we can all agree that the old future is dead. Humans and mages have proven that they won’t live in the shadow of dragons. And dragons, if you’re willing to fly to war and destroy this planet we all share, why not come here first and talk about what your demands are. As far as I am concerned, the old future is dead, as will be anyone who insists on following it.”

Mutters of dissent came from the reporters. Clearly, they didn’t quite know what to think of this. From the looks on some of their faces, they were simply concerned what broadcasting this message to every aggressive dragon and military leader in the world might do to Detroit. Leave it a smoking black pit seemed like a fair guess.

“Are you declaring war on the system itself?” Chuck asked.

“No, Chuck. I am not. However, as both a cop for the great city of Detroit and a dragon investigator, I am declaring both systems—the one controlled by the Dragon Council and our own human governmental system that lets the most powerful do as they wish while the poor suffer—officially on trial. I will not watch as two factions who each claim to be morally superior rip each other to shreds. Those who insist on fighting will be dealt with. By me, yes, and by the dragons and mages and human soldiers I work with, but also by the thousands of people, mages, and dragons out there who have smelled the rot of our society for decades. If you have felt something is wrong, I ask—no, implore—you to come to Detroit. Peace is possible. Look at my team.”

Kristen couldn’t help but love her team. Stonequest stepped out, as well as Amy on her skateboard, the Iron Dragon, and Constance. Behind them came dozens more battle-scarred dragons, tired humans, and mages with torn and tattered robes.

“We all used to be enemies. We used to fight each other because of our disagreements instead of trying to find middle ground. As soon we all agreed that no one had to die, we were able to see things from the other’s perspective.

“I know this won’t be easy. In fact, I know this will be really fucking hard.”

A few reporters’ eyebrows raised the F-bomb dropped on international television. Chuck only shook his head and laughed.

“But we can do this with your help. You can do this with our help. That’s what I believe and that’s what I need people like you to fight for. I’ll have my mage show you how to open a portal to teleport here now. If you’re a mage in hiding or a former technomage terrorist, you are welcome as long as you share the beliefs I share. If you’re a dragon with a mage under your command, ask them if they want to come, and if they do, break the shackle on their wrist and we’ll help them open a portal and get you here.

“I know my enemies can use this technique to attack us but I trust that far more of you will come to help. Please don’t prove me wrong.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

She finished her speech, drew a deep breath, and accepted that she’d done all she could. It would have to be enough. Every reporter’s hand immediately raised, demanding answers to questions while Constance explained how to make a portal to an audience Kristen prayed was out there.

Fair enough, she thought. Of course they would have questions. She was about to start calling names when she sensed a pulse of aura from Lumos. When she turned to him, he shook his head and gestured hastily toward the north. It didn’t take a dragon investigator to realize what he was saying. The enemy dragons had regrouped and returned for another round.

“I know you all have questions,” she said and tried not to make it sound like too much like an apology. “But you need to get out of here. The dragons who attacked earlier will be back soon.”

“What about other dragons?” a reporter demanded. “Are you concerned that you might have brought every dragon on the continent and maybe beyond down on the Motor City?”

“I’m sure many dragons will see us as a threat,” she agreed. “And I’m sorry for that. I truly am. But we have to make a stand. That means all of you need to get out of here.”

“You can’t make us go!” someone shouted.

“Of course not, but my job is to protect people. That’ll be much harder to do if you are all milling around here, waiting for these dragons to appear. I suggest everyone gets underground. If you have a basement, great, go there. If not, find a friend who does, or go to the storm shelters at the schools.”

Most of the reporters heeded her advice. They looked shaken by the idea of their city being razed to the ground while they hid beneath it, but they also knew her and her reputation. She wasn’t threatening them but trying to protect them. Those who argued only did so because they were scared. She didn’t blame them but she hoped they could get over their feelings and head to safety before it cost them their lives.

Kristen left her podium and returned to the grounds of her base. Lumos fell into step beside her.

“How do you think I did?” she asked the old dragon.

He smiled kindly. “I am quite proud of you, young Lady Steel. I don’t know how this will all come down in the end, but you showed courage and conviction out there. I’m honored to fight alongside someone who has justice so clearly in their sights. However, I have news to report as well.”

“Good news, right?” she said with a phony grin.

“I suppose it’s good that we have news at all.” He smirked. “Your brother has been…what’s the term, chopping? Breaking? Illegally accessing the human radar systems at various airports.”

“Hacking.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she said. Now was no time for semantics, although she loved that even after a battle, Lumos still struggled with human terms. “What did he find?”

“He has hacked the human radar systems at various airports, and he’s tracking the east and west flights of dragons.” He paused and took a deep breath and she could feel him struggle to gain control of his aura. “They’ve changed course. They’re now coming toward Detroit. All of them. Brian estimates the total at three times the force we fought off.”

“Goddammit,” Kristen said. She had known this might happen—that her enemies might hear her message and come for her because of it. But she hadn’t expected them to act so soon. She had wanted to go to Lake St. Clair and do something for the fallen dragons. While she knew it was unfair, she especially wanted to do something for Emerald. He wasn’t a water dragon and didn’t deserve to spend eternity under the waves of the lake. His death had been heroic, and he deserved to be honored as the warrior and officer of peace and justice he was, not forgotten as simply another warrior fallen in battle.

But what could be done?

Kristen looked at her people. There were so few of them. They hadn’t lost nearly as many dragons as the enemy during the battle over the lake, but every one from their side who was killed represented a significant loss. They were already outnumbered and now, they would face even greater odds. Worse still, humans and mages didn’t have healing abilities. Dragons could attack again and again and heal themselves as long as they got some meat to fuel their power. Her human and mage fighters would need sleep and first aid in a way that dragons simply would not.

Her gaze shifted to Constance and her technomages, all of them in meditation and all of them feeling for other mages around the world trying to open portals to come and join them. The leader had explained that if anyone tried to use the unfamiliar magic, she and her mages would be ready to reel them in, so to speak, but it looked like no one had taken them up on the offer. That put her in another bind. Was it better to leave the woman out of the next battle despite her superlative combat proficiency in hopes that mages would answer their call? Or was that suicide?

She was painfully aware that every single one of her people could die trying to stop this war. And then what? If that happened, she would be dead and that would be a bummer, obviously, but the implications for the rest of the world were far worse. Without her to stand between the power hungry faction of the dragon hierarchy and the military industrial complex, what could stop a world war? The humans and dragons would all but eradicate one another, and they’d probably destroy half the planet in the process. Those who survived would be people so far disconnected from society that it would be like civilization as they knew it was simply erased. Hopefully, whoever—if anyone—managed to come back after the war was destroyed would value equality more than the current power system did.

“Kristen, I can feel your aura and I believe you’re looking at this all wrong,” Lumos said and drew her away from falling deeper into the pit she’d already let her mind leap into.

“Is there a right way to look at the potential end of human and dragon society?”

“You took a stand. Merely by doing that, you have made a huge difference. The Dragon Council has become calcified in their ways. They do little more than dole out compensation to the survivors of dead humans. It has been many centuries since any dragon dared to take a stand against them. It’s unheard of in modern times.” He laughed as if she had managed to whip a cream pie into a teacher’s face rather than invite a rain of fire on her hometown. “Even if we all die in the field of battle here today, your actions will shake the dragon power structure to its very core. Although I’d rather not die, so let’s work on a plan?”

She couldn’t help but laugh at him. “Sure. You were starting to make going out in blaze of glory sound good, but yeah, I’d rather survive to eat more pizza and drink more beer.”

“I agree, my lady. So, tell me, what does the Steel Dragon think?”

Kristen rubbed her chin as she walked. “Well, I’d rather play this as a defensive action if we can. It would make sense to pull back to an easily defended location. We could try to mount the anti-dragon defenses on our base or maybe see if any of our dragons have a cave we could hide in, but we can’t do that.”

“It seems sensible, so why not?” Lumos asked, but she had a hunch the old battle master only asked her to make her speak her thoughts aloud.

“Because the dragon army would simply ravage Detroit. If they’re coming here, they see us as a threat, which means if they can’t find us, they’ll still need to make it clear that we are not a threat. The easiest way to demonstrate that to humans would be to raze the city.”

“I fear that is correct.”

“And if that happens, the humans would have to retaliate. A defensive operation won’t work.”

“I was waiting for you to come to this conclusion.”

“But how can we possibly attack?” Kristen asked aloud. “We were already outnumbered. And now they know that we can use mages and bullets from the backs of dragons. They won’t attack in the same huge wings. It’ll be a much tougher, bloodier battle.”

“Remember that your foe relies on the shadows to fight. For millennia, he has used deception over strength and lies over truth. If we can but illuminate the shadows he hides in, we could have a real advantage,” Lumos said.

She wanted to believe him more than anything, but how could she? The Masked One—Boneclaw was his name and she kicked herself for not exposing him when she had the international audience—had already proven himself a powerful foe without fighting at all. He had convinced Diamontus and close to a hundred dragons to attack Detroit instead of the Alaskan base that had scrambled the jets.

But then, of course he’d protected that base. He had been the one to call for an attack to come from there, after all. She sighed and felt like she was still learning the rules of checkers while she played against a chess grand master.

“We’ll have to try something he’d never expect,” she said slowly.

“Precisely!”

“But what can possibly surprise a dragon who has been around for millennia? He knows everything there is to know about dragon bullets. He practically pioneered their invention. He knows about the technomages and was in contact with them for who knows how long—decades? We can’t outsmart something like that.”

“You’re right, of course. We cannot, but you can. You’re the Steel Dragon. More importantly, you’re Kristen Hall. You are a dragon of formidable power who was raised in a human world. You are special, a cosmic weight to bring balance on a cosmic scale. You have done things that no one else on this planet has done. You have cooked food like a human, labored like a human, you have probably dangled a string into a pond to catch a fish rather than simply boiling the entire lake. And yet you have flown like a dragon and have tasted the power that flows through our blood.”

“Wait, what was that?”

“You have the power of dragons. You know you do. You were strong before I started training you but now, you have what it takes to save this city.”

“No, no, no. Not the inspirational bullshit.”

Lumos guffawed at that. “It was not bullshit, my lady.”

“It was, but that’s fine,” she said, her mind spinning. “You’re right, I have been fishing. I remember this one time, sitting in a rowboat with my dad and brother. We must have sat there all day, waiting for a fish to bite our lure—any fish.”

“If you hope to use bait, I trust you have a better source than you once did.”

“Do you think dragons know much about birds?” Kristen asked.

“Excuse me?” He frowned in confusion.

“That day, while we were trying to catch fish, I remember watching the birds. Every damn bird on that lake must have caught a fish while we finally left with nothing. Do you think dragons know about birds?”

He frowned but he answered the question all the same. “No, my lady. Dragons have never been particularly interested in natural history like humans are. The only animals most of us cared about were the big ones we could eat. We didn’t even know eggs could be eaten from chickens until we learned it from humans. I do not think we know much about birds.”

“Let’s hope not,” she said. “I don’t want to end up being the fish.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Masked One couldn’t believe it.

It had come as no surprise when the Steel Dragon had run. He knew she had a cowardly streak in her and suspected she’d want to die with the humans she called her parents.

Diamontus had been easily convinced to lead the force himself, and he’d trusted the brute to level the city that the Steel Dragon called home. Yet somehow, the Steel Dragon had defeated a force of more than twice her numbers.

Stormwing called the Masked One after the debacle, his voice shaking so much that he didn’t need an aura to tell that the dragon was petrified. It was unbelievable and completely pathetic.

“She attacked us with mages who could blast holes in dragons,” Stormwing stammered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Those weren’t mages, you moron. They were dragon bullets,” he replied, tried to keep the neutral tones of his alias Lord Boneclaw, and failed.

“Diamontus is dead, killed by a common green dragon. It’s impossible but I saw it happen. I’m leading the retreat,” Stormwing said.

“No, you fool! Hold your position. I’ll come myself.”

“But…this whole war was Diamontus’s idea. Without him, should we even continue?” the dragon asked and sounded even more frightened.

The Masked One ground his teeth. He couldn’t blame him for being such an ignorant moron. The architect of this war was alive and well but of course, no one knew that except him. Although that might need to change. It was a small miracle that the Steel Dragon hadn’t called him out already. He assumed she was hoping he’d treasure the secrecy behind his identity.

But no. Centuries of scheming had all led to this point, and she had almost undone him too many times already.

He would lead his forces into battle personally.

“Stay there, get meat, and be ready for when I arrive,” he said and disconnected.

As he flew, his thoughts churned and made him soar onward all the faster. The Steel Dragon needed to be destroyed for the benefit of all dragons everywhere. She was already a splinter in his plan, but she hadn’t known about him before so he couldn’t blame her for his own well-played conspiracy. But now, in spite of the vote, she still insisted on following her pathetic moral code? How dare she stand against what the Council ordered?

This time, he was done playing with Kristen Hall. He would kill her and would do it for dragon kind, but he would also do it for himself.

Finally, he reached the upper peninsula of Michigan and located the dragons he’d sent—under the guise of Diamontus’s leadership, of course—to obliterate Kristen and her forces. What he found disgusted him. Instead of acting like the noble beings they were, they behaved like sniveling whelps and whimpered over their wounds while they commiserated with one another over the weaker dragons who’d been killed by inferior beings. It was pathetic and he had no patience for it. He hated them all in that moment—their weakness, their cowardice, and the way they looked at him and then to the north, in the opposite direction of the battle they still had to fight.

“Lord Boneclaw,” Stormwing whimpered. “Thank goodness you’re here. Did you manage to convince the rest of the Council that this war would not be as easy as Diamontus told us?”

The Masked One sighed. He was faced with a decision. The persona of Lord Boneclaw had served him well for years. It had given him vast riches and significant power. Through secret cunning, it had precipitated this war but it could no longer serve him effectively. That dragon was a dealmaker, more intent on keeping all parties happy than accomplishing any of his own goals. Lord Boneclaw—at least the one all these dragons knew—was not the kind of dragon to lead a force into war.

And yet he had no other option. He wasn’t about to transform into his human form and put a human skull on—as much as he’d like to—and it would accomplish nothing even if he did. But he couldn’t let Boneclaw continue to be the weak-spined persona he had always been.

Ah well, he thought, in war, sacrifices must be made.

“The Council has not surrendered to the Steel Dragon yet,” he said and let strength underpin the normally quiet tones of his public persona. “They are shocked, as am I, that Diamontus was defeated, but they are resolute in what must be done. If we retreat now, the Steel Dragon will only be emboldened. People may even believe her and her arrogant message of policing dragon kind. We cannot allow this.”

“But the Council—”

“I am the Council now,” The Masked One said and drew looks from many of the dragons. “And I—like them—do not think we should let the death of our brothers and sisters go without punishment.”

“But, sir, they tore us to pieces.”

“We will not attack them in the same formation. We know better than that. Instead, we will flank them and torch her beloved Motor City.”

“But why?”

“Because that is her weakness. She cares for humans as if they were something more than the cattle and servants they are. We will twist this against her and force her to see the error in her beliefs or cling to it even to her death.”

“But we have fewer numbers than we had for the initial assault.”

He smiled at that. “For the time being, this is true. But the Steel Dragon is not the only one who called for aid. Come. Time is of the essence. We must join them in battle. Some of us will die, but when our brothers and sisters arrive in numbers that haven’t been seen since the Second Mage War, we will crush them like the insects they are.”

At the promise of reinforcements, the dragons cheered.

Not one to lose momentum, the Masked One leapt skyward, roared in rage, and bellowed for the dragons to follow him. They rose as one and torched the forests of Michigan as they passed.

Led by their new leader, they glided over Lake Huron so no human bases would see them coming. When they were ten minutes out, he sent half his forces over land to catch the Steel Dragon and her team in a pincer strike. He wanted the battle to take place over the city. He knew that she and her team of peasant-obsessed morons would try to protect the people instead of focusing on what needed to be done.

Truly, this would have been enough of a reason to battle over the metropolis, but a ball of joy also grew in his stomach at the thought. The idea of torching her beloved city sounded utterly delightful to him. He would turn Detroit to ash to bring him pleasure and her grief. It would be resplendent.

They were close and in only a couple of minutes, it would be theirs. How quiet it looked, waiting there in the sunshine as if this were simply another day. The Steel Dragon had done well to lure the last attackers out over the lake. It had given her city a few precious hours of existence.

No longer, he thought smugly. In another few minutes, the Masked One would level it to the ground. A few hours from now, he would build his throne atop the wreckage.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dragon break formation from one of the smaller wings he’d put them into. The daft creature simply dove and speared directly toward the water.

“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.

The diving dragon tilted in the air. He didn’t seem to be conscious.

“Sir?”

“Get him,” he ordered and two dragons hastened to obey.

The rescuers streaked after him and caught up easily. They were flying, after all, not plummeting as this one seemed to be and they caught him before he struck the surface of the water.

“And?” the Masked One demanded.

“He’s dead!” The dragon sounded panicked.

“Spread out and remain calm,” their leader said and scanned the horizon. Could the Steel Dragon have placed defenders at the top of the buildings? It was possible, but he’d seen no flash of light to indicate a sniper attack. He saw nothing and no indication that they faced an ambush.

Another dragon fell from the sky.

“The mages are attacking!” a dragon shouted.

A third screamed in pain and yanked his leg up. It had a hole in it.

“Those are dragon bullets, you fools! Not mages. They’re firing at us with long-range weapons.” The Masked One was frustrated that these dragons continued to underplay the threat of the dragon bullets. Admittedly, this was because he had hidden their existence for decades and downplayed their significance even after the Steel Dragon had finally exposed them to the eyes of the world. That deception would cost lives today but not his.

“It’s the Steel Dragon’s human warriors. Where are they?”

A screech answered his question as a storm of dragon bullets rained on them from above.

He had time to look up barely in time to see the Steel Dragon’s fighters dive out of the sky. They had hidden in the blinding light of the sun and now savaged through his ranks.

The battle for Detroit had begun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Kristen had guessed that the Masked One had no idea what a kingfisher was and she was right. It shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise that a dragon of shadow didn’t think about how someone could use the sun to attack, but it still felt great for a plan to work.

Already, her fighters had eliminated more than ten of the enemy dragons. One advantage of the dragon bullets was that they hurt like hell and—once buried in the flesh of a dragon—limited both their healing and dragon capabilities. This meant that even shots that didn’t kill effectively disabled them from active combat.

That was good. While they were attacking Detroit, she wanted to kill as few as possible.

But the time for battle tactics was over. Lord Boneclaw swooped directly at her.

He roared as he approached and lashed out with bony claws and tail. Jim and one of the soldiers he’d brought—a woman good with a sniper rifle who went by the name Nines—were on Kristen’s back, and they fired a volley at the old dragon.

With incredible speed, he spun as the bullets came at him and turned the part of his body that was shaded by the top half into shadow. It became a spinning torpedo of dragon and dark mist that tried to strike at her.

But Amy was on her back too. When he tried to swipe across her chest, the mage threw him back. He bellowed in frustration as he and Kristen both circled for another pass.

They closed the distance between them and both exhaled a great blast of flame. In this, she had the disadvantage because although her steel skin was impervious to most dragon fire, the humans on her back were not. She had to twist to keep them safe.

Lord Boneclaw banked into yet another onslaught and she did the same, marveling at how obvious it was now that he and the Masked One were one and the same. His bony claws had struck at her deep in the cave and the same skeletal tail had delivered almost lethal blows. Now that she knew his dual identity, she felt a fool for not realizing it sooner. Right now, though, there was nothing left to do but defeat him and end this war.

They exchanged breaths of fire again. This time, Jim and Nines fired at the Masked One and ruined his attack.

He roared at them, or so Kristen thought, until she saw clouds begin build in the sky. Another dragon lurked there, one with the ability to control weather.

“Katrina! Get rid of that dragon!” she yelled.

The unseen adversary was summoning a thunderstorm but she wasn’t worried about fighting in rain. It was the huge, fluffy clouds condensing into existence that terrified her.

As soon as a shadow fell over the Masked One, he vanished into mist.

He reappeared above her and gutted Nines. The top half of her simply fell away, while her legs and waist remained tethered to her back.

“Amy!” she shouted.

“When he takes that mist form, I can’t do shit to him,” the mage responded.

The sound of Jim’s gun firing said he was experiencing the same thing.

Kristen streaked toward a patch of sun. Her opponent harried her and effortlessly evaded Amy and Jim’s attacks. She looked up, hoping to see the Iron Dragon defeat the dragon causing the storm-clouds, but a group of four dragons flew interference. Even with her formidable combat prowess, Katrina wasn’t able to stop the clouds from forming.

With only a few clouds, the Steel Dragon and the humans on her back were outmatched. Her enemy had his shadow abilities, which meant he was impossible to strike. She surveyed the battle quickly and wondered if it was as desperate as the duel she was currently engaged in.

To her pleasant surprise, it wasn’t. Her people were winning. Their initial attack had rattled whatever confidence the Masked One had managed to instill in his forces. Her people were fighting with everything they had, while his were merely trying to stay in the air.

It meant that all she needed to do was buy them time and the battle would be won.

She reached the patch of sun and turned to attack, but she no longer tried to land strikes. It was impossible given the cloud cover, and very soon, some of her dragons would finish their battles and join her. No matter how strong the old dragon was, he wouldn’t be able to stand against a force of five, or ten, or twenty dragons.

“You’re not fighting as well as you were,” he teased. “You’re fighting like you’re only prolonging the end of your life.”

“Actually, I’m prolonging yours. You’ve lost this battle, Lord Boneclaw—or should I say the Masked One. You may not know it yet, but your forces and my forces do.”

To her dismay, he merely laughed. “Oh, you sweet, silly little girl. Did you really think I would use the force of dragons you’d already bested to defeat you?”

She made no response and only unleashed another wave of fire that he dodged by turning to shadow. “Surrender now and we’ll start building a prison cell for you instead of a grave.”

“There is no prison that could hold me,” the Masked One said. “And the only grave that needs to be dug is yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look.” He pulled back from his attack and pointed to the west. Faint specks in the distance grew slowly in size as they flew closer.

“We can handle more dragons,” she snapped in response. “Your forces are almost gone.”

“But you didn’t look in both directions,” Boneclaw said and pointed to the east.

Kristen turned and saw more of the same specs on the horizon. Her earpiece buzzed and she answered immediately.

Brian began to speak. “We have radar picking up two more sets of dragons approaching fast. We’re talking minutes, Kristen. They must have dodged a number of the military bases or something.”

“How many dragons?”

He drew a sharp breath. “Each force looks twice the size of the first one we fought. We’re talking close to five hundred dragons.”

“Ah, very good,” the Masked One commented in his habitual oily tone. “Did one of your little humans tell you what will happen via telephone? You see, I willingly entered your trap because I had laid one of my own. Now, I will end this little rebellion of yours and return to wiping the human pestilence from the planet.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Amy! Get us some separation!” Kristen ordered and the mage obeyed.

Rather than confront the Masked One directly, the girl created a blast of wind that cleared the sky above them. He retreated to the edge of the circle of light, still laughing with thinly veiled triumph.

“Couldn’t you have done this sooner?” Jim demanded.

“That dragon’s powers are made for this. Mine aren’t!” Amy replied. “He keeps making clouds appear even where I blow wind. I can get us a minute maybe.”

Kristen used the time to survey the battlefield again.

It wasn’t good.

Now that she knew the enemy had reinforcements, it was clear that his troops weren’t retreating but instead, leading her warriors ever closer to the city. The intention wasn’t only to defeat them but to destroy Detroit itself.

And there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She hoped the people of her city had all found somewhere safe. Even dragons couldn’t incinerate more than the top foot of the soil. Maybe the people of Detroit could survive this if they were deep enough underground.

She was about to order a retreat to her base. It was the only option, as shitty as it was, because at least that way, they could control the areas of destruction. Unless, of course, the Masked One let them get under cover and simply unleashed his dragons upon Detroit.

There’s no other choice, she thought when Brian yelled in her ear.

“Holy shit, Kristen. You are not going to believe this.”

“What now?” she asked in disbelief. The force of dragons that approached was already enough to slaughter her team. What more did the enemy need? Given her luck as of late, a nuclear strike didn’t seem unreasonable.

“Hold on a sec. Let me patch someone through.”

While Kristen was still waiting for the static of the connection to resolve into a voice, a flight of fighter jets punched through the clouds the dragon was forming. In an instant, they opened fire. Her heart dropped with the realization that her warriors were in no position to fight the US Air Force.

In the next moment, a voice came through and she realized that maybe she wouldn’t have to.

It was General Samuel “Sammy” Peralt. “I saw your broadcast, Steel Dragon. We hope we’re not too late to join the action?”

She watched in amazement, unable to immediately respond as the fighter jets targeted the Masked One’s dragons. They didn’t have dragon bullets but they had big fucking guns and more than enough ammunition. Dragons tumbled with each fusillade.

“Sammy? How is this possible?”

“We saw your broadcast. I’m putting my entire fighter wing at your disposal for the duration of this crisis. Your tech guy, Zed, has already patched us through to your radio and dropped markers on all your dragons. My pilots won’t target them, not if they don’t want to scrub toilets for a month.”

“What are you doing in a cockpit?” she asked as the jets began to turn the tide of the battle.

He laughed loud and hard. “Are you serious? I wouldn’t miss this for anything. It will go down as the most important battle in generations. The big boys might name an aircraft carrier after me.”

Although she still hadn’t completely processed her good fortune, Kristen gave orders all the same. “Can you divide your fighters and harry the two incoming attack forces? Don’t get too close as dragon fire will wreck your aircraft and pilots and we’ll need them.”

“Yes, ma’am!” he responded, and his jets pulled up and separated into two wings to engage the approaching swarms of dragons.

“You might have made this battle less decisive!” the Masked One roared, “but I will still have my victory. If we lose a few dragons, that will only further my cause. Every death today will inspire a hundred more dragons to rain fire on mankind.”

But Peralt wasn’t the only one who heard Kristen’s call.

On the grounds of her base below, a portal blazed to life.

Constance held it open while mages poured through it. These didn’t look like the battle-hardened assassins she had trained in her cells, but given the sheer numbers arriving, that might not matter.

As the mages emerged, Larry showed them how to make defensive barriers. A massive sphere of shimmering blue energy already protected the base and continued to grow. It expanded even more as another portal opened, followed by a third. Mages streamed through them, adding whatever power they had to the barrier, and the entire city was soon under the protective shield. The call for aid had worked.

“This means nothing!” the Masked One roared. “This will only strengthen our cause. We will be forged in battle and come out stronger—”

“Like steel?” she quipped.

He snarled and tried to attack, but Jim blasted a few rounds at him and Amy put a shield up to keep him at bay.

Kristen was ready to push her attack and finish this entire battle. She surged toward him and he turned to face her, and for the first time, she saw fear in his eyes.

She looked to the south and saw a wing of dragons approaching. These, however, didn’t fly in any formation. They mostly looked younger, but she saw a few of the older dragons she’d helped along the way. Some of the Midwestern dragons she’d saved from being blown up so long before were there to fulfill their debt.

“Lord Boneclaw!” Decimus Aurelius bellowed and she had wondered why he hadn’t been at the Dragon Council meeting on the island in Canada. “End this violence now. This is not the war you asked us to vote for. You spoke of swift victory and compromise, not a slaughter on both sides.”

The Masked One roared in fury. He dove at Kristen but Amy hurled him back again with her magic.

The clouds broke and Kristen looked up. Katrina had finally managed to knock the storm dragon out of the sky.

“No matter! We will still end this. Together, my dragons. We fight together and end this.”

Kristen didn’t even have to give an order. Her dragons and the humans mounted on their backs swooped through the middle of the swarm of dragons who tried to assemble over Detroit. The humans aimed to wound and mages disabled dragons by striking their wings or removing air from around their heads. The enemy force crumbled and broke into dozens of little clusters as many injured dragons fell Earthward.

“Curse you, Steel Bitch!” the Masked One roared, but he turned toward the north where he’d come from, and his forces followed.

She had won the battle but she knew he would strike again. That was fine with her. She knew full well a reckoning would come. Next time, she’d be ready for him.

But not today. They’d already lost so many lives. She had to pay her respects and welcome all those who had made their victory possible.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The raucous cheers of thousands of different people greeted Kristen when she landed in front of her base.

And different didn’t begin to describe everyone who was there. Ancient dragons mingled with those so young their human forms had yet to grow facial hair. There were mages of every stripe including old spinsters who’d hid their powers from all except those who ate their cookies and powerful mages who had convinced their dragon masters to come with them. A hundred languages could be heard and a thousand skin tones could be seen.

As she moved through the crowd, thanking leaders of various forces and clasping hands with the people crazy enough to come to help, she knew this fragile peace could not hold. She’d let the Masked One go because she knew how hard it was to pursue a dragon into the dark. But she knew he wouldn’t stop, not when confronted with a group of such diversity. The army around her was the antithesis of a dragon-controlled world, a democratic power structure in which everyone looked out for each other instead of those at the top only looking out for how they could rise even higher.

After hundreds of handshakes and thousands of congratulations, Peralt arrived via helicopter.

“I had the boys wait at the planes, just in case, but I had to be here.”

“I’m glad you came. I don’t think we would have lasted another minute without you back there,” she said.

“I’m glad to help. And honestly, it was my duty. In this case, the interests of the USA and your force aligned perfectly.”

“Well, thank you for serving your country,” she said.

“You’re welcome, but that wasn’t the only reason. I came because I personally believe in what you are trying to accomplish. That’s what got me into a cockpit. You’re right. Humans and dragons can wipe each other out or they can learn to coexist. But any coexistence at this point needs to be built on mutual respect. The days when humans were willing to sit under dragons’ claws are past, at this point. Especially now that humans have seen how effective their weapons can be against dragons.” He couldn’t help but grin with his last statement.

Not that she could blame him. This was the first time in history that an air force had ever fought against dragons. Even without dragon bullets, they’d proven themselves to be hugely formidable against the massive airborne warriors. No one would forget that. It would be like forgetting a new continent.

“The problem with mutual respect is that it has to be enforced,” Kristen said with a sigh. “It’s all well and good to say we’ll play nice, but the fact is that not everyone always will. That’s when we’ll need a police force that can hold all beings accountable. We’ll need a fighting force strong enough to deal with the criminals, be they human, mage, dragon, dwarf, or whatever.”

“It’s a good thing we have one in front of us,” he said and gestured at the diverse crowd. “Your force is the perfect nucleus for that. Look at what you’ve done. I never thought I’d see mages, humans, and dragons gather around a common cause, let alone with people from what looks like every damn country on Earth. How often does that happen? I’d say about never.” He winked and the gesture reminded her that he was usually called Sammy.

“I think we can make this more than a one-time thing,” Constance said when she approached with the magical scroll where she and Kristen’s people had signed their names in service to the cause of stopping warfare between the races. She handed it to the Steel Dragon. “I think it’s time to add more names.”

“No,” Kristen said and studied the huge crowd of people at her base. “I couldn’t ask that of all these people. They already risked their lives once.”

“Living is a risk,” the technomage said. “These people came because they believe in you and what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s time to turn this simple scroll into an oath that your new organization will follow—a code that demands equality and justice for all sentients on Earth. This can be the blueprint for a way forward. I know it won’t be perfect or easy, but…this is what I didn’t know I was fighting for all these years. This is the way.”

After a moment’s thought, she nodded and took the scroll. Nervous but determined, she stood before the entire crowd.

Immediately, a hush fell over those assembled.

She cleared her throat. While she was used to speaking to cameras, the crowd was huge—easily thousands, she thought shakily.

“Thank you all for coming. Without you, today would have been one of the darkest in human or dragon history. Because of you, it’s a day of celebration.”

A riotous cheer rose from the crowd. It was the sound of survival, one that could only be made by those who had faced their deaths head-on and ran willingly into that danger.

“But our history doesn’t end today,” she continued when the applause died down. “We need to forge a path forward and I will need your help. I want to ask if any of you here will read the oath on this scroll and sign your name—not to me or for me, but for each other. Together, we can usher in a new dawn. A time of justice for all!”

An enthusiastic chorus of agreement rang from the crowd.

Kristen nodded and thanked them all. In that moment, she realized that although she had never wanted an army, she had one now.

She dared the Masked One to try to do something about it.

THE STORY CONTINUES

The story continues with book fourteen: The Battle of Dragons, coming soon to Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

BOOKS BY KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN

Realms of Power and Fury

Discovering Power (Book 1)

Finding Honor (Book 2)

Field of Valor (Book 3)

Tomb of Malevolent Evil

Roll For Initiative (Book 1)

Cast of the Die (Book 2)

Natural Twenty (Book 3)

Steel Dragon Series

(with Michael Anderle)

Steel Dragon 1

Steel Dragon 2

Steel Dragon 3

Steel Dragon 4

Steel Dragon 5

Dragon’s Daughter

(with Michael Anderle)

Never A Dragon (Book 1)

Dead Dragon New tricks (Book 2)

Thicker Than Blood (Book 3)

Dragon Fire and Pixie Dust (Book 4)

The Cult of Tiamat (Book 5)

The Sum of All Magic (Book 6)

The Dragonclaw Sword

(with Michael Anderle)

Clawing for Survival

Clawing for Escape

Clawing for Honor

Clawing for Vengeance

Clawing for Battle

Clawing for Victory

Adventures of the Starship Satori (Space Opera blended with military SF)

Finding Satori - prequel short story, available only to email list fans!

Book 1 - Ad Astra: Book 2 - Stellar Legacy

Book 3 - Deep Waters

Book 4 - No Plan Survives Contact

Book 5 - Liberty

Book 6 - Satori’s Destiny

Book 7 - Ashes of War

Book 8 - Embers of War

Book 9 - Dust and Iron

Book 10 - Clad in Steel

Book 11 - Brave New Worlds (2019)

Book 12 - Warrior’s Marque (2020)

The Ragnarok Saga (Military SF)

Accord of Fire - Free prequel short story, available only to email list fans!

Book 1 - Accord of Honor

Book 2 - Accord of Mars

Book 3 - Accord of Valor

Book 4 - Ghost Wing

Book 5 - Ghost Squadron

Book 6 - Ghost Fleet (2019)

Valhalla Online Series (A Ragnarok Saga Story)

Book 1 - Valhalla Online

Book 2 - Raiding Jotunheim

Book 3 - Vengeance Over Vanaheim

Book 4 - Hel Hath No Fury

Blackwell Magic Series (Urban Fantasy)

Book 1 - By Darkness Revealed

Book 2 - Ashes Ascendant

Book 3 - Dead In Winter

Book 4 - Claws That Catch

Book 5 - Darkness Awakes

Book 6 - Spellbinding Entanglements

By A Whisker (short story)

The Raven and the Rose - Free novelette for email list fans!

Dead Brittania Series:

Dead Brittania (short prequel story)

Book 1 - King of the Dead

Book 2 - Queen of Demons

Raven’s Heart Series (Urban Fantasy)

Book 1 - Stolen Light

Book 2 - Webs in the Dark

Book 3 - Shades of Moonlight

Other Titles:

Over the Moon (SF romance)

Midnight Visitors (Steampunk Cat short story)

Demon Ex Machina (Steampunk Cat short story)

The Coffee Break Novelist (help for writers!)

You Must Write (Heinlein’s rules for writers)

BOOKS BY MICHAEL ANDERLE

Sign up for the LMBPN email list to be notified of new releases and special deals!

https://lmbpn.com/email/

For a complete list of books by Michael Anderle, please visit:

www.lmbpn.com/ma-books/

CONNECT WITH THE AUTHORS

Connect with Kevin McLaughlin

Website: http://kevinomclaughlin.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kevins.studio

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KOMcLaughlin

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kevins.studio/

Connect with Michael Anderle

Website: http://lmbpn.com

Email List: http://lmbpn.com/email/

https://www.facebook.com/LMBPNPublishing

https://twitter.com/MichaelAnderle

https://www.instagram.com/lmbpn_publishing/

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/michael-anderle