THE BATTLE OF DRAGONS

STEEL DRAGON™ BOOK FOURTEEN

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

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Version 1.00, May 2022

Previously Published as part of the megabook Steel Dragon 5

eBook ISBN: 979-8-88541-631-3

Print ISBN: 979-8-88541-632-0

THE THE BATTLE OF DRAGONS 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

Kristen Hall couldn’t believe it had been a week since a force of hundreds of dragons had attacked Detroit. It felt like it had happened only minutes before and at the same time, like months had passed. The city was still scarred from the battle—hurling dragons from the sky had consequences. And yet, after everything the Motor City had been through since she had discovered she was a dragon with the awe-inspiring power to turn her skin to steel, the people there were as quick as ever to get back to normal.

Even her base of operations reflected this strange dichotomy of time. On the one hand, it seemed like they were preparing for battle more than they had before. Her numbers had been hugely bolstered by new volunteers. In her moment of greatest need, she had called for help and people had answered.

Mages, dragons, and human soldiers who were able to hitch a magic ride to the battle had all come to her aid, and more than half of them had remained as part of her self-proclaimed peacekeeping mission. The new—and well-paid—volunteers were being trained by members of her old team. After all, humans, dragons, and mages had never shared a battlefield before—at least not all on the same side—and she knew it took considerable adjustment to think of a dragon’s fire and a mage’s innumerable abilities as part of one’s arsenal.

Most of the other half of her old force was on ready alert status, watching for anything that might break the fragile peace. She had won the last battle against Boneclaw and his massive force of dragons because her ancient adversary had decided to retreat. Of course, she knew he had only done this to better prepare for his next assault. And if she were in his shoes, she would attack within the next forty-eight hours.

And yet, despite the weight of this unseen, unsensed strike she was all but certain would come from her most dangerous enemy, she was busy arranging folding chairs.

“And you’re sure there should be three sections?” Butters asked and rubbed his big belly at the prospect of moving the chairs he’d spent time arranging meticulously. “I think everyone seated together might make the most sense.”

“I disagree, Lady Steel,” Timeflash said. “Two sections is the most logical. One area for dragons and one for humans.”

“No,” Kristen was steadfast. “Three sections for three groups. Mages do not see themselves as belonging to dragons, and their needs are different than regular humans. They are their own power-block, and they deserve their own seat at the negotiations table.”

“Well, can we at least get one of them to rearrange the furniture?” the sniper whined. “Amy or Larry could do it in less than a minute.”

She smiled at him and shook her head. “Sometimes, I wonder if you’re a sniper because it’s the only job where you get to sit still and snack.”

“I’m a sniper because my eyes are as good as any dragon’s and my aim is even better.” He winked. “But I wouldn’t have signed up for the job if I knew decorating was part of the responsibilities.”

“I like redecorating,” Timeflash said and looked around the ground floor of the base. They had transformed it in the week since the battle. The old warehouse had already gone through changes in its long life, from bustling factory to warehouse to dilapidated property, and finally, to the base of operations for Kristen and her team of mages, dragons, and humans. Now, it had to serve as an elegant yet approachable space where peace talks could be held in two days.

Before, the ground floor had been filled with gear, sleeping nooks, surveillance equipment, and an over-used kitchenette. They’d transformed most of it into a large meeting room complete with black drapes for walls and large potted plants Timeflash had insisted on—“Nothing says care and compassion like caring for plants,” she’d said. A few smaller rooms had also been partitioned off from the large open floor to create private meeting chambers for each delegation.

Sleeping chambers were set up too, as everyone seemed to anticipate a need for security although of course, everyone thought the threat would come from different sides.

It had been frustrating for Kristen to have to devote so much of her time to this part of the operation. She would have preferred to be outside training the recruits, but she’d been needed there. Everyone else constantly displayed bias toward one group or another. She had been the only one who seemed capable of thinking about all sides, which meant that while her team prepared for war, she was inside rearranging chairs.

“Kristen, we have visitors,” her brother Brian said into her earpiece.

“Do they look important?”

“Uh…yes?” he said. “Certainly unique. I’d…well, I think you need to receive them.”

“Have someone escort them in.” She sighed. There had been visitors all week. Dragons had arrived to highlight points they thought she needed to hear. Mages thanked her or cursed her. Humans tried to get a selfie or sell them security systems more suited to the suburbs than a base like this.

A minute later, there came a sharp knock on the door. She went to answer it and both plastered a smile on her face and filled her dragon aura with confidence.

When she opened it, however, no one was there. She looked left and right but saw no one.

“Excuse me, miss?” said a voice from below her navel.

She looked down to see two burly men with massive beards and extremely bright clothing in far too many colors.

“How can I help you?”

“We’re an official delegation from Canada and we demand to see the Steel Dragon.”

CHAPTER TWO

The two short, burly, bearded men were dwarves from Canada, she realized somewhat belatedly. Their hats and facial piercings should have given them away. When Kristen had gone to Canada, all the dwarves had looked like these two. Well, not quite like them. The members of the deputation were extensively pierced and their hats especially vibrant.

“How may I help you?” she asked.

“Well, we’ve walked all the way across the bridge. We’d love something to drink for starters,” the first said huffily.

“But what we need most is to speak to Kristen Hall, the Steel Dragon,” the other said.

She forced her fake smile to grow even wider. “I am Kristen Hall,” she said as sweetly as she could.

“I told you she was the Steel Dragon,” the first said and clobbered the other across the head with such force that his feet cracked the concrete they were standing on.

“You did not, Barmus!” The dwarf rubbed his head. It was a reminder of how strong they were. He had been struck hard enough to crack cement and he hardly seemed hurt. “You said she was a young woman with red hair, piercing eyes, an ample bosom, and…oh…oh yeah, I guess you did.”

“Forgive Rupert, my lady,” Barmus said and bowed so low his beard touched the ground. “We dwarves have not had to serve as ambassadors for years. Rupert is considered quite the socialite, but I will banish him to Canada if you so desire—”

“No!” Kristen interjected, not wanting anyone, least of all an ambassador, banished on her account. “Please, Barmus, Rupert, come inside. May I offer you something to drink? We have tea, coffee, or perhaps something stronger?” She hadn’t meant to offer them alcohol, but with everything going on, she thought a pint of beer sounded amazing right now.

It was a disappointment when Barmus asked for coffee.

She led the ambassadors to one of the smaller meeting rooms they’d set up. The three of them sat and the dwarves both removed their vibrant knitted hats before they clambered into the human-sized chairs.

“Forgive me. If you’d like something more your…uh, height, I’m sure I can find beanbags or something.” She felt like she had already ruined this, but ambassadorship was yet another new skill for her to hone on the fly.

“No, no, no, these are fine,” Barmus said. “You honor us with such offers.”

“We merely wish you’d been so generous when designing these peace talks!” Rupert stated sharply.

A little confused, she was about to ask what exactly he was talking about given that the conference hadn’t even begun. At that moment, Timeflash entered with a tray loaded with a pitcher of coffee, mugs, and appropriate accouterments.

The visitors busied themselves fixing their coffees with more sugar than she thought was strictly healthy. She drank it black and hoped the caffeine would help her brain make sense of this bizarre situation. The dwarves sipped their coffee contentedly, then returned their attention to her.

“I must say, the caliber of this coffee only makes me fear that Rupert was indeed right,” Barmus began.

“What’s wrong with the coffee?” she asked as she thought it was perfect. It always was when Timeflash fixed it.

“A dragon brought it to you unless my nose is mistaken,” Rupert said.

“Yes, and?” she prompted, hoping she didn’t come across as rude.

“And dragons don’t do anything for humans!” he countered. “This is exactly why we came. We heard about these peace talks through our sources, yet we never received an invitation.”

“And you want to come…for the coffee?” she asked hesitantly.

“No!” Barmus said while Rupert said, “Yes!” at the same time.

“We want to be here to broker peace,” Barmus said and cast a glare at the other dwarf.

“Especially now that we see you truly have dragons treating you as equals,” Rupert added.

“Oh, I’m sorry, of course,” she said and finally grasped what the hell was going on. “I had simply assumed that since no dwarves were part of the war, there wasn’t a need to have you here for the peace talks.”

“See? Is that not what I told you?” Barmus said and struck his companion so hard that he tumbled backward out of his chair.

“Honestly, there’s no need to—” Kristen tried to say before they both waved her off.

Despite being knocked about, Rupert was finally smiling. “Forgive me, Lady Hall. I made false assumptions and made a—what do you humans say?—butt of myself.”

She wisely decided not to call him an ass as the phrase dictated.

Barmus stood and bowed cordially. “We feel it is important for a delegation of dwarves to be present. We have a sense that these talks may create a new order in the world. The balance of power is already shifting, and we would prefer to be a part of that shift than be left out of it.”

“Of course. It makes perfect sense.” She understood entirely. “I apologize for not reaching out to you myself. You will be affected by these changes as much as any other group, even if you do choose to remain neutral most of the time.”

“And we wish to remain neutral,” the lead ambassador was quick to point out. “We merely wish to have our voices heard and to know what exactly the terms are you all agree to.”

“That makes perfect sense to me,” she said. “In fact, you being here will make it even more likely that all sides agree to whatever we decide here. As you know, I was raised as a human but am now a dragon investigator and in both societies, dwarves such as yourselves are highly respected. We’d be honored to have your delegation present.”

“You honor us, Lady Hall, you truly do,” Barmus said. “Now, as for food, we like meat as much as any dragon and bread more than humans. We’ll bring what we can of those and some to share, but we’d appreciate you providing beverages and vegetables from the south for our hundred most esteemed dwarves.”

“I’m sorry, a hundred?”

“We dwarves like to make these decisions in what’s called a century,” he said and his bushy eyebrows knitted together.

“You are more than welcome to come and we will provide you with food and beverages, of course, but every other delegation will only have twelve members. In the interests of equality, I’d ask you dwarves to bring the same number. My team will provide security for the event as well as work as mediators. Our hope is that new laws and peace treaties can come out of this meeting. Maybe a new and better future for everyone. If you’re a part of it as well, maybe we truly can usher in a new era of global peace.”

The two shared a look that seemed to say they thought it quite impossible that so few individuals could work anything out, but after a few twitches of their mustaches, they turned back to her.

“That will be…acceptable,” Barmus said. “Although we’d like to say that we think an era of peace may be overly optimistic. We hope that a Great War can be averted, but the thought of laws for peaceful coexistence that humans, dragons, and dwarves can all agree to is somewhat…optimistic.”

“Humans, dragons, dwarves, and mages,” Kristen said. “They will have their own delegation.”

The ambassadors glanced at one another but this time, they turned their attention to her much more quickly. “Of course, that makes sense,” Barmus said. “A Great War would be bad for everyone, even us and even if we are able to remain neutral. To truly avoid such a calamity, mages must agree to it as well as anyone else. It would be difficult to choose sides between the mages and the dragons.”

“Difficult?” she inquired. “But not impossible?”

Their shared look seemed to be a private conversation that she witnessed but wasn’t a part of.

“We would not wish to hurt the mages,” Rupert said. “We’ve given mages succor in their times of need and many of them have become part of our society.”

A good sign, Kristen thought, until Barmus spoke. “But we would never fight against the dragons. Even with our flame-resistant skin and dwarf strength, to fight the dragons would be folly. If they didn’t kill us all, they would surely destroy our way of life. No. We would not join sides in this, which means all sides would lose.”

“Okay.” She nodded, disappointed that she had no idea which way the dwarves would go and annoyed that her position as self-appointed peacekeeper didn’t sway the neutral dwarves to simply side with her. “Your delegation of twelve dwarves needs to be here in two days. We’re very honored that you will be here, and I apologize once more for not inviting you sooner.”

“Please, you’ve honored us enough,” Barmus said. “We’ll be here on time.”

“Seriously,” Rupert added. “We will wear our luckiest duds to attract the luck we will need if we are to truly build a peace that might last. For everyone’s sake.”

CHAPTER THREE

The dwarves left as abruptly as they had arrived. Kristen instructed Brian to track them with some of his aerial drones. They left as they said they would by walking across the bridge that linked Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Before she could return to the task of rearranging the already rearranged chairs, she saw Constance approach her.

“That was a dwarf delegation,” the technomage said. It almost sounded like it was intended to be a question, but it wasn’t. And why would it be? The woman knew the dwarves better than she ever had.

“It was,” she admitted. “They want to be part of the talks.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes. I think it will give whatever agreement we come to more weight since the dwarves are neutral. I wish I had thought of inviting them sooner, but at least we’ll have an impartial party.”

“I hope the dragons see it that way too,” Constance replied.

She raised an eyebrow at the former leader of the technomages. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m merely glad they’re coming.” The woman shrugged. “The dwarves have been stalwart allies of the mages for centuries.”

“Do you think so? I thought you led your groups into action because of how the dragons were treating the mages. The dwarves never intervened.”

“They’re not stupid. They know they can’t attack dragons directly. Their veneer of neutrality has served them well, but they’ve also made a habit of taking in refugee mages fleeing dragon cruelty. That makes them both friendly and wise, in my mind at least. Like I said, I hope the dragons see them as a neutral party.”

“Even if you see them as allies, I won’t let anyone agree to any rules that don’t govern everyone. I won’t let you convince the dwarves to ally with the mages against the dragons.”

Constance looked cross at the accusation. “My goal has always been equality. Nothing more and nothing less. I’m only glad the dwarves are coming because they’ll be interested in the same goal.”

Kristen wanted to say more but she saw Stonequest and Drew hurrying toward them. “What is going on? You’re supposed to be training the new mages with those two.” She pointed at the former leaders of Dragon and Detroit’s SWAT teams.

“It’s lunch.” The technomage smiled as if she’d outsmarted the Steel Dragon on the battlefield.

Drew and Stonequest each had a box filled with sandwiches, chips, pickles, and a cookie. The restaurants that did lunch catering had made out like bandits in the last week as she had hired so many more people. It was easier and more efficient for the training sessions to simply feed them instead of leaving everyone to their own devices. The downside was that she hadn’t been able to enjoy a meal by herself for a week.

“Hi, boys, what can I do for you?” she asked. It seemed to be her catchphrase these days.

“We came to talk security,” Stonequest said and handed a box of food to both women. A small marvel, she thought—a dragon as wise and prestigious as the leader of SWAT delivering lunch to a youngling like her and a former enemy mage. Things like that gave her hope. She assumed the dwarves had seen the same relationship around the coffee.

“That’s right,” Drew said around a mouthful of turkey sandwich.

“I had hoped that all this training had something to do with security,” she said before she began to all but inhale her nacho cheese-flavored chips.

“This meeting will attract some bad attention,” Stonequest stated matter of factly. “All sides of this, human, mage, and dragon—”

“And dwarf,” Kristen added.

“Wait, dwarves are coming?” he looked puzzled.

“They are now,” she confirmed before she crammed more chips into her mouth. “But only twelve. If anything, I think that will make us a bigger target. Having them here will help to hold everyone to whatever we agree to, but it also means there’s more incentive to disrupt the meeting.”

“But…won’t Lord Boneclaw be here?” Drew asked. “You said he’s the Masked One. How can he attack us if he’s here?”

“That’s if he arrives,” she clarified. “I don’t think he will. I think something will come up that prevents his arrival. That’s what I want to primarily be prepared for.”

“If that’s your concern, I don’t think we have to worry too much,” Stonequest said.

“You can’t underestimate him,” Constance said. “If this Lord Boneclaw is truly the Masked One.”

“He is,” Kristen insisted.

“I want to believe you. It was the Masked One who led my technomages by a hidden string, after all, but you’ve yet to present proof.”

“Regardless…” Stonequest cut her off. “Lumos has trained like a beast. Whoever the Masked One is, he possesses the ability to change into shadow. Lumos’ light powers are the perfect foil for that ability. If he attacks, we’ll be ready.”

“He won’t attack alone, though,” Drew said, his mouth still full of sandwich.

“Which is why I think we should pair every dragon with a mage,” Constance said smoothly.

“You merely want to keep tabs on my dragons because you don’t trust us,” Stonequest growled.

The woman didn’t object, which to Kristen was essentially a confession. Still, it was perfectly understandable.

“I want Amy on Lumos’ back. Together, they should be able to stop the Masked One. Stonequest, if you don’t trust the recruits, ask Larry to accompany you. Eric can ride Katrina as well. They work well together, and both signed the contract binding them to our cause. Beyond that, you can all work out the particulars but Constance is right. I want a mage on every dragon flying above the city. It’s a powerful combination and symbolic of what we’re trying to move toward.”

“Next, you’ll want a dwarf on our backs too,” Stonequest grumbled.

“They’re too brightly colored,” she said. “It makes them too big a target.”

Constance and Stonequest both laughed at that, at least, and it broke some of the ice that always formed between them.

“I also thought the mages could erect a shield barrier around the base to keep everyone out,” the woman said.

“We’ve talked about that before,” Drew interjected, his mouth finally empty of food. “But you said it would take too much power.”

“That was before,” Constance pointed. “Our most powerful mages should be on the backs of the dragons. The recruits won’t be ready for combat after only a week, but there are enough of them that we should be able to make a shield that can last for the entire meeting period.”

“There’s no way you can make a shield last two days!” Stonequest scoffed.

The technomage leader smiled coyly. “You do remember that it was my team, including me, that rediscovered the ability to open teleportation gates? I assure you, we can make a shield that strong with the new mages.”

“How strong would this shield be?” Drew asked. “Would our people be able to get in and out?”

“Not at all,” she said. “It would be as hard as stone until we break the casting or it runs out of energy. Because of that, we would need to wait until all the delegates are inside before we turn it on.”

“How long would it take to create?” Kristen asked.

“If you wish it to hold for the entire meeting, we should start it after lunch,” Constance said.

She nodded. While she didn’t much like the idea of being locked inside, it wasn’t like she would be alone. Besides, the delegations might be more willing to come to an agreement if they knew they couldn’t simply leave the table and refuse to negotiate.

“Talk to me about security inside if we create this dome,” she said.

“Sure. Honestly, it won’t be much different than if we don’t have the dome,” Drew said. “I expect there will be some hotheads in this meeting, especially if this asshole Lord Boneclaw comes. I’ll have two dozen of my best humans, plus a half-dozen dragons working security. Humans will be armed with dragon bullets as a precaution—something I think we should tell the dragons.”

“No way. That’ll end these debates before we even begin,” Stonequest protested.

“That’s the way of the world now,” Constance said. “You can’t put that technology back in the box.”

“Yeah, thanks to you,” the dragon retorted.

“What about security for the mages? Did we get cuffs?” Kristen asked and tried to keep the conversation on track.

“We did. Those we freed from that prison were all cuffed. We have way more than the dozen we might need for the delegation. Every one of my soldiers will be equipped with one.”

“A wise precaution given the mages’ history,” Stonequest said.

Constance thankfully didn’t argue the point.

“Your brother will be our eyes,” Drew continued. “He’s finished calibrating the newly installed radar. That won’t let anything slip past. He said it should pick up incoming dragons, missiles, planes, or anything else that could threaten the meeting. He told me to tell you…” He sighed and frowned as he tried to remember. “That he could detect a goose with a firecracker up its asshole if he needed to.”

Kristen nodded. That was a threat from her childhood. Her brother had always said he’d put a firecracker up the butts of the Canada geese that called Detroit home if they ever came after his sister. She had been terrified of the giant geese as a child, yet his threat had always calmed her. If he said that now, it meant his system was working perfectly.

“What about threats? Do we have any clues of who might want to crash our party?” she asked.

“Nothing yet. Brian and Keith have been working on that too. They’ve both scoured the Internet for any warning signs that someone could be plotting something. Neither one of them has turned up anything.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean no one’s planning an attack,” Constance said.

She nodded. That was true, but it was also good to know Brian and Keith hadn’t found anything suspicious. The two of them were both quite adept at shining light into the darkest corners of the Internet. It was a small comfort that they’d found nothing. Or, she reminded herself, nothing yet.

“All right then,” she said, having already devoured her sandwich. “It sounds like we’re doing all that we can to ensure a secure meeting. Hopefully, with this dome of yours, Constance, all our preparations will be enough. Which means all we have left to do is add another section of chairs for the dwarves.”

“Butters said Constance can do that with her magic,” Drew said quickly.

The technomage smiled tightly. “I have combat powers and the ability to control the wind. I can’t exactly blow the chairs into place.”

Kristen smiled and clapped. “It’s lucky I have all of you to help me do this the old-fashioned way.”

From the expressions on everyone’s faces, she might as well have asked them all to put a gun to their heads.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Masked One had lost so many of his favorite toys.

Constance Vigil had been taken from him after years of following his orders without her knowledge.

Katrina, the Iron Dragon, had been taken, even though he had personally argued for her to be created. She was like a daughter to him, a beast of power and destruction, and now, she’d sworn to destroy him.

Diamontus had been killed by a pathetic excuse for a dragon. He’d simply been a common green with no powers who the diamond-crusted dragon should have been able to crush like the insect he was.

Obscura and Shadowstorm had been defeated long before. Those two—despite being gone longer than the rest—might have stung the most as they shared blood with him.

Even his alter ego as Lord Boneclaw was in jeopardy of being destroyed.

All of them had been lost because of the Steel Dragon.

Merely the thought of her filled him with rage. He gestured for a human servant to come to him. The man, a strongly muscled, well-built fellow with the most amazing falsetto voice had the only thing that would calm his master.

The ancient dragon turned into shadow and used a clawed hand to peel the man’s skin from his skull in an effortless gesture. He let him bleed out, trying to enjoy the blood shed and the man’s high-pitched screams, but even this joy tasted of nothing but ash.

He harvested the man’s skull all the same, removed the one that hid the scarred face of Lord Boneclaw, and donned this fresh one. There was something comforting about the coppery smell of fresh blood and the sticky feel of it as it adhered to his head.

Now, finally, he could think!

The Steel Bitch hadn’t taken everything from him.

There was still Neal Havington, the leader of the technomage cell that had operated in Europe for so long before being forced to flee by the Steel Dragon. The Masked One had thought that he would lose this mage too, but he had not. Havington had refused to sign the Steel Dragon’s pathetic little contract and thus earned himself a voyage in the jail cell of a ship from an island in the south Pacific to North America. There, the Steel Dragon planned to put him on trial.

It was almost funny. Was that what she planned to do if she ever caught him? It was a delightfully quaint notion and one rife with opportunities to be exploited.

The first of which was that the boat they traveled on was painfully under-guarded. The Steel Bitch had massed all her forces in Detroit and left only enough people to steer the ship and care for the prisoners.

It was almost too easy to get inside.

The Masked One simply waited for nightfall, when his powers were at their zenith. He’d followed the ship’s passage via satellite for days, so he knew exactly where it was. While he couldn’t teleport like Constance could, he could move from shadow to shadow at the speed of the darkness, which was as fast as light. It meant that during the nighttime, he had free range of the skies as long as he didn’t move too close to the blinding lights of human cities.

But of course, there were no such distractions over the Pacific Ocean. Only a storm on the horizon and that too was his doing. He might have sprung Havington sooner had he not needed the ship to be as close as possible to the United States and the hidden source of the nearby storm to be ready and in position.

But all his preparations were in place now. The Masked One moved through the shadow of night until he was above the ship, then entered through a crack in a doorway so narrow that even a rat couldn’t have squeezed through.

He reappeared on the other side of the door, took the form of a human in a robe, and used his shadow powers to fully obscure his face so nothing but the strongest lights could penetrate.

With arrogant confidence, he walked down the stairs and slit the throat of a human guard who had failed to hear him approach. In a split-second, Havington was on his feet with his fists raised as if in a reflexive attempt to ready his magic. In the light cast by the dull overhead lights, the Masked One could see that imprisonment had not been kind to the man. His eyes were sunken from lack of sleep and his normally well-trimmed face was haggard with days of growth. If he had been offered baths, he must have refused them as he had the sickening stench of a dirty mammal about him.

But still, the mage had strength. He raised his hands aggressively, an obvious threat that indicated his willingness to use them, even without his magic.

Boneclaw responded to the gesture as exactly that, held his hands up, and backed away. “No, please—I’m a friend,” he said and modulated his voice to sound like an old human instead of a timeless dragon.

“Reveal yourself, then,” Havington snapped.

“I wish I could,” he replied. “But we both know that our side now has enemies all around us. If you were to be captured, I couldn’t risk you knowing my identity. I’m so sorry.”

“If I was captured? Do you hear yourself? I’m standing behind fucking iron bars right now!”

The Masked One stepped toward the door of the cell. The guard had not had the keys, but that didn’t matter an iota to him. After all, he had been picking locks since humans invented them. He slipped the sleeve of his robe over the lock so his entire hand was obscured from from the mage’s eyes. Then, he simply turned his hand to shadow, felt inside the lock, and solidified parts of his claw to turn the tumblers and release it. He pushed the door to the cell open.

Havington smiled. “There’s a nice trick.”

“I’ve followed your exploits,” he said, still using the voice of an old, decrepit human. “I even tried to join you once or twice but I… I chickened out.”

“What good are you, then?”

He smiled at the challenge. It was particularly futile. He had broken the man out, something he had failed to do for himself, and yet he still acted like he was in control? Ah, the arrogance of humans despite their fragility was a fascinating thing.

“I’ve studied magic since I was a boy and hid my powers from the dragons so they couldn’t enslave me. I thought your team would finally end the dragons’ tyrannical rule. What…what happened?”

“It was that Steel Bitch, Kristen Hall.”

Perfect, the Masked One thought. That was exactly who he wanted to point this particular weapon at.

“I’ve heard of her. And in fact, I have another ally who also wishes her dead. That’s why I’m here. But we must move quickly.”

“We must move quickly?” Havington’s anger manifested in his stiff and offended posture. “I’ve been left to rot in here while you’ve been hiding and we must move quickly? Who are you to demand such things of me?” He took a step toward his rescuer.

Rather than stepping back, he slipped into a shadow and reappeared outside the cell.

The mage raised an eyebrow at that. “You’re more powerful than you let on, old man. I’ve heard of shadow magic but only rumors of it in dragons. How did an old mage learn to do such a thing?”

“I told you, I spent my entire life hiding from these monsters. I’m not a fighter but I am an ally of the dark. It’s the only perfect way to hide.”

Havington looked down his nose at him. For the briefest of moments, he felt nervous. Shadow powers were rare in the dragon world and unheard of as far as he knew in mages. He couldn’t let the man link his powers to the legend of the Masked One. He would have to use his anger to distract him.

“But I can’t hide any longer. Even now, we’re wasting time,” he insisted in his old-man voice.

“Again, you insult me. I’ve been here for days.”

“I would have freed you sooner but I was afraid. Even now, I fear being captured.”

“Then why risk it, coward?”

“Because the Steel Dragon is holding peace talks.”

That stopped Havington in his tracks. “Between who?”

“The mages, dragons, and humans. I even heard a rumor that the dwarves would be there. If they proceed, we’ll never free ourselves of dragon rule. They’ll use their aura powers to trick the other sides and we’ll all agree to slavery. Please, I came because I need your help.”

“We can at least both agree that the dragons ruling this planet need to be put down,” the man said. “If my mages agree to false negotiations with them, it could set us back decades.”

“Or forever.”

He glared at the old man for voicing such impertinence but he didn’t disagree. “What are you proposing?”

“I have made an ally. Together, your abilities and his powers could create a distraction that would allow me to disrupt the peace talks from the inside.”

“I thought you said you were scared?”

“I am.” He let his voice crack in terror. “I’m so very scared. But I’ve been scared my entire life. If I continue to live in fear, I won’t be able to live with myself. I showed you my shadow spells. I will use them as best as I can, but I’ll need your help.”

“Fireballs won’t do much against the force she’s assembled,” Havington groused.

“What about a firestorm?”

The man smirked. “I thought you said you’ve studied my powers, old man. You should know that such a show of power is beyond me. Mages cannot control the weather for any extended period of time.”

“Yes, but some dragons can.”

“Who are you?” Havington demanded.

“Only a friend!” The Masked One cowered and used the very aura the mage had been suspicious of to bolster his confidence and fuel his fury. “Please, please! I only got the idea because of you. There is an Iron Dragon who worked with you, is there not?”

“She’s a traitor to our cause,” the man snapped.

“As are some of your mages,” he said. “I only ask you to meet him. He feels the same as you do—that the members of the Dragon Council have held their strength for too long. He wishes to see their end as much as we do. His name is Stormwing and together, his control of the weather and your fire powers would be formidable. I have seen him make storms so powerful that he can control their lightning. I have even seen him make tornados.”

Havington’s suspicion of the dragon seemed to burn away with the thought of creating a firestorm the size of a tornado. It didn’t hurt that the Masked One used his aura to ever so subtly tweak the man’s suspicion away. “How can you trust him?”

“He has no love of Shimmerclaw, I know that. But…I’m not asking you to trust him. Stormwing is powerful but not much of a fighter. If he turns on you, I’m sure you could kill him.”

“So you say.”

With a small smile, hidden when he turned away for a moment, he played his trump card. He gave Havington the gun he’d taken from the guard he’d killed. Both of them knew it was loaded with dragon bullets.

Until that moment, the technomage still harbored suspicions about the mysterious old mage who had come to free him, but when he was offered this weapon, those doubts burned to ash. He took it and didn’t even consider aiming it at the old, cowardly mage in front of him. The Masked One had him.

“You said he can make tornados?” Havington asked, checked the magazine of the gun, and smiled at the dragon bullets inside.

“He can. If you could be at the center of one, you could set it ablaze. A swirling pillar of fire ravaging her precious hometown would surely distract the Steel Bitch long enough for me to strike.”

The man studied him for a moment. He cursed himself internally because he’d let his emotions get away from him in the heat of the moment. It was foolish, but he wanted that bitch put down like the dog she was.

Fortunately, his companion did too. “Can you get me off this ship?”

“I have a rowboat outside. I’ll take you there now. Stormwing is already on his way and we have made arrangements to have a mage ready to remove those cuffs.”

They left as effortlessly as the Masked One had entered. Even when he moved Havington through shadow, the mage didn’t notice that it was a dragon with him and how could he? The shapeless shadow form looked neither dragon nor human.

He deposited the technomage on the boat. Perfectly timed, Stormwing approached and cracks of lightning silhouetted him against the dark sky.

“I’ll see you again when this is over. Together, we’ll make sure dragons don’t continue their tyranny.”

“Consider it so,” Havington agreed. “And, old man, whoever you truly are, thank you.”

“Oh, no, please. I’ll be forever in your debt,” he said, thinking about how long he would rule this planet once he finally did away with the Steel Dragon, Shimmerclaw, and everyone else who stood in his way.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was the day of the conference and the previous forty-eight hours had passed in a blur. Kristen didn’t know how her team had managed but somehow, they were ready for the delegates to arrive. She fidgeted with the uncomfortable formal dress she wore, wishing she could have opted for more comfortable clothing.

Unfortunately, both Stonequest and Larry insisted that she had to look the part and to dragons, that meant a woman should wear a dress. She tried to get Constance to side with her, but the technomage had only suggested that she wear a robe like her. As much as she didn’t want to wear a dress, she wanted to wear a black robe with strange sigils on the back even less. Still, she wished she’d chosen one that showed a little less cleavage.

She stood outside her base, feeling both like eye candy and an ambassador at the same time, and greeted the reps as they arrived. It helped to make her feel a little more comfortable when she reminded herself of the pistol strapped to her thigh beneath the dress and the ability to turn into a steel dragon.

“Constance, is everything in place?” she asked and moved her hands away from her garment’s hem with an effort.

“I should ask you that,” the woman said and turned her back to the Steel Dragon to welcome a mage who had arrived via a portal.

Although it was a little rude, she knew the technomage was right. Constance acted as the leader of the mage delegation. It wouldn’t do for her to seem to have any kind of personal relationship with Kristen.

“Lady Steel, this is Emil Lord. He’s worked as a servant to a dragon in South Africa for the last two decades,” the woman said stiffly.

“Nice to meet you,” Emil said and stepped from the portal.

“Nice to meet you too, Emil,” she replied. “Forgive me, Constance. I had thought the mages on your delegation would be free like yourself.”

“Emil has worked for mage equality for years. He’s written papers and papers on the topic.”

“Not that the dragons like that,” he said.

“How…commendable,” Kristen said.

“Thank you, Lady Steel.” He bowed in a well-practiced motion that showed his deference to her as a dragon. “Constance contacted me about these talks and I thought it would be wise if at least half the mages worked for dragons. That way, the dragons could see that this isn’t all about rebellion. Some of us have followed their rules and simply want a better way.”

“I look forward to hearing more of your perspective in the following days,” she said.

Emil bowed once more and turned to greet another mage. This one was not beholden to any dragon and looked more like a witch out of a fairy tale than an ambassador. She’d most likely been in hiding from the dragons for quite some time. Kristen wondered how the twelve mages would agree with each other, let alone the other delegations.

However, once the last member of the twelve-mage delegation arrived, Constance closed her portal and the representatives all seemed friendly enough with each other, despite their different backgrounds.

Kristen watched them all enter as a motorcade of black and almost certainly armored SUVs rolled up to her gate.

The guard let them in and a moment later, she began to greet the human delegation. There were no national leaders—which she understood—but she was still impressed. The Secretary of State from the United States was there, along with the chief ambassador to the dragons. Top diplomats from Russia, China, Germany, France, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Kenya, Egypt, and Japan comprised the rest of the human team.

She had felt guilty excluding so many other countries from the meeting—guiltier than the United States government did, given that they’d sent two people while every other country had had to make do with one—but the humans now stepping from the SUVs seemed far more united in purpose than the mage delegation had. Despite being from different countries, they all wore suits. The only exception made for gender was that some of the women wore brighter colors than the men, although even these were subdued. The meaning of the clothes and SUVs was obvious to her. We are here to get shit done.

Kristen greeted them warmly, and the humans responded in kind. She wasn’t surprised to see that they seemed more optimistic than the mages. After all, it was the humans who had most recently proven what a threat they could be with their fighter jets and dragon bullets. The mages had pioneered that technology and suffered the dragon’s retributions for it.

The regular humans had made all the gains of this new paradigm, yet they had not had to suffer for it. On top of that, if these talks fell apart, they knew there were over seven billion of them. That, plus their tools of war, meant they were far less fearful of war than the mages, simply because their numbers gave them an advantage.

She showed them to their section of the meeting room and returned to her post outside as the dwarves arrived—all twelve of them.

That it was the dwarf delegation was painfully obvious. There was their diminutive stature, of course, plus their preposterously long beards. But truly, it was their clothes that helped her identify them immediately. While the humans had gone mostly for blacks, dark-blues, and grays, these seemed to be the only colors the dwarf delegation had avoided.

Every one of them looked like a coloring book left in the hands of a technicolor zealot. The cuts of their clothing were unusual and a far cry from what one might consider a well-fitting suit. Instead, they wore long, elaborate robe-like garments or ponchos, or something she might call a gown if it had been worn by someone without a long beard and shoulders knotted with muscle.

Before she could approach them, Amy dropped from the sky on her skateboard and landed with a massive flip in front of the delegation. Rather than being put out by this admittedly awesome but undoubtedly unprofessional show of athleticism, the dwarves cheered. One of them even ran forward to embrace her.

“Alp? Is that you?” the mage asked and hugged him before he answered.

“It’s me, all right,” Alp said from somewhere near her navel. “I took out some of my old piercings and put in some new, but it’s me all right. How are you? Still risking your life with the Steel Dragon, I see.”

“Anything to keep from being bored,” Amy replied.

He laughed as if it was an old joke they’d shared many times. “It’s good to see you’re doing well.”

“Thanks to you,” she responded, her tone more serious and heavy with gratitude. “I don’t know where I would have been without your help. Serving in the mage army or dead, or who knows. I owe you so much.”

“Ah, don’t mention it. If I had my way, I would have sent you to a fish farm in the far north. Sticking with the Steel Dragon was a wise move, though. You know what, if you do feel bad, you could get us all some beers.”

Amy grinned. “You got it. Do you…uh, want me to do something with those cows?”

“That’d be cool,” Alp said.

Six of the dwarves had a cow on their shoulders. That each of them could carry one was an impressive show of strength to Kristen. She could lift one with her dragon powers, of course, but to walk a few miles with it on her shoulders? That was a real show of strength. Or so she thought until the girl lifted all six with her magic telekinesis.

“Kristen, I’ll take care of them. You remember Alp, right?”

“I do. It’s nice to see you.”

He bowed deeply and introduced her to the rest of the delegation. It was a mess of names, but she made sure to note the name of Krot Minestrength, the Prime Minister of Canada. Most of the delegation were members of his cabinet. She also recognized Rupert and Barmus, the ambassadors who had procured the dwarves’ presence at the table.

Once introductions were made, the dwarves followed Amy inside. They were a big ball of bright colors and high energy. Kristen was extremely thankful for their arrival. Hopefully, they would defuse some of the tension from this meeting simply by being themselves.

She was forced to wait far longer than she wanted to for the dragon delegation to arrive. It wasn’t a surprise, of course. She’d said the convention would start at ten in the morning, so why would the dragons bother to be early? It spoke volumes about their power that even though they had suffered the most losses in the early battles of the war, they still forced all the other delegations to wait for their arrival.

Finally, she got a radio message from Butters. He’d located them from his vantage point on the roof.

“Are there any we recognize?” she asked.

“Yeah, I see the platinum one. She’s the leader, right?”

“That’s Lady Shimmerclaw, yes.”

“I see the one whose ass you saved—Aurelius or something?”

“Decimus Aurelius. Thank God,” Kristen said. She knew Shimmerclaw was on her side but having another friendly member was helpful.

“There’s another one I don’t recognize and a real bony motherfu—Kristen, Lord Boneclaw is coming.”

“What?” she snapped, and her aura pulsed out of control before she clamped it down again.

“Yeah, I recognize his bony ass from when we saved them from that bomb. I thought you said he was the Masked One.”

“I did,” she confirmed. “But I have no proof. I’ll…shit!”

The dragons were already circling overhead. She knew their hearing was too good for her to continue this conversation with Butters.

With smooth efficiency, they came in for a landing and settled in a wide formation. The delegation took up far more space than was strictly necessary but that was the way of dragons. They took their time to transform into their human forms so the parking lot of the base was filled with glowing amorphous shapes and flecks of a dozen different colors as dragons shifted bodies.

“Lady Steel, thank you for having us,” Shimmerclaw said and acknowledged her with the faintest of nods. Kristen knew the Council leader was on her side, but damn did the old dragon have a good poker face.

“Even if this does prove to be a waste of time,” Boneclaw interjected.

Kristen narrowed her eyes at the scarred man. “Lord Boneclaw. I didn’t think you’d want to come, given that the topic of conversation will be peace and you recently led an attack on this city.”

“The point of these talks is a path forward,” he responded icily. “I want to make sure no one agrees to a foolish path.”

“Nothing’s as foolish as that attack you led on the Steel Dragon.” Aurelius smiled his perfect smile at her and took her hand to kiss it as if she were a princess. “Lady Steel, a pleasure. I apologize for the attack Lord Boneclaw led here. I would have stopped it myself if I had not been lured away on urgent matters.” These last words were spoken with obvious venom to the ancient dragon.

“Don’t blame me for your servants not verifying their messages,” Lord Boneclaw retorted.

She could tell this would be as fraught with tension as she’d expected. “And who are the other members of your delegation?”

“This is Lady Jade,” Shimmerclaw said. “She is a Councilor from Asia. Not many other dragons were willing to spend their time working with the other…delegations.” Kristen wondered if she’d wanted to say “lesser species.” “But worry not. I assure you that if the four of us can agree to the terms set forth over the next few days, the rest of the Dragon Councils will agree to them as well.”

“Pardon me, Lady Shimmerclaw, but don’t you mean the twelve of you?” Kristen tried to gesture politely to the other eight dragons. When she did so, she noticed that these were all dressed in loose-fitting clothing. It still looked formal but in the same way that the uniform of a martial arts champion looked formal. She also noticed that the other eight dragons were armed.

“As I said, the other Councilors did not wish to attend,” Lady Shimmerclaw said. “Lord Boneclaw and Lady Jade thought it wise for us to have security.”

“Given that these talks precipitated from violence committed against dragons by mage and humans, this was the only way we felt safe,” Lady Jade said.

“Speak for yourself.” Aurelius rolled his eyes.

“Very well,” Kristen said and reminded herself that her security forces were armed with dragon bullets and that these warriors did not appear to be wearing Kevlar. She sincerely hoped it didn’t come to violence. “If you’ll follow me, we should begin.”

“I would like to welcome everyone to what I hope will prove to be a historic meeting. I know this is quite different than the history we all share, but I hope to build the foundation of a truly equitable future over the next few days, and I would like to thank all of you for being here to be a part of that.” Kristen thought her opening remarks were fairly decent but apparently, she was wrong.

“A foundation?” a human from France asked. “We were hoping to come to a legally binding agreement—like the bill of rights you Americans are so proud of.”

“It makes sense to us,” the dwarf prime minister said. The other dwarves all raised steins they had apparently brought from Canada, clinked them together, and sloshed beer everywhere.

She thanked herself silently for creating four separate sections. Even the thought of what a dragon would do if they had beer sloshed on them was harrowing.

“We dragons would like to hear exactly what is being offered by the other delegations,” Lady Jade said.

“Being offered?” Constance already had her hackles up. “Mages served you as slaves for centuries, and you ask about what is being offered? Make no mistake, we are here to dismantle the dragon hierarchy and put something more equitable in its place.”

“And why would we agree to our hierarchy, as you call it, being dismantled?” Lord Boneclaw asked. Only he and the three dragon Councilors were seated. The dragon warriors remained standing with their hands on their weapons. “Let’s be honest. Dragons have the power. Why should we share it when all you’ve done is threaten us?”

“A question you dragons need to start asking yourselves about your relationship with the United States,” the Secretary of State said.

Kristen sighed. At least everything looked professional. The meeting room they were now in was spacious enough to give all the delegations their own zone and thus prevent the brawls that humans, mages, and dragons seemed to want to fight. She wondered if the temporary walls they’d put up for each delegation to have a meeting place would prove to be insufficient.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please. I think it might be wise if we begin by breaking into our groups and finalizing what each delegation is hoping to achieve. Maybe then we can find common—”

Before she could finish, an unnaturally loud knock issued from the front door. It sounded as if a giant tried to kick a path into the base.

“Brian?” she asked into her earpiece.

“I’m working on it!” he said. She could hear his fingers flying over his keyboard through her headset. “There’s nothing there but a few birds. Nothing that could have made that noise anyway.”

She could see she wasn’t the only one on high alert because of the sound. The dragon warriors had drawn their weapons and the mages had all spun a different variety of magic. The humans looked concerned. These were diplomats, after all, not soldiers. The dwarves looked ready and willing to fight.

Kristen told her security team to check the door and hoped they were armed well enough for whatever was out there.

CHAPTER SIX

“Amy?” Kristen said into her earpiece as she stepped away from the lectern at the front of the conference room.

“I don’t see anything from up here.” Wind whistled in the background, which indicated that she was either flying on a dragon or her levitating skateboard. “But I sense something.”

That was an ominous sign. Their plan was to seal the protective dome when the talks broke for lunch, but she wondered if she shouldn’t implement it sooner.

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” she told the delegations of humans, dwarves, mages, and dragons.

“Jim, Drew, what do we have?” she asked as she followed her security team to the door.

“Nothing as far as we can tell,” Drew said but he had yet to open the door.

She understood. He had a bulletproof vest but she had dragon healing powers plus the ability to turn her skin to steel. She donned her natural steel armor and opened the door.

No one stood on the threshold. She frowned and looked from one side to the other, then paused when someone yelled at her in what had to be the most high-pitched voice she had ever heard.

“We are down here, Lady Steel!”

Kristen looked down and gaped at twelve of the most peculiar beings she’d ever seen. They had the ability to surprise even a woman holding a convention with technicolor dwarves and shape-shifting dragons.

The first thing she noticed about the little beings was their height. They were so small, they made dwarves look like Godzilla. She estimated that the tallest of the group was maybe twelve inches, but most seemed to be only eight or nine inches tall. They were all exceptionally beautiful in an androgynous kind of way. She thought she could tell that the one who spoke was a female, but she wasn’t sure if she could distinguish which were males.

They wore their hair long or shorn into—what else?—pixie cuts. High cheekbones, massive eyes, and pointed chins made them all seem vaguely feminine to her, but she had thought all the dwarves were male since they were bearded. Perhaps she needed to work on her gender expectations.

The pixies wore gossamer clothing that shimmered like dew at sunrise. In fact, sunrise was a great way to describe their clothes in general. They were all bright and almost white in shades of blue, yellow, and pink and seemed to be about as transient as they were almost transparent.

“How may I help you?” Kristen said, way too late.

“We are rather upset about not being invited to this conclave,” the leader said and elevated to hover in front of her face on wings that looked like they’d been taken from the world’s largest dragonfly. She didn’t know much about pixies, but she did know that they’d originally been made by human mages, which meant their wings might have indeed been modeled after insects.

Another pixie, this one with the dusky wings of a moth, fluttered to join the first. “Yet again, we pixies have been left out.” This one’s voice was only slightly lower, but to compare them in pitch was like comparing the notes that came from a piccolo. “A meeting of every race and power on the Earth except us pixies.”

The being with the dragonfly wings who had spoken first shook her head sadly at this. “It’s like the other races don’t think pixies have any thoughts of importance.”

“I can assure you this is not the case!” the moth-winged stated. Despite them speaking over each other, neither seemed bothered. To her, it only made it harder to tell them apart. “We have many thoughts to share.”

“Important thoughts. On many things,” one added from the ground.

“Yes! On many important things,” yet another one stated.

“Like buttercups and honeybees.” This contributor had bee wings and shouted loudly to be heard. It earned a cheer from the tiny, high-pitched voices of the others.

“Forgive my compatriots,” the first said. “We do not think as you do. We do not think so…linearly. But that does not mean we wish to be ignored.”

Kristen looked back into the room she had been addressing, already crammed with way too many different ideas and viewpoints. What could twelve seemingly crazy pixies hurt? she thought somewhat flippantly. But they were right.

“I apologize, Lady…”

“Dragonfly,” the pixie with the dragonfly wings said. “It is not my name but you could never understand our language anyway, so Lady Dragonfly will do.”

She wondered if the creature had somehow read her mind. Did she find in her thoughts that her wings were the feature she found most unique? Or was she simply used to dealing with humans?

“Lady Dragonfly, I admit, the oversight was mine. I slighted the dwarves similarly. Since you were not involved in the war, I did not think you would wish to be involved in the peace talks. Allow me to correct the issue. Whom among the pixies should we invite to these talks?”

Lady Dragonfly smiled so wide she had to shut her oversized eyes. “We saw that each delegation had twelve members, so we worked that part out ourselves.”

“How did you—”

“Did you think a gathering such as this could be kept secret?” a pixie that appeared to wear a beetle’s carapace asked. “We could smell the magic for leagues. Hundreds of leagues.”

“Thousands of leagues,” said another.

“What’s a league?” asked a third.

“Focus!” Lady Dragonfly snapped and all the pixies fluttered their wings and flew into a halfway decent formation. “We’ve been practicing,” she said, either noticing Kristen’s stare or reading her mind.

“If you will give us a few moments to prepare you an area,” she said in bemusement.

“But of course.” The pixie leader streaked past her, followed by the other eleven in her delegation. There was much more to the tiny creatures than insect wings because as they moved, they left trails of sparks in red, yellow, and orange that faded to nothing in their wake. They circled the meeting area and darted about above the heads of the groups.

The dragons looked quite annoyed at the intrusion but they didn’t say anything. Kristen often saw pixies at dragon gatherings but she had the feeling dragons saw them like they did everything else—as property or entertainment. Shimmerclaw looked intrigued while Lord Boneclaw didn’t look as pissed as she thought he would. No doubt he anticipated the new arrivals creating even more chaos, thus ensuring the status quo would not change.

The humans seemed overwhelmed by the strange creatures. They watched them with open mouths and wide eyes as if she had invited a flight of fireflies to the convention. For all the experience she had with pixies, she might as well have done exactly that.

The mages’ reaction was divided, but not along any lines that she could distinguish. Some like both the old witch and Emil Lord seemed delighted to have the pixies, while others seemed wary of the strange creatures. Constance was as inscrutable as always. Kristen vowed yet again to never play poker or any game involving bluffing with the leader of the technomages.

The dwarves were the only delegation that seemed truly delighted to have the pixies there. They smiled fondly as the creatures released their showers of sparks on them and were already fetching chairs and making space for the diminutive delegation.

“We only need two chairs,” Lady Dragonfly said to one of the dwarves who rearranged the furniture. Her tone was so solemn, it sounded as if she’d already begun the deliberations.

Kristen used the temporary chaos to pull Larry aside.

“Larry, please tell me you know more than I do about pixies.”

“Sure.” He grinned. “What exactly do you know?”

“Let’s say absolutely zero.”

“Zero?”

“Well, not zero. I know they make sparkly things and I know they were made by mages in the First Mage War—”

“Second.” He cut her off. “Dwarves were from the First Mage War. Wow, you weren’t kidding about the zero.”

She looked nervously at the room. The pixies tried to balance three to the back of a chair. This meant they constantly climbed it, then fell and resumed the process, to the amusement of the dwarves.

“Okay, well, the mages made them because the dwarves were a spectacular failure. They had thought that by modifying humans, the dwarves they created would want to join them, but they saw how powerful they were in their own right and didn’t want to come into existence simply to be dragon fodder.”

“Larry, now is not the time for a history lesson. Tell me about the pixies.”

“Right, sorry. The mages decided not to model the new beings on humans, what with their propensity to disagree. They harnessed wild magic itself to create the pixies.”

“So should we assume that the pixies will side with either the humans or the mages?”

“No way!” He chuckled. “From the perspective of the mages and the regular humans who joined them in the second war, the pixies were an even greater disappointment than the dwarves.”

“Why?”

“Pixies are creatures of wild magic,” Larry said and rubbed his chin. “They are pure magic given solid form. As such, they each hold immense power—far more than virtually any human, mage, or dragon.”

Kristen felt a sudden pang of fear given that she had had now admitted twelve of them into her base before they’d put up the defensive shield that Constance had planned. “Should we be worried?”

“Um…technically, yes. They have powers to do far beyond what any of us—even Amy—can do. But they’re capricious and willful to a fault. They’re more likely to use their powers to pull pranks than they are to do anything serious.”

“Then why do you think they’re here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of them trying to enter any kind of serious deliberations with anyone. Them merely showing up is anomalous, to say the least.”

“But you’ve seen them before, right? I know they’re usually at dragon parties.”

“They only go to those because dragons often ask pixies to pull pranks on other dragons, which they love to do. Them being here is odd, and we should watch the little troublemakers carefully.” He tried to sound tough, but a smile sneaked through. It seemed the mage had a soft spot for the little beings.

“Lady Steel?” Aurelius asked. “Are we ready?”

Kristen turned to see that the pixies had finally managed to take their places. As promised, they’d only needed two chairs. Three sat on the seat of each one, while another three balanced on the back of the seat. Once the dwarves had stopped laughing, the pixies simply used their wings to keep their balance rather than fall repeatedly.

“Now,” she said and moved to stand at the lectern on the small stage in the front of the room again. “Where were we?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

If there was any benefit to having two more delegations at the convention than Kristen had anticipated, it was that the dwarves and pixies remained relatively silent.

The other three factions were far more outspoken about their demands.

After her opening statement, she had dismissed each group to formulate their hopes for the outcome of this meeting.

The humans had been the first to finish their deliberations, which hardly surprised her as human beings had been making treaties with other groups of humans they hated for thousands of years. The delegate from Germany was the one to outline the human position once all five groups reconvened. She didn’t know if his slightly aggressive accent and quick speaking would work as a positive or negative for the humans.

“We want nothing short of full equality under the law. Dragons who kill humans should face far more significant penalties than their current laws provide. It is not acceptable that a human who kills a dragon is executed without trial, while a dragon who kills a human is fined and set free.”

“And what if the human is killed because they intruded into a dispute between two dragons? Surely a dragon should not be executed for a mistake on the human’s part?” Lady Jade interrupted.

“If such events occur, the dragon should be put on trial, exactly as a human would be,” the German delegate snapped. “If a dragon has a history of such offenses, that should be held against them.”

“All dragons have a history of such offenses, boy,” Lord Boneclaw said.

From the sneer on the delegate’s face, this was exactly his point.

“Lord Boneclaw has a point,” Shimmerclaw added. “We live far longer than you and our shared past with humans is a bloody one. If you wish for peace going forward, past transgressions must be forgiven. That is what you are asking us to do with these mages, is it not?”

“What we are asking is an end to servitude,” Constance said and looked imperious in her black robes. “Generations of our people have done nothing more than made the lives of dragons easier. We wish to be masters of our destiny, the same as all free beings on this planet.”

“Oh, come now,” Lady Jade said. “Many mages are treated well. They are all paid in this day and age, and most are paid handsomely.”

Emil Lord spoke quickly, and his South African accent added a different weight to his words. “Payment without the choice of freedom is merely a slightly kinder form of slavery. Wages are simply softer shackles when the fruits of our labor can never be enjoyed without a dragon taking whatever they wish from our efforts.”

“Ridiculous!” Lord Boneclaw snapped and the mage delegation all pushed to their feet and demanded that the old dragon apologize. He had done little besides voice such interjections. All of them had been aimed at whatever consensus seemed close to being reached. If there was one person there truly trying to scuttle the whole meeting, it was him. Unfortunately, Kristen didn’t know what to do about it. She still didn’t have any proof that he was the Masked One and everyone there, even him, was under her protection.

“What is ridiculous…” Constance’s voice cut through the hubbub of the room and inspired silence on all sides. “Is that despite decades of service, when the first glimpse of open conflict appeared, you dragons rounded the mages up and imprisoned them.”

“That was for their safety,” Aurelius protested.

“It was not!” she fumed. “The dragons there treated these mages worse than cattle. They were bound and naked and being executed by dragon fire when I rescued them.”

“Dragon fire is the price for mages who shoot us with bullets made of our dead,” Lord Boneclaw said as if he wasn’t the dragon who had given the technomages the idea to make those bullets. Kristen’s hatred for him flared.

Constance, though, snapped before she could speak, “None of those mages were part of my group. Not one. The mages those dragons intended to burn alive were loyal servants of dragon kind. They were people who kept their heads down and did your paperwork and laundry for a chance at retirement that they knew would probably never come. Your betrayal of those mages was the final straw.”

All the mages nodded at this. Magic swirled around some of them and gave their anger form as flames or smoke or shards of energy.

“But dragons were attacked by mages when that happened,” Lady Jade said. “What would you have us do, roll over?”

“We would have you stand trial,” the secretary of state said. “We would have you answer to your crimes in a court of law.”

“And would you consent to a trial by peers?” Boneclaw asked. “That is what your law demands, is it not?”

“You’re damn straight it does,” the man retorted. “But that doesn’t mean that the rich and privileged are only judged by the rich and privileged, nor does it mean that women are only judged by women.”

“But you can’t expect a dragon to sit through a court case?” Aurelius asked.

“We’d be more than happy to call dragons for jury duty.” The Secretary of State seethed.

“Again, what do you offer us?” Lady Jade asked. “Your jets already killed some of our best warriors and now, you want more? Why should we agree to any of your terms?”

Krot Minestrength, the dwarven prime minister, cleared his throat as he stood on his chair to be seen when he spoke. “Dragons, the requests of the humans and mages are not unreasonable. They are not asking to take your gold or your castles, simply for an opportunity for justice. Is it not true that to the person used to privilege, equality feels like oppression?”

“But we are not privileged!” Lady Jade whined as eloquently as Kristen had ever heard someone whine. “We maintain peace in the world. We oversee financial institutions that humans have no interest in. We have responsibilities that the other races have never even thought of.”

“Nonsense!” the German diplomat yelled, perhaps emboldened by the promise that no one would be incinerated by dragon fire at these meetings. “You act as if we are trying to make you inferior. We are not! We simply wish you to be beholden to the same laws as the rest of us.”

Lady Jade snorted. “The same laws? How often does a human get caught between a dwarf battle or a duel for honor amongst pixies?”

No one answered, which she took to mean never.

“Precisely! It does not happen. You try to veil all this in the language of equality when the truth is the only group that will lose our status in this world is the dragons.”

“Because the dragons are the only filthy murderers,” the old witch screamed and pointed a crooked finger at Lady Jade that was clearly loaded with one hell of a curse.

Kristen moved between the woman in her off-colored raggedy clothes and the simpering green dragon in her flawless silk dress.

“Let’s break for lunch,” she said, hoping the beef the dwarves had brought could avert an international interspecies catastrophe.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The tension in the room was such that when Kristen called for a break, each group subsided stiffly and continued to glower at each other. Rather than advancing to violence, however, the agitation was low enough that everyone was still willing to talk amongst themselves and take a break from the other—in each delegations’ eyes—unreasonable groups.

She swallowed a cup of coffee proffered to her by Timeflash and decided to start making the rounds to each group in an attempt to show them all that the aims of everyone else weren’t so insane. When she looked around to choose her first destination, she noticed the pixies.

Some of them seemed content to dart about the room and shower everyone with sparks, but Lady Dragonfly and a few of the more conversationally gifted seemed to better understand what was going on. Every other group had their area to retreat to except the pixies.

Kristen sighed and moved to avert this slight to their honor before they simply magicked one of the other groups out of existence. She approached them, still wondering if they could do that when Lady Dragonfly fluttered into her face. With her tiny hands on tiny hips, she was the angriest, cutest little creature she had ever seen.

“Lady Steel!”

“You may call me Kristen and please, if you’d like to come this way, I’ll show you to a private area where you may discuss the proceedings.”

The pixie’s fierce little scowl gave way to a big goofy grin. “You honor us, Lady Steel.”

“I hope so,” she said and scrambled to think where the pixies could go. She knew they didn’t need much room, but she still wanted to give them a space that wouldn’t dishonor them. The messy bunks of her team, now all crammed into the upper floors, seemed wildly inappropriate, as did the workout room and the kitchen as, despite her constant threats, it was always messy. Finally, she settled on her office.

She led the delegation down a hall. They darted and bounced off the walls until she stopped smiling at their antics.

When she opened the door to her office, she was pleasantly surprised to find it quite tidy. That made sense, though, as she rarely used it. It was a pleasant room with framed newspaper articles of her exploits on the walls, a filing cabinet she’d inherited from Windlock in one corner, and a big old desk she’d had made by a local carpenter who used wood from old barns. Two of the walls were floor to ceiling windows that looked out over the city. The pixies all raced to the windows and crammed their faces against them as if they’d never been this high before.

“You are welcome to my office. I’ll send someone to fetch you when the full meeting gathers together.”

“You honor us, Lady Steel.” Lady Dragonfly landed on her desk and bowed so deeply her wings brushed the old barn wood. “If we wreck the place, we will put it back together. You have my word.”

“Thank…you?” Kristen said and was about to see herself out, but her curiosity overcame her. “If you don’t mind me asking…”

“You are welcome to ask any question you like, Lady Steel. Except what Sir Ladybug likes to eat. It’s not a question that’s pretty to answer.”

Sir Ladybug waggled his eyebrows—she had thought he was a lady—in challenge and she tried to ignore him.

“Honestly, that hadn’t even occurred to me.”

He wilted.

She continued quickly, hoping she hadn’t offended him. “I’m curious to know what you think of the meeting so far.”

The pixies all buzzed excitedly at the question and made sounds that were somewhere between the tinkle of bells and chirp of crickets. She assumed it was their language, but she began to realize that assuming anything with them was not wise.

After a moment of this, they returned to exploring her office. Lady Dragonfly stood next to a framed picture of her parents. She was only slightly taller than their images. “In truth, my Lady, we aren’t quite sure yet. There has been considerable yelling but not much said—from our perspective, of course.”

“You’re not wrong about that,” she agreed. “But I think it’s good that at least the humans and mages have laid out their positions. Coming to a consensus will probably take some time. At least that’s what I’ve been led to understand.”

“I sense that you, like us, are new to all this talking about things more important than buttercups,” Lady Dragonfly said ponderously.

“I am,” she admitted. “I’m a cop, or I was. I enforce the laws, I don’t make them.”

“We understand,” the leader said after a chorus of tinkling language from the rest of the pixies.

“We too are not well-suited for this kind of discussion. Unlike humans or dragons, we tend to roam rather than settle anywhere. Sometimes, it seems we have as much in common with butterflies as with the more humanlike races.”

“Certainly a more similar sense of humor!” Sir Ladybug added, a statement that would later keep her up at night with the implications in it.

“But we do understand how humans and dragons work. We understand you make rules and you divide the world into realms of control. We are unhappy with our place in the world your two races have built. Much like the dwarves, we feel like an afterthought.”

Kristen nodded and tried to process the wisdom this tiny creature offered on her. “If you don’t mind me asking, what do you hope to gain from the peace talks? I started these discussions in an effort to stop a war, but with you and dwarves here, I see the potential for so much more. Do you and the pixies have any specific problems I can help address?”

“Lady Steel! You honor us,” Lady Dragonfly said yet again and bowed deeply. All the pixies stopped their mad flights around the room and came to bow before her. “You honor us by even asking. Truly, that more than anything else is what we would like to see changed. There are some issues here that we will not have an opinion on, I admit. Property rights, for example, are something we have trouble understanding, but we still wish to have our opinion asked. We do not feel valued in this world. You did not invite us to the peace talks.”

“Again, I’m sorry.”

“It is fine, Lady Steel. You were only following human and dragon precedent. We are never invited to anything but parties. No one cares about our views.”

“So, you want more invitations to things?”

“Yes!” the pixies chorused.

Their leader giggled at her flock. “Yes, we would like to be included in things like this. But we also wish to have protection. Currently, we are not protected by dragons or humans. Dragons are fond of us, at least, and leave us be, but there are many places we simply cannot go without fear of being caught by a human’s net or shot with a slingshot. We could, of course, turn the humans to toads, but we do not. Are we thanked for this? Never!”

“Well, what else do you want besides invitations and protections? I think those are both reasonable places to start, but is there more?” she asked.

“I think we want what everyone else wants. Well, we also want humans to stop spraying pesticides on their foods, those fucking morons. But we also want to live free. We want to be treated fairly and be equal to other races.”

Kristen nodded. “I think freedom, fairness, and equality are good goals to aim for.” She didn’t know what to think about the pesticides remark. “I’ll help you in any way I can to achieve those goals.”

The pixies rocketed around the room to show their appreciation.

CHAPTER NINE

Kristen called for the meeting to reconvene after a half-hour. She had thought the time apart would have cooled everyone’s nerves. How wrong she was.

The dragons seemed cooler than before, but she could feel their auras boiling with distrust and anger. The human delegation wore scowls above their folded arms. Malevolent energy swirled in the air above the mage’s heads. Even the dwarves seemed to be in a funk. Only the pixies didn’t seem upset, and she began to realize that she might not even understand what an upset pixie would look like.

She took the lectern to start the meeting but paused to give a warning instead. “We all came here because we all ostensibly agreed to peace talks. I understand that there are many opinions in this room, but that is no reason to behave without civility to each other. I feel like I need to clarify the rules. Delegates who cannot behave themselves will be removed and their vote will be nullified.

“This meeting has grown into something much more important than I had originally planned. Before, I saw it as a way to move forward, a chance to get people talking. Now, it has become a vital part of the pathway to lasting change for our world. When in history have all five of these groups met together? When in history have we agreed to listen to each other? I know I declared myself sheriff, but surely all of you can see that my team can’t enforce the rules for the entire planet.”

“We’re counting on it,” Lord Boneclaw mumbled, but when she darted him a glare, he withered and said nothing further.

“We need rules for how the races will interact. We need laws that we all agree to so that we can all enforce them on each other.”

“We have laws,” Decimus Aurelius protested. “Dragons have had laws far longer than humans have, in fact. All the races have prospered under them, I might add. Admittedly, they’re not perfect, but do we need to throw everything out?”

“You’re right, Lord Aurelius, we do have rules. Humans have laws, as do dwarves. But the rules that supersede all the others—the rules of dragons—have failed us.”

“How can you say that?” he demanded.

“Those rules were what led to both mage wars. They almost precipitated a third mage war a week ago. Those rules have let dragons grow wealthy and powerful while everyone else has fought for scraps. All of the rules are based on a time when dragons controlled everything else simply because they had overpowered all other groups. Those rules were rules of fear.”

Kristen reached into her pocket and pulled out a dragon bullet. She held it up for everyone to see. It didn’t look any more threatening than a normal bullet. The casing was the same and the primer was the same. The only difference was that instead of having a bullet made of metal at its tip, it had a bullet made of the off-white material of a dragon’s tooth or claw. This particular one was lined with tiny hair-like filaments of what must have been blood vessels when this was still part of a dragon.

“But dragons can no longer rule by fear. Not with these. Twice already, the mages have tried to overthrow the dragon rules of fear. Twice, they failed and twice, they were defeated. Does anyone in this room truly believe that a war fought between these five factions would end in a decisive victory for any side?

“The days of easy victory are over. For better or worse, there is more than one superpower at the table. Humans now have missiles that can blow dragons up. Mages have dragon bullets and who knows what else they can use to fight dragons with. The balance of power has become more even. Dragons, humans, and mages all need to recognize that. We no longer live in a world where dragons can simply have their way. But we won’t enter a new era where humans or mages take the place at the top that dragons possessed for so long, either.”

The dwarves cheered for that while the pixies streaked about the room, clapping and sending sparks down on the people below them.

“A war would be devastating for all involved. No matter who won, the fighting would destroy the planet and wipe out most of every race. Peace is a better way forward, but peace is harder than war. Peace takes work and it takes compromise. It is something we have to strive for every day. That’s what we’re all here for.”

She sat to loud applause. Even the dragon delegates seemed swayed—except Lord Boneclaw, of course, who sat in his chair stewing in rage while he picked at one of the scars on his face.

The humans spoke first. “Lady Steel makes good points,” the Secretary of State began. “After some deliberation, we’re willing to agree to the dragons’ terms that no crimes committed before this meeting will be held against them. However, we still strongly insist that any murders committed by the dragons in the future will need to be investigated by dragon and human teams.”

“We can agree to that,” Shimmerclaw said.

“We can as well,” Constance added. “With the caveat that no one’s past crimes, human, mage, dragon, dwarf, or pixie will be held against them.”

“Fair enough,” Aurelius said.

“But there is still the point of dragons having to surrender so much,” Lady Jade said.

“We have an idea for that as well,” the man said. “If you dragons agree to pay taxes when you’re in human territory, we will agree to set aside up to ten percent of each country by land mass for the exclusive use of dragons. This would be land you can still rule however you see fit. Humans would only enter with travel or work visas and would be beholden to your rules on your land.”

“All we have to do is let your governments drain our gold?” Aurelius asked, although he didn’t sound particularly upset by the idea.

“That’s right. If you’re on human land—or dwarf land for that matter—we expect you to pay your fair share.”

“We like the sound of that,” Krot Minestrength added.

“What about the mages? Where do we fit in all this?” Constance asked.

“You have always been treated as humans by humans, and we would continue to treat you as law-abiding citizens. I can’t speak for all the countries here, but the United States would like to create a bureau in the federal government to better understand how mages work, how to educate you—”

“And how to exploit us?” the old witch asked.

The Secretary of State smiled a very American smile. “There are certain business considerations we have never had to consider because magic has been in the domain of dragons for so long. We would need to formulate laws about liability around magic and that kind of thing, but yes, we expect you mages could grow very wealthy under a more equitable system.”

Some of the mages didn’t seem to care for his suggestion, but most of them liked the idea of becoming respected members of society.

“What about the pixies?” Kristen asked the group. “The dwarves have Canada, their territory governed by their laws, but what about the pixies? Do you also wish for your own land?”

“We do not, Lady Steel,” Lady Dragonfly said. “We pixies like to travel, and the idea of having to stay in one area because of an imaginary border will confuse most of us. If it suits the rest of the delegations here, we pixies would like to be able to come and go as we please on the condition that we follow the laws of the land we’re on.”

“In exchange, we will continue to refrain from turning all of you into toads. Which, for the record, some of you deserve,” Sir Ladybug said formally.

“Dwarves, do you have new requests?” Kristen asked.

“We think a court of international law might be necessary. Even if the dragons get some of their own territory, we all know many dragons will continue to want to live amongst the humans. We think there should be a court made up of judges from the races to appeal to if cases cannot be solved locally.”

She nodded and tried to pay attention as the conversation slipped into the banalities of bureaucracy. Before long, they discussed tariffs, worker’s wages, defense contracts—in other words, the dull day-to-day processes of government that made the world work. Although it was dull to a cop turned dragon investigator, she was pleased to see that this meeting was working.

At the rate they were going, it seemed entirely possible that they might come to the first agreement between the five races. While trade percentages would have to be adjusted and inflation accounted for and courts would need to be rebalanced, all that could come with time.

The brief sense of satisfaction was deceptive, which made her feel quite panicked when Brian came into the room with a look in his eyes that said he didn’t have a second to spare.

Kristen excused herself and went to him. “Is everything all right? You know you could have contacted me via headset.”

“Yeah, but I thought this merited talking to you in person. There’s a bad storm coming.”

She smiled weakly. “You don’t by any chance mean a regular storm that’s particularly strong? Like a summer blizzard or something?”

“I don’t know, Kristen. Do normal storms have tornados made of fire at their center?”

CHAPTER TEN

Kristen excused herself as quickly, politely, and unobtrusively as possible. Unfortunately, it simply wasn’t possible to achieve all three of these at once, so the eyes of dragons, mages, dwarves, and humans tracked her as she followed Brian to his security station.

“See?” he said and brought up a grainy picture. “I tried to get close with a drone, but the damn thing was shot by a bolt of lightning and totally fried.”

Still, the image it had captured was clear enough to tell that his assessment was right. A huge swirling cloud of fire and smoke powered through the northern suburbs of Detroit and destroyed everything in its path.

“How the hell are we supposed to stop it?” he asked, his voice tight with fear.

“You’ve done your part, Brian, now get a grip. You’ve fought bigger shit than this in videogames. Pretend that’s what we’re doing now.”

“Okay, you’re right. I’ve been Diablo himself. I can handle this.” Brian took a few deep breaths and seemed to get himself under control.

“Right. Good. Now, I want you to contact all our outside forces and get them active. Make sure the dragons are all paired with mages. Command goes to Lumos and Amy and next in line is Drew and Stonequest, although I’ll want them to lead the evacuation of the civilians before they join the battle. Katrina and Eric need to answer to Lumos—tell Lumos this, not Katrina, for the love of God—but other than him, I want them to have full autonomy. This has to be an attack by dragons and mages. We’ll need their experience out there.”

“Great, sure, and what will you do?” he asked.

“I’ll handle on-site security—keep our butts safe and this conference on track.”

That finally made him smile. “There’s a fucking flaming tornado coming and you still want to finish your job? That’s my sister!”

Now, Kristen had to the almost impossible task of extricating Constance from the meeting so she could lead the mages in creating her barrier spell. She made it as far as, “Constance, can I borrow you for a moment?” before chaos erupted between the delegates.

“We demand to know what is going on,” Lord Boneclaw called.

“There seem to be a few…troublemakers approaching,” Kristen said. “I merely need Constance for a minute.”

“Why do you need a mage?” Lady Jade asked.

“Because us mages are the only ones who can make defensive barriers,” the technomage said. “Your warriors are more than welcome to go outside for the duration, especially since none of them have said a thing. We wouldn’t miss their presence.”

“How dare you try to short-seat the dragon delegates!” Lord Boneclaw roared.

“I don’t wish that at all,” she retorted. “That’s why you should allow me to set this barrier up. Once it’s done, we could withstand tank blasts and missiles.”

“Now wait a minute,” said the Secretary of State. “I don’t much like the idea of being locked in here by magic, especially given that tanks blasts and missiles are what we would use to get us out. Are you saying we’re under attack by a military?”

“No, not at all,” Kristen said.

“Then what?” A dwarf asked.

“A tornado of flame,” she said quickly and hoped that honesty would make the delegates move a little faster. Again, she proved to be quite wrong.

Everyone began to shout except the pixies, who raced around the room and added to the feeling of panic and chaos.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” she yelled. “Ladies and gentlemen!”

A burst of emotional energy struck her. Heartsbane was using her aura to make everyone want to shut the hell up.

“Thank you,” Kristen said to the silent room. “Now, I promised you all your safety. Constance will help me to do that. I understand that many of you don’t trust her but you all trust me, correct? That’s why you’re here.”

“But you won’t be doing the spell,” Aurelius protested.

“True. But Constance has bound herself to me with contractual magic. She cannot do anything to harm me. Plus, I might add, the mages have the most to gain from this meeting. It's in her interest to make sure it goes smoothly. We have a bunker in the sub-basement below that was designed for exactly this kind of eventuality. If you would all follow Heartsbane below, we can continue our meeting.”

“But how do we know that she didn’t do this?” Lord Boneclaw asked.

“Because she’s been here the entire time,” Shimmerclaw said.

Aurelius chuckled. “Seriously, Lord Boneclaw, that would be like saying you made the fire tornado.” Aurelius laughed even harder at this while Kristen’s blood ran cold.

Of course Lord Boneclaw had done this. He must have set this attack up. Who else would want to derail these talks more than the Masked One? He had probably only come to slow the deliberations and to establish an alibi while whoever he’d convinced to to do his dirty work for him was out there risking their lives.

Oh, how she hated this dragon.

But what could be done? Aurelius was right. Kristen couldn’t accuse the dragon of foul play right now, not without opening Constance and herself up to the same accusations.

“If we could please proceed calmly, we can resume the meeting,” she said.

Despite the considerable grumbling that followed, no one seemed to have an alternative plan to stop a flaming tornado.

She watched them leave for a moment before she focused on Constance, who stepped outside and led the mages tasked with security to create the defensive shield. Each mage began by casting a simple shield spell around themselves. Their leader moved between them, correcting here and encouraging there.

Once she’d walked the perimeter of the building, she performed a complex series of gestures that blew a wind over the mages. It didn’t stir any of their clothes or hair but it did trigger all their defensive shields to mingle. One joined with another until instead of dozens of thin bubbles of protection, one huge one now covered and enveloped the entire base.

The woman returned to Kristen, sweating but looking proud. “They’ve done well. That will hold for days, even if these assholes drop a meteor on us.”

She hoped it didn’t come to that. Although she was concerned about the rest of the city, Drew knew what to do. She had to trust her team to do their job while she did hers.

Kristen fell in at the back of the delegates and saw Jim, who proved himself to be the Wonderkid, as usual. He seemed to meet every face—be it pixie, dwarf, dragon, or human—with the same warm smile. His reassurances and jokes were delivered easily and calmly and lowered the tension like he could control it with a thermostat.

She gestured for him to follow as she eased through to the front of the crowd. Once there, they caught up with Heartsbane, who was explaining what was about to happen to the sixty delegates crammed into the hallway.

“This bunker is as secure as anything can be,” Heartsbane said and used her aura to pump confidence into the room so everyone would trust her. “We’re a good forty feet down, which will protect us from almost anything. But on top of that, we have surrounded the structure with reinforced concrete. The only way in or out is through these doors.”

“What if someone needs to use the bathroom?” a dwarf asked.

The dragon struggled to not roll her eyes at the dwarf’s tasteless joke and the awkward laughter that came with it.

“There are bathrooms provided,” she explained. “Like I said, this is the only way to get in, and it's only keyed to those of us who work security. That means me and the Steel Dragon.” She wisely didn’t mention that Jim could also get in and out, as humans were much squishier than dragons. “Any questions?”

No one raised their hand, which had to be a first for the entire meeting. Heartsbane nodded, and Kristen wondered if she’d used her aura to make them all feel satisfied. She doubted it. The dragons would have surely noticed and besides, a fire tornado had a way of inspiring people to cooperate.

The door opened, and she led them inside to a very large room with three hallways leading down sets of stairs and deeper into the bunker.

“We’ll go directly ahead. We have a communal space there but it’s not quite as well decorated,” Kristen explained, thinking about the lack of the potted plants Timeflash had arranged upstairs, “but it’s big enough to hold all of us.”

“What’s down the other two ways?” one of the dwarves asked. He seemed quite interested to discover that humans also made use of tunnels.

“We have our armory to the left and storage rooms to the right. However, those areas aren’t quite as amenable as the meeting room, so we won’t visit them today. Now, if everyone would please follow me.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Do you have any fancy dragon strategy to destroy this, or should we do it my way?” Amy shouted from Lumos’s back as they flew toward the fire tornado and the massive thunderclouds all around it.

“I would quite like to see you dissipate this in its entirety before my wings get wet,” he said.

“All right, then.” She let the magic inside her course through her muscles and out through her fingertips. “Let’s do this!”

The young mage pushed her magic into the storm and used some of the wind techniques that Constance had shown her to dissipate the clouds. Although the fire tornado was at the very center, the thunderheads that stretched for miles all around it pulsed with lightning that struck anything and everything below it. Houses or trees that it touched caught fire, and every new source of flame seemed to only strengthen the tornado.

“It’s…it’s not working!” she yelled and let the magic drop away before she gave herself a nosebleed thirty seconds into the battle.

“That’s strange. I feel mage magic in there,” Larry said from Stonequest’s back. Both Lumos and Stonequest each led a wing of dragons. On the back of each one was a mage and a human soldier armed with an assault rifle loaded with dragon bullets. But none of that would make any difference if they couldn’t see their enemy.

“I feel dragon magic as well,” Lumos said. “The storm itself is being fueled by a dragon, I think.”

“It makes sense,” Stonequest said. “I’ve met dragons with storm abilities. There was one in the last battle, in fact.”

“Stormwing,” Katrina said from where she followed Lumos in formation. “He has no love of mages. He’s taken many of our number.”

“He’s a real piece of work,” Eric added from the Iron Dragon’s back.

“But he doesn’t have fire powers, correct?” Lumos asked.

“Not that he used against us,” Katrina confirmed.

“I don’t think the fire is coming from a dragon at all,” Stonequest said as a bolt of lightning cracked not ten feet from his wingtips. “It’s too sustained. Even the dragons I know who have fire powers rely on their breath to fuel it.”

“I’ve never seen a mage with powers like this, though,” Lumos said.

“No, no, most mages don’t, but didn’t Havington have fire powers?” Larry asked Katrina and Eric.

“Yes, but he could never have accomplished something like that,” Eric said.

“Not alone, no, but if Havington and Stormwing combined their powers, it might create a magical vortex. Both mages and dragons use a specialized form of wild magic. If they combine their powers, they could create something self sustaining that feeds off the ambient magic itself.” He sounded both amazed and terrified.

“But why would Havington team up with a dragon?” Katrina demanded. “He hates dragons.”

“He teamed up with you, didn’t he?” Amy asked.

“Because he knew I’d kick his ass if he didn’t,” she replied.

“Stormwing had no love of mages, either.”

“This reeks of the Masked One,” Lumos stated grimly. “Think about it. The only way to break these meetings up would be a force like this. Any attempt by one power block alone would be defeated. He probably arranged for Havington to escape and convinced them both that they had to do this in the interest of their own kind.”

“Fools,” Larry muttered.

“Fools or not, what the hell do we do about it?” Amy asked. “I can’t do shit to these clouds. I guess the dragon magic makes it impossible.”

“We’ll need to find Stormwing himself,” Lumos said.

“And Havington,” Larry added. “Right now, their powers are fueling each other’s. As long as one keeps going, the other will simply be able to gain strength from the one still standing.”

“So where the fuck are they?” Amy asked.

“I can only guess about Stormwing,” Katrina said, “but Havington always needed to be the center of attention.” With that, she pumped her wings, dropped lower over the city, and headed directly toward the fire tornado.

“What do you say, Lumos? Do you want the storm dragon or the mage?” Amy asked.

“Let’s not let them have all the fun. Stonequest, Larry, you’ll look for Stormwing?”

“With pleasure,” Stonequest replied.

“Right. I hope to see you all in the sunshine very soon,” Lumos said. It was more optimistic than anything Amy was thinking.

Drew had been through some shit but nothing like this. From his vantage point in the streets of Detroit, it looked like the sky was on fire and trying to eat the Motor City. The worst part was that he knew he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Not directly, anyway. But he could still contribute by rescuing those in its path. He had people to save.

“Come on! This way! There’s a shelter under the school,” Drew yelled to a couple of young men who ran past. He kept his arm around the old woman who teetered slowly across the street, complaining about the Steel Dragon.

“I don’t see why there’s all this big hoopla. Ever since she’s shown up, this city had more traffic and higher taxes. I can hardly stand it.”

“Ma’am, that sounds like a problem for your city council representative. Right now, I’d appreciate it if you could get to the shelter.”

“You police are all the same. Always deferring the problems.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said before he recruited one of the young men who had joined them to help the old woman.

The kid obliged, but rather than a thank you, the old woman darted a scowl at Drew. “Lazy cop.”

He didn’t have time to argue. Although Kristen’s base was in a mostly unused part of the city—she’d bought the warehouse at a discount price because this wasn’t a particularly desirable area—there were still people around. Many had lived in the neighborhood for decades and seen its highs and lows—homeless folk who were down on their luck or those who didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Jim had asked Kristen for funds to help revitalize the area, but Drew found he was glad things had been happening so fast that no one had yet moved in. It was hard enough to get the people out as it was. If there were more of them, he didn’t want to think about what the casualty count might look like.

Especially now that it was raining fire.

At first, he thought he was imagining it. The clouds above his head were already glowing red. They almost looked more like smoke than water vapor. The lightning pulsed through them like lines of fat in a steak and only made them more ominous. When tiny embers began to fall, he thought at first that it was a mirage or raindrops refracting the red light from above or something like that. But no, he realized. It was fire.

His heart began to pound harder as he went to extinguish the flaming contents of a homeless man’s shopping cart. “You have to get to cover, sir. There’s a school near here. You need to get underground.”

“Are you serious? Do you know how much this stuff is worth? I got well over a thousand dollars worth of radio transistors alone in here.”

“I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

“Deal!” the man said and snatched the proffered twenty.

Drew watched him leave while the contents of his cart continued to burn. He looked at the sky and tried to determine how this was possible. While he understood what Larry had said over the radio—that a dragon and a mage had joined their powers together to make this firestorm—how could they make it rain fire? Even in a world of magic, that was impossible. He had never heard of such a thing.

The flaming rain began to fall harder and he understood that he had been right, after all. It wasn’t raining flame. It simply appeared to be. It wasn’t flaming water that fell but flaming shingles, flaming pieces of fence, and flaming shoes. The tornado sucked up all the detritus of the Motor City, ignited it, and spread it into the bank of clouds above his head. Then, free of the upward draft of the tornado’s violent winds, these burnt pieces of Detroit fell back onto the city to trigger more blazes in a horrible cycle.

To him, this looked even more dangerous than a flaming rain.

“On the double, people! This is about to go from bad to a whole lot worse.”

He began to weep as he pounded on door after door, making sure as many people were as safe as could be. Desperation kept him moving. He couldn’t face the prospect of them not making it underground, not when the consequences were their cremated remains falling to Earth to ignite their neighbor’s house.

Drew looked at the dragons and the mages upon their backs. He prayed they’d be able to stop this assault while there was still a city to protect.

“Katrina, do you think you can get close to that tornado and see what’s going on?” Amy asked the Iron Dragon.

“Please. I’ve flown through storms worse than this. Eric?”

“Don’t worry about your eyes. None of these pieces of junk will touch us.”

The young mage watched as Katrina surged ahead directly toward the tornado itself.

“She truly is a force to be reckoned with,” Lumos said.

Indeed she was. Despite her iron skin, Katrina was fast. She seemed to move twice as fast as she had been, and they hadn’t exactly been dilly-dallying. Eric was also damn impressive to watch. He didn’t have the power Amy did—no one did—but damn, he certainly had a level of control that even Larry couldn’t claim.

Any flaming wreckage that came near them was summarily whisked away or torn to pieces so small they couldn’t burn. When Amy had battled Eric when he’d been on the other side of this entire conflict, he’d shown an incredible mastery of moving tiny traces of matter. He’d fought with a veritable swarm of needles and used those same powers now, but defensively. It was a sight to behold.

The duo pushed ever closer to the tornado and reached it without real hindrance.

Katrina didn’t hesitate.

“Shield?” she demanded as if she already knew what her rider would say.

Eric grunted an affirmative before a bubble of calm settled around the Iron Dragon. She punched through the tornado with such force that she blasted a hole in the flames themselves. The bottom section of it shook as if it had been disconnected from its power cell in the sky.

“They must be up above!” Amy yelled. “Take us higher.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lumos agreed and carried them upwards.

She began to wonder if she would even be needed but pressed on, nonetheless.

Katrina and Eric were so formidable, it seemed like they could indeed destroy a flaming tornado on their own. They punched through it again and made a third pass. Each time, it seemed to shake as if this disruption was more than it could handle.

Amy supposed that it was. After all, most tornados only lasted a few minutes. This one had outlasted them by ten times a tornado’s normal lifespan. If Katrina could destabilize it, they would be able to deal with whoever controlled it.

But the Iron Dragon would never get the chance.

On her fourth time around she flew up and almost to Amy’s level. As she prepared to dive toward the target, a great boom of thunder echoed in the black-and-red sky above them.

A hundred bolts of lightning erupted from the cloud at the same time. The dragons who had followed Lumos and Stonequest were all struck and more than fifty bolts of lightning still remained.

One caught the Iron Dragon, but she flew on. Another struck her and her iron skin began to glow. When a third impacted with her, Eric slid from her back and fell like a ragdoll. Katrina tried to slow to catch the mage who had protected her when a fourth bolt of lightning struck her horns.

Either her iron skin had finally worn off or the mage had provided far more protection from the blasts than Amy had realized. Without him, this bolt of lightning ended the Iron Dragon’s part in this fight.

She screamed in pain as she fell and her muscles convulsed and spasmed before another bolt ravaged one of her wings and sheared it off. The pitch and timbre of her shriek of agony rose in volume and intensity until she pounded into one of Detroit’s many warehouses and brought the entire building down with her.

Amy swallowed hard as more bolts of lightning began to crack all around them. “How long can this asshole dragon pal of yours keep this up?” Amy asked Lumos.

“Indefinitely, unfortunately,” the golden dragon replied before he descended sharply to below the level of Detroit’s skyscrapers. The lightning now struck the lightning rods erected on most of the buildings instead of the dragons who flew beneath them. Using this brief respite, Amy took stock of their team.

Stonequest and Larry were all right, as were three other dragons. Everyone else had been disabled. Hopefully, that was all that had happened to them, but she knew from experience that there would be deaths to mourn when this was all over. For now, though, she chose to focus on best-case scenarios rather than dwell on the negative.

“What the fuck do you mean, indefinitely?” she demanded.

“Storm magic is strange,” Lumos explained and glided between the buildings while he watched the flaming tornado that drew ever closer to Kristen’s base. “Stormwing controls the clouds, not the lightning. It takes dragons like that a great deal of energy to gather the clouds in preparation, but once they’ve harnessed them, they’re little more than micromanagers. There is tremendous energy in this storm. Stormwing isn’t creating it so much as riding it.”

“But he struck us with lighting!” Amy said. Indeed, he still seemed to be doing exactly that as bolt after bolt of crackling electrical energy connected with the tips of Detroit’s skyline.

“Lighting is merely static electricity on a massive scale. He can cause it to discharge but not aim it. That’s why we’re safe down here.”

“We seem to have different definitions of that word,” she quipped.

“Regardless, we must eliminate Stormwing. He won’t run out of energy, especially if it is as Larry said and the combination of their powers draws magic in to sustain them.”

The young mage rubbed her face, intending to wipe the rain away, but her hands came away grimy with wet ash. She didn’t want to think about what that ash was made of.

“If we can’t stop the dragon, we have to target the mage,” she said.

“What do you propose?” Lumos asked as they banked around a building and over the desolate streets.

“Get me as close to that tornado as you can. If a mage is in there, I can probably overpower him.”

“I’ll try,” the old dragon said and circled another building. Now, instead of flying away from the tornado, they moved toward it.

Amy tried to center herself as lightning cracked all around them and fire fell from the sky. She closed her eyes and brought her hands together while her legs remained firmly wrapped around Lumos’s body. She wasn’t familiar with fire magic but all mage magic was similar at its core. It was an extension of the will—a sense or a power regular people didn’t have, but to those who had the gift, it felt as natural as their body, like an extra arm.

She merely needed to reach past the flames, through the storm, and into the tornado itself. If she could find the part of his body that the mage used to control the fire, she could engage it like a couple of wrestlers in a trial of strength. She didn’t need to defeat Havington—if that was truly who was inside the tornado. All she needed to do was to take his attention away from his spell. She had to force him to engage with her instead of focusing on the tornado.

Suddenly, she located him. He was high up in the tornado and almost directly above it and flew with both his powers and the help of the dragon’s winds. His attention was focused squarely on the tornado of flame.

Amy intended to change that.

She reached out with her powers and began to push him. The first prize would be to thrust him from his position in the center and force him to feel the winds he didn’t have any power over.

It had begun to work when Havington realized what she was doing. He responded to her pushes and prods with a massive fireball, bigger than any she had ever seen.

The young mage tried to block it and succeeded only in breaking it from a sphere into a thousand tongues of flame. But much like a popped water balloon, the broken sphere could still fulfill its original intention.

Amy might have been burned to a crisp if Lumos hadn’t spun into a barrel roll and knocked the flames away with his tail. His scales crisped and puckered from the heat, but they began to heal instantly. Fire was never particularly effective against dragons.

He finished his spin and she returned her attention to the tornado, expecting the fire to be extinguished since Havington had expended so much energy on his enormous fireball.

The swirling flames were still there, although one or two parts of the tornado seemed to have temporarily gone out. Before she could draw encouragement from that, it simply reinforced itself with even more heat—far more than Havington should have been capable of.

“It’s the wild magic!” Larry shouted from Stonequest’s back. “We can’t expect to stop only one of them, not with the wild magic fueling their synthesis of powers. We have to stop them both simultaneously or this will never end.”

“Well, how do we do that?” she demanded.

“I don’t have any fucking idea!” He screamed as Stonequest dodged another lightning bolt. Now that the core of the storm was closer to downtown, some of the lighting strikes were lower. Or maybe it was simply that a few of the lightning rods had been destroyed by the massive onslaught of power. Amy had no idea.

“Well, what the fuck do we do?” she asked Larry, Lumos, and the universe at large.

“Pray,” the old dragon said as the flaming tornado incinerated the chain link fence that surrounded Kristen’s base.

It moved through the parking lot, scooped cars up like they were nothing but children’s toys, and gouged the asphalt. Larry retrieved his radio.

“Lady Steel, we couldn’t stop the flaming tornado!” he shouted into the device over the wind and booms of thunder.

“We noticed,” Kristen replied although she was hard to hear over the static that Amy assumed was caused by the lightning strikes.

“If you guys can get out, you need to.”

“It's too late for that,” she said over the radio. “But we’re in the bunker. We’ll be all right.”

As the magical attack moved onto the base, Amy couldn’t help but think of the clambake her parents liked to do in Maine every year. They’d go to the beach, dig a great big pit, fill it with clams and seaweed and whatever else they could scavenge from the ocean to eat, and cover it before they built a fire on top. While the flames never touched the clams, they turned out to be cooked perfectly every time.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Even with the thick steel doors to the bunker closed, Kristen could still feel what was happening outside. The frantic updates from Larry didn’t much help the feeling of unease in the crowded meeting room either. She had turned the radio down as much as possible and Brian was linked to his equipment on the upper floors via a tablet, but even these two small pieces of technology were hard to conceal in such close quarters.

It was also impossible to hide the fact that the room was slowly but surely heating up. When they’d first come down there, the air was pleasantly cool, if somewhat damp. So deep underground, the bunker was insulated from temperature fluctuations on the surface.

That assurance, however, now proved to be an assumption rather than fact.

Already, the air had risen five or six degrees. The pleasant moisture of the cool room began to shift into stifling humidity. The sixty delegates’ body heat didn’t help much either.

She had instructed the representatives to discuss the new proposals from the other groups amongst themselves. That had bought her maybe five minutes but now, everyone watched what she was doing out of the corner of their eyes. The pixies didn’t even attempt such subtlety. They hovered around her head, poked under her armpit, and flitted underfoot as she tried to determine what exactly the hell was going on up there.

“What can you show me, Brian?”

“The cameras on the outside of the base are still intact—oh shit, there goes one.”

Kristen scowled as the view from one the cameras mounted near the parking lot seemed to melt and cut to static. Her brother switched to a camera inside the base itself.

“The wind isn’t getting through and neither is any of the debris,” he explained. “But the heat is coming through the barrier.”

“Well, there’s that at least,” she said and tried to feign optimism.

That lasted for about three seconds until something snapped in the magic barrier and wind rushed into the room they’d evacuated. In a moment, every single window shattered. In the next, the room they had spent so much time organizing and reorganizing was on fire. She didn’t even see any flaming debris get in and start the fires.

It seemed that the heat was so intense that an invisible spark had been all it took to turn the entire room into an inferno. In less than a minute, the black curtains framing the room were gone. The fabric backs to the chairs they had so painstakingly rearranged ignited and the cheap metal began to twist and warp in the heat. Her lectern was already ablaze. A moment later, Brian had to jump between cameras as the interior ones began to melt like the ones outside had.

“Can you show me anything outside?” Kristen asked.

“Only one.” He cut to an aerial view of a drone.

“Where’s the city?” she asked. All she could see was a great blanket of flame across the landscape. It didn’t seem quite right as there were no trees or buildings to break the monotony of roiling, billowing smoke. She couldn’t identify any structures that seemed to be burning.

“This is over a mile up. Above the storm.”

“Then all that—”

“Is the clouds. The storm is covering the entire city and it looks like the clouds themselves—”

“Are on fire,” she finished in horror.

“I never anticipated such an attack,” Constance said as she joined them.

“Constance, unless there’s anything else you can do right now, I need you to return to your delegation. I can’t have everyone coming up here right now during a security crisis.”

“This kind of heat is beyond my reckoning. I had anticipated the fast-burning strikes of dragon attacks or the rapid-fire bullets and missile blasts of humans, but nothing like this. It…this shouldn’t be possible.”

“Then there’s nothing you can do?” Brian demanded, his voice both too loud and too high-pitched. It drew the attention that his sister so desperately tried to avoid.

“What do you mean there’s nothing she can do?” the human from Egypt demanded. “I thought your dome was supposed to keep us safe.”

“Let us out of this magic prison!” a dragon warrior who had not yet spoken shouted. His aura pulsed with anger and triggered a ripple of fury through the tightly packed crowd.

“You dragons won’t do anything but save yourselves,” a dwarf bellowed and swaggered toward the warrior. “Let us out there, Lady Steel. We were designed to withstand flames. We can withstand the inferno and stop whatever’s raging outside.”

“You could not withstand this,” Constance said.

“Are you calling us dwarves weak?” Rupert demanded.

“Quiet, Rupert!” Barmus shouted and whacked his colleague so hard he tumbled into a mage.

The mage scrambled to his feet in an instant and a swirling cloud of ice particles spun aggressively around his hands. “Don’t touch me, dwarf!”

“Everyone, calm down,” Heartsbane said, stepped forward, and used her aura to send a wave of tranquility through the room. Unfortunately, it was more like an attempted wave. No doubt she had tried for a lake and ended up with a puddle.

“Don’t you use those powers on us, dragon!” one of the mages shouted. This only further pissed the other the mages off, as they hadn’t realized that she had been manipulating them.

Kristen stepped into the middle of the room. “I understand that you’re all upset and I don’t blame you. My team will get this under control, but we cannot do our jobs with all of you fighting down here. I need everyone to go back to their corner of the room, now!”

“Or what?” Lord Boneclaw inquired, all smiles.

“Or I make you—personally,” she snapped at the dragon.

“Ah. I merely wanted to make sure we’ve reduced ourselves to human cavemen, using violence and threats to get our way. Right this way,” he said, acting as if he’d won as he retreated to his corner with the other dragons.

Thankfully, the other groups did the same. Slowly, the tension began to seep from the room, although the heat continued to increase. Kristen did a quick headcount and saw that everyone was where they were supposed to be.

Except the pixies.

At first, she hadn’t noticed what they were up to. But now that all the groups were in their corners, she realized that no pixies buzzed around her head, showered the room in sparks, or played practical jokes on everyone else in the room.

She didn’t see them—accustomed as she was to looking at eye level first, then to the ground second—but she heard them. They were singing. Where before, their language sounded like crickets playing bells or something of that nature, it now had the unmistakable sound of voices humming in chorus.

It was beautiful in an alien kind of way. They had the high voices of children but none of the shyness and harmonized in ways she had never experienced. Hell, they harmonized in ways that might not even be possible for humans to achieve.

Following the sound, she finally located them. All twelve of the little insect-winged creatures were gathered near the ceiling. They had formed a circle and held hands while they sang, but the strangest part was that they glowed. Pixies emitting light was not unusual in itself. After all, these creatures had launched sparks out of their fingertips since they’d arrived. What was strange was the quality of the light.

While before, the sparks had come from outside their bodies, the light now seemed to emanate from within them. It was as if a filament in their chests had been ignited and was now visible through their skin. The glow grew steadily brighter. Soon, the illumination from them was so intense that Kristen could hardly make out their features. They looked like human-shaped lights wrapped in gossamer clothing.

“Lady Dragonfly?” she said.

Neither Lady Dragonfly nor any of the other pixies responded.

“Lady Dragonfly. What are you doing?”

“This reeks of wild magic.” Lord Boneclaw sneered and slunk quickly to his corner of the room when she glared at him.

The other dragons—even Shimmerclaw and Aurelius, Kristen’s ostensible allies—retreated as well. The four Councilors stood in their corner while the eight warrior dragons put themselves between the ring of glowing pixies and their superiors. All wore looks on their faces that seemed to indicate their certainty that these pixies were as dangerous as a technomage armed with a dragon bullet. For all she knew, they could be.

“Excuse me, Lady Dragonfly. Please tell us what’s going on,” she said. She wanted to believe they were trying to help, but it certainly did not feel like it. The room was still getting hotter. If anything, the temperature increased at a faster rate than it had before the pixies started their little kumbaya session.

“Constance.” She beckoned for the mage to come closer. “Please tell me you know what they are doing.”

The technomage raised one hand to her temple and extended the other, her fingers a half-formed claw. She held this pose long enough for the temperature in the room to click up another degree or two. When she opened her eyes, they were wide with shock. Sweat glistened on her brow, although Kristen did not know if it was from the heat or from whatever she had sensed.

“I…I can’t tell what it is. The dragons are right, though. It’s wild magic.”

“Isn’t all pixie magic wild magic?” she asked.

“Indeed. But all magic stems from wild magic. I’ve encountered spells from pixies before and been able to sense their purpose or how they were similar to my own, though. A fire spell is a fire spell is a fire spell, which is what we teach our novice mages, but this is… This is something different. Something unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

“Great,” she said, tried not to sound sarcastic, and failed miserably.

“Also, Kristen,” Constance said and swallowed so hard she was worried she’d eaten her tongue.

“What?”

“Whatever they’re trying to cast, it’s a huge spell. It's larger even than the barrier we put around this base, and that took dozens of mages. I think my delegation and I should stop it.”

“No, don’t,” she said, almost surprised at herself for how quickly she had responded. “I don’t think they’re trying to hurt us. They trust me.”

“With all due respect, Kristen, you have no experience with these creatures,” Constance insisted. “They don’t think like we do. They aren’t even exactly made of matter like we are. They could be trying to help in their way, which could be antithetical to our existence. I strongly advise—”

“Let me talk to them,” Kristen said and took a step closer.

“I think—”

One of the dwarves stepped forward. She recognized Alp, who both knew Constance and had helped Amy. “Is there a problem here, Lady Steel?” he asked politely.

“I was telling the Steel Dragon that we should stop this spell,” the technomage said quickly before Kristen could answer. “We don’t know what the pixies are trying to do.”

“I think it would be a safe bet to assume they’re trying to save us from getting roasted alive,” he said and used his brightly colored hat to mop sweat from the part of his face that wasn’t hidden by his thick beard. It could not be comfortable to be a dwarf in this heat.

“You can’t know that!” Constance fumed.

“I’ve always valued our friendship,” Alp said. “But if you try to hurt those pixies, I will stop you. I’ve always wanted to see what dwarf skin can do against magical blasts.”

“It would be the last thing you see, that’s for sure,” the woman said petulantly, then turned with a swirl of her cloak and stormed away to her corner and the other mages.

“Lady Dragonfly,” Kristen said again and took a step toward the pixies, then another. “Lady Dragonfly, please tell us what’s going on. We’re all here because we want to work together. That means communicating about what our intentions are—”

She smacked into a magic barrier and scowled as she rubbed the pain from her nose in surprise. Her eyes narrowed at the pixies on the ceiling, who were still a few feet away. She raised a hand to reach toward them but it struck a magical barrier.

“What the hell is going on?” Heartsbane asked and came to the other side of the pixies. She stretched a hand toward the pixies and also encountered the magical barrier. “What the fuck is this?”

“Lady Dragonfly!” Kristen demanded and pounded on the shield. It was different than the swirling blue shield spells the mages cast. This was completely invisible and as hard as granite. She doubted that even her dragon strength would be able to do much to it.

The pixies seemed completely oblivious to what was going on outside the barrier they had erected around themselves. Their humming grew in both volume and pitch. They produced more noise than she thought their small bodies would be capable of and it grew even louder as the heat in the room intensified. By now, at least one representative from every delegation yelled in protest, yet she could hardly hear them. All she could hear was the song of the pixies that increased steadily in volume and pace like a choir gone crazy.

They glowed even more brightly too. Already, they shone with such radiant energy that Kristen couldn’t look at them directly. She shielded her eyes and looked away, noticing that Lord Boneclaw sheltered behind the dragon warriors, no doubt because the shadow powers of the Masked Dragon made him hate light. She filed that detail away for later.

But there was nothing she could do for now. The pixies’ activity continued to escalate together with the almost unbearable illumination until they were all she and anyone else could focus on. Somehow, the unbearable brightness suddenly flared to indescribable brilliance as their spell reached the peak of its crescendo.

The sound they emitted was as close to angelic as Kristen had ever experienced. Even though there were only twelve pixies, it sounded as if a hundred voices were singing, or a thousand. The notes they sang opened and closed, trading places in rhythms she had never heard but was already intimately familiar with. It was as if they sang the notes of the universe itself.

And the color left her breathless with awe. It was white, yes, but it was every other color too. Reds, yellows, blues, greens, and pinks all flashed past each other in a brilliant kaleidoscope until she lost all track. It surged and bloomed beyond its peak until the spell of the pixies consumed every sense she had.

When she had reached a point where she thought she could endure no more, all the lights went out.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

For a moment, Kristen thought she might be dead. Her first thought was, the pixies tried to take us to heaven but we were all too shitty. It was silly, brought on by too many melodramatic movies, no doubt. But the sudden lack of light and sound was so completely overwhelming and utterly isolating that she could not help but think that maybe her life was over. She could see nothing but the afterimages of the lights the pixies had flooded the room with. When she tried to listen, she could hear nothing but the hum in her ears that was left from the euphoric music the pixies had been singing.

A sliver of panic stirred but a light flared maybe twenty feet away, and she saw Constance. The mage looked harried. She was sweaty from the heat and her robes were askew. The light orb levitated a few inches above her palm and flickered with her discomfort, then flared a little brighter like a kerosene lantern being adjusted. The technomage looked like she felt—like she was surprised and not entirely relieved to find herself still alive.

In the light it cast, Kristen could see the other mages, the humans, and even the outline of the dragons in their distant corner. She was alive, she decided. If there was an afterlife, she was fairly certain it wouldn’t be populated with the members of the convention all drenched in sweat.

The next thing she noticed was that the sound of the room had changed. The pixies were no longer singing or glowing but other sounds were gone too. Most notably, the roar of the storm was gone. Before, it had filled the bottom range of her hearing, a low, dull roar that had subconsciously put everyone on edge.

Now, it was gone.

Not only that, the gentle rattle of the air conditioner and the beeps of the computers tasked with keeping this room secure were also absent. In fact, all she could hear was the breathing of the sixty delegates, plus her security team.

It might have been comforting to hear only this simple proof that everyone in the room was all right, but after the insanity of the light and sound show the pixies had produced, it was uncomfortably underwhelming. She imagined that this was what coming down off of drugs must feel like.

“Ma’am,” Jim said as he negotiated a path toward her through the dark. Kristen noticed he hadn’t turned his cellphone on to use as a flashlight. “It sounds like the air conditioning is dead. I think we need to crack the door open, otherwise, we’ll run out of air mighty quick.”

She smiled at the Wonderkid. There was something comforting about being in this room with ancient dragons, powerful mages, strong dwarves, and leaders of the world and still find that the former soldier turned cop was the first person to get his bearings and focus on the simple logistics of survival.

“Sure,” she said. “Take Heartsbane and some of your soldiers and see what’s happening out there. I don’t want anyone to leave this room yet but open the door and post a guard. Don’t you have a flashlight on your belt or something?”

“I do, ma’am, but the batteries are dead.”

“Somehow, I don’t think the Wonderkid forgot to put fresh ones in.”

“You know me too well. I checked all the flashlights only two days ago. Whatever those pixies did, I think it knocked out all the power, even the batteries.”

Kristen pulled her phone out of her pocket and found that it too was dead. “Okay. Go check on what’s happening outside. I’ll make sure we’re all fine in here.”

Jim didn’t look like he wanted to obey and leave her, but he nodded and complied without argument.

As hastily as she could—given the reality that counting forty-eight people would never be quickly accomplished—she made a headcount and confirmed that everyone was accounted for. Even Lord Boneclaw, which both calmed her nerves and made her wonder why the shadow dragon didn’t use this opportunity to attack. A brief flash of doubt that he was the Masked One passed through her, but she disregarded it as the false idea she knew it to be. All his current inaction proved was that he hadn’t anticipated that something would knock the lights out.

“We’ll find out what’s happening and get this convention back on track,” she said to the whole group.

Almost everyone began to grumble in response but at that moment, Jim cracked the door and a blessedly cool gust of air blew into the room. The Wonderkid ignited a bright white flare and stepped into the hallway.

“If you can make light, please do so,” Kristen said.

A few mages obliged her with more glowing orbs. Two of the dragons ignited their weapons, which of course put the humans and mages on edge for a moment. When the dragons didn’t move their flaming weapons from their corner, everyone remained more or less calm.

She noticed that although all the humans and some members of the dwarf delegation reached into their pockets to retrieve their cellphones for illumination, no screens turned on in the darkness. Whatever the pixies had done had killed the electricity and batteries. She didn’t know of technology that could accomplish that. While she had heard of electromagnetic pulses in movies, surely the pixies hadn’t created one of those. Why would they? An EMP wouldn’t do anything to a tornado.

No, she suspected that whatever they had done was far more unusual than a device from a sci-fi movie. She only hoped the tiny, strange beings had an answer. They didn’t seem like the type who normally bothered to explain themselves.

Kristen approached the pixies and her gaze tried to find them in the gloom. They were not where they had previously been on the ceiling. So where were they?

“Kristen, they’re hurt,” Brian said. She hadn’t noticed her brother and realized he now knelt below where their ring had been. He was the only person, mage, dragon, or dwarf who had dared to enter the space the creatures had sealed with magic moments before. The light was dim as no mages were nearby, but there was enough for her to see the distress on his face as she sank to a knee beside him.

All the pixies were on the floor and all were unconscious. Whatever they had done, it had knocked them out cold. It meant she wouldn’t have any answers anytime soon.

“Damn it,” she cursed to no one in particular.

This was exactly the kind of thing her security force was supposed to prevent. It mattered to her that the pixies had seemingly hurt themselves. If the cool air wafting into the room was any indication, whatever they had done had been to protect everyone down there. They had, in effect, done what had been her job. That the pixies had to step in at all reflected a failure on her part.

She only hoped they weren’t dead. If twelve pixies had been able to disable the power in this room and stop the heat from the fire tornado, she didn’t want to think what ten times that number could do. Or a hundred. It had been hard enough to talk to the delegation, and Lady Dragonfly had said that the group was one of the more logical groups.

Kristen studied them carefully and extended a hand to the one closest to her, hoping the little creatures had pulses like she did but not at all sure.

“Be careful,” Constance warned and levitated her light orb closer so that she could see. Despite offering her magical orb, the technomage remained a few steps away. Kristen hoped that in a few moments, the woman would prove to be paranoid and that she would still be alive.

She touched Lady Dragonfly gently. The little pixie was warm to the touch, which was a good sign. Very tenderly, like she was checking on a baby bird, she extended one finger and pressed it gingerly against the tiny chest.

“Oh, thank God, she has a pulse.” She checked the others and confirmed that they too were alive.

“It’s wonderful to know the little sprites didn’t die,” Lord Boneclaw said and sounded like he did not think it was at all wonderful.

Kristen hadn’t seen him approach and did not like how much darkness flooded this room they shared. “I would think you’d like the darkness,” she muttered.

He twisted his scarred face into a sneer. “I don’t like things I don’t understand. You were the last one to talk to them. We saw you take them away while the rest of us were deliberating. Now tell us, what did they do?”

“My team is investigating and will radio me as soon as they have an answer,” she snapped at the dragon councilor.

“Yeah…about that,” Brian said. “I don’t think that’ll happen. All the computers are dead. Like, all of them. I checked a few and it doesn’t look like a power surge, more like there’s no power at all.”

“Could the storm have damaged the powerlines?” Kristen asked.

He looked at her like it was the dumbest thing she’d ever said. After the briefest moment of reflection, she realized it wasn’t the smartest question she’d ever asked.

“All the electronics are dead,” he said bluntly. “We had backup generators that haven’t turned on. My phone is dead and so is my tablet. Even the radios are out. I would say it’s fucking weird, but I saw twelve pixies hold hands and sing a song that stopped me from being roasted alive so honestly, losing power is like par for the course at this point.”

“So what you’re telling me is that my head of intelligence is completely useless right now since you can’t use your cameras, drones, the Internet, radios, or anything else?” she asked.

“Er…will this affect my pay?” Brian asked.

“No, because you’ll take care of these pixies.”

The look on his face was one of pure horror. “I…you remember my bearded dragon, right?”

“You won’t leave the pixies in the yard while you chase the ice cream man, will you?”

“Uh…no?” He still looked aghast but he seemed to gain a hold of himself. “There are a few boxes in the supplies room. Maybe I can fix them a little shelter.”

“Do that,” Kristen said. She turned to the leaders of each delegation. “Constance, Lady Shimmerclaw, Krot Minestrength, Mr. Secretary—would you all like to come with me to investigate?”

“I think Ambassador Johnson will do fine,” the Secretary of State said and pushed the chief American ambassador to the dragons forward. The other humans seemed quite happy to send Johnson to see what the fuck had happened.

“Take Alp,” Krot Minestrength said, settled in with his dwarves, and kept an eye on the dragons.

Lady Shimmerclaw and Constance—demonstrating true leadership in her opinion—both nodded and followed her to the door.

She led the way out of the room they’d sheltered in and into the hallway that led to the top of the base. It was a supremely uncomfortable feeling to have to do this in person. For months, the entire base had been under the constant surveillance of Brian and a security detail. But now, his cameras were all dead, as was their communication equipment and everything else that was powered by electricity. She simultaneously felt like she’d been thrown into the dark ages and rocketed into a post-apocalyptic future.

The first thing she noticed was how cool it was in the hallway. If anything, she had expected it to be even hotter there than it had been in the room with all the delegates, simply because there was one less layer of insulation. But the opposite was true and a wind whistled through the hallway, howling a pitch that set her on edge.

She almost transformed into a dragon when Brian appeared from the gloom at the end of the hall. A magic ball of light followed him, which was all the more unnerving as he didn’t have a magic bone in his body.

“Brian?”

“I found a box for the pixies,” he said in a rush and moved past her and into the room.

“They’re sentient beings, not grounded bats!” she shouted after him, but he was too nervous to notice his sister.

Kristen watched through the cracked door and past the guards she’d posted as he carefully picked the unconscious pixies up one by one and placed them into the box. That done, he shook out a towel and tucked them in gently. Or, at least, that was what he appeared to do. She couldn’t see through the box or much detail in the gloom, even with the orbs of magical light in the meeting room.

“Lady Steel, shall we?” Shimmerclaw asked and gestured down the hallway in front of them.

“Of course.” She realized she’d been woolgathering. They proceeded cautiously and remained close together. The wind definitely came from up ahead. It blew in their faces and whipped her red hair from behind her ears and into her face. The cool it brought would have been refreshing after the heat from the tornado, but as they drew closer to the stairs that led to the base, flecks of ash began to appear, drawn into the tunnel with the draft. It was hard to feel refreshed when continually reminded that a force greater than any she had seen before had been unleashed on their city.

They reached the base of the stairs to find the door already open.

“Is it supposed to be that way?” Ambassador Johnson asked.

“I sent Heartsbane and Jim ahead to investigate,” she said, as much to herself as to everyone else. “They must have opened it.”

Alp, Shimmerclaw, and Constance offered no response. The dwarf simply tightened his hand on the ax he wore at his belt and the mage’s floating light orb began to spin in a manner that Kristen and the rest of them found to be rather aggressive. Shimmerclaw seemed nonplussed, but she could transform into a dragon if she needed to and so had no need to panic. She had the same ability, but that didn’t stop her from donning her steel skin.

The whistling sound came from the slightly askew door. She pulled it open the rest of the way and the sound stopped. A cool gust blew across them before the wind seemed to die down as if it had only blown to lure them out there.

“Heartsbane?” Kristen called out up the stairs, not proud of herself for sounding scared but also scared and beyond giving too many shits right now. “Jim?”

“Kristen,” Jim responded quietly. That he was alive was more of a relief than it should have been. “You need to see this.”

They walked up the stairs as if a monster of their nightmares might attack at any moment. Only the human ambassador didn’t look like he wanted to fight whatever that might be. She didn’t blame him, though. The rest of them were supernatural beings with magic coursing through their veins. She was willing to bet Johnson didn’t even have a gun with him.

They reached the top of the stairs without being eaten by a demon or a monstrous clown and discovered that the ground floor was completely trashed. Kristen nodded at the damage, having seen some of it already through Brian’s cameras before they failed. All the decorations they’d put up for the convention were destroyed. The curtains had been burned to nothing. Some of the chairs looked like they could be salvaged, but the vast majority were either melted or thrown into each other with such force that they would never seat another butt again.

Broken glass from the windows was scattered everywhere. It was a mess. She sighed, but it wasn’t much worse than when they’d bought the location. It would cost both time and money, but new windows could be installed and new chairs could be purchased. The base itself seemed relatively unharmed. It seemed Constance’s magic had done a decent enough job of protecting them.

“It looks like a flaming tornado came through here, all right,” she said in an attempt at humor to lighten the mood.

“Yeah, but where is it now?” Alp asked, his jaw was hanging open and his gaze focused beyond the building to the outside.

At first, Kristen didn’t know what he was talking about. Although she had dragon vision, her eyes had more difficulty piercing the gloom than the dwarf’s did. Past the windows, it was as dark as it was inside.

Her heart dropped.

“Why is it dark outside?” she asked no one in particular. “We weren’t down there that long. Did the storm knock out the lights to the whole city?”

“More like knocked out the whole city,” Heartsbane replied. She also stared out the windows into what looked like the blackest night Kristen had ever seen.

“Constance, can you raise that ball so we can see what’s out there?” she asked.

The technomage nodded grimly and complied. She launched her ball of light into the warehouse space and made it grow in size and intensity. In a moment, the dull gloom of the room had transformed into bright areas of light and harsh shadows.

But the darkness outside the base didn’t change at all. It simply swallowed the light the woman created as if it were hungry for more. Her heart dropped even deeper into her stomach when she saw what was out there.

Only blackness existed, the utter black of nothingness.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Amy was desperate. She couldn’t get close to the mage inside the tornado and she couldn’t find the dragon who created the storm. Already, the base of the tornado had swallowed the building all of her friends were in.

It worked at the magical bubble Constance and her mages had created like the world’s most powerful snail trying to pry open a clam. She had no idea if the people inside were already dead. Their radios no longer made contact, which she took as a bad sign.

“We have to do something!” she shouted at Lumos.

“What do you propose?” the golden dragon asked.

“I don’t know,” she shouted in return. Currently, she wondered if she had the strength to simply lift one of the smaller skyscrapers from downtown and hurl it at the top of the tornado. She had no idea if she had the strength for this and understood that if she did it, there was a chance it would simply turn the entire building into tornado fuel or crush the building below, but she honestly didn’t know what else to do.

“I don’t know what went into Constance’s shield, but I don’t see how it could stop all these factors. The wind, the heat, and the physical blows from the debris will wear it down,” Lumos said. It did not comfort Amy at all that she could tell the old dragon tried not to sound nervous.

That settled it for her. If a thousands-of-years-old dragon was nervous about the goddamn firestorm, she would heave a building at it or die trying. She knew the sheer force of such an exertion might very well overwhelm her. But the people inside had all risked themselves for her or people like her, confused kids who didn’t understand their place in the world. She would not let them get cooked.

Cautiously, she sent tendrils of energy out and began to dig into the foundation of a nearby nine-story hotel. As she wrapped her mind and her magical powers around the pieces she would need to sever to lift the building, a blinding flash and a huge pulse of magic came from the base itself, right at the foot of the tornado.

“What did you do?” Lumos asked in shock.

Amy unwrapped her magical abilities from the structure and narrowed her eyes at the flaming tornado that worked so hard to roast her friends.

Except her friends were no longer there.

The bottom of the tornado now spun over empty air, maybe forty feet off the ground. Instead of the base that was her de facto home beneath them, there was nothing. The upper floors were missing and the main level was gone. Even the basement Kristen had no doubt taken everyone into had vanished. It was as if reality were made of gelato and some godlike ice cream man had simply scooped the facility out of reality itself.

Where a moment before, the base was ravaged by the fire tornado, nothing remained at all. She gaped at an enormous hole in the earth with a few smaller holes in its sides that must have led into sewers, pipes, and the steam tunnels that ran under Detroit that she had always found so creepy.

Now, however, she’d spend a week in a steam tunnel if only to have an explanation for whatever the fuck had happened to the base.

“For the warmth of dragon’s breath, did you do that?” Lumos shouted.

“I didn’t do it,” she said.

“Are you…sure?” he asked. “I sensed you doing something seconds before this happened.”

A moment of odd calm followed during which they both simply watched the fire tornado extend its base into the hole where the base had been. So much for her hopes that someone had simply turned it all invisible.

“It wasn’t me. I promise,” Amy said and shook herself from the stupor she’d fallen into. “I tried to pick that hotel up over there to chuck it at the tornado.”

“That does sound more like you…” Lumos said as he banked wide around the magical attack so they could continue to look for the missing base. The tornado seemed to search too. Its flaming base worked inside the giant hole but it found nothing. No delegates materialized in the ember-filled wind and no pieces of familiar equipment were suddenly unearthed. It was like the base had simply ceased to exist.

“I felt…something,” she said. It was surreal to be so much at a loss for an explanation for whatever the fuck had happened while a literal firestorm was still in the sky above them, striking lightning onto the city.

“Felt what?” Lumos asked. He seemed to be regaining his sense of urgency more rapidly than she was. It made sense, though. He had been alive for thousands of years and had probably seen some shit.

“I felt a pulse of magic immediately before that flash of light. It came from either the base or the bottom of the tornado. I know that much.”

“Then we should assume that whatever it was came from inside the base itself,” he said.

“What? How can you possibly know that?”

“I can’t.” The old dragon sounded somber. “But given that the tornado is still raging and looks furious over having lost its intended meal, I think it’s safe to guess that neither the mage, the dragon, nor one of their allies are responsible for the disappearance. Otherwise, they’d be celebrating. Whoever did this was probably inside.”

“Okay, but what is this?” she demanded.

“I don’t have any idea either,” Larry shouted from Stonequest’s back. They had caught up to Lumos and Amy.

“We don’t have time to find out, though,” Stonequest said.

“What do you mean we don’t have time?” the girl shouted. “Our friends are gone!”

“And there’s not a thing we can do about that,” Larry said. “The tornado, on the other hand, needs to be stopped.”

Sure enough, the masters of the flaming tornado seemed to reach the same conclusion that Amy and her allies did and began to resume the attack on the city. It took a moment to pull itself up and out of the huge hole it had searched through, but once it was clear, it moved directly toward the downtown skyscrapers. She was suddenly very relieved that she hadn’t gone through with her plan to use a skyscraper to try to stop it.

When it struck one, it simply savaged it and hurled burning debris in every direction.

“Shit, you’re right. We have to stop it!” Amy shouted.

“Do you have any ideas?” Larry asked.

“Katrina seemed like she might be able to do—”

“That’s not an option.” Stonequest cut her off. “She was badly injured by that lightning and is out of this fight. It’s up to us.”

That was not at all what she wanted to hear, but there it was.

“We tried getting closer and we couldn’t. The heat was too much,” she said and tried to sound strong although despair began to close in.

“Well, if you couldn’t, we can’t,” Larry said and sounded as depressed as she felt. “He’ll see us coming and hit us with lightning or a fireball.”

“That’s it!” Amy said, suddenly knowing what she had to do.

“We need to…let him hit us with a fireball?” Larry asked.

“Not we, you!”

“As the dragon carrying the mage toward the tornado, I have to say I object to this plan,” Stonequest said.

“Gather all the dragons still airborne and get all of them to make dives at the tornado. Stay safe but keep him occupied. Lumos, how fast do you think you can get us out from under this storm?”

“I can get us above it in less than a minute.”

“No!” Amy shouted, surprised how sure she was that this would work. “Stormwing seems to be able to sense the winds of the storm. We need to get out.”

The old dragon seemed confused but he looked at the horizon. “Five minutes, if you can hold on.”

“Do you hear that, Larry? We need ten.”

“He said five.”

“Start the clock,” Amy shouted and spurred Lumos to start his flight.

“I’m a dragon, not a horse,” he joked but he obeyed all the same and pumped his wings. Their speed increased until the wind whipped in her face and the raindrops from the storm stung like hail.

They flew away from the tornado, the lightning, and the clouds until, miles distant, they were once again under clear skies.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the golden dragon said. “I’ve never fled a battle before.”

“Good, because it’s time to go in again,” she said in triumph.

“What? We did all that to let Larry and Stonequest have some practice? I know they need it, but still.”

“For an old fella, you sure can be slow. Fly above the clouds as high as you can. We’ll go above the storm, where the dragon can’t sense us. Once we get above the tornado, we’ll drop down on them.”

“You can’t possibly know that this will work,” Lumos said.

“The fact that a dragon who said he’s never run from battle before retreated for five minutes means you don’t have a better idea.”

He cursed under his breath as he flew them above the clouds and increased their elevation until the air was thin before he began to race toward the center of the storm. Amy willed him to go faster. There was no other option. This had to work.

She only wished she felt more certain that it would.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Kristen, Constance, Shimmerclaw, and Ambassador Johnson all stared out the windows of the base and into the deepest, darkest blackness any of them had ever seen.

Only Alp didn’t seem terrified at the void. “I reckon we ought to chuck a rock at it,” the dwarf said.

Constance guffawed louder than Kristen had ever heard her. “We are faced with a void more engulfing and complete than any discovered by magic or science and you think we should simply chuck a rock at it?”

He responded with a half-shrug. “I reckon we ought to, yeah.”

It was better than any ideas she had right now. Looking at it didn’t inspire her. It simply emptied her head as completely as the outside of the base seemed to be. She knelt and picked up a piece of twisted metal—either a part of a broken window frame or the leg of a chair—and threw it out the window. Propelled by her dragon strength and guided by the eyes of a police officer who had spent considerable time on the shooting range, the projectile streaked through the aperture and into the void.

That was her assumption, at least. She couldn’t honestly be sure.

As soon as the piece of metal met the darkness it simply vanished. She was at least somewhat certain of that. It didn’t simply become harder to see as it moved away from Constance’s light orb. It vanished. One moment, it spun end over end toward the wall of inky darkness and then it was gone, swallowed like a dinosaur that had plunged into a tarpit.

Everyone waited—their breath held—for the piece of metal to end its trajectory and make impact with something. No indication of this came, however. There was no sound that suggested it had encountered either an object, structure, or the ground.

“Hello!” Alp shouted at the top of his lungs, which made Johnson and Constance both jump. Shimmerclaw almost changed into her dragon form in surprise. No resounding dwarf voice echoed in return and no one hollered for him to shut up.

In fact, nothing seemed to come from outside except darkness. There were no sounds and no smells or vibrations of the battle that had raged on the streets of Detroit only moments before. There had been wind in the hallway but now that she had pushed the door wide open, even that had faded. It was if the outside had simply ceased to exist.

Constance took a step forward toward one of the walls as if the void didn’t surround every side of the base. “I would like to examine this…darkness for a moment if I may. Would someone else mind doing the lights?”

“Sure.” Kristen scrounged around for a moment until she found a piece of unburnt fabric inside a ball of ashes. She wrapped it around the metal leg of a chair.

“Here, I can help with that,” Alp said and took the makeshift torch. He pulled a vial of some kind of yellowish gooey oil from his pocket and applied it gently to the fabric. Once the oil was stowed, he retrieved flint and steel, knocked them together in a practiced motion, and ignited the torch.

“I had a lighter,” she said and brandished a plastic one.

He shrugged. “Dwarves are trained to be able to find their way out of caves when they’re young. We also keep supplies on hand.”

“It’s a pleasure to know we’re in a situation where underground survival skills prove to be useful,” Shimmerclaw said but didn’t sound pleased.

The problem of illumination solved, Constance let her glowing orb wink out and took a few steps closer to the front door of the base. The door had been ripped off its hinges so they could see outside. It was even more uncomfortable than looking out the windows.

Through the windows, Kristen’s brain made a valiant effort to tell her conscious mind that it was simply the night sky but completely devoid of stars, the moon, and the lights of the city. But when she looked through the doorway, that illusion simply didn’t work. The blackness began at the edge of the sidewalk that went up to the door. She couldn’t tell if it went into the ground as well, simply that the sidewalk seemed to ceased to exist in a spectacularly creepy fashion.

Constance also seemed less than comfortable around the darkness because she did not step through the doorway. Instead, she remained behind the frame as if the almost broken rectangle would provide her with some measure of protection.

She extended one hand and a great gust of wind blew from between her fingers into the wall of black. The void swallowed it as if she had done nothing. It did not move, make a sound, or give any indication that she’d had any effect on it. Undeterred, she lifted a few pieces of rubble with her telekinesis and pushed them slowly into the void. She drew one of them back, and Kristen barely caught a glimpse of it before the woman hurled it into the inky vacuum.

It looked like the part that had gone into the blackness had vanished.

Finally, the technomage closed her eyes and started the now-familiar chant that was used to open a gate for teleportation. But rather than proceeding for the few minutes required to open it, she stopped after only a few seconds. Her eyes jerked open and widened with alarm.

She took a step back, drew a deep breath, and regained her composure. Kristen wondered if she had appeared to lose it to the others present. But to her, after all their time battling and then working together, it was as plain as day that Constance was as scared as hell.

“Well?” Ambassador Johnson asked.

“I’ve heard of things like this before but never seen them.”

“Things like what?” he pressed and revealed his experience as a politician.

“Other dimensions. Places outside of ordinary space and time. The teleportation spell we rediscovered uses such places to function.”

“Are you telling us this is some kind of weird magical reality?” Alp asked and gestured at the inky blackness like it was something on his plate he did not particularly want to eat.

“I would not use the word reality to describe anything out there, but other than that…yes, you have the gist of it.”

“And we’re simply supposed to take your word for it?” Johnson demanded as if he hadn’t been the one to ask her to explain it.

“I agree with the mage—pardon me, Lady Vigil,” Shimmerclaw said with a slight nod of respect to Constance. “Although it has been hundreds of years since I have heard about any kind of breach between the worlds. The last time was—”

“Let me guess,” Heartsbane interjected, “during the last mage wars.”

Shimmerclaw nodded at the younger dragon. “Some of our youth know their history, anyway. But even though I believe this to be one of those realms, I don’t see how we could possibly have ended up in a place like this.”

“Could it have been the firestorm?” Jim asked from near the door to the bunker below. He had not come out much farther than a couple of steps. “Even a Marine like me could tell you that was a shit ton of magic. Could they have…I don’t know…broken something?”

“I think the firestorm may have been a factor…” Constance said slowly. “If a mage and a dragon teamed up, it's quite likely their combined energies would have invited wild magic to join them.”

“No one can invite wild magic,” Shimmerclaw huffed. “That’s why we call it wild.”

“Not intentionally, of course,” the technomage said quickly. “But magic is like life. It attracts itself.” She snapped her fingers, realization plain on her face. “But those were not the only two spells, were they? There was also the protection spell my mages cast.”

“You mean the spell that completely enveloped the base like the bubble of black?” Jim asked.

“Indeed,” she said grimly. “The combination of all those forces plus whatever ritual magic the pixies did might have created this…this event.”

“So…you don’t have any fucking idea what those little pixies did either?” Heartsbane asked.

“I’m afraid not, no. I have tried to make allies of pixies, but they do not ever wish to share their magic with us. They don’t use spells like we do. I know that what they did was powerful, and I suspect it had some effect on this…void. Lady Shimmerclaw, perhaps you, in your experience and wisdom, can illuminate the problem?”

The old dragon shook her head. “I have seen pixies do many remarkable things but nothing like this, I’m afraid.”

“It sounds like we need to wake them up,” Johnson said as if he could delegate himself out of any problem that presented itself.

“We’ll let them rest for now,” Kristen said and tried not to make it sound too much like an order, even though it totally fucking was. “If Constance is right and their spell somehow…misfired, they’ll probably need their rest before they try to fix it. In the meantime, I need to do a damage assessment of this building. If any of you would like to join me, that would be fantastic. But if anyone wants to return to the chamber below, that would also be fine.”

“I need to head down and make a report,” Johnson said, quick to look away from the blackness outside. He started toward the door to the bunker.

“I think I might also be more useful down below,” Shimmerclaw said.

“I wouldn’t mind having a poke around,” Alp told her.

“I’d like to investigate further,” Constance concurred.

The three of them set out to explore the upper floors of the base. It was all much the same as the ground floor—broken glass and everything but the brick walls burnt to hell. The structure itself wasn’t completely ruined, and there were odd little pockets where either the wind hadn’t penetrated or perhaps Constance’s shield had held and the damage was minimal. They found a kitchen in perfect working order, as well as Stonequest’s office, but everything else was completely wrecked. Still, with the considerable wealth left to Kristen by Windlock, she could replace it all. It would be a massive inconvenience but at least no one was hurt.

When they reached Brian’s computer station upstairs, she paid particularly close attention. His room was one of those that had fared better. Considerable smoke had seeped in and the door had burned off its hinges, but that must have happened late in the chaos as the computers seemed fine.

Except, of course, that none of them worked. They were completely powered down and not even pressing the little glowing switch on the surge protector was able to revive them. For some reason, this tiny detail put her on edge. It felt like absolute proof that they were in uncharted waters.

“I truly wish I could say I understood what happened here,” Constance said.

Alp shrugged. “We dwarves say if you dig too deep, you might get burned. Maybe those pixies reached a vein of lava, so to speak.”

“I hope not,” Kristen muttered and wished she could feel hope right now.

They headed downstairs to inform the others about what they had found.

Shimmerclaw was already most of the way through the first report. “So the pocket dimension we’re in is small but seems stable,” she said.

While she spoke, Kristen went to check on the pixies.

“They’re still out cold,” Brian whispered while the dragon continued to talk. “Is it as bad as Shimmerclaw makes it sound?”

“It—wait, what?” She moved her attention from the pixies to the room.

“Although we don’t have answers yet, this convention has people from all the major races, so we should have an answer soon. Surely someone here will know what to do,” Shimmerclaw stated.

“You’re saying that even though we have powerful mages, dragons, and dwarves, none of you know what is going on?” the German human yelled, his voice rising in terror.

“Not quite, no. But if we cannot solve it, surely the people outside will.”

“Now you’re saying we won’t find the answers?” the Russian demanded.

“If we don’t, surely someone will,” Shimmerclaw said and looked openly annoyed with the humans.

But of course they were freaking out. Kristen knew they were the most out of their depth, what with not being magical in any way. Everyone else at least had some vague inkling of how magic could bend reality. Dragons knew their dragon body went somewhere when they transformed, and dwarves owed their very existence to magic. It was only the humans who didn’t have a touching point for this.

Unfortunately, their panic had begun to spread.

Kristen stepped forward, thanked Shimmerclaw for her report, and tried to calm those present. “Look, I understand that this is weird, but we’ll get through it. If anyone has any ideas or interest, please speak to Constance Vigil, who will be in charge of this investigation. Everyone else, we need to be prepared to be here for a few days.”

The inevitable grumbles followed, but it was the “I don’t want to do any work, I’m a powerful diplomat” kind of grumbling instead of the “I’m afraid for my fucking life” kind of grumbling, so that was good.

“We have more than enough supplies for everyone, but the upstairs area was destroyed. We had bunks prepared, but we’ll need help to set all that up again. This bunker was not meant to hold this many people and quite frankly, you’re all starting to stink.”

The dragons laughed at this, but no one else did. She swallowed. So much for humor.

“We’ll need food, water, cots, and kerosene lanterns so we can see. Right now, I want mages who aren’t helping Constance’s investigation to help with light. Dragons and dwarves can help carry stuff, oh—dwarves, could we get some torches?”

In a frantic few movements, the eleven dwarves who had been empty-handed all held one. Even Minestrength, the prime minister, seemed to think it important to have the materials needed to start a fire handy.

“All right, let's get to work moving supplies and cleaning the upstairs. With luck, we’ll be all set up when the pixies wake and knock this shield down so we can get back to our deliberations.”

Everyone got to work. Kristen had already counted on more than a little luck to make this entire convention work. Now, she doubled down to simply get back to the reality they all knew so well.

She had never been much of a gambler.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Masked One had expected the flaming tornado created by the mage and storm dragon he’d put together to create chaos at the convention, but even he had failed to anticipate whatever the pixies had done.

He had expected the magic dome Constance made, of course. Over the last year, the mages under Kristen’s leadership had been quite adept at using their magical powers to defend themselves. He had not thought they would have failed to block heat itself, but the rules of the universe—even the non-magic rules—were tricky to fully account for.

His plans included the expectation that the mages would defend themselves and in doing so, cut themselves off from the rest of the city. He had hoped that halfway through the deliberations, Kristen would look outside to see nothing but a flaming wasteland where her precious Motor City had been. Now, however, there was nothing outside at all.

More out of habit than any actual distrust, he hadn’t believed Shimmerclaw and while she’d been talking, he had slipped above. It would have been impossible for any other being to move as quickly as he did, but he could move at the speed of darkness, which was even faster than light. It was always there behind every pebble and every blade of grass. It had taken him less than three seconds to reach the surface, see that the outside world was indeed nothing but a void of darkness, and return.

Experience and knowledge made sure he understood that the darkness outside the base wouldn’t provide him the shelter his powers needed to work. It meant he was trapped in there with the rest of them.

The Masked One didn’t like his plans being upended but on the other claw, he was a creature who knew how to seize an opportunity. He was a schemer and a planner, yet he saw the innate value of chaos. In this particular situation, the Steel Dragon was the one most reliant on the plans—they were hers after all—which meant the chaos could belong to him.

She finished her pathetic little pep talk and started to delegate orders like she already thought she controlled the new world order she seemed to be so earnestly intent on creating. The room slowly emptied and he sent the dragon warriors with Lady Jade and Decimus Aurelius while he lingered in the room. He wasn’t sure what he might discover, but once the mages left with their spheres of light and the dwarves with their torches, he was sure he could find something of interest.

Unfortunately, the Steel Dragon’s runty human “brother” stood at the door and watched him.

The room grew darker but the young man stared into the darkness, his eyes narrowed in suspicion and his distrust clear. The Masked One wanted to eviscerate the primate. He wanted to rip his entrails out and strangle him with them. His instinct was to peel his skin back and harvest his skull. It would be pure pleasure to attack the Steel Dragon while wearing the remains of one of the disgusting beings she had sworn her allegiance to instead of the rightful leaders of this world.

“We’re all heading up to help. I need to lock this room,” the disgusting, fat mammal said.

He almost lost control at that. The impertinence of this greasy slug! To think that he not only dared tell him what to do but that he said it as if he were nothing but a common cleaning wench. His blood began to boil. What light was still in the room came from the hallway. It was not even close to enough to protect the boy. In a blink, the old shadow dragon could disincorporate and sink his claws deep into his chest. He could almost feel the warmth of his blood on his hands as his victim’s heart ceased to beat.

Oh, how he wanted to.

He wanted to so much.

But he wouldn’t. Not yet and not now. The Masked One saw the utility of this moment. He was trapped there, yes, but those obnoxious electric lights the humans cowered under were gone. With a little patience, he could accomplish far more than slaughtering one little piggy.

“Of course. Forgive me,” he said and did not attempt to hide his disgust from the boy.

Using the practiced, weak-spined posture of Lord Boneclaw, he joined the rest of the crowd struggling to get through the door like a herd of fat cattle.

The boy relaxed, his aura as easy to read as a children’s book.

“Thanks. I appreciate your cooperation,” he said.

That was not easy to ignore. The arrogance of this whelp!

The Masked One merely nodded and followed the crowd down the hallway toward the surface. By the time he reached the intersection of hallways, the area was already bustling with activity. Dwarves and dragons carried cots and supplies from one hallway up the stairs to the surface. Mages made balls of light dance, casting long shadows that shifted this way and that. Even the humans—ostensibly leaders in their own countries—carried supplies like they were nothing more than ants. He looked at all of them with disdain.

None of them looked at him.

The fat boy who had made sure he left the room was now busily trying to activate some kind of electronic device. No doubt he was having withdrawals from the video pornography humans of his ilk were so obsessed with. The old dragon took a step back into the shadow behind a concrete pillar and vanished.

In a split-second, he was in the corridor outside the storage room where the humans and dragons labored. Even though the mages had balls of light moving up and down the hallway, they made no attempt to erase every shadow. Why would they? As a result, he was able to move from one dark patch to the next, first hiding in the darkness beneath a crate, then in the shadow cast by a moving human.

He entered the storage room and found it as he’d expected. It was filled with predictable survival supplies. Jugs of water. Packets of food. Batteries. Lights that didn’t seem to be functioning. Medical supplies. Boring.

The Masked One went back up the hallway to the intersection. A glance at the dullard of a human showed him that he had given up on pleasuring himself and checked on the unconscious pixies once more.

That gave the shadow dragon all the time he needed to vanish into the other hallway.

Part of him had wanted to stay and wring those little pixies’ necks, but he knew that such a gesture, even if performed out of the sight of everyone—an unlikely possibility given the current circumstances—would have been in vain. The creatures could be killed, of course. All living things could die. He had spent a century of his life proving this very theory personally.

But the pixies were trickier to kill than most. It had something to do with the wild magic of which they were largely comprised. Crushing one beneath a boot or wringing its neck did little beyond turn them into a shower of sparks. Magic had to be used to kill them. He had done so before using his shadow abilities. What a fun little challenge that had been, but there was no point in doing so now. Especially given that the pixies might be the only beings that could do away with the void they all found themselves in.

Plus, there were other more exciting things to kill than a cluster of glorified magical insects with a child’s sense of humor. He focused on what was important and moved deeper into the hall opposite the one with the survival supplies. At the very end, he found a locked door.

He had to admit that at least the Steel Dragon was being appropriately cautious. This room had a touchpad that surely would have demanded his fingerprint if it had power, an electric camera that would have required his retina, and a keyboard for some esoteric password. That there was no power was no impediment to this security system, and the door simply remained locked. It seemed that even if the Steel Dragon herself wanted access to this room, she wouldn’t be able to have it at the moment. The steel bolts that made this door as solid as the reinforced concrete on either side of it were stubbornly in place. No power outage could disrupt its purpose.

Too bad for the Steel Dragon’s security system that he had never met a door that could hold him. And she had tried so valiantly. It was substantial and the walls around it even more so. In addition, the hallway was fairly small. It would be difficult for a dragon to take their true form and have the space needed to simply demolish it. Even if they could, The Masked One knew that humans were greedy and the Steel Dragon was no different. She might have even rigged the room to destroy its contents if broken into.

Of course, he would not break in. He honestly didn’t know if he could—brute force had never been a trait he particularly valued—and he also didn’t want to make a noise. Besides, why bother when the room had a door?

This one, like all the others, was made to be opened. In this case, it meant hinges. No thicker or substantial than a shadow, he slipped through the tiny crack that allowed the door to move.

Sometimes, he wondered if even the doors humans put on the rocket ships they sent to space could hold him. Certainly, those on a plane had failed to do so more than once. The problem was that air obeyed the rules of pressure, while his will was a far more determined force than any inanimate matter.

Inside, he discovered he was exactly where he wanted to be.

It was the armory and oh, what an armory it was! No enchanted swords covered these walls. No unbreakable spears rested in wait for their user. The walls there held the most human of all weapons—guns.

Dozens of them—possibly even hundreds. An entire wall was hung with every type of gun a modern murder-obsessed human might wish to possess. There were big ones the Masked One knew could shoot hundreds of bullets with the simple squeeze of a trigger. Others were long and straight and could punch through the many materials humans had devised to stop that very kind of weapon. Some fired bombs. Weapons for wounding instead of killing hung beside those intended to be worn as a show of force and still others designed for concealment.

But truly, it wasn’t the weapons that most interested him. It was the crates.

The room was full of them. There were huge ones made of cheap wood and smaller versions of burnished metal. Some were locked while others were nailed shut. All of them sat there, ominous in the shadows. He could almost feel what was inside them. Time had taught him that the death and suffering involved in their creation had a particular flavor, and this room positively reeked of it.

He moved toward one of the crates, one of the few that was in a stack on its own. It reached to his chest and was nailed shut. This, of course, was no impediment to most dragons and him even less so. He simply turned his hand to shadow—relishing the complete and utter darkness of the room he was in—and slipped a claw between the lid of the crate and its four walls. When he turned his hand to its solid state again, he pushed the nails up and out of the wood they had kept closed.

With the lid open, the Masked One rested it on the ground, careful to not make a noise. He then examined the contents.

It was as he expected.

This was where the Steel Dragon stored all the dragon bullets.

For a moment, he felt overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the room. He had expected that the crates were filled with bullets, of course. It had been fairly obvious but still, to be confronted with the truth of it was another thing entirely.

There had to be thousands of bullets there. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds if all the large crates were as full as this one was. He had known this many existed. After all, it was he who had convinced Windfire to give the mages his DNA to be used to make the clones that had been harvested to make these bullets. In a way, he was responsible for the contents of this entire room. This was the arsenal the technomages had intended to turn on dragon kind and in doing so, initiate the war he so badly wanted.

If only the Steel Dragon hadn’t intervened. The mages would have continued their attacks and the dragons would have responded the only way they knew how—by burning the mages and the very ground they stood on. The mages would then have revealed this massive cache of weapons that had until recently been spread all over the world. The ensuing bloodshed would have left both sides decimated and likely pulled the humans with their weapons of war into the fray as well.

The world would have burned until there was no fuel left. Finally, in the darkness that followed, the Masked One would rebuild a better, more sensible society in which everyone would know their place. Dragons would not be beholden to the rules of bloated, dull-witted Council members. Humans would not have to waste their time competing in a nonsensical economy. He would have found a place for every dragon, mage, human, and dwarf. All would have served his world—a better world rich with the efficiency of darkness—and it would have been good. There would be no more arguing and no more fights and only one leader to appease. He would have sat atop a throne of human skulls made from the discarded masks he could afford to make daily.

Ah, but the Steel Dragon had ruined all of that.

Like a lighthouse blowing out the cool light of a starry night, she had appeared out of nowhere—no, not nowhere. She was one of his experiments turned against him and she’d ruined everything.

Well, almost everything.

These weapons were still there, still asking to fulfill their purpose.

The Masked One went to the wall of weapons and frowned at having so many choices. Yes, guns were the logical evolution of the rock the primate ancestor of humans had first used to slaughter one of their kin. Guns were not weapons befitting a dragon, but how could he refuse one now? After all, he’d done the work to turn them into a tool that could kill dragons as easily as they killed human beings.

With so many choices, the Masked One was almost at a loss. He certainly liked the idea of simply picking up a couple of military-style rifles, loading the magazines, and slaughtering each and every delegate there.

But of course, he wouldn’t give in to such fantasies. There were mages about, for one thing, and many of them had proven more than capable of stopping bullets. Plus, if one dragon emerged from the blood bath, it would ruin Lord Boneclaw’s reputation as a mediator. Even though that reputation was practically gone, he didn’t want to wage his war from anywhere but the shadows. That meant a direct assault was an impossible fantasy.

In turn, it meant stealth would, as usual, be his weapon of choice.

He tested many guns in his hand but in the end, settled for a beautiful little Beretta with a suppressor. It was easy to recognize the weapon from the violent films humans glorified. Satisfied with his choice, he returned to the crate until he found rounds that fit the magazine.

Carefully, he loaded the magazine to capacity with dragon bullets. The little handgun ended up fitting seventeen bullets. Each one—if properly aimed—could kill a dragon. It was an efficient tool of death, the Masked One had to admit, even if he did feel like a brute tucking the gun into a holster he had chosen from an extremely convenient set of choices in the room.

Feeling somewhat smug, he turned into shadow and joined the rest of the delegates. He made sure to grumble when he lifted a couple of jugs of water, and the fat human boy who had lost sight of him saw this and smiled.

Although he wouldn’t need a dragon bullet to put him down, he thought he might go ahead and do the boy the honor if the chance presented itself.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The air was still above the storm. It was almost frightening how rapidly Amy’s pulse dropped and how quickly her breathing returned to normal. The clouds didn’t look like a storm of destruction. They didn’t look like something straight out of the apocalypse. Instead, they resembled a sunset spread below them. They glowed with reds and oranges and yellows, and the crevices where they weren’t filled with fire were rich with dark purples and blues.

It was horrifying that a creation of such violence—a force that was able to destroy a city almost as an afterthought—could be so beautiful. Like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear weapon or the clean lines of a fighter jet, there was an elegance to this force of destruction.

She wanted nothing more than to obliterate it.

“Do you see anything?” she asked Lumos.

“I’m afraid not,” the old dragon replied. His eyes were stronger than hers and as they doubled back toward the center of the city, he had kept them trained on the clouds below.

“If he’s in the clouds…”

“Then this will never work,” he finished for her. “We need to attack without notice. Otherwise, he’ll simply strike me with lightning.”

“I can stop a bolt of lightning.”

“I believe you. But what about two? Or ten? Or a hundred?”

Amy didn’t bother to reply. She knew she had limits and although she’d never tested them against lightning, she wasn’t particularly optimistic.

A clue she needed distracted her before she could refocus her thoughts.

“Look at those clouds down there. Do you see that?”

“They’re beautiful, yes, but that doesn’t help us, does it?”

“No, look. They’re moving in a pattern—do you see? It’s like they’re circling a drain or something.”

Lumos stopped focusing on the space directly below them and looked farther out. She could tell he’d noticed when he almost hiccupped in surprise. “My dear, I think you solved our problem.”

The golden dragon adjusted course and his new trajectory took them directly to the center of the swirling clouds.

As they approached, they seemed to rise like foam. He flew above them and a moment later, the two of them stared into a tornado.

At the center, resting atop the clouds like a vulture gliding without flapping its wings, were their targets.

Stormwing’s scales were the color of bruised clouds. Rivulets of electricity crackled and popped from his scales. Every time the dragon made a micro-adjustment to his wings, electricity surged from them and lanced the clouds around him. The roar of thunder was constant and deafening.

On his back sat Havington, and the mage truly frightened her more than the dragon did. His robe, normally well-pressed and perfect, was half-burned away, and a horrible tube of flame issued from each hand. These extended past the dragon and were sucked in opposite directions to join the horrible counterclockwise swirl of wind that both swallowed the flames and made them larger. He laughed maniacally as he flicked his fingers to send balls of fire at the other dragons who tried to distract this godlike combination of warriors.

“Should we knock to let them know we’re here?” Amy asked.

“Oh, I think it might be better to simply drop in and say hello,” Lumos replied. He tucked his wings and plunged like a hawk made of lead.

They plummeted from their position in the heavens toward the back of the dragon, gained in speed, and multiplied their force as she pushed him ever faster with her magic.

Seconds before they were about to strike, he uttered an ear-piercing shriek. Stormwing flinched at the sound and rolled to intercept him, which was exactly what the old dragon warrior wanted.

Lumos’ claws, already glowing with radiant energy, found his target’s chest. They punctured his scales and thrust the dragon from his place above the flaming tornado.

But Stormwing was large and brimmed with power. Lightning cracked and Amy had to shield them from it.

As soon as she did, Havington blasted a ball of fire at her that she deflected.

The fight had only begun and already, they were on the defensive.

She would have to change that. Focused, she reached into the wall of fire that spun all around them, found every trace of shrapnel she could, and gathered tables, car doors, and old tires. The detritus of an entire city was at her fingertips. She threw them at Havington while Lumos and Stormwing fought with tooth and claw.

“You can’t defeat us!” the enemy mage yelled hysterically as he threw a series of fireballs at the objects she lobbed at him. He didn’t have to drop his tubes of fire to do so. The gesture of a finger was enough in his current state to incinerate a car door. “The forces of magic in this world have deemed our mission a holy one! The magic of the earth fuels this storm.”

“Is that right?” Lumos asked and made one of his claws glow as bright as the sun before he raked the other dragon across the face.

The assault made Stormwing release his control of the storm. The golden dragon flew back as gusts of wind that previously hadn’t been present in the eye of the tornado buffeted them.

Havington was forced to drop the tubes of fire and hang on to Stormwing or risk being blown off his back.

They had done it. Between them, they had made Stormwing lose his place at the center of the tornado and stopped Havington from powering the flames. Amy paused and waited for the storm to rip itself to pieces.

Inexplicably, it didn’t.

The mage, his gaze focused on her, only laughed. “I told you that the powers of the earth fuel this tornado. You cannot stop us.” To accentuate his point, he hurled a fireball at her. She deflected it but felt the heat all the same.

Beneath him, Stormwing turned to Lumos. Without warning, lightning surged and blasted the old dragon’s wing. His flesh sizzled, but he didn’t cry out in pain.

Instead, he smiled. “I haven’t been tested like this in years.”

“Are you saying we have a chance?” she asked, deflected another fireball, and hurled a crowbar at Havington. He melted it into hot iron droplets that joined the tornado of flame that surrounded them all.

“A slim one,” the golden dragon said as the enemy mage threw more balls of fire at him. He was forced to dodge both balls of flame and bolts of lighting.

“They’re too strong together. We need to separate them,” she said.

“He can’t fly like you can,” Lumos agreed.

“Do you think we should split up?”

“I think if we can face them one-on-one, we might have a better chance.”

Amy nodded, found a sewer lid that swirled in the mad tornado, and jumped from Lumos’s back.

As she fell into the center of the tornado, Havington laughed and flung a stream of fireballs at her.

When her feet found the metal disc, his laughter faded.

She rocketed toward him and increased her speed until she launched the metal out from under her. It spun as only a skateboarder could make it spin and cracked the man across the face. He fell from Stormwing’s back.

Lumos chose that precise moment to strike. Glowing like a sunrise, the golden dragon powered into his enemy and thrust him away from the mage who had been riding on his back.

Amy called the sewer lid to her as she reached the height of her ascent. She made it fly toward Havington again, who was falling into the tornado.

But rather than continue his descent, he launched a great blast of fire from his hands and used the energy of it to fly.

He streaked toward Amy, a wizard turned Iron Man, and pounded into her with a flaming fist. She tumbled off her support and immediately began to plummet.

The man was falling, too. He needed his hands to fly and the fire punch had cost him elevation. Fortunately, the girl was far more adept at flying than he was and she reached into the maelstrom and retrieved the bumper of a car. She ran across that but her adversary destroyed it and continued his assault against her to demolish all the projectiles she summoned—a table, a chair, and a piece of plywood, which he lit on fire.

All the while, the tornado continued to burn.

Amy fell until her feet found a pillow, of all things. It caught her and she rocketed herself up past Havington and had a moment to see the dragons above her fight.

It was like watching the sun fight the storm.

Lumos glowed with radiant energy. Every strike he made launched white-hot light into the wounds of the other dragon. Stormwing answered with strikes of lighting and deafening booms of thunder.

But the golden dragon’s experience was telling. He struck with grace and efficiency, while Stormwing did little beyond hope his lightning strikes connected. Lumos’ eyes ignited in a blinding light and suddenly, his opponent couldn’t see. He followed through on his advantage and drove into the younger dragon to mangle a wing and thrust him from the sky.

He fell into the tornado, seemingly unconscious.

But Havington had regained his elevation. He rocketed past Amy until he was far above her. Then, like the world’s most pissed-off phoenix, he engulfed her in a firestorm.

Flames of red and orange gave way to flames of blue, and for the first time since she’d discovered her magical abilities, she feared for her life. A little panicked, she enveloped herself in a web of shields as fire roiled all around her.

She fell at an alarming speed, riding the pillow like she was a horseman of the apocalypse.

In her fiery cocoon, she couldn’t see Lumos, Stormwing, or Havington. All she could see was flames. They ate away at her shield and prevented her from doing anything to stop her fall. She couldn’t see the ground either, so had no idea how close it was.

Without warning, the flames dissipated. Above her, Amy could see that Lumos had snatched Havington in his claws. The mage screamed in pain. His hands were blackened and his fingers reduced to stumps. The magic he’d employed had overpowered him.

She let her shield drop and threw every ounce of magic she had into stopping herself from making the inevitable collision with the rapidly approaching earth.

It wasn’t enough. She was going too fast and couldn’t stop without ripping herself to pieces. All she could do was slow and hope she could survive the impact.

Seconds later, she landed with a whump and remembered that for once, she was riding something more sensible than the hood of a truck or a giant boulder. Her pillow cushioned her fall and hopefully left her with nothing but the world’s largest bruise on her ass.

Amy looked around in bemusement and finally realized that the tornado had lost its momentum. Stormwing lay on the ground beside her. His scales were burned from Havington’s attack and his body mangled and broken from the fall. He wasn’t breathing and without him, the tornado had begun to disintegrate.

If wild magic fueled the storm, it no longer had any control. The tornado broke in two pieces, then into three. Each of these did little more than spin themselves out. The fire that burned within their walls of wind, now denied a source, simply snuffed out.

Lumos landed in the surreal, burned, and battered landscape. He held Havington in his claws and the mage was weeping.

“My hands,” the mage said. “My hands…my hands—what have you done to my hands?”

“It isn’t anything you need to worry about in the future,” Stonequest said and marched toward him like he’d waited for their arrival this entire time. Drew stepped from his back and gently put a pair of magic dampening cuffs on the man’s charred and misshapen hands.

Havington wept as the last of the flames in the air extinguished themselves. “My hands,” he repeated as if trying to draw more attention to what was left of them. “My hands.”

Amy couldn’t help but feel sorry for the moron. Maybe something could be done for him but for now, he’d have to suffer for the flames he’d engulfed a city with.

Her attention returned to their base—or rather, the pit where the base should be. Nothing remained beyond a giant hole. Whatever had fueled the flaming tornado had not been responsible for what happened to Kristen and the others. She had no idea what could have taken place but was sure that the attack had not caused the base to vanish.

Despite their victory, she felt only despair.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It took about an hour, but they finally had all the delegates more or less settled in. Kristen could not help but see the silver lining in the chaos of this attack. Before, she and her team had spent days trying to determine how to best optimize the space to give everyone privacy from the other delegates.

That was now impossible.

Everyone had a cot—dragon, human, mage, and dwarf. They had cooked one of the cows the dwarves had brought and supplemented the meat with emergency rations. It was an extremely democratic existence in that everyone, from the guards to leader of the dragons herself, had the same meal.

They had given up on any attempt at privacy as well. There were a few tarps and rolls of fabric that Timeflash had purchased with the intention of making uniforms, but it was nowhere near enough to create partitions like they had had before.

What materials they had in the storage area—which wasn’t much—had been used to hang over the broken windows to block some of the views of the eternal void that stared at them from outside. That did help everyone’s mental state but not enough. They’d cleaned the room, swept the ash, and gathered all the rubble and piled it in one corner. The broken windows weren’t that bad but the void on the outside was a constant reminder that they weren’t exactly in Michigan.

Still, the tarps helped. Instead of almost every pair of eyes staring out the windows into the thick darkness, there were now a few mumbled conversations. In fact, such a sense of normalcy had returned that people had even begun to start to complain again.

“If this is some kind of a plan to force us to compromise, I don’t like it,” the Secretary of State said to Kristen.

“I assure you, it’s not.”

“Good. Because we’re not interested in furthering these talks until we know who is responsible for our situation and how we’ll get out of it,” he said as if they were still in the United States instead of whatever realm their base had been transported to.

“Who is responsible?” Lady Jade demanded. “The real question is who is responsible.”

She turned to the beautiful dragon woman in her silk dress. “Lady Jade, if you have a theory about what this place is and how to get out of it—"

“It was the mages who did this, obviously. The dragons and humans were making headway, so the mages did this to stop us from progressing. They used the pixies’ magic and are probably planning something even as we speak.”

Kristen clenched her teeth as hard as she could to prevent herself from punching her in the face. “That is an extremely serious accusation. Do you have any evidence to back it up?”

“Evidence?” Lady Jade scoffed. “What more evidence do you need? The mage said she made the dome around the facility and only what was inside the dome was transported.”

“I think the pixies did the transporting,” a dwarf interjected sharply.

“It’s exactly like a dwarf to side with the pixies,” the dragon snapped.

“Lady Jade, please. He’s not siding with them,” Shimmerclaw said and unknowingly saved the other dragon’s jaw from a punch from Kristen’s fist. “If these mages were capable of feats such as this, do you believe they would have been so reliant on the dragon bullets?”

It was Lady Jade’s turn to clench her teeth. The gesture might have looked out of place on the slender, graceful woman but when she made it, her eyes flashed into their dragon form and two dragon teeth jutted from her mouth to make her look more like a serpent than a human.

The Secretary of State swallowed hard and went to make himself busy somewhere else.

“Kristen, please tell me we have an idea about what to do next,” Shimmerclaw said. “The talks were progressing better than I had hoped. I fear if we do not resume them soon, all progress will be lost. Have you managed to revive the pixies?”

She shook her head. “I wish. My brother is with them in the bunker, but he hasn’t reported anything yet,” she said and retrieved her cellphone to check if he’d texted, only to remember that all the electricity in every device had ceased to function.

The Council leader nodded. “I fear they will be our only hope.”

“What about the mages?” Decimus Aurelius asked. “Even if this was not their fault, surely they can think of some way to get us out of this mess? I’ll say that personally, whoever rescues us from this…this void, will earn my good graces and greater consideration in how I vote.”

“Is that supposed to mean you plan to vote against the humans?” the German delegate demanded. “We are the only group who you know cannot free us from this prison.”

“We can’t free ourselves from this ‘no-place’ either,” the dragon retorted.

“We have all seen dragons change from their reptilian form to their human one. Where does that mass go? Hmm? This does not seem so different to us,” the Russian delegate added.

“Who are you calling reptile?” Aurelius asked.

Kristen tried not to sigh. He was one of her best dragon allies but he was still arrogant, demanding, and thin-skinned. They needed to get out of this mess so people could at least go outside to catch their breath.

“Constance, I know you checked earlier, but have you or your mages made any breakthroughs?”

“I’m afraid not, Lady Steel,” the technomage said and guided a few of the mages from her delegation away from one of the windows that had not been covered with a tarp.

“Please tell us you’ve found something,” Aurelius said.

“We have eliminated a few avenues of escape, yes,” Constance said, which earned groans from everyone in earshot.

“You must understand,” she continued, “that we must proceed with the utmost caution. We have tried all our elemental magics, and the…bubble has not responded to any of them.”

“The bubble?” Aurelius asked.

“Indeed,” the woman said. “I believe that some kind of synthesis of magic created the barrier that protects us from the void. It is a porous barrier, as anything we have put through it has met no resistance, but nothing has come through from the other side. I fear we are in some type of antimatter realm, to use the words of human scientists. The skin or bubble or however you wish to think of what separates us from the void is not indestructible. I don’t want to try anything too…aggressive for fear of popping the bubble.”

“Well, why not simply pop it?” the German delegate asked. “Lance it like a boil.”

“As I said, I believe there is magic of some kind keeping the void out of this base. If we were to destabilize its structural stability, I fear the consequences. For example, a gate spell seems to be the most obvious choice to get us out of here, but I am not sure what that would do to the skin protecting us.”

“What could it do?” Kristen asked and wondered if the time for risks was now.

“The worst-case scenario would be that by some effort on our part, we pop or shatter what’s protecting us and the dark nothingness out there would simply rush in here and cause all to cease to exist,” Constance said flatly as if explaining a math theorem in a geometry class rather than the nonexistence of everyone she could see.

“Of course, we can’t be sure the void out there would cause all to cease to exist,” she continued in the same professorial tone. “It’s possible that the skin doesn’t exist at all and that we will simply linger in eternal darkness forever. There is no electricity, which seems to indicate that some of the basic rules of the universe don’t work here. For all I know, stepping into the void may simply take us to Detroit.”

“Have we tried that?” Aurelius asked.

“We have not,” the technomage said patiently. “I find that an unlikely possibility, given that no sounds or indications of anything have come from outside. I fear that the most likely possibility is that the pixies tried to take us somewhere but the barrier my mages had erected plus the forces of magic creating that tornado interfered. I think we might be trapped in a kind of in-between.”

“Do you have any answers?” the Egyptian delegate demanded.

“I am certain that the stuff out there isn’t from the reality we come from. It simply doesn’t respond to the types of magic we command. It makes me fairly confident to say that coming into contact with it would be…bad. However, as I said, I’m not sure. I heard Lord Aurelius say freeing us from this place would win his graces. Perhaps a human would like to test this theory? I’m fairly confident that a human walking through it wouldn’t destabilize it for the rest of us.”

“You mean it would simply make us cease to exist?” the German delegate asked.

“That is my leading hypothesis, yes,” Constance agreed. “But I might be wrong.”

Considerable grumbling came from the room at this. It seemed almost everyone had listened to their conversation, which wasn’t surprising. There was little else to do in this nothing-place. Still, grumbling aside, no one came forward to volunteer to test the theory.

It meant that people would begin to get upset. Kristen didn’t care if they were human, dragon, dwarf, or mage, she knew that restlessness did not breed good thinking. She needed them focused on something else.

“I know this is a weird situation, but we don’t need to worry,” she said and raised her voice to draw the attention of everyone in the room. “We have far more mages outside than we do in here, and I’m sure they’re working on what to do even as we speak. Most of you are familiar with my mage, Amy, and the power she controls.”

Many heads nodded at that.

Encouraged, she continued. “She won’t simply let us vanish. I’m sure that with her power and Larry’s experience, we’ll be out of here before we know it.”

“You can’t know that,” someone shouted from the back of the room. She guessed it was Boneclaw, still doing what he could to sow doubt and discomfort even when he had no other options to try.

“No, I can’t. But we’ve been in this situation for less than three hours. There’s still a very good chance the pixies will wake up and undo this themselves.”

“Wake them, then!” a human shouted.

“We’ll give them six hours to recuperate, then we will. In the meantime, I suggest we either delegate chores or continue with our peace talks.”

A concerted wave of discontented mumbling followed that and almost everyone turned away from her, not interested in chores or peace talks any longer. She would give them a few minutes to avoid the work until they grew restless again, then she’d make them resume the talks. There was simply nothing else to do.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was easy to lose track while looking at the void. Kristen shook her head to clear the sensation. How many minutes had passed? Five? Ten? However many, it couldn’t have been more than an hour, as the delegates were still talking amongst themselves. She shook her head again and wondered what in the hell the void was. As she’d watched it, she’d had a strong sense that it was coming for her. But that was obviously only misplaced emotion. It was still beyond the windows and as dark and silent as ever. No tentacles had come from it and no demons of night had invaded. They were still trapped.

Right now, though, she needed a break from the oppressive black that felt like it was pushing in through the windows. She started walking and headed downstairs, where she found Brian at the intersection of three hallways. A dwarf torch burned next to him, its base taped to the back of a chair.

“Oh, man, am I glad to see you!” he said. “I was getting lonely down here.”

“I thought I said for you to wait in the bunker. Why are you out in the hallway?”

“Honestly?” He looked furtively around him as if he didn’t want to be overheard. “I was scared. That room is big, and the back of it was all black, even with this torch. At least over here, I can hear you guys…well, when you start to argue anyway. I take it things are not going well?”

“Not really, no,” she admitted. “Funny, I had thought that being trapped in a giant bubble of an unknowable void would make everyone start to see eye to eye.”

“Yeah, gee, I can’t believe that tactic didn’t work,” Brian said sarcastically.

Kristen smiled. Even in this face of their possible destruction, her brother always had time for snark.

“Well, I don’t see much point in you staying here now that we’re all set up. You should bring them topside with everyone else.”

“Sure! It sounds good to me,” he agreed. “But before we go, can I go get some of my computer equipment?”

“I thought it wasn’t working,” she said as she motioned to Jim to come down the stairs so he could keep an eye on the pixies while she went with her brother to get some of his equipment from the bunker room.

“It’s not, but I have some ideas about how to make it functional. It’s a longshot, but if I can maybe get something up, we could contact the outside. That’s assuming we’re not four hundred thousand lightyears across the galaxy or whatever, of course.”

“From the way Constance talked, we might not even be in the same universe right now.”

“Jesus. You’d think a lifetime of video games and sci-fi movies would prepare me for you to drop that kind of crap in my lap but nope, I’m still as scared as fuck.”

“Let’s get your equipment.”

“Yeah.” Brian nodded, tried to look confident, and forgot that Kristen—being a dragon—could read his emotions.

They took the torch off the back of the chair, leaving Jim in the harsh glare of a flare, and moved into the bunker.

The room was exactly as Brian described it—oppressively dark. The torch they held—although it burned brightly—didn’t seem to even attempt to pierce the gloom on the far side of the room.

“Not to be like a chicken or whatever, but can you see why I didn’t want to go back there?” He pointed at the gloom. “Now, at least, your dragon vision can tell me where the fuck my AC adapter is.”

“I…” Kristen rubbed her eyes and tried to blink the darkness away as he walked across the bunker to the dark in the back of the room. Despite him growing closer, his torchlight simply stopped before it reached the back of the space.

“Brian, stop!” She flexed her aura to make him feel terror and stop in his tracks.

“Damn it, Kristen. I’m already scared as hell! Do you have to do that dragon aura crap? You’ll make me pee my pants!”

“It’s better than you walking into the void.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“The reason this room was so dark is because that wall is no longer a wall. It’s the same darkness as what is outside the building upstairs.”

“Are you serious?” He jumped back and dropped the torch.

“I tend not to joke about primeval forces,” she replied and approached the curving wall of darkness slowly. It was the identical thick, inky darkness as what waited outside the windows of the base and the same curtain of black outside the door.

“You’re saying that tricked-out shock-resistant laptop I purchased was what—swallowed up by that crap?” Brian asked.

“I guess so, yeah.”

“But this crap wasn’t here before. Are you saying it’s shrinking?” he asked and his voice rose with fear.

“I don’t want to, but yeah. Or expanding and our bubble is shrinking. Do you want to try to salvage any of your computer equipment? It looks like there’s a little still on this side of it.”

“I’m good, thanks,” he said. “If it's all cool with you, I’ll go back to pixie duty but this time on the main floor, surrounded by a horde of dragons, dwarves, and mages.”

“Yeah, Mom would never forgive me if you were eaten by an unfathomable void.”

“You are joking about primeval forces?”

“It doesn’t seem like there’s anything else we can do to them,” Kristen replied.

They left the bunker to find Jim huddled over the little pixies.

“Please tell me you’re watching them do a little pixie dance or something?” Brian asked.

“No, but these little guys don’t look good,” The Wonderkid looked up and his grim expression hardened further. “You guys don’t look good either. Is everything all right?”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “I need you and Brian to take these pixies upstairs. Get them in toward the center of the floor and tell everyone else to avoid the edges of the base. I need to talk to the leaders of the delegations.”

A few minutes later, she returned to the bunker room, this time with Constance, Shimmerclaw, Minestrength, and the Secretary of State in tow. The human and dwarf each had a torch, and Constance held a glowing orb in each hand. With this much light, it was far more obvious what was happening to the back of the room.

“That wasn’t here when we were in here,” the Secretary of State said. “I thought you said we were safe inside this bubble or pocket or whatever.”

“I said we were safer in here than out there,” Constance said and knelt in front of the curving wall of darkness. She held her hands up and sent glowing tendrils out from her fingers into the dark wall. Focused, she attempted this for a long few minutes before she finally shook her head, stood, and stepped away from the void.

“Thoughts?” Shimmerclaw asked her.

“It’s the same as the darkness up top,” the technomage said. Kristen could kiss her for how calm her voice was. “My spells simply cease to exist as soon as my magic enters the dark region. I can’t tell what it is, but the bubble protecting us all from it is definitely shrinking.”

“Are you sure the bubble is protecting us?” the Secretary of State asked and his voice shook with fear.

Kristen decided to answer the question herself. She walked to the front of the room and found a broom, approached the wall of darkness, and shoved the broom forward. The bristles on the bottom entered the void and bent slightly before going in fully. It felt as if a wall of sludge was being held back by the magic bubble rather than a void of nothingness. That did not do much for her sense of calm. She pushed the broom in deeper until the bristles were all swallowed. It wasn’t exactly easy as there was a fair amount of resistance to her push.

“Be careful,” Constance said. “I don’t know what will happen if your body touches it, but I’m not exactly optimistic about the outcome. In other words, don’t touch.”

She nodded and stopped pushing once the dark goo—she couldn’t help but think of it as tar or lime or primordial soup now that she’d felt it—covered about a third of the broom. Then, she tried to pull it out.

It did not come easily. It was almost as if the wall of gunk attempted to suck the entire broom out of her hand. As she pulled, she kept her breathing even. She couldn’t panic, even if she couldn’t completely banish the sensation that her entire base had been swallowed by a creature of the night and they were now in its belly.

“Do you need a hand?” Minestrength asked, which irked her into transforming her skin into steel.

She yanked the broom again and it popped out. Or maybe broke it was a better way to think of it as the part that had vanished into the dark did not reappear. Only the handle they had already been able to see came loose. There was a clean slice where it had touched the goo and she examined it carefully. It was more than clean and looked as if the broom had been burned away or eaten by acid and then polished. There were no splinters in evidence and nothing to indicate that the missing end had ever existed.

Perhaps odder to her was that none of this slimy blackness had come away and stuck to it. It made her think that whatever this crap was, it wasn’t something that would respond to any form of assault. It was a complete, slimy force of darkness, and it seemed hungry.

“I think we can agree on one thing at least,” Kristen said.

“Wh-what’s that?” The Secretary of State stammered.

“We definitely should not touch.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Amy might have fallen deeper into despair if she knew that Kristen was as much at a loss inside the building as she was on the outside.

“What do you make of this?” Larry asked her in the teacher voice she usually appreciated but right now found very fucking annoying.

They stood at the edge of where the base used to be. Or maybe, more accurately, where the base used to exist. Now, there was nothing.

“Okay, there’s nothing here. It’s like a huge scooped-out hole. Like God or the devil came at it with a galactic ice cream scoop.”

“I appreciate the metaphor but I think it's flawed,” her companion said.

Lumos and Stonequest chuckled. The dumb dragons were out of their league and couldn’t help at all.

“How can you stay so calm when the base is gone?” she demanded.

Larry raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “I only mean that if it were scooped, there would be some evidence of its movement. Like a crater on one side or bent pipes or something, but there isn’t.”

He was right. The area was clean-cut like the base had been vanished rather than scooped up. The edges that used to lead to the base were smooth and flawless, almost like they were polished.

“How could Havington possibly have done something like this?” she asked out loud. He had only been able to power the tornado because Stormwing had controlled the wind and atmospheric effects. Plus, as Larry had said, there had been wild magic involved.

“I don’t think he did,” Larry said ponderously.

“Do you think Stormwing had some secret power?” Stonequest asked.

“No. No, I don’t think it was either one of them. This is so much more elegant than a freaking fire tornado. I don’t think their kind of magic could have done this.”

“But it was magic,” Stonequest said stubbornly. “And for some reason, I don’t think the mages in there would have disappeared themselves. It had to be those two.”

“Think about the motives, though,” Larry said. “If Havington was behind this, he would have left as soon as his objective was completed. He wouldn’t have stuck around, waiting to be captured. The guy might not be on our side but he’s not dumb.”

“Okay, but if it wasn’t Havington or Stormwing, then who was it?” Amy demanded.

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” he said with a waggle of his eyebrows.

“Could the mages have teleported the base away?” Lumos asked. “If they formed a gate and could move it, maybe they could…uh, kind of slice away reality.”

Larry had his eyes closed and arms extended toward the hole, so Amy was forced to answer even though magical theory was not her strong suit. “That’s not how that spell works. The entire basis of it is connecting to anchored points in space and time. It can’t be moved and things can only move through it.”

“I have something!” the other mage shouted and eyes snapped open. “Oh, damn it—wait, let me try that again.” He closed his eyes.

“Try what again?” Stonequest asked.

“Eureka!” Larry chuckled. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

“Well, what did you get?” Lumos asked and seemed to translate the Greek but not get the reference.

“I recognized the feel of the power residue. See, magic is not like light. It doesn’t simply vanish when you turn the switch off. It's more like water and always leaves a trace behind. You merely have to know how to sop it up.”

“What did you sop up, oh wise one?” Amy asked sarcastically.

“It’s wild, uncontrolled magic,” he said like he thought he was wiser than master Yoda.

“So it was the firestorm?” she asked.

“No, there’s wild magic here, but there’s an intention to it. If I had to guess—and we most certainly do if we want to save our friends—I’d say this is pixie magic.”

“But there were no pixies out here,” Stonequest said.

“But there were some inside,” Lumos said. “They arrived right before they put the dome up.”

“I bet they had something to do with this,” Larry said.

“But why would they disappear everyone?” she asked.

“I bet they didn’t mean to.” The mage rubbed his chin in thought. “I think we can safely assume that the fire tornado caused damage to the inside of the base. Otherwise, we would have had updates from Kristen while the tornado was raging.”

“Okay, let’s say it was damaged, but so what?” Amy asked.

“Well, the mage spell had failed, so the only other group capable of doing something to stop a magic tornado must have stepped up.”

“The pixies,” Lumos said.

“Right.” Larry nodded.

“But why disappear the base?” she pushed.

“I still say they didn’t mean to. Pixies understand even less about magic theory than you do, Amy. No offense.”

“Absolutely none taken because I am not a nerd,” she replied.

“Right. Well, my guess is that the pixies attempted some kind of defense of their own and their spell maybe interacted with the shields around the base, the firestorm outside, or even both. Somehow, that resulted in what we see now.”

“What does magical theory have to do with that?” Amy asked.

“Some spells—well, more specifically, some types of magic—have odd effects. Combining mage, dragon, and pixie magic in the quantities needed to stop a flaming tornado could have had any number of unusual effects. The power here must have tweaked with existence itself.”

“Are you saying Kristen and everyone else are… gone?” She scowled. “Like, they don’t exist anymore because the pixies don’t do their magic theory homework?”

“I don’t want to give anyone false hope. That is a possibility.” Larry looked glum but not as glum as everyone else.

“But it’s not the only possibility, not even kind of,” he continued and forced himself to sound positive. “Windlock and I saw different types of magic combined quite a few times, and the only thing that’s consistent about mixing magics is that the effect is never predictable. I’ll not give up on our team simply because they’re not here. There’s too much I don’t understand about wild magic for me to be sure.”

“But if you don’t understand it, how are we supposed to find the answers?” Amy asked. “Constance is inside. If she knows a way out, I think she would have used it by now.”

“You’re right. I don’t know nearly enough to solve it on my own. But I know who does.”

“Time is money as the humans say,” Stonequest said, “Out with it.”

“I think it’s time we ask some pixies for help,” he said with a grin.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Despite Brian saying that he wanted to be around other people, Kristen had hoped to bring the pixies to her office on the second floor without anyone noticing. But after her time below observing the now shrinking sphere of darkness, any hopes of privacy were gone.

Her brother was near the top of the stairs to the basement level, guarding the cardboard box the pixies slept in. And guarding was the right word for it. Everyone seemed quite eager to share their theories on how the creatures might be able to help their current predicament.

“Let’s give them a little shake!” The German delegate shouted, his voice edging into what she could only describe as mad-scientist.

“You shake those pixies and we shake you,” a dwarf replied, which of course made the humans all group together and grumble at the dwarves.

“Perhaps the humans have a point, though,” Lady Jade said ponderously. “If the pixies are doing this, giving them a…shake might wake them up.”

“We’ll not do anything that might hurt them,” Kristen said and put herself between the box and the room of unruly delegates. “I want them to get us out of this as much as everyone, but we simply don’t know enough about how their magic works to know if trying to wake them is a good idea.”

“For all we know,” Constance said, her voice loud enough that the entire room could hear, “they might be in a trance to hold this void at bay. If they are indeed maintaining some kind of protection for us, waking them could very well bring that void inside this base.”

That didn’t do much to stop the general discontent in the room, but it did get the human delegates and Lady Jade to go back to their spaces.

“Maybe we should take them to your office,” Brian said. “I was looking forward to some company but on second thought, I think it might be better to chill with the unconscious pixies than to make small talk and risk our entire existence.”

“Good plan,” Kristen said and gestured to the leaders of each delegation to follow her upstairs with the pixies.

Shimmerclaw and Constance agreed, but Minestrength and the Secretary of State wanted to stay behind.

“I’ll make sure no one follows,” Minestrength said and glanced at the human Secretary.

“I think I should stay as well to make sure everyone here feels adequately informed of the situation.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “We need to determine the best way to share this information. I don’t want to start a panic.”

“We’ll hold the fort down here while you three determine our educational strategy,” the Secretary of State said.

“Thank you, Mr. Secretary,” she replied politely before she, Constance, Shimmerclaw, and Brian with his box of pixies went upstairs.

Once in the privacy of her office, her brother went to fetch a cot. A long moment of silence lingered between the three women while he was gone. It might have been an awkward moment, but the absolute blackness outside her huge windows had a way of filling the gaps in the conversation. She couldn’t believe it. Everything was so black. It was like they had been taken to the deepest darkest corner of space, a region between galaxies where not even stars burned. It was profoundly troubling, so much so that when Brian entered the room with a cot, all three of the powerful women jumped at the sound.

“Sorry. I should’ve knocked…but then you would’ve jumped at the knock…so not sorry, I guess. Sorry about that,” he muttered as he set the cot up.

Once it was done, he took out each creature gently from the box, starting with Lady Dragonfly, and laid them out one by one. Once all twelve were out, he took a blanket and tucked them all in. Not one of them stirred while this happened, a disturbing sign. Also troubling was their color.

“Do they look healthy to everybody?” Kristen asked.

Shimmerclaw pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’ve seen pixies in every shade of skin but none of them have ever been so gray.”

“Constance?” Kristen asked.

“I wish I knew more about their constitution and their magic.” The technomage sounded slightly ashamed. “As it is, I worry that any of the spells I might cast to invigorate them would either overwhelm their little bodies or cause this dome to shrink even faster than it already is.”

“Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “I think we should tell everyone that the bubble around us is shrinking. What do you think the best way to share that intelligence is?”

Constance and Shimmerclaw shared a look that one day might prove to be one of the most significant in history. There was nothing particularly unusual about it—it was simply the narrow eyes and high eyebrows of shared incredulity. What was unique was who did it. Never before had the political leader of the dragons and the political leader of the mages agreed on a point so quickly or so strongly.

“I don’t think we should share that the bubble is shrinking,” Constance said.

“Nor do I. All it would do is sow panic.”

“Dragons panic?” the woman asked and shattered the brief moment of shared disbelief.

“Dragons like to be able to transform into our true forms,” Shimmerclaw said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “There is already too little space to allow that. Less space would make some of our warriors start to wonder about how to make more.”

“But that’s only the dragons,” Kristen said, “Surely the mages—”

“Would be even worse,” Constance said. “Our entire existence has been one of persecution. We are a paranoid people. We spend our lives looking over our shoulders and hoping to appease dragons, no offense meant to Lady Shimmerclaw.”

“None taken. You have made your point clearly and eloquently many times during this convention. It hardly surprises me to hear that a group of rogue mages might think in terms of paranoia when trapped with a party of dragons.”

“The humans aren’t doing any better,” Brian added. “All of them—hell, all of us, me included—are out of our depth here. My sister is a steel dragon and I’m still freaking out. If you tell them that the bubble is getting smaller, it would be chaos.”

“I merely don’t think we’ll be able to keep it quiet,” Kristen said. “And if everyone discovers it themselves, we lose what trust we’ve built with each other.”

“It’s a fair point but—” Constance didn’t get to finish it.

At that moment, it felt as if something reached into Kristen’s gut and yanked. The sensation passed quickly. For a second, it felt as if some creature from beyond space and time had grasped one of her internal organs and attempted to remove it before everything returned to normal.

“Did anyone else feel that?” she asked.

“You mean the sensation that Cthulhu kicked me in the nuts?” Brian asked and rubbed his gut.

“It feels as if the magic force that animates the universe was…tightened,” Constance said, also rubbing her stomach.

“Indeed,” Shimmerclaw said. “It felt like a demon grabbed my spine.”

“Shit,” Kristen cursed. “If we all felt it, we can bet everyone down below felt it too.”

“But what was it?” the Council leader asked.

“I think I know why it feels as if there’s less magic,” Constance said. She pointed out the windows into the blackness.

It seemed like the blackness was not quite as far away. It was hard to be certain, but Kristen thought that only a few minutes before, it had seemed as if the darkness began a few feet out of the window. Now, it seemed that if she opened the window, it would simply pool in. Still, she moved closer and looked out, up, and around the building she was in.

As she’d seen below, she could almost make out a curve to the darkness as if they were inside a sphere. It curved up and around and cut into the top of the structure. The roof—and all the fancy defense systems they had recently installed—was probably already lost to this non-space.

“Oh, shit, you guys.” Brian’s voice sounded even worse than Cthulhu kicking him in the nuts.

“What now?” she asked.

“I think I know why the darkness got closer,” he said with a sniff and pointed to the cot. Kristen realized what he was talking about immediately.

One of the pixies was dead. Even though they were all unconscious, it was still easy to see that Sir Ladybug had passed on. While the other pixies still had color, he looked as blue-gray as a body from the morgue. As she watched, he seemed to unravel like the matter that held him together was made of string and there was no longer anything to hold all those threads in place. It took less than a second. The body of Sir Ladybug lay motionless, then he unraveled and was no more.

“Oh, dear,” Constance said and rushed forward to check on the others. She checked the pulse on each one gently and confirmed that all eleven were still alive. “They seem to be fading as well. I…I can’t see them lasting much longer.”

“I bet their energy is fueling this sphere around us,” Brian said. “I bet this place contracted by a twelfth of its original size when that happened.”

“But it was already shrinking,” Shimmerclaw pointed out.

“Right, which means that keeping out that…that inky shit out there must be killing them. I don’t think they’ll wake up. Not as long as we’re in here.”

“Which means we can’t expect them to help us get out,” Kristen said.

“Damn this,” Constance cursed, her voice shaken. “We are trapped in a puzzle. I hate puzzles.”

“We need to go downstairs and check on everyone else,” she said.

“Agreed,” Shimmerclaw said. “I think I should go to the basement and look at the progress down there. I didn’t look at the distance of the sphere up here before it contracted, but I think I might be able to estimate down below.”

“Estimate what? How much time we have left to live?” Brian asked.

The dragon merely nodded.

“Right. Brian, you’ll stay here?” Kristen asked.

He nodded. Kristen, Shimmerclaw, and Constance went down to a scene of chaos.

“I said to not panic!” the Secretary of State yelled and made it clear who had caused the panic and also what exactly everyone was panicking about.

“What the hell are we supposed to do about the walls shrinking?” Decimus Aurelius bellowed.

“Not kill those pixies. They’re all that’s keeping us alive right now!” a dwarf replied and stepped closer to the dragon. Despite him being less than half the height of the dragon’s human form, he did not look at all intimidated.

They weren’t the only two close to blows. The old witch mage had some kind of magic swirling around a dragon warrior. Another dragon had his weapon drawn and faced a dwarf with the world’s largest hammer. Two humans yelled at a dwarf about land-use codes and he bellowed as loudly in response. All in all, it looked like they were moments away from erupting into the world’s smallest but most powerful war. Or maybe not the world’s, as she wasn’t exactly sure that they were even in the world anymore.

“Tell us this is merely more subterfuge by the humans!” Lady Jade demanded of Shimmerclaw. “The only way they could even earn their right at the bargaining table was by using the weapons the mages made. This…news the human Secretary shared is a ploy. More madness designed to take power away from the dragons.”

It seemed everyone was desperate to hear they were overreacting and one by one, the arguments fell away. Those who had been pressed chest to chest, posturing like adolescents pumped up on testosterone, stepped away from each other. All the eyes in the room turned to Shimmerclaw.

“This is no ruse,” the Council leader said plainly. “I do not know what Mr. Secretary said, but I can tell you this. The bubble we appear to be inside is indeed shrinking. We had thought it a gradual process, but we cannot be sure it will proceed that way. Everyone here doubtlessly felt a tug a few moments ago—”

“Tug? More like a creature from the depth beneath grabbed my nuts and twisted!” a dwarf shouted, which earned a few snickers and bled a little of the tension out of the room, thank God.

“That was the passing of a pixie,” Shimmerclaw said. “Whether they are being drained to create this dome or whether they are simply cut off from the wild magic that fuels them, we do not know. We do know that time is limited and that, if we are to make it out of this, we will have to not panic and work together.”

“More empty platitudes.”

Kristen fully expected it to be Lord Boneclaw once again stirring up the energy of the room, but it was not. It was one of the dragon warriors, who until now had said nothing and been the perfect image of stoicism.

“I am telling the truth,” Lady Shimmerclaw insisted.

“I’m sure you are. Your type always does. Maybe you’re not telling the full truth, though. Maybe you’re leaving out a key detail, but I’m sure you’re telling the truth,” the dragon continued and his words slurred almost as if he were drunk. “This whole thing stinks. You bring us all here, lock us in this warehouse, and then the world vanishes? And why? So you can make everyone pretend to be allies. It's sick. Dragons should rule this world. Dragons are the power that will decide our fate. All of this is merely pissing in the wind.”

“That’s enough,” Decimus Aurelius said to the warrior.

“And you are as bad as she is! The only one of these councilors worth a damn is—”

“He said that was enough,” Lord Boneclaw snapped, and the dragon warrior subsided. “I do not like this situation any more than anyone. But I can at least see that we will not survive this if we cannot think our way out of it. Dragons, perhaps we have played too passive a role. If we create some space for ourselves, perhaps we can try to transform and see if we still have the ability. If we do not, that could give us a clue about how sealed off we are in this place.”

“It’s a fair idea,” Shimmerclaw conceded.

“Very well,” he said and went about setting the dragons up around the room. The rest of the group had to crowd together to give them space, but that suited Kristen fine. As a dragon transformed, it at least gave the rest of the room something to focus on.

“Lady Shimmerclaw, this might be your chance to slip away,” she said.

“Indeed. I thought the same thing.”

“Are you sure you’ll be able to tell how far it has contracted?”

“I am,” the old dragon said and sounded only a tiny bit smug. “I have earned my position primarily by noticing things that go overlooked. To say I pay attention to detail would be something of an understatement.”

“Okay. But be careful down there, all right?”

The older dragon smiled as if to say, “I always am.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

One of Shimmerclaw’s most glaring weaknesses was that she let her control over her aura drop when she thought she was alone. It was stupid—profoundly so—but there it was. The Masked One didn’t blame her for such shortcomings. He understood as he spent so much of his time hiding, concealing his aura, and pretending to be something he was not. It was exhausting and of course, it only worked if it went unnoticed, which was frustrating in its own way.

Still, despite his empathy for his fellow Councilor, he would not do her the courtesy of refusing to taste her emotions. He’d put up with her weakness long enough. Finally, after millennia, that might come to an end.

He vanished into shadow and followed her from the darkness that pressed in all around her. She had only a torch and her dragon sight. Neither would be strong enough to see him. In a place such as this, he might as well be invisible.

It was a curious question about the diminishment of powers in this non-space they occupied. He had pursued many lines of study over his years on this planet, but he—like so many others—did not much care for pixies or see their importance. It seemed this was a miscalculation on his part. But whatever the creatures had done, it had not affected his powers. He could still slip into shadows as easily as always and change his form as effortlessly. His aura powers were beginning to diminish, but they had served their purpose well enough.

Shimmerclaw entered the bunker and approached the back wall. It was as she said. The inky void had come into this place. The Masked One didn’t understand why his powers seemed no weaker, given that he couldn’t enter the inkiness any more than anyone else could. He’d turned the claw of his left hand to shadow and attempted to enter the space and succeeded only in giving himself a manicure. No, he didn’t want to penetrate that dark. It was a job for a different dragon.

“Maybe twenty-two inches,” the Council leader muttered and knelt to make marks on the floor with her claw. She scratched a few dozen of these, each a perfect inch apart.

That done, she stood and watched the darkness slowly consume them. It took more than fifteen minutes for the darkness to reach the first mark.

During this entire whole time, the Masked One felt Shimmerclaw. He felt her nervousness and her dread. He felt her hope for this convention slowly rot and putrefy. And he felt her faith in the Steel Dragon.

It was sickening that this dragon was the one who all dragons called leader. She was a spineless worm, more interested in a mongrel runt than her kind.

He had to admit, though, the old bitch was patient. She stood calmly, no doubt counting silently to measure the time. To humans, things like electronics were a necessity for counting time or even measuring lengths. In fact, it seemed with every iteration of technology, the humans became that much more mentally deficient. But to the dragons, modern technology was nothing but a fad. Neither he nor Shimmerclaw needed anything but their brain to count the time.

But it was she who had true patience. When The Masked One heard one of the Steel Dragon’s human guards descend the stairs, he couldn’t help but investigate.

Well, investigate was a silly way to put it. What he did was form out of shadow, slice their head from their body with one swipe of his claw, and peel the skin from their skull before he tucked the bloody corpse into the darkness. Oh, it did feel good to be honest with himself. He understood why Lady Shimmerclaw did it so often.

An instant later, he returned to his surveillance. It didn’t take long to butcher a human. The Council leader was talking to herself. “It’s going slowly. At this rate, we should have days.” She chuckled, the moron. “I wonder if that will be a good thing or bad.”

“Bad, I would think,” he said, using Lord Boneclaw’s familiar voice.

“Lord Boneclaw!” Shimmerclaw said, clamped down on her aura, and cut off the flood of emotional information she had been giving him.

“Do be careful, Lady Shimmerclaw. I don’t think one even as powerful as you would want to fall into this void. I don’t think it would be healthy.”

“Why are you down here? You said you would lead the dragons in their transformations.”

“The shrinking sphere doesn’t seem to weaken dragon powers, only the mages. What about you, Shimmerclaw. Do you feel weaker?”

She narrowed her eyes at him as if she managed to decipher the extremely obvious clue he had dropped in her lap.

“No… No, I don’t feel any weaker. Do you?” she asked. What kind of fool did she take him for?

“As strong as ever, my lady. I am curious, though, how much longer until we all die?”

Lady Shimmerclaw smirked at that, which put the Masked One on edge. How much does she understand? But his worry was unnecessary. Her next remarks proved that she was still painfully oblivious to what was about to happen. “A direct question, Lord Boneclaw? That might be a first for you.”

“I’ve never been trapped in a sphere of darkness before.” He wanted to ask whether this was how his victims felt. But that was too obvious, even for this late point in the game. “Have you been honest with us? The mages cannot see a way out of this?”

“Unfortunately, yes, I have been. The mages are not familiar with this type of magic and don’t seem to be able to penetrate it.”

“Then all hope is lost.” For you. The Masked One kept the last words to himself.

“Not yet,” Shimmerclaw said and hope shone from her aura. “I’ve seen the Steel Dragon manage miracles on more than one occasion. I never thought she’d have fought off that mage attack on our secret base in the mountains. Do you remember that? We had the entire area closed off. No electricity, nothing but dragons, yet as soon as we took flight, dragons started to die from those infernal bullets.”

“I do remember that, yes. This is another level of danger, though, is it not?”

“It is, of course. Even so, if anyone can do it, it’s the young Kristen Hall,” she said warmly.

“You use her human name?” he asked and his Boneclaw character slipped.

“I do. I think her human upbringing is what gives her the edge. You disagree, though, don’t you? That warrior intended to say you were the only Councilor he agreed with.”

He sneered at that. Indeed, his aura powers were slipping. He had been the one to work up that dragon’s temper, of course, but he hadn’t meant to make him so slobberingly stupid. The fool had almost made it clear to even the races without aural powers that Lord Boneclaw was the thorn in this meeting’s heel.

“He was out of line.”

“Curious, though, was it not?” Shimmerclaw asked, smiling now. “Normally, our warriors are so contained. That’s what we teach them, isn’t it? To control their bodies, minds, and emotions, and yet, his got away from him. Why do you think that is?” Her aura moved into something fuzzier that suggested suspicion. Curse this! Truly, this proved that dragons were more related to mages and pixie magic than he would have liked to admit. Why else would their auras be suffering?

“Curious,” the Masked One grated.

“To think they lasted so long and then snapped. I wonder why. They would benefit from peace between the races.”

“Would they?” he asked through clenched teeth.

“We all would. I think Kristen Hall will make a wonderful leader.” Curse Shimmerclaw. She used the human name on purpose.

“A wonderful leader of what? She does not prioritize dragon kind.”

“Of course she doesn’t. She sees a true way forward. A chance for real progress. I think before long, we’ll all use her human name.”

“I would think not,” he growled and took a step closer to her.

She moved one leg back and shifted her legs into a braced position. This was a woman who was ready to fight. The foolishness of it all.

“She has done so much, though,” she continued as if they were younglings gossiping in the nest. She was trying to piss him off. He knew it. “She stopped the assassinations in Detroit. She stopped Death, the dragon assassin who had plagued our kind for years.”

“That was quite a blow,” he said. Of course, Shimmerclaw didn’t know that he’d paid Death for all those years. She couldn’t. Right?

“Then she stopped those assassinations in Europe and that out of her element, no less. Very impressive. And her final blow was catching the technomages—all of them.”

“Not all of them,” he growled.

“Oh? It seems their leaders are all here.”

“Not Havington.”

“Havington? You mean the mage in Florence. How did you know about him?”

“I’ve read the reports.”

“Those reports were classified.”

“I have my ways,” the Masked One responded coldly. This was not going well. Could she read his aura?

“And you’ve used them well. Back in the Hudson Bay base, I thought you might have succeeded.”

“And would it have been so bad if I had?” he snapped. The guise of Lord Boneclaw had fallen away in the face of this obnoxious questioning.

“A global war? Yes, I think it would have been,” Shimmerclaw said as if she were addressing a child.

“We would have won! How can you not see that?”

“The mages are powerful.”

“Which is why I ordered them all rounded up. They wouldn’t have been able to make that shield that trapped us in here if that Steel Bitch hadn’t interfered. And if they hadn’t made that shield, Havington and Stormwing would have blown this place to rubble.”

“I thought the pairing of the fire mage with Stormwing was a brilliant stroke. Too bad about the pixies throwing that all off.”

“You… I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The Masked One snapped the denial.

“Tell me, how did you manage to get them to work together?” Shimmerclaw asked, still in the casual tone of a simple gossip. How he hated her then. “Stormwing was always very much about dragon’s preeminence and from the reports I read, Havington was no fan of dragons.”

“They both understood that there needs to be a hierarchy with someone at the top. Democracy only leads to chaos. You’ve done nothing but let our kind plateau with your fake leadership. This world needs a true leader. Havington thought it would be an old mage and Stormwing thought it would be an old dragon.”

“Neither of them knew they were working for the Masked One?” Shimmerclaw asked.

He paused for a moment and studied her, wondering how long she’d known—if she’d known or if he could still lie to her about his identity. But, unbidden, he began to laugh. She knew! She finally knew! He felt like she must have felt whenever she let her aura run uncontrolled. He felt liberated, free, and like himself.

The Masked One smiled at Lady Shimmerclaw, wiped tears of joy from his eyes, and nodded. “No. Neither of them ever saw my face. But then, no one does.”

“I see your face right now,” she said.

“This is but a mask,” Lord Boneclaw said. He reached into shadow, retrieved the freshly harvested skull, and put it on his head. Oh, how good it felt to finally wear his mask, his true face.

“That’s what the scars are from, then?” she asked in her politest tone.

“Indeed,” he admitted, turned one arm to shadow, and closed the heavy steel door behind them.

Now, it was only the two of them, Shimmerclaw’s torch, and the darkness.

“You don’t think you can defeat me in hand-to-hand combat, do you?” The Council leader smiled. “The size of this room might prevent me from taking my dragon form, but I have prepared for this fight for centuries. Even if I didn’t know that Lord Boneclaw was the Masked One, I heard the rumors of his powers. I have prepared for your shadow abilities, Boneclaw. You will find them not particularly effective against my platinum punch.”

“Your platinum punch is your greatest threat? Truly?” This amused him no end. “You have spent too much time with the humans. The platinum punch. It sounds like something they’d serve at a bar or the final move of one their wrestlers.”

“Do you wish to try it?” Shimmerclaw challenged. Her skin began to sparkle as if each of her skin cells turned slowly into glitter. Every tiny light irritated his face but he was no vampire of human superstitions. He could walk in broad daylight without coming to harm. The platinum dragon would need more than glitter to defeat him.

He regarded her curiously and realized for the first time in millennia that he had underestimated this foe. Truly, she had abilities that might rival his own. “I wonder which of us would win if it came to a fight.”

“There is no need to wonder.” Her fists were clenched and he wondered if she were ambidextrous.

“Ah, but I worry I will for the next century.”

“Do you refuse to fight?” She grinned. “Then you’ve decided to risk yourself in the void? I wouldn’t make such a move but perhaps the blackness will recognize the dark in your soul and embrace you.”

“The only one of us to join the void will be you, Lady Shimmerclaw, but your soul will be long departed.”

“I tire of your threats—”

“But of course,” the Masked One said and drew the suppressed pistol he’d taken from the Steel Dragon’s armory. He squeezed the trigger and a bullet made of the tooth harvested from a dragon exploded from the barrel and bored a hole in her chest. She had brought her arms up to block a shadow attack that had never came. They sparkled with the lights of the stars themselves.

Then, they faded.

“Curse you, Boneclaw.” She fell to one knee. “I would have…destroyed you.” The sparkling lights traced up and down her arms and continued to wink out, one by one, like the clouds of a hurricane covering the gentle glow of the milky way.

“Perhaps. But now, we will never know.”

He shot her again, not in the heart but the lung. The bullet missed any bone and continued through her chest. For the briefest moment—a moment imperceptible to human senses but laid bare by the abilities of dragons—he saw through her body and out to the wall of blackness she had been examining. Blood hemorrhaged to fill the hole as she toppled to the floor.

“You’re…a fool…Boneclaw,” Shimmerclaw sputtered. Blood seeped out of her throat and made her words hard to understand as they were delivered through a mouthful of red.

“If this is some kind of threat, I assure you it’s a weak one. You cannot heal, not with a dragon bullet inside you. The second one went right through, but the first would have done you in as surely as the second.”

“I’m already dead, you idiot,” she said, but it was not a statement made with malice. She sounded as if she were talking to an old friend. The Masked One supposed that, from her perspective, maybe she was. She didn’t understand that Lord Boneclaw had never existed except as a disguise for the Masked One to accomplish what he desired.

“Then how, pray tell, have you outsmarted me?” he asked and used the voice of Boneclaw for her benefit.

“You killed me in the Steel Dragon’s base. You do realize she’s a cop?” The platinum dragon barely managed to say the words over her laughter. Blood pulsed with each guffaw. It was almost enough to make him simply put a bullet through her brain to make her shut up.

“I have followed her career, yes. But I fail to see the relevance. No one will take me to jail or put me on trial. We are trapped in this dimension of shadow—or I am, anyway. You’ll be free soon enough.”

“The fact that she’s a cop means she’ll come down here and investigate, idiot. She’ll find my body and do human forensics on it. She’ll find out who did this and she’ll catch you.”

It was the Masked One’s turn to laugh. Loud and long he laughed. It was so loud that for a moment, he worried that others might hear them. But no, the door was solid.

“What is so funny to you?” Shimmerclaw wheezed.

“Did you think I was joking about sending you into the void?” he asked. “Your corpse will be swallowed by that wall of void in less than an hour.”

The look on her face said that no, she had not considered the painfully obvious plan of letting her body simply be swallowed by the dark. “No, please…” Coughs wracked her. She didn’t have much time left. “Don’t let my body vanish into this force of darkness. Use me for your bullets. Burn me. Anything. Please don’t let me simply cease to be!”

He smiled. “As you wish,” he said coldly and shot her in the gut. She sprawled back from the blow and landed inches away from the void. “You do make a good point about the firearm, though,” he said to her unconscious body and flung the pistol into the hungry darkness. Good luck getting forensics off that, he thought as he strolled away to rejoin the other delegates.

It felt simply wonderful to have one less nuisance to deal with. Hopefully, the pestilential Steel Dragon would prove as easy to dispatch.

The Masked one vanished into shadow and snuck upstairs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Where the hell are we supposed to find pixies?” Amy demanded of Larry.

He grinned at her and shrugged, a clear indication that he didn’t know. It wasn’t much of a surprise. He’d worked for a dragon investigator for years. That didn’t exactly leave one time for many hobbies like investigating mythical creatures who happened to be real.

“So what are we supposed to do?” she asked.

“I have some ideas,” he said. He hadn’t realized that he’d said all that aloud. It happened to him often. His mind raced constantly and his mouth always tried to catch up.

“I’m interested to hear those ideas as well,” Stonequest said.

“Well, pixies like wild magic, right?” Larry asked, mostly rhetorically. He tried his best to pay attention to what everyone was saying and more importantly, to what came out of his mouth.

“That much is clear, yes,” Lumos said.

“Then we simply need to go to a place of wild magic and we’re bound to find some.”

“Great. So where are places of wild magic?” Amy asked.

Larry scratched his head. “Ancient forests, pristine waterfalls, smoldering volcanos. That kind of thing.”

“We went to a volcano a week ago and I didn’t see any pixies,” Stonequest said.

“Fair point,” the mage conceded.

“Plus, we’re in Detroit. The only bodies of water around here are damn polluted. And even the suburbs are as manicured as hell,” Amy sounded distraught. “I guess we could go to the great lake.”

“Lake Superior,” Stonequest said.

“But that would take hours. I don’t want to spend that kind of time.”

“You’re right about that. I think we should do what we can to act as quickly as possible.”

“Are you sure we should all go?” Lumos asked. “This could turn out to be…less than efficient. I think perhaps some of us should stay here in case they return.”

“I agree. I don’t want to leave her to go look for pixies,” Amy added quickly.

“We wouldn’t be leaving her,” Larry protested. “We’d be looking for the only way to help.”

“Well, it looks like that’ll be only you and me, then,” Stonequest said.

He nodded. That would have to do. “Fine, but we still need a wild place.”

“What about Lady Amythist?” Lumos asked. “Her gardens are not exactly manicured.”

“That’s putting it lightly,” Stonequest added.

“Plus she’s surrounded by forest. There might be pixies there,” the golden dragon concluded.

“Better yet, we can call ahead.” Stonequest retrieved his phone and dialed Amythist. As it rang, he said, “Can you imagine what we would do without these things?”

Larry chuckled. “Fortunately, I don’t think anything could wipe out all the phones.”

The call connected. After a few questions, he hung up. “She says there are pixies there. Three live on her land, it seems.”

“We’ll probably need more than that,” Amy said heavily.

“But that’s a start,” Larry said and tried to sound optimistic. “Let’s go. Amy and Lumos, you’ll stay here. Are you sure?”

They shared a look, but it was obvious on their faces that yes, they would remain there and wait for the Steel Dragon.

“Let’s go, Brockton,” Stonequest said. The mage climbed onto his back and they were airborne in moments.

The stone dragon flew as fast as he could. Larry used some of the tricks Constance had shown him to put the wind at their backs.

“Do you think this will work?” the dragon asked.

“Honestly? I have no fucking idea,” he said. “But that…hole or whatever the hell it is radiated wild magic. If the pixies weren’t responsible for that happening, we are dealing with some force far beyond what I thought this world was even capable of.”

“That’s not a comforting thought.”

“If you want comfort, go back to sleep,” Larry said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, it was something Windlock used to say when a case got tough,” he said, thinking fondly of his old boss. “Whenever we would hit a block or it would seem like there was no other option and I would say something about quitting. Jokes, mostly, but Windlock didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Anyway, his point was that life’s not supposed to be easy or comfortable. And that, most of the time, if you feel comfortable, it means you’re ignoring what’s going on all around you. We could sit at that dome and wait for something to happen but in the end, it might merely lull us into comfort.”

“I feel like you lost the thread in there somewhere,” Stonequest said with a trace of disdain in his voice.

“Look, let’s hope I’m wrong, okay? I hope we can make them all reappear. Because if I am right and we need the pixies’ help, this won’t exactly be easy.”

The time for conversation was over, however. They were above the woods that surrounded Amythist’s cottage. A moment later, they descended in slow circles and landed on one of the few patches of open grass large enough to accommodate a dragon.

Amythist came out to meet them, not that she was easy to see. Her gardens were overgrown and unsightly, especially compared to the perfectly manicured estates where most dragons lived. Here, it seemed that the plants didn’t so much grow as they fought each other for space to survive.

Beds and paths ran between them, but the beds were so packed with plants that sometimes, it was hard to tell where one ended and another began. Plus, as they walked toward her, they’d come across some specimen of plant that had started to grow in the path between the beds. Rather than plucking it, she had encouraged it to grow. In the beds themselves, flowers proliferated, as did herbs in a hundred different colors. There were also numerous dead plants too, many of them heavy with the husks of seedpods left to fully ripen and harden.

It was as close to wild as Larry could think of and insane to think that it existed only a few miles away from the burned-out urban wasteland they had recently left.

Perhaps the strangest of all, though, was that through this malaise of overgrown shrubs, plants going to seed, untrimmed trees, and abundance of flowers, there were dragons. He couldn’t be sure how many slunk about but it didn’t take more than one to put him on edge.

He'd already seen at least three and reminded himself of those they had rescued from the island who Amythist had escorted home and taken under her wing like the others they’d liberated from the technomages.

One of them scratched itself under an old oak tree. The other two fought over the carcass of something so large, he thought it might have been a moose.

“My skekleton!” one of the dragons growled in what almost sounded like a toddler’s mispronunciation.

“Fine! My meat!” said the other, thus demonstrating which of the two had been rescued earlier and been under Amythist’s tutelage longer.

“I saw a young stag in the north forest,” Amythist told the two dragons as she ambled through her garden toward Larry and Stonequest, who was still in his dragon body.

“Eww. Who likes stag? This skeleton looks much better!” the second dragon said. A female, Larry judged, based on her voice and the line of her neck.

The first, a young male who seemed to share the sentiment, bit all the more viciously on the carcass. The female—seemingly disgruntled—flew off.

“That’s how you let them settle fights?” Larry asked. “They’ll learn might makes right.”

“Ah, but you see, Silverwing likes stag. She was manipulating Emberbelly into not following her.”

He nodded because he’d seen human children pull the same trick a thousand times. “But these aren’t children.”

Amythist’s smile, bright until this moment, wilted like one of her flowers. “No, they are not. Emotionally and intellectually, though, they’re not much brighter than children. They were stunted by their lives in captivity. My only hope is to educate them and thus give them a life.”

“But they were robbed of their childhood,” he said.

“Ah, but dragons live much longer than humans do. If I can get these to mature a little, they could have millennia of fulfilling lives ahead of them. But come now, you didn’t tell me what you needed on the phone, only that you needed pixies. What has the Steel Dragon done that she requires the help of my fickle little friends?”

“Can’t you summon your pets and we’ll tell them?” Stonequest said.

“Pixies are not pets, no matter what some dragons think they are,” she snapped and revealed some of the fire that had once earned her the nickname “mage eater.” “They are powerful beings in their own right and deserve as much respect as anyone. You must give it to them if you wish them to show it to you.”

“Oh, come on. We’re both talking about pixies, right? Like, the little guys who will shoot sparks in your drink at parties? They’ve never shown me any respect.” Stonequest sounded bemused as he took his human form.

“But if all you expect is sparks, that is all you will get.”

“We have something way bigger than sparks,” Larry said. “And not much time to explain it. Can you ask them to come? I haven’t seen any in here.”

“Just because you cannot see a pixie does not mean they are not around,” Amythist said enigmatically.

“All right, so you’re saying they can hear us now.” The mage paused and played back what he’d said in his head. There was a fair amount to work through. He hoped it had all been good. To Stonequest’s credit, the dragon at least looked embarrassed about his remark about the sparks.

“So, you came to see some pixies?” said an extremely high-pitched voice from deep inside a shrub covered in yellow flowers.

“We did, er…ma’am. I think we need your help,” Larry replied to the bush.

From deep within the tangle of branches, leaves, and flowers, what had to be the world’s largest beetle buzzed out to hover in front of his nose. Except it wasn’t a beetle. It had the hard, iridescent purple-and-green carapace of a beetle and the same long, clunky wings, but instead of six prickly legs, it had human arms and legs. In fact, its body didn’t seem to be a beetle at all, more like a human wearing a beetle, which somehow made sense to Larry’s troubled brain. Its face was undeniably beautiful, he had to admit, and the only odd feature was the too-large eyes. Still, even seeing the pixie, he was no surer of its gender or if it even had one for that matter.

“Well, you could start by not addressing me as an old lady!” the beetle pixie huffed.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, a little startled because he’d never realized he could find men, pixies, and even beetles attractive.

“I’m not a man!” the creature huffed.

“Jewel, please, these men need your help,” Amythist said with a sly wink at Larry.

“But you said—”

“I said don’t call me ma’am.” Jewel squealed with laughter. “That doesn’t mean I’m a boy. You humans! You don’t understand anything about us.” More laughter followed. It was high and tinkling like the sound of bells. He decided he rather liked it.

Stonequest, however, did not seem so amused. “We came because we think pixies did something to our friends.”

“Well, they probably deserved it.” She laughed with genuine amusement and another bell tinkled along with her. Larry saw that another pixie had darted over. This one seemed to have the wings of some kind of fly.

“What did your friends do to the pixies?” the newcomer asked.

“Our friends have vanished,” Stonequest explained. “One minute they were in a base, a fire tornado created by a mage and a dragon struck, and then they were gone.”

“It sounds like a good thing,” the fly pixie joked. Jewel laughed so hard she almost fell out of the air.

“What does this have to do with pixies?” she asked. “It sounds more like dragon and mage boring stuff, blah blah blah. All you guys ever do is blah blah blah, but you never ask pixies for anything except party favors. Did you know Lady Amythist asks us to pollinate her garden? We would never do something so perverse out in the open but we asked the bees to do it. No one else asks us a thing.”

“But that’s not true!” Stonequest snarled. “Pixies were at these peace talks.”

“Is that right?” the fly asked.

“It is,” Larry interjected before the dragon could completely ruin any chance they had at getting help. “In fact, we think those pixies did something to make our friends vanish. My guess is that they tried to cast some kind of protection spell.”

“Pixies don’t use spells,” Jewel said matter of factly.

“Okay, sure,” he agreed amicably. “See, that’s why we need your help. I’m telling you, the wild magic pouring off this the crater had to be from a pixie. I think something went wrong and made our friends vanish.”

“So what?” the fly asked.

“Yeah, so what?” Jewel repeated.

“So what, chicken butt?” her companion asked and she fell into giggles.

“Well, I thought that since this was pixie magic gone awry, you pixies could fix it,” the mage said.

“It’s not our problem, though,” the male muttered.

“Not really at all,” she echoed. “Pixies do things all the time that have nothing to do with me. Why, only last week, a pixie in Australia did something.”

“What did he do, Jewel?” the fly asked.

“How am I supposed to know? He was in Australia!” Both pixies collapsed with laughter, which could prove to be fortuitous as it might have saved Stonequest the effort.

“I knew this would be a waste of time!” the stone dragon fumed. “Pixies, pah! What have you ever done for anyone but yourselves?”

“About as much as anyone else has done for us,” Jewel retorted and flew directly at his face.

The dragon’s reflexes were such that he easily intercepted the pixie. He didn’t catch her, however. Instead, her body broke into a thousand tiny sparks that flurried around his hand before they flared into his face with the sound of firecrackers.

The fly, not to be outdone, darted around the dragon’s back and used the moment to give him an honest to God wedgie.

“I will turn those two into party décor!” Stonequest fumed, but Larry put a hand on his shoulder and managed to stop him. Not that he could have done anything to the creatures. Both of them—their pranks accomplished—had streaked away into the garden and vanished into hedges. They were gone.

“I told you to treat them with respect.” Amythist shook her head.

“Can’t you make them come back?” Stonequest asked.

“I can’t make them do anything. Your failure to recognize this point is why they left.”

“But they might still be here, right?” Larry asked. They couldn’t fail. Not like this. Not with so much riding on these bizarre little creatures.

Amythist shrugged.

The mage turned to the garden, tried to locate one of the pixies, and failed. They could be anywhere. In a tangle of weeds, hidden inside a bush, or hiding underneath a bunch of roots—anywhere.

“I knew this was a waste of time,” the stone dragon muttered.

“Can you stop with the negativity for a second?” Larry asked him.

“Let’s go.”

“Give me a minute,” he said, glad his companion was at least outwardly controlling his temper.

“Pixies, I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can, please listen. I know your kind has been given the short end of the stick, so to speak. You’ve never been a part of society, and that’s not fair. But look, Kristen Hall—that’s the Steel Dragon, if you’ve heard of her—admitted twelve of your kind to the peace talks so the pixies would be represented. But now, she and these twelve of your kind have gone missing. I don’t think we’ll be able to get them back without your help. So, if it's not too much to ask, could you please help us?”

Jewel reappeared in a flurry of sparks. “We’ll do it!”

“Really?” Larry asked. He had thought his speech was all right but had expected it to start a dialogue, not end the conversation.

“We’ve never heard such kind words before,” she said. “And to think you said it twice! Now, what did you want us to do?”

“I…wait, what word are you talking about?” he asked, confused.

“Please. You said please,” the fly told him and tinkled with laughter.

“They weren’t even listening,” Stonequest muttered.

Larry darted him a look that he’d never given a dragon before. Previously, it had been reserved for small children whose parents refused to reprimand them for throwing rocks in the playground. Thank goodness his teammate merely rolled his eyes and shut up.

“They heard what they never had before, isn’t that right?” Larry said to the pixies.

“Exactly! Most people simply dismiss us, or order us around, or try to trade us things we don’t even understand like green paper with old dead people on it. You are the first person who has ever said please.” She was glowing.

“Well, I gotta say it wasn’t exactly my idea,” he said, hoping this would work. “I learned that kind of respect from Kristen—the dragon who is in trouble right now. She was the one who invited the pixies inside. She fights for equality and now, she needs your help.”

“I don’t know…” the fly said dubiously.

“Please consider it,” Larry continued, not afraid to use the first magic word he’d ever learned. “Just think, of all the dragons you have ever known, how many have given pixies an equal seat at a discussion of real importance?”

It didn’t take them long to answer. “No one has. Never never never. Not even Amythist and she’s the nicest dragon we know.”

The old dragon smiled indulgently at the little creatures. “I am sorry, but we have been over this. I will not tear my cottage down so I can plant a grove of willow trees.”

“See!” Jewel said, although at least she no longer sounded frustrated.

“Well, the Steel Dragon has,” the mage continued in an attempt to seal the deal. He knew pixies enough to know he could not truly count on their help until they were in Detroit and doing what they needed to do. But he could not lose momentum, not now. “Kristen believes that all living beings are worthy of respect. Dragons, humans, mages, dwarves, and pixies are all at the peace talks. I cannot imagine that it's easy for her to get all those different viewpoints to work together or agree on much of anything, but she’s trying. And now, she needs your help.”

“She does sound rad,” Jewel nodded.

“Freaking rad indeed,” the fly added.

“But it still sounds tricky. They disappeared? Maybe that’s good. Maybe they went somewhere more fun.”

“Somewhere with tons of flowers.”

“And bugs!”

“And chocolate!”

“Yeah, chocolate!”

“I suppose that’s possible,” he said, somewhat terrified by how quickly these odd little beings could get off track. “But if she doesn’t come back—if she dies—then her voice dies as well. Since I’ve met her, she’s worked to make the world a better place. She’s worked to make our world one of real equality. If she dies, I don’t know if we’ll be able to find someone like her to help again.”

“I guess even if she went to the flower, buggy, chocolate dimension, she couldn’t help here,” Jewel said and sounded serious for the first time.

“Wait, is that a real place?” Stonequest asked.

“That’s irrelevant.” The mage elbowed him in the ribs. “What matters is that she’ll be gone from here. And if she is, the voice for equality will be silenced. She’s the first person to value pixie life. Without her… I don’t know what to think.”

“What’s in it for you?” the fly asked and studied the stone dragon.

“He—” Larry tried to answer but the pixies darted about until he shut up. They settled to look at Stonequest.

“Honestly?” the dragon asked.

The pixies nodded.

“Kristen is my friend. She’s one of the most amazing people, dragons, and cops I’ve ever met. Losing her would be bad for these peace talks, but it would be even worse for me. She’s changed my life.”

“You like her!” Jewel giggled.

“What? No!” he protested.

“We’ll do it!” the pixies beamed.

“Great! Thank you so much,” Larry said quickly.

“Of course!” the pixies responded as if they hadn’t spent way too long trying to convince the flighty little creatures.

“If you’ll follow us,” Larry said as Stonequest transformed into his dragon shape and Larry climbed on his back.

“I will, I will,” Jewel said.

“Uh…Fly Guy?” Larry looked at the other one.

“Oh, my gosh, please call me that forever!” the newly named Fly Guy gushed. “I have some very important stuff to do first.” In an instant, he was gone.

Larry felt their chances begin to evaporate. He could not see what one pixie could possibly do against the wild magic he had sensed where the base should be.

But there was nothing he could do now.

“Would you like a ride?” Stonequest asked the pixie.

“Yes, please!” Jewel chirped, flew to his back, and sat in front of Larry.

The flight was a frantic one. Both Larry and Stonequest were afraid that every minute spent was another chance to save Kristen and everyone else gone forever. But at least the pixie didn’t make them slow their pace. In fact, she made it very clear she hadn’t needed a ride. She sat on the dragon’s back when it suited her, but she spent as much time flitting around Larry’s head as if they were back in the garden. And yet she never lost pace, nor was she ever bothered by the wind. Their wild magic did seem to make them creatures not of this world. Larry hoped that would be enough to help.

But, as much as he wanted to hope, he simply did not see how one pixie would be able to unravel this mess.

After what felt like a lifetime—although he knew was merely a long few minutes—they entered the airspace over Detroit. Despite knowing exactly what had happened there and that no one could have fixed it in the time they were gone, it still felt like a knife to his gut to see the destruction.

The fire tornado had done far more than try and fail to swallow Kristen’s base. It had destroyed entire streets, incinerated houses that had stood for a hundred years, and toppled skyscrapers. The rampant power had all but destroyed the city. What remained resembled a wasteland more convincing and thorough than any Larry had ever seen in any film. It was a nightmare now, and somehow, he was supposed to find hope in this barren and fire-burned landscape.

“Wow. I have to say, this place is fucked,” the pixie said. “That’s the word, right?”

“It sure is,” he said without humor.

They descended and landed near the giant pit where the base had been. Lumos was in his dragon form and flew loops around the area. His eyes scanned the now blue sky for enemies, and he seemed to reach out with his talons and tail as if he might be able to brush against the vanished base.

Amy sat cross-legged and levitated a few feet above the ground. Her nose was bleeding and her hair whipped in an unseen, unfelt wind. Larry could tell by her expression that even with her formidable magic skills, she hadn’t been able to locate their missing friends.

He climbed off Stonequest’s back. The pixie hovered close to him. Stonequest took to the air as mage and pixie approached the vanished base.

“Oh, no,” Jewel said in what had to be the most disheartening start to a solution he had ever heard.

“What do you think?” he asked, hoping—praying—that there was more to the pixie’s assessment.

“You were right.” She nodded. “I can sense wild magic here that was channeled through a pixie. They were sent to another dimension.”

“Is there any chance it was the chocolaty flower dimension?” he asked.

“Oh no, not at all. The energy I sense here is not the good kind.”

“But you can do something about it, right?”

“By myself?” The stream of giggles that came from the pixie’s mouth was in no way encouraging. “Oh, no way, you silly human. I will most certainly not be able to do anything about this on my own.”

“What if we help?” Amy asked, stood from her meditative float, and wiped the blood from her nose. She was too pale and had been pushing herself too hard while he was gone. Not that he was surprised.

Jewel shook her head. “You humans need too much rational thought to work your kind of magic. Pixie magic is different. You won’t be able to help. I’m so sorry.”

“So we’re simply supposed to give up because Fly Guy had more important stuff to do?” Larry tried to control his tone but it was damn hard. He’d thought they had a chance, but it seemed they’d failed yet again.

“Yeah, that sums it up. Maybe you should take a nap until he’s done,” Jewel said. “You humans do that, right? Nap?”

“I will not nap right now. Not with my friends in danger.”

“There’s nothing else for you to do, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Well, can’t you try something?” Larry asked. “Please?”

“There’d be no point,” she said. “I’m sorry. I truly am. Even with a hundred pixies, this would be extremely difficult.”

“Then it’s a good thing I brought one hundred and one.”

Fly Guy appeared in a shower of sparks and buzzed around Larry’s head.

“Fly Guy?” the mage asked and tried to wrap his head around the surprise arrival. “I thought you had important stuff to do?”

“I did! I had to gather a group to help.”

Pixies appeared from the sky above them, from cracks in the pavement, and from the river they could barely see through the destruction. Some crawled along the earth like roly-polies, while others flew using bug wings. A few jumped like grasshoppers.

“I think it could be the Ink,” Jewel said.

“That feels right to me,” Fly Guy replied.

“Plus, I think the place they made is diminishing in size.”

“Equidistant points or groups?”

“Equidistant points, I would think. Let’s stick to a circle, though, rather than trying to make a sphere. The last thing we want is for their space to come back twisted on one of the axes of reality,” Jewel said.

“That can get messy,” Fly Guy agreed and buzzed off to issue the orders.

The two pixies talked so fast and with such attention to detail that Larry had trouble reconciling them with the same silly beings they had found fluttering in Amythist’s garden.

“Do you think you can bring them back?” he asked, daring to hope again.

“We’ll try,” Jewel said grimly. “But honestly, Fly Guy should have brought more pixies. We don’t have time to gather any others, though.”

“What will you do?”

In response, the creatures began to sing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Kristen had hoped that the dragon-form tests would have proven something, but as far as she could tell, they didn’t. The mages disagreed. They thought it was quite interesting that while their powers continually diminished, the dragons’ were largely unaffected. Their aura powers were almost gone—this brought great dismay to Heartsbane, of course, who largely relied on them—but to the rest of the dragons, this was a small sacrifice.

In the space of a few hours, the mages had their powers whittled away while the dragon’s strength and healing abilities seemed unaffected. The mages attributed this to dragons fueling their magic from their bodies. Their magic was baked in, so to speak, while mages had to channel it every time.

But Kristen found it all fairly tedious. What mattered was that her powers were not diminished, so she could still fight. But, on the other side of the coin, neither were Lord Boneclaw’s. He had lurked in his corner of the base and watched the dragons run their tests for the last hour. Even when she had stood to pass food and water out, the Councilor hadn’t moved. He smiled constantly at her like he already knew the outcome of these meetings while everyone else had to keep guessing.

Still, he hadn’t done anything so it wasn’t like she could simply attack him, even if he was being weird. That would be wrong, although he certainly deserved it. But that didn’t make bringing him food and water any more pleasant.

“Here, a dozen water bottles,” she said and gave the water bottles to one of the warrior dragons. “Someone should be over soon with six MREs, and a dwarf will serve beef. Hey, where is Shimmerclaw?”

She only counted eleven dragons. The Council leader was missing.

“I haven’t seen her in a while,” Decimus Aurelius said. “I thought you sent her on some errand?”

“I did, but that was ages ago,” Kristen said and her gaze flicked to Lord Boneclaw, who continued to watch her.

“I have not seen her,” Lady Jade said. “Nor did she participate in the tests.”

“That’s right,” she said when she thought about the dragons who had transformed. “Lord Boneclaw, you didn’t participate either, correct?”

“Correct,” he said with a wicked grin. “Although you will find my powers are no more diminished than any of the dragons.” He said it kindly enough, but she couldn’t help but read it as a threat. In fact, she’d be a fool to interpret it as anything else.

“The food will be here in a few minutes,” she said to excuse herself. Thinking about it, she hadn’t seen Shimmerclaw since she’d been down below. Was she still timing the shrinking of the blackness? She decided to check.

As she crossed the room, she found she had a shadow. Constance was following her.

“I just realized that Lady Shimmerclaw has not returned from when she went below to investigate.” The technomage kept her voice low, obviously not wanting the information to spread.

“I’m sure she’s paying way too much attention to detail,” Kristen said but her voice lacked confidence.

“But of course, and yet I feel I should come downstairs with you all the same.”

She glanced at where Lord Boneclaw had been seated but she could not see him. The darkness in that corner was too thick.

They descended the stairway into the darkness of the lightless tunnels beneath the base. Halfway down the steps, when the lights from the torches and magical effects above faded, Constance ignited an orb of glowing light.

They walked through the intersection of the hallways, leaving both the storage area and the armory behind as they ventured deeper beneath the earth. When they reached the door of the bunker section of the basement, the door was closed.

“That’s odd,” Constance said. “I wonder why she closed it.”

“Maybe she didn’t want anyone to see her counting on her fingers,” she joked but in the darkness, the humor felt flat and fake.

The technomage pushed the door open.

At first, they saw nothing but darkness. The void had moved farther into the bunker, but the light could not pierce it any more than it could before. Shimmerclaw was not visible. She was not in any corner of the room, nor was she near the void or hiding from it. Kristen was about to suggest they check the other parts of the basement when she saw her—or what was left of her.

“Oh, dear God,” Constance said as she sent her light orb above the partial corpse of the dragon. The void had already swallowed both of Shimmerclaw’s legs, most of her torso, and one of her arms.

It had not, however, swallowed the upper portion of her chest where two bullet holes revealed her cause of death.

“She was murdered,” the woman said, her voice heavy with dread. “But by whom? She had enemies in every delegation. I don’t think the dwarves would use such a weapon, but humans would seek such an advantage, as would my mages.” She shook her head in despair.

“Wait a minute—look at her hand,” Kristen said. It looked as if whoever had shot Shimmerclaw hadn’t finished the job. Her hand was human no longer but had transformed into a dragon claw. In it, she grasped a bone—no, not grasped, but used it to point back in the direction from which they had entered. She was pointing to her attacker.

“Is it a clue?” Constance asked.

She was way ahead of the technomage. Of course Shimmerclaw hadn’t died easily. She had used the last of her strength to share this message in a way that she knew Kristen of all people would understand. In her claw, she held a bone.

Boneclaw.

Lord Boneclaw did this.

Which meant that even if he wasn’t the Masked One, he was still a murderer.

“Lord Boneclaw did it,” she said. “That’s what that means. She must have confronted him and accused him of starting the war.”

“But how did he get a weapon? We searched everyone before we got in here.”

“It must be one of ours.” Kristen slapped her forehead with her palm. “When the power failed, I assumed the weapons would be safe because the vault needs electricity to work but of course, the Masked One can simply move through shadow. Oh, dear God, I’ve been so stupid.”

“Come on. Let us try to bind him,” Constance said.

She desperately wanted to agree. Better yet, she wanted to batter Boneclaw’s face in, but she’d rushed into so many situations before. Sometimes, it worked out well but often, it didn’t. “I don’t know if now is the time,” she hedged, as much as she hated saying it.

“What? Why not? At least now he can’t run away!” The technomage was already pulling magic into a vortex of wind.

“That’s true, but I don’t know if we can beat him here,” she said. She hated this fucking situation so goddamn much. “I can’t take my dragon form here. All the training I’ve done with Lumos…it would all be for nothing.”

“You’ll have the advantage in your human form.”

“I don’t know. He can turn to shadow, Constance. You haven’t fought him like I have. It’s not easy.”

“But together, surely—”

“Your powers are diminished, aren’t they?”

The woman clenched her teeth. “They are.”

“Maybe if we could get the rest of the mages to help?” she asked.

Constance shook her head. She looked as pissed as Kristen felt. “No. No, that’s not wise. The bubble of magic sheltering them is fragile and weakening. If all the mages used our powers…I wouldn’t want to risk shattering this bubble.”

“Shit!” she said. “Then we have to wait. We can’t take him here, not with all this darkness.”

“You don’t think he planned it all this way, do you?” The technomage sounded so morose it was almost contagious.

“No, he couldn’t have. The fire tornado must have been his doing, but to plan all this he needed to plan for the pixies, and I don’t see how he could have.”

“They are flippant little things, aren’t they?” Constance said with a weak smile.

“They are, which means the Masked One could not have planned all this. He probably saw an opportunity to assassinate Shimmerclaw and used it. Goddammit! This is why that asshole’s been staring at me.”

“Still, we are agreed. We wait?” Constance asked again.

She nodded. While she hated it, she nodded.

Although what they saw next would almost break her resolve.

In the hallway on the way to the armory, they saw Boneclaw’s other victim. They almost missed the body as it was beyond the door and as far into the darkness as anything could be.

It was a macabre sight to see a human body with its head severed and the skin shucked and tossed aside like a banana peel.

Worse still was the name on the nametag. Kristen didn’t want it to matter. She wanted to feel the same pain for all the people on her team.

But finding Jim Washington’s corpse hurt far more than she could have possibly imagined.

“I will kill that son of a bitch,” she roared.

“No, Kristen, now is not the time.”

“I fucking mean it, Constance. How could he kill Jim?”

“He will pay. We’ll make him pay. But we talked about this. I’m not at my full strength and there’s too much darkness here. He probably left the body here to piss you off.”

Kristen tried to calm but it felt like an impossible task. The Masked One had murdered Shimmerclaw and Jim in cold blood in the place where they were supposed to come to a consensus of fairness. He had not only intentionally jeopardized the talks, but he’d also killed any people who might stand in his way. Still, Constance was right. No doubt, he did this so she would attack him unprovoked.

“We have to get out of this fucking bubble,” she snapped.

“Agreed,” the technomage said. “But until we do, you’ll wait.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “But if that asshole so much as looks at me wrong—”

“If something happens, I’ll have your back, but we can’t let him look like a victim. We have to prove that he did this and have him hung for it—or whatever it is dragons do to each other.”

“Yes. Good,” she said aloud so maybe she would believe her own words. “Boneclaw will be the first dragon, mage, dwarf, human, or pixie tried in the courts we set up.”

“He’ll be an example,” Constance said.

“Okay. Okay. This fucking sucks but okay. Jesus, how the fuck did he get a gun? I don’t even have a fucking gun right now.”

“Your armory? Can we go there and arm ourselves?” Constance asked. She was thankful for her companion’s cool head.

“The problem is that the armory is set up to keep everyone out in the event of a power outage. I can’t get in there. He could because he can turn into a fucking shadow but…goddammit!” Merely the thought of losing Jim was almost too much to bear. Even in his death, he had made sure to take care of her.

“What, Kristen? What is it?”

“Jim planned for this,” Kristen muttered and stormed down the hallway toward the room filled with supplies. Constance followed and created another orb that drifted after the Steel Dragon as she moved.

She opened the door to the supply room and looked through all the food, rations, cots, medical equipment, and everything else that was left. Finally, she found it—a crate labeled CANNED CURED SAUSAGES.

“Are you planning on…stress eating?” the technomage asked.

Her face set and grim, she ripped the wooden lid off the crate. The nails keeping it shut presented no real resistance for her steel fingers. Inside were six handguns and two hundred dragon scale bullets. She loaded the magazine of her gun, tucked it in her waistband, and gave another to Constance.

“Do you have a plan?” the woman asked.

“We go upstairs as discreetly as possible. We get Heartsbane, Decimus Aurelius, Alp the dwarf, and the German Ambassador since he seems the most trigger happy, and we tell them to come down here one by one. Once we’re all armed, we announce the murder and the suspect once we have the Masked One surrounded. Even he can’t dodge six bullets fired at him at once.”

“Are you sure about that?” Constance asked. “Can we honestly stop him with guns?”

“No. I have no fucking idea,” she said. “But I will not go quietly into the dark. I will not let this void eat me while that bastard continues to walk free. Maybe you should tell the mages to ready those light orbs.”

“Okay. Give me a half-hour and I’ll see who I can get to help. You talk to the people you want to arm and I’ll get mages.”

“All right. Here we fucking go.”

Both women left the supply room and hurried down the dark hallway toward the main room of the base where the others were gathered.

They never made it.

Lord Boneclaw waited for them at the top of the stairs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Six against one. That might have made this a fair fight,” Lord Boneclaw smiled before he vanished into the dark.

“Constance, don’t let him go to shadow!” Kristen shouted.

The technomage hurled her ball of light to where he had been, but he was already gone.

He reappeared behind Kristen and laughed.

She turned to steel and tried to punch him, but she faltered.

It wasn’t his face she saw, or not all of it anyway. He wore a human skull over the top of his face so only his weak jaw and heartless eyes could be seen. She knew he hadn’t had it when he came in, which could only mean one thing.

“That’s Jim!” She gasped.

“It was,” Boneclaw admitted and dodged her sloppy punch easily. He made his leg vanish into shadow and reappear to tangle with hers. It didn’t take much of a shove to send her tumbling down the stairs.

But as Kristen fell, she saw that Constance was still at the top of the stairs, a ball of light at the ready. She hurled it at the Masked One.

It had no effect and simply flashed in his face, and the ancient dragon laughed. “If light could defeat me, I would not be the dragon I became,” he said and rushed to her with a burst of speed.

She was ready for him, though. The technomage had gone toe to toe with Kristen a few times and she knew how to fight. She could use magic to augment her muscles and give her greater speed and strength. While it was diminished, she still had enough to do that now and she pushed herself to match Boneclaw’s insanely fast dragon strikes.

But as she tried to keep up, the light orb she had been powering began to fade and it soon winked out completely.

Kristen heard her body thunk down the stairs when the dragon overpowered her.

“Constance, you have to get up. Constance!” She shook the woman’s unconscious body. Thankfully, the mage surfaced and ignited another orb light. It was smaller, though, and less bright than it had been.

She put herself between Boneclaw—the Masked One—and the technomage. “Why? Why do all this now? You might never escape.”

“I guess that’s part of it,” he said. It was hard not to think of him as the Masked One when she looked at the bloody skull he wore. “I didn’t want to die with all of you thinking that Lord Boneclaw was behind all this. That was merely an alias, a mask. This is who I am and this is who will destroy you.” He sauntered down the stairs as if he were about to attend a gala.

Kristen raised her gun and shot him.

His laughter came from everywhere. It came from the pools of shadow hiding at each step, from the darkness behind the concrete pillars and even from her footprints. Her bullets had done nothing. They could do nothing to his shadow form.

“Constance, we need to get above!” she shouted.

“That would be useful, wouldn’t it?” their adversary replied from the darkness and sucker-punched her in the gut. A human would have been dead. Even most dragons would have doubled over in pain, but she was the Steel Dragon. Her steel abs caught the blow and prevented the air from being forced from her lungs.

She threw an elbow down and tried to drive it into the back of his head. She connected but only succeeded in cracking the skull—Jim’s skull—and knocking it aside.

“That was a new one, you stupid bitch,” he said as he vanished. A clawed hand reappeared from the dark and grasped her by the throat, lifted her from the ground, and strangled her.

But the light orb hovered above them and Kristen could see the Masked One’s torso and head connected to his body. She swung a steel foot and kicked him in the side of the head hard enough to make him release her.

“We have to get upstairs!” she shouted to Constance.

The mage nodded and made sure to not let the light orb she had used to make the Masked One solid dissipate. They moved back to back and inched up the steps while he tried to attack them.

Together, they were barely able to hold him back. The light was enough to force him to become solid, which allowed Kristen to strike. Most of the time, he simply moved away but she landed a few blows, which unfortunately didn’t seem to hurt him at all.

He was incredibly fast. Any time Constance’s orb created a point of darkness that was too close, he slid inside it and lashed out with a claw or the barb of his tail.

Still, they made progress.

Step by step, they pushed up the stairs.

Finally, they were at the top. Kristen grabbed the door and pulled it open.

In that brief moment of distraction, the Masked One shoved one of his bone-clawed hands through Constance’s gut.

She shrieked in pain but it was cut short by what sounded like a ruptured lung.

“You bastard!” Kristen screamed.

He lifted the mage, his claw still embedded where he’d punched her, and hurled her into the darkness.

“She’s not dead,” he said. “But she will be. Do you go down there to save her and risk me finishing your pathetic life off in the dark, or do you leave her to die and go ask your friends for help?”

“I will kill you. Do you understand that?” She used every ounce of speed and strength she had, but it wasn’t enough. Despite her efforts, she could not hit what was not there. She could not punch a shadow or choke a silhouette of darkness. Frustrated, she maintained her offensive but her fists found nothing, while Boneclaw hid in the blackness and was able to test her steel skin for weakness.

After a minute of feeling like a child fighting a monster she couldn’t see, Kristen sensed a blow directed at her face and she managed to block it barely in time. A moment later, she would have been blind for life and not only because of the dark.

“This is what you do, isn’t it? You don’t fight and simply try to weaken and terrify. You truly are nothing but a shadow.” She hissed her disgust.

“A shadow with claws,” Boneclaw said and struck with such ferocity that bloody gashes opened on her steel back.

She cursed and acknowledged that she couldn’t defeat him down there. They both knew it, and it meant she had to leave Constance while she went to get help.

Her decision made, she turned swiftly and yanked the door open behind her. The Masked One used the opportunity to stab her in the back of the knee. The pain was intense, but the welcome flood of light coming into the room from above took away the sting.

“Shimmerclaw is dead!” she yelled into the room. “Everyone get into cover. The Masked One—”

“Is who made the void!” Lord Boneclaw shouted from the other side of the room.

Kristen’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “No…no, Lord Boneclaw is the Masked One.”

“But he’s right here!” Lady Jade said and gestured to him. “What is this about Shimmerclaw being dead?”

“She was murdered,” Kristen repeated. “So was Jim. Constance is down there too and she needs help. If any of you mages can heal, please hurry. You can’t believe him. Lord Bone—”

But before she could reply, a shadow claw thrust out from the darkness of the subterranean floors behind her and hurled her across the room.

“It is the Masked One!” Decimus Aurelius shouted and moved toward the attacking limb, but it was already gone.

“What is this?” Emil Lord, the mage scholar demanded. “You dragons brought violence.”

“It is one of us who was killed,” Lady Jade pointed out.

“Please, this is what he wants,” Kristen said before a tail emerged from another inky pool and knocked her across the room.

“Enough of this!” Minestrength bellowed.

He was catapulted into a wall by the shadow dragon.

All the dwarves pushed to their feet, ready to fight. “You dragons always were against us,” one of them shouted.

“No, please,” Kristen protested.

But it was too late. One of the dwarves attacked one of the dragon warriors, who defended himself with a flaming sword. The sparks that flew from the strike of the blade lit the coat of one of the human ambassadors on fire, who yelled to the mages for help. The mages began to launch balls of energy at the dragons, who deflected them with their swords.

It looked as if it would turn into a mage and dwarf battle against the dragons, but as the mages readied their power, the void outside the room began to shake and tremble. This prompted the dwarves to yell at the mages to stop, who of course ignored them.

Panicked, the dwarves attacked them too and turned the shrinking room into a three-way free for all. Dragons, mages, and dwarves fought each other indiscriminately. The humans tried to stay out of the way. Her security team tried to intervene, but most of them were human. They couldn’t do anything to a mage, let alone against the inhuman strength of a dwarf or dragon.

“No, please!” she shouted. The room was now filled with dancing shadows. No one attempted to keep any orbs or flames in consistent places, so the darkness ebbed and flowed, disappeared and reappeared in random places.

And from it, the Masked One attacked Kristen.

Every new pool of darkness that appeared near her seemed to contain him. He struck her with claw after claw, focused on her joints, her neck, and everywhere that Lumos had shown her to be the weak points on a dragon and now transferred to her human body.

She attempted to fight back, but he was too elusive and too fast. It was as Constance had said. This was his battlefield. The darkness, the close quarters, and even the chaos of the brawl that now unfolded around them was to his advantage. She could not defeat him there. In all honesty, she wasn’t sure she could beat him anywhere but knew it wouldn’t happen in a corner of a bloody brawl.

Once she’d accepted that realization, she stopped fighting.

While the Masked One continued his attacks, she moved to the center of the room and what was left of the stage. He did not simply let her stroll toward it, of course. He struck her from the shadows of dwarves and from behind and around magical attacks from the mages. His onslaughts pushed her into dragon warriors and shoved her in the ways of spells.

But Kristen soldiered on. She had no other choice and had to get there. The fighting could not be allowed to continue.

As she stumbled forward, she watched the chaos all around her. The dragon warriors gave the mages their all. It took everything their opponents had simply to hold them back. Shimmering shields in different shades of blue tried to absorb and stop the raw brutality of the dragon’s blows, but it required immense effort and power.

Even more ominous was the fact that every time a dragon struck the shield of a mage, the void outside rippled. Kristen could almost see the pixies absorbing every one of these blows in their bodies. The tiny creatures still tried to keep the powers both outside and inside the sphere they had created from ripping this bubble of safety apart.

The dwarves tried to help against the dragons, but they did little more than fight to a standstill, which benefited the Masked One. Every second gained was a second closer to him destroying them all.

Finally, Kristen reached the stage. She was bleeding in a dozen different places, her blood a vibrant shade of crimson as it trickled over her steel skin.

“I challenge Lord Boneclaw to a duel!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

For a moment, nothing happened—or, more accurately, nothing changed. Many things continued to happen as dragons, mages, and dwarves tried to beat the shit out of each other.

“Lady Jade,” Kristen bellowed and managed to catch the woman’s attention, although it didn’t make her loosen the chokehold she now had on a dwarf. “I challenge Lord Boneclaw to a duel! Will you officiate?”

The dragon vaulted upward and turned into what was quite possibly the sexiest dragon body Kristen had ever seen. She breathed green fire, which did an excellent job of making everyone stop fighting. It also highlighted how close the sphere of darkness had come. Already, it had cut corners of the building off. The roof above them was still intact, but it wouldn’t be long before it was damaged even more and it tumbled onto them—if it wasn’t swallowed by the void first.

“On what grounds?” the jade dragon demanded.

“He’s the Masked One.”

“That is simply preposterous,” Lady Jade replied.

“He killed Lady Shimmerclaw,” she said.

“That is no cause for a duel,” Lord Boneclaw replied and walked toward her as if he had not attacked her from the shadows this entire time.

“He’s right, Lady Steel. That is an issue for our courts to decide.”

“Fine, then. According to dragon law, he killed one of my people. I demand a duel as payment.”

“You can’t prove a thing,” Lord Boneclaw said.

“Remove your hood and let people see the ring of blood around your head. It’s human blood. Jim’s blood.”

“Lord Boneclaw, if you please, remove your hood and disprove this nonsense,” Lady Jade said.

“I will do no such thing,” he replied and stepped into the middle of the room. All the mages and dwarves stepped back and he was left standing in a ring of dragon warriors.

“The blood is proof,” Kristen replied. “You can disprove my accusation by simply removing your hood.”

“I will not debase myself with such a foolish act.”

“Lord Boneclaw, your hood was down earlier,” Lady Jade said. “Why do you refuse now? Your honor is at stake.”

“Fine!” he roared and dragged his hood down. The dried, coagulated crown of blood was still there. “So I killed a human, so what? He tried to shoot me with a dragon bullet.”

“Jim would never—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Should we ask him what happened?” Lord Boneclaw sneered. “Admit it—it's your word against mine. There’s no proof either way.”

“Which means the duel is valid,” Lady Jade said. “This will be a duel of your human forms as there is no room to be dragons here.”

Everyone else in the room shuffled into their respective corners, ready to watch a fight between two almost legendary dragons.

Kristen, still wounded and extremely weary, stepped down from the podium and entered the ring of spectators. She flexed, used what strength she had to heal her wounds, and wiped the blood away. It made sense to remove the evidence so he wouldn’t have target points to deliver additional strikes to already weakened places.

Her adversary did nothing with his shadow powers. Instead, he revealed why Boneclaw was such a believable name for the dragon lord. He extended each forearm until they were twice their natural length. At the end of these, he transformed his fingertips into jagged claws that seemed to be thrice their original size. The skin seemed to peel away so it honestly looked as if she was about to duel with a man with literal bone claws. It wasn’t a pleasant image.

But still, this was a duel between their human bodies and she might be able to win.

“The loser is whoever forfeits,” Kristen said. “They’ll be bound by a magical bracelet until they can be put on trial for Shimmerclaw’s murder.”

“And if neither of us gives up?” Boneclaw asked.

“Then the law is clear,” Lady Jade said. “Neither of you will be tried for the death of the other. If you wish to quit, there is honor in that, but if you wish to push your very limits, no one here will stop you.”

“As long as you don’t bump into us!” a dwarf shouted, which did nothing to break the tension that lay so thickly in the room.

They joined in battle, entirely focused on one another.

Lord Boneclaw was furiously fast, a whirling, swirling vortex of bone and claws.

His strikes, however, fell on the hard steel of her skin. Sparks flew as she defended herself and looked for an opening. He increased his speed until she almost couldn’t see him, but it cost him power and he hadn’t yet managed to deliver a decisive strike. When he fought from the dark, he could attack with his full power but there, under the lights of dwarf torches and magical spheres, he was forced to use different tactics.

Kristen could beat him.

She let him come at her and his claws battered her shoulders and forearms until he extended himself too far. Ready for the small opportunity, she rocketed a steel fist into his gut with such force that he sprawled backward.

He was on his feet in a second and resumed his attack to scratch, claw, and try to stab her eyes, but she was steadfast. She waited for another opportunity, and when it presented itself, she head-butted him so hard in the face that it split the skin on his forehead.

Boneclaw landed hard and she strode up to him, put a steel foot on his chest, and crushed him beneath her weight.

The old dragon sneered at her as the wound on his forehead slowly healed, but the blood on his face did not go away. He tried to wipe it out of his eyes, but she applied more pressure.

“Surrender,” Kristen said.

“Never.” Boneclaw struggled beneath her.

“Everyone here heard you refuse. It means that if I kill you, I win. There will be no repercussions.” She applied more pressure until she heard a rib crack.

“Foolish Steel Bitch,” he wheezed as she leaned over him and made a critical mistake.

With the action, her body blocked the light that had fallen on him. Despite the few torches and mage spheres, the only significant light came from above and her form eclipsed it.

Lord Boneclaw vanished and the crowd gasped.

“He is the Masked One,” Lady Jade said, her voice suffused with dread.

“Of course I am.” He reappeared behind Kristen and in the crowd itself. His tail lanced out and swept her feet out from under her.

The dwarves closest to where he had reappeared tried to catch him but in doing so, they dropped their torches, which had probably been what he wanted.

He struck her again from the shadow. When attacking in this way, his blows were insanely powerful as if he’d traveled at the speed of the darkness itself before he materialized to deliver his attack.

“Mages—light!” Emil Lord bellowed and nine mages responded by making their orbs glow brighter.

“No!” Kristen shouted as the increased light made Boneclaw rematerialize.

Above the base, the void moved closer. Its surface rippled as if each ball of light was a stone thrown into its placid surface.

“If you use too much magic, we’ll pop this bubble and die!” she shouted.

“It’s better if only the Steel Bitch dies,” Boneclaw said and appeared from shadow as the mages dimmed their orbs. He punched Kristen across the jaw hard enough to make her spit blood. She tried to fight back, but in the chaos of the dropped torches and the now powerless mages, it was impossible.

Lord Boneclaw savaged her repeatedly and forced her to heal and use what dragon energy she had to simply stay alive. She tried to absorb his strikes as she had before, but now that he had given up any pretense of hiding what he was, he was too powerful, too fast, and too ruthless.

Still, she had to try. Jim deserved that and more.

She braced, let him pummel her shoulders, and when he drew back to slice at her neck, she threw a steel punch at him with every ounce of strength she had.

The Masked One caught her blow as if she were a child.

“It is a pity you couldn’t put up more of a fight,” he hissed into her ear as he dragged her close. “But if you find something out there in the void, I’m sure you’ll come back to tell the rest of us.”

He squeezed her fist so hard it broke the bones in her hand despite her steel skin. With a cruel smirk, he squeezed harder and pierced her hands with his bone claws to skewer her like a lamb shank. The pain was so intense that she let her steel skin drop involuntarily.

That was what Boneclaw must have wanted. As soon as she assumed her regular human skin, he flung her vertically by the hand he had caught with such force that it yanked the shoulder of that arm out of its socket and she careened upward.

She tried to transform into a dragon. Her wings could slow her assent, she thought, or maybe her steel form would be best.

But it was no use. She was too exhausted and powered through the roof of the base to avalanche broken concrete everywhere as she approached the void. At the speed she was going, there was no way to escape it. She would join Shimmerclaw and there wasn’t shit she could do but try to stay conscious.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Amy watched the entire day go by and still, nothing had happened. The pixies continued to sing and they chanted and glowed as they surrounded the area where the base filled with her friends had been. They had started when the sun was overhead and the sky still blue in the aftermath of the firestorm.

Now, the sun was kissing the horizon. The sky was shifting from the washed-out blue of late afternoon to the richer purples of the evening. What clouds were still present glowed red and orange as if they wished to be ignited from within once more. Shadows grew all around them and danced here and there from small fires in the places the mages and dragons who had been tasked with defending Detroit had yet to put out.

She wondered if it might finally be time to help them set the city to rights. She’d remained with the ring of pixies and watched them faithfully as if her presence and her willingness to believe that they could rescue Kristen might be the edge they needed.

So far, nothing had happened.

Miserably, she sagged into a seated position. She lowered her face into her hands and began to cry. Sobs wracked her body as she began to contemplate what her future would look like without the Steel Dragon. Maybe Lumos would take her on as a servant and at least that way, she wouldn’t be hunted until she died. Maybe she could become a recluse.

A sob choked out and made her cough. It was too depressing to focus on that. She wiped her tears and told herself she needed to help extinguish the last of the fires, but when she opened her eyes, something had changed.

The pixies were glowing.

At first, it was only Jewel, but a moment later, another ignited in bright white light. The others mirrored them and each began to glow like stars in the sky at dusk.

“They’re doing it!” the young mage shouted to no one in particular.

“Not…yet…” Jewel stopped singing long enough to groan.

Their vibrant bodies began to radiate more light and tendrils of it stretched from each pixie toward the others nearby. It looked as if they tried to grow a sphere of vines made of light over the missing base. It didn’t seem to be enough, though. Despite the energy pouring off them, their grasping tendrils of light couldn’t quite reach each other.

Out of nowhere, another pixie appeared. He simply flared into existence in a shower of sparks over Amy’s head, glanced at his surroundings, and flew to the pixies and began to sing.

Another streaked over her shoulder, and another. They filled the spaces in the ring of pixies and added their voices and their light to the magic.

Others arrived within moments—ten more, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred.

“I’ve never seen so many in one place before,” Lumos said as he landed beside Amy.

The tiny creatures continued to arrive until they were able to hold hands as they floated in a circle around the sphere. Beams of light darted from each of their singing mouths, up and over the sphere where the base had been until the entire area was cocooned in light.

Larry ran up, grinning as always. “Are you able to understand what the hell they’re doing?”

She shook her head. “I can see it, but that’s about it. Anytime I reach out—”

“It slips away. Yep. Me too. I can’t trace the paths of energy they’re using, but damn if this doesn’t look like a spell to me. Some of what they’re saying is words in languages and some of it sounds like music. I didn’t know such a thing was possible.”

“There!” Lumos pointed through the glowing sphere. The flashes and pops of lights were constantly distracting but Amy could see something that appeared to be the outline of where the building used to be. It looked like it was being carved from the light—no that wasn’t right. It was more like it was being sanded out of the light. Like the pixies had channeled an enormous blob of pure energy and their voices and powers now brushed away all the extraneous pieces. With almost painful slowness, it gradually became more distinct.

At first, it was only the basic rectangular prism shape of any old warehouse before the windows were carved out of it, then the doors. The fixtures on the roof seemed to be gone or beyond the power of the pixies. Lines etched themselves in light to form the bricks of the building. The panes of glass on the windows became more visible and it was soon apparent that something had broken almost all of them.

A sonic boom and an enormous flash of light made her jump and the building was back. It hung in the sphere it had once filled for the briefest of moments before gravity caught hold and fell two feet into the hole with a loud crunch.

Amy gaped as her mind tried to accept the evidence of her eyes. The pixies had retrieved the base. It was damaged and seemed to be missing some corners, but it was there. Before the sonic boom had plowed through Detroit and shattered windows in its path, Kristen rocketed through the roof of her base and into the sky.

“Lumos!” the young mage shouted, but the dragon was already kneeling so she could climb aboard. She hopped up, using her magic to make her shoes give her extra lift, and landed on the dragon with him already in flight.

Kristen reached the peak of her ascent and began to plummet earthward.

“Kristen!” Amy shouted as Lumos pumped his wings and tried to close the gap.

The golden dragon was too slow, however, and he wouldn’t make it. They were too far, and it took too long for a dragon to build speed.

Fortunately, they weren’t only dependent on him to save Kristen.

She reached out with her magic and immediately felt the drain of everything she had done earlier but ignored it. Her powers caught hold of her friend and wrapped her in a net of magical shielding. Kristen did not respond and seemed to be unconscious.

But that didn’t matter. Amy—as tired as she was—had caught her. She held her aloft until Lumos moved beneath her and let her fall onto the golden dragon’s back. With her arms wrapped around her, she felt for her pulse and found it since the steel skin had failed to function.

“Thank goodness. She’s all right,” she shouted to the dragon.

“She is for now,” he said.

She was about to ask what the hell he was talking about when she looked toward the base and saw the reason for his warning.

An enormous pool of shadow boiled out of the building below and transformed into a dragon as it rose. Its laughter was darker than any shadow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“You need to get Kristen to safety. Get out of here, now!” Lumos shouted as he pumped his wings to gain height on the massive shadow that had emerged from the base. It seemed to reach its maximum height and was as big as the fire tornado had been, then began to shrink and solidify into a dragon made of bone and held together with little more than darkness.

“I can help!” Amy shouted, still cradling the unconscious Kristen.

“Yes, by making sure she survives,” he shouted and spun into a roll.

Normally, she could hold on to him effortlessly, but she didn’t have the magic to do so now. She slipped free, her legs as tired as her magic ability, and retained her hold on her friend. They began to plummet toward an inevitable hard landing.

The young mage cursed as she used what power she had left to slow her descent. It wouldn’t be even remotely enough, but as she approached the ground, Larry added his powers to hers and they managed a soft enough landing on the sidewalk.

She tried to use her magic powers to lift herself by her shoes so she could return to the fight, but all she accomplished was to give herself a nosebleed and a splitting headache. The young mage slumped, glad Kristen was all right but worried that her safety wouldn’t last much longer.

Lumos had waited what felt like an eternity for this. As a child, he had been raised on legends of the Masked One—a horrible, cruel beast of a dragon who fought from the shadows using lies. He had dedicated his entire life to becoming a strong enough warrior to defeat him. Ever since he’d discovered his unique dragon powers of light itself, he knew that if the dragon of darkness did exist, he would be the one to have to fight him.

“I’ve studied for millennia for this day,” he shouted as the mass of shadow and darkness took the form of a dragon he had never particularly cared for. “Although I had hoped for an opponent more impressive than Lord Boneclaw. Or do you prefer the Masked One? It must be frustrating to hide your power behind this pathetic little farce of a dragon.”

Boneclaw only laughed. “You might have once impressed me, Lumos. Centuries ago but no longer. You’ve suffered wounds from the dragon bullets and you’ve lost your edge. You’re simply an old, out-of-shape has-been. You’re too old to have the strength to defeat me yet still young and inexperienced compared to the plans I’ve laid.”

“It seems logic has left you, Boneclaw. How am I both too young and too old?” The golden dragon turned at the apex of his flight and began to dive toward the solid form of his adversary. The dragon was all long, bony spines and long, vicious claws. There was little meat or muscle on him, which might mean that attacking his weak areas would be easy or that it might be impossible.

“You were born when I had already found a place of leadership, and yet the powers you have that burn so brightly have done nothing but use what strength you once had. Still, you are a warrior of legend, Lumos, or you were. Stand aside so I don’t have to kill you. Let me flay the skin from the Steel Bitch’s human face and wear her skull as my most prized mask. Do you think her bones are made of steel?”

“If you want her, you’ll have to go through me first,” Lumos bellowed as he plummeted and increased his speed.

“You may not believe me, but I had hoped you would say that,” Boneclaw replied.

He roared in response and a light bright as the sun began to glow in his throat. It erupted from the ancient dragon’s mouth and cut through the inky darkness that had almost completely encapsulated the base.

Boneclaw roared in frustration. He was completely solid now but far enough away that he was able to avoid the attack.

Lumos dropped past him and banked low over the building. “Get out. Everyone get out of there now!”

The dragons, mages, and dwarves within heeded his advice. They ran from the structure as the old dragon spread his wings and glided over the top.

But the Masked One—he could not believe that after all these years, he had finally discovered the identity of the legendary force of evil—did not simply let him go. He attacked from behind and raked him with claws both long and sharp.

The golden dragon twisted in midair so he now flew upside down, facing his enemy. He readied another blast of light from his throat, but Boneclaw clamped down on his jaws.

Lumos smiled as he made his claws ignite with the same blinding light.

He stabbed his talons into the shadow dragon’s chest. Boneclaw screamed in pain and released him as he pulled up and away.

The boney dragon pumped his wings and tried to reach a shadow. They were in the sky, and the sun had yet to set so there were none close by. Even if he made it to one of the darker areas under the clouds, he wouldn’t be able to escape.

Lumos followed and the light from his claws intensified until each glowed like a flare. Despite Boneclaw’s more advanced age, the dragon had not been lying when he’d claimed to be in better shape. He was much faster too, but the light dragon knew how to fight.

He opened his mouth and unleashed another blinding beam of his power at the Masked One. It caught him squarely in the back. This was no ordinary light of course, but a dragon’s fire breath turned into light energy itself. His adversary screamed in pain as his scales burned and evaporated in the blinding energy.

In the next moment, Lumos closed and his claws tore at the other dragon’s flanks, joints, neck, and every possible target. The claws made most dragons feel intense, searing heat, but to the Masked One, they seemed far worse. Every slash of light made the shadow dragon bleed dark, inky blood that turned to black vapor as he screamed.

They pounded into a skyscraper, drove through the glass walls, and came to a stop wrapped around some of the concrete pillars that held the interior up.

Boneclaw, wounded but not defeated, thrashed his tail with a practiced motion that shattered the ceiling and shorted all the lights.

In a split-second, he was gone.

Lumos wasted no time. He knew exactly what the Masked One would want to do.

He left the building, spread his wings, and doubled back as he descended to the first and second floors. Once there, he blasted them out with his light breath.

The Masked One roared in frustration as his shadowy form fled the light. He assumed his dragon form and took to the sky as he continued his attempt to escape.

“The sewers? Really? Did you think I wouldn’t see that one coming?” Lumos shouted after him.

Despite the injuries the golden dragon had inflicted, the enemy seemed to have healed already. This fight wasn’t over yet, even if Lumos did have his opponent on the run.

They played an aerial game of cat and mouse. Every time The Masked One tried to duck inside a building to escape into shadow, he launched a blast of light. Those that didn’t impact the dragon directly cut his path off.

“How long can you keep this up?” Boneclaw bellowed.

“Longer than you. In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re losing.”

“Ah yes, but we’ve only just begun and the sun has set.”

Lumos cursed inwardly. It was true. There was still light in the air but there wouldn’t be for much longer. He had to end this as soon as possible. Of course, he could not let the Masked One know that. “Unlike you, Boneclaw, my powers are not dependent on my surroundings. I can fry you with light all night long.”

His adversary sneered at this—which suited Lumos perfectly—then tucked his wings and plunged toward a stand of trees near the ground.

The golden dragon blasted them all with light but he was slightly too late. His target was gone, vanished into shadow.

He didn’t waste a heartbeat, however. The Masked One had made it clear what he thought of the old gold dragon. It was Kristen he was after, not him. Lumos turned on his wing and raced to where Amy had caught their leader and put her on the ground.

He reached them not a moment too soon. As he came around a building and saw Amy patting Kristen’s head weakly with a wet towel, a great blob of darkness appeared above them from the shadow of a building.

Enormous claws extended, ready to skewer the two women.

Lumos was in place to avert the attack. He opened his mouth and launched an even stronger blast of light energy. The dark dragon shrieked as the light fell on his back and forced him to coalesce into his solid form. The golden dragon dropped sharply and his claws glowed with energy, ready to end this fight once and for all.

He crashed into the Masked One and missed his throat by inches. Without pause, he drew his head back—his teeth now glowed too—for another strike, but Boneclaw wound his long bony tail around his neck to prevent him from completing the lethal blow.

But he had other options. He dug his claws deeper into the other dragon’s sides and his opponent howled in pain before he stabbed his claws into Lumos.

Both ancient dragons were far too stubborn to let go, so they remained locked in a lethal embrace as they fell from the sky and powered through one of the walls of Kristen’s base.

Lumos managed to position Boneclaw so his back broke through the brick wall, but the shadow dragon was able to twist so Lumos was the one who pounded into the concrete floor.

For a moment, the golden dragon could see nothing but dust and debris. He had struck the ground with enough force to knock him unconscious for the briefest of moments. Across the base—somehow it was still standing despite now missing a wall—he could see the motionless form of Boneclaw.

It was done, he thought with relief.

He pushed to his feet and looked around the room, sensing for any delegates who had been too stupid to flee. Even though Boneclaw—the Masked One himself—was gone, any people in there would still be in danger. Hell, any dragons in here would be in danger. Dropping a building on anyone hurt.

But he didn’t sense anyone. Not on this floor anyway, and he had no idea how far his powers could reach underground. It wasn’t relevant now, though. They would have time to clear the building and check for survivors once they made sure any people working for Boneclaw were caught and in prison.

Lumos turned to the dragon, thankful that the fight had been as easy as it turned out to be. He had suffered some wounds but keeping the fight in the sky had been a smart move. In the gloom, he could see the broken form of the skeletal dragon. It looked as if one of its arms had sheered off.

From behind him, a claw dug into his spine.

He screamed with pain and then dread as Boneclaw’s shadowed form melted away into the dark.

Instinctively, he snatched at the claw behind him but it too was gone. All that remained was the pain.

“You thought that would be enough to defeat me?” the Masked One hissed from all around him.

“Face me, you coward!” Lumos shouted into the darkness. He made his eyes glow and released lights into the gloom. They illuminated nothing but rubble and he saw no enemies except for the limitations of his powers. He had lied to Boneclaw about the night and did get energy from the sun, exactly like the Masked One drew power from the dark.

“We had the little fight above the city in the rays of the sun, did we not?” his enemy asked from the darkness. “We tried your way. You did not use it as well as you should have.”

“So says the dragon hiding in the dark.” He spun and flicked his tail at every moving shadow.

“Perhaps you would prefer it if I stop hiding?” A claw appeared from the darkness and slashed across his face with far more force than he had expected. It thrust his head sideways and before he could recover, a disembodied tail stabbed a spine into his side.

Lumos unleashed light to where the tail had been, but the Masked One was too fast. By the time the light illuminated the place, his attacker was gone.

A moment later, claws tore the membrane of one of the golden dragon’s wings. He flapped them both and flung the bony dragon back, but it was too late. The damage was done and he would not fly that night.

Still, the enemy refused to attack directly. He continued to strike from the shadows to wear him down, tire him out, and force his dragon healing power to overextend itself.

Finally, Lumos decided he’d had enough.

He’d noticed a pattern to the Masked One’s strikes. Feint, feint, strike. Feint, feint, feint, strike. He never initiated more than two or three moves without making contact. Logically, he tried to keep him on edge with the feints but didn’t want him to get wise to them. Fortunately, he had already discerned the ploy.

At the Masked One’s first feint, Lumos looked at the sky. The gloom was growing as dusk faded and he had to act now.

On the second feint, the golden dragon began to prepare his greatest power.

Luckily, his opponent feinted a third time and gave him time.

At the fourth attack, the one that he expected to be real, he unleashed his assault as soon as he sensed movement from the darkness.

Boneclaw lunged forward and Lumos met his claws with a dazzling flash of light. It came not from his claws or mouth but from every scale of his body. Every pore, every whisker, and every piece of exposed skin radiated light. The room filled with the blinding glow and the Masked One—drawn out as he had been—screeched in pain and clutched his eyes as he stumbled back.

The golden dragon pounced and savaged his adversary’s armpit with his claws.

The Masked One roared, but he didn’t retaliate and instead, tried to dissolve into shadow. His effort proved futile as the light attack had overwhelmed his abilities. He was trapped in his solid state.

Lumos wasted no more time. He bit the dragon in the neck and a great geyser of blood sprayed into his throat.

This proved to be enough for Boneclaw, who stopped trying to dissolve and began to fight like God had intended dragons to fight.

Claw found claw, tooth found tooth, and tail found tail as the two beasts battled. Like the world’s greatest Komodo dragons, they bulldozed their bodies into each other. Their powers were spent. The Masked One could no longer use his ability to vanish and Lumos had used every ounce of light energy he possessed in his grand flash.

What followed was a brutal, bloody brawl. The enemy, for all his bluster about fighting from the shadows, was an adept brawler. He blocked Lumos’ most vicious strikes yet let those that would only fall on his scaly flank strike without care.

He was hard to wound because of his skeletal frame. The golden dragon found that he often ripped through the other dragon’s skin and scales to find nothing but bone beneath. When he found meat, the Masked One roared in pain, but in the places with nothing but scale and bone, it was as if he felt nothing at all.

They engaged repeatedly with violent clashes. There was no longer any real strategy. Each had to inflict enough damage on the other to overwhelm their ability to heal and cause their body to fail and die. It was not a pretty thing to do.

“You could still surrender,” the Masked One hissed. “and serve as my second. You’re a better warrior than even Shimmerclaw’s boasts made you out to be.”

In response, Lumos grasped the dragon by the back of the neck and threw him into one of the three still standing walls. The impact was enough to make bricks crumble and the roof sag even more than it already was, but the shadow dragon wasn’t disabled.

He darted into another assault, drove his adversary into the opposite wall, and thrust a barb into his chest that might have killed him if it had gone an inch deeper.

“Your healing power is nearly used up,” the Masked One said.

“Take a look at yourself,” Lumos retorted.

Both dragons took a moment to assess their wounds. They were bleeding profusely from dozens of injuries. The Masked One had a jagged line across his neck from where Lumos had bitten him, and the golden dragon’s scales in front of his heart were healing far too slowly to provide him any real defense.

“You could come willingly,” Lumos said.

“Indeed,” Boneclaw said and lurched forward to drive him into the wall again. More bricks fell, as did many sections of some kind of piping from the ceiling. If they weren’t careful, the entire base would collapse on them. In their current state, that would likely mean death for them both.

The golden dragon took a deep breath. That would be worth it, he decided. If he died ending the reign of terror of the Masked One, he would die with honor.

“What?” his enemy hissed. “Did you wish to take this outside so we don’t get crushed?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said and lunged forward, ready to finish the fight.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lumos saw the heavy metal door to the basement crack open. Constance Vigil, leader of the technomages, stumbled out, barely held upright by an old woman whom he could only describe as a witch. “Constance! Get out of here!” he shouted.

The woman looked up, confused by the chaos of the surroundings.

The Masked One grinned savagely and hurled a chunk of the wall at his foe. It missed by a wide margin and Lumos was about to gloat when he heard it thump into a wall behind him.

The building had suffered so much damage that it should have fallen a while before, but it decided that this was its moment. The entire roof caved and brought the walls with it.

Lumos lunged toward Constance. She couldn’t die, not with an actual peace between dragons and mages so close.

He reached her as the roof struck his back. It crushed him to the floor, but he was an ancient dragon of unthinkable power. He kept his legs strong and protected her and the woman who had rescued her.

Unfortunately, it turned out that he had overestimated how long it took for the Masked One’s powers to return. An inky blackness poured through the rubble until a bony tail materialized in front of Lumos’ eyes.

It plunged into his chest and speared his heart.

The last thing the golden dragon heard before he died was his enemy gloating and a mage screaming his name.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Ever since Constance had discovered that she possessed the gift of magic, she had given her life to fighting for mage equality. She had changed her name, forsaken her family, and lived in hiding, all so that one day, mages could throw off the oppressive yoke of the dragons.

In the service of this mission, she had killed many dragons and done terrible things to even more. She had imprisoned them, found ways to use them to kill their kin, and reduced them to nothing but their bodies. On her journey, she had learned that some dragons—those who had not been indoctrinated since they were children—could be trusted. Kristen was one. Katrina, the Iron Dragon, was another. But that was the end of her list.

Until now.

She was trapped under a massive pile of rubble. But she was only trapped and not dead because a dragon had sacrificed its—no, his—life to save her. That Lumos thought he might have survived made no difference to her. He had seen that she was in danger and came to protect her despite being in what must have been one of the most dangerous fights of his entire life.

And now, his murderer was there—his murderer and her former teacher. She had not known that the man who showed her how to take dragon bones and turn them into weapons was indeed a dragon, but she knew now.

“This was impressive,” the Masked One commented and resumed his human form with the scars on his face that she recognized. “To play such a long con, only to distract that dragon at the very last moment. Very impressive.”

“What is he talking about?” the witch who had revived her asked.

“Kill her,” the dragon said to Constance. “Kill the old woman to prove your loyalty to me. Then, together, we will finish both the Steel Bitch and that pesky little mage you failed to capture and convert to our side.”

“This woman saved my life,” she said before something else occurred to her. “Our side? How can you say that? I have worked my entire life to free the world of dragon oppression.”

“We fought with different means for the same ends,” he responded and took a step toward her. Shadow billowed behind him as he approached as if it wanted to embrace its master. “The Dragon Council kept their claws on the throats of mages, humans, and dragons for millennia. Now that Shimmerclaw is dead, we can remake the Council. In her place, a mage can reign.”

“I would rather die.” Constance spat in his face, using her magic to control the blob of phlegm to make sure it landed in his eye.

He flinched at the impact. “That can be arranged!” he snapped and vanished into shadow.

The technomage acted quickly but not quickly enough. She tried to spin a shimmering shield of magic around her and the mage who had saved her, but she was too slow. The darkness lifted the witch high above her and savaged her in the air. Claws assailed the woman from a hundred different directions to shred her piece by piece until all that remained was a skull suspended in the dark. Blood, bone, and viscera rained on Constance, but she didn’t let the gore weaken her resolve or her shield. The Masked One might be able to use shadow but he still had to become solid to strike her. If the shield could block bullets, it could block a claw.

“I’m sorry I never showed you my true face,” the darkness said as the skull floated to seemingly levitate in front of her.

“I saw it during the peace talks. It’s nothing to be proud of,” she replied to the darkness all around her.

The Masked One chuckled. “Such a tongue you have. Will you use it to beg for your life before I rip it out? But no, that was not my face, not any more than the shadowed hood I hid inside was. This is my true face.”

Beneath the skull, his human body coalesced. In one moment, the skull floated freely and in the next, his body had materialized from the shadow with the skull covering his face. He sighed contentedly as if he’d just had sex or a particularly rich dessert. “It is so difficult hiding who you truly are, is it not?”

“I’ve found that since I broke ties with you, I no longer have that problem.”

“And to think I gave you a chance to join me. I’ll enjoy mutilating you. Too bad your skull is too small to wear. It would be a prize rivaled only by the Steel Bitch’s.”

Without warning, the Masked One attacked.

He gave up all pretense of remaining in his human form. Instead, he evaporated into shadow and rained blow after blow on Constance’s shield.

It held and magical energy crackled and sparked every time he struck it. Still, it remained in place, although fissures began to form and her nose trickled blood.

With every strike, she felt the blow as if someone had battered her temple with a hammer. She realized then that her shield would not hold indefinitely.

Calmly, she did what she had trained hundreds of mages to do.

She reached into her robe, drew the handgun loaded with dragon bullets she’d taken from the Steel Dragon’s storage room, and fired four shots into the Masked One’s gut.

Every single one of them missed.

Her adversary simply turned to shadow and stopped his relentless attack.

He laughed from the darkness and it seemed he was all around her, hidden in plain sight. In the rubble of the base, there were a hundred shadows or even a thousand.

“You cannot defeat me here. Not in the dark,” he gloated. “That dragon might have stood a chance if not for him sacrificing himself to save one of my greatest pawns. Oh, the irony is sweet with this one. Perhaps, once I level the world’s largest cities and slaughter the vermin who call them home, I’ll erect a statue of you as one of my most loyal followers.”

“Fine,” Constance said, lowered her gun, and scanned the darkness for any sign of him. “Kill me then. I won’t join you, so you might as well simply kill me.”

“If only all my victims were as wise as you, truly, my job would have been easier.”

“I only ask that when you erect that statue…” She saw something move in the darkness. “That you make sure there are spotlights on that bitch!”

With her left hand, she lobbed a sphere of light into the air and illuminated the room with every ounce of strength she had.

The Masked One screamed at the light, coalesced into his solid form, and stood at her two o’clock.

“You fool! The dragon thought he could defeat me with light as well. Now you will have to watch as I eviscerate you!”

“Watch this,” she said and fired her gun at him a fifth time.

He was insanely, incredibly, unnaturally fast and leapt back at the moment she began to raise the weapon. But Constance was fast too. Her muscles and reflexes were augmented by magic, so she was able to track him as he moved away from her.

She saw the bullet punch through one of his arms and emerge from the other side with a spray of dragon blood.

His screams almost deafened her. They were high-pitched and horrible, the sound of pure pain and so loud and powerful, they made her want to vomit. Yet she had never heard a sound so sweet.

She pursued the Masked One over piles of rubble, but she was too slow.

By the time she caught up to him, he had melted into nothing but a pool of inky darkness that flowed into a crack in the floor of the base. Constance fired at the darkness for good measure, but like before, it did nothing to him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Kristen woke to the sound of Amy crying. Despite the pain she experienced, she couldn’t help but feel relief, although she wasn’t sure if she was more relieved to be alive or to exist. The last thing she remembered was trying to fight Boneclaw and being thrown up into the void like she was nothing but a ragdoll.

“Amy?” she asked and wondered why the mage sounded so heartbroken when she felt nothing but happiness at seeing stars in the night sky above her.

She sat, feeling like a train had run over her, and looked around. The first thing she saw—the most obvious thing—was that her base had been utterly destroyed. One wall was still standing, but that hardly counted for anything.

The next thing she noticed was that her friends were all around her. Stonequest was there and looked grim. As did Larry, his expression morose. Her security team had set up a perimeter and a quick headcount told her that Drew, Butters, Beanpole, Hernandez, Keith, and Heartsbane were all okay. Timeflash flew overhead. Emerald had died in the last battle over Detroit. It still hurt to think about him, but not as much as it hurt to think about Jim. Someone was missing but her friends had to know.

“Jim—” She choked and Drew nodded.

“We found the body in the rubble,” he said.

“Where is Boneclaw?” she asked when she realized who was missing. In her mind, the dragon should have been cuffed.

“The pixies brought you back,” Larry said frustratingly and didn’t answer her question. “They all vanished as soon as it was done, but they did it. They brought you back and by the look of things, not a moment too soon. As soon as your base reappeared, you rocketed through the roof. Amy barely caught you in time.”

Kristen wondered briefly if the effects she had seen during that final brawl had been from the pixies and not the mages. But there was something more pressing on her mind. “Where is Boneclaw? He murdered Shimmerclaw in cold blood. We have to bring him to justice.”

“Constance told us about your theory,” Stonequest said.

“Theory?” she sputtered.

“There’s no evidence of that except for your word, Lady Steel,” he said and didn’t sound all that happy about it.

“I can attest to everything the Steel Dragon said,” Constance said.

“I know you can and I believe you,” Stonequest said. “But under dragon law, a dragon accusing another dragon of murder needs evidence to back up that claim. Testimony from anyone but a dragon does not count.”

“Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous.” Kristen would have said more but her head was swimming. Why was everyone so upset? What was she missing? She felt like her brain attempted to make sense of everything but was still missing a piece.

“It’s something I wish the peace talks could have changed.”

“Could have?” she asked, her head still spinning.

“They fell apart,” Larry explained. “When the bubble broke and everyone was free, they all went home, even the pixies.

“Shimmerclaw’s body—”

“Is gone,” Stonequest said. “Constance showed me where she fell but most of that room is gone. It's like it was simply…erased, I guess.”

“She left a message!” Kristen protested.

“Also gone,” he told her.

“Fine, okay, but what about Boneclaw? Did you catch him?”

“No, we didn’t,” Larry said. “But we’ll have to hunt for him another day. Right now—”

“What?” she demanded. “All of you are acting like someone died. I know Shimmerclaw was powerful but she wasn’t close, not like Lumos…” Her mouth went dry. “Where is Lumos?”

In response, Constance approached and sat beside her. She looked at her and although the line of her mouth was as firm as ever and the strength in her posture was not at all diminished, she could see that the tough lady was in pain.

“I had always thought you were special because you were raised by people,” the woman said as if that explained anything. “But in his final moments, Lumos used his powers to save me—a mage who has done more to hurt dragons than any in hundreds of years.”

“Oh, God, no,” Kristen said and tears welled in her eyes as she understood why Amy was weeping.

“I’m afraid so,” Constance said heavily. “And I do not know if I can bear his sacrifice. I spent my decades thinking of dragons as nothing but enemies. You had begun to change my mind but still, my heart had not fully taken in what it meant that dragons could see us as we see ourselves. With Lumos’s sacrifice, I can finally see how blind I was.”

A thousand questions poured through her head but the only that reached her lips was, “Where is he?”

Constance’s head jerked toward the base.

“Oh, Jesus, he’s not still in there?” Her aura flashed with rage but she made no attempt to control it.

“We had to secure the perimeter,” Stonequest said. She noticed for the first time that there were mages everywhere, shining lights in a wide circle.

She ignored them as she scrambled past toward the rubble of her base.

His body glowed in the moonlight. He had always been so beautiful, a creature of golden light who was still somehow humble, kind, and friendly to people he could have stepped on if he had been anything but his true self.

From the rubble, a mangled wing, most of his tail, and one leg protruded.

“We can’t leave him like this!” Kristen shouted and turned to steel. It felt like a hammer had pounded against her skull when she activated the power. She grasped chunks of concrete and twisted rebar to haul them off the noble dragon who had died fighting for others.

But at least she didn’t have to work alone.

Stonequest joined her. Using his dragon form, he was even more efficient than she was. Larry helped too, using his powers to lift and remove rubble. Everyone else joined in and for a few minutes, all that could be heard was the labored breathing of men and women hard at work, the dull thuds of concrete being dropped on more concrete, and the flat clang of rebar.

When his head was finally uncovered, Kristen stopped.

She moved closer, closed his beautiful lifeless eyes, and stroked his long mustache as if he were only sleeping.

“You were a better teacher than I could have hoped for,” she said finally. “Not about fighting, though. The Masked One totally kicked my ass.”

Keith laughed but no one else did.

“You taught me to be kind. You taught me to care for the inexperienced and the less fortunate. You taught me there are more important things than gold. I don’t know what dragons think about the afterlife, but whatever happens, you deserve a good, long rest, Lord Lumos.”

She stroked his mustache a while longer until finally, it felt like something left the dragon. His scales didn’t fade and his body didn’t sag, but it still felt as if he had finally let go.

Kristen went to check on Amy while everyone else said their goodbyes. This was becoming a ritual that was far too common. And there was still Jim’s funeral to plan. Oh, dear God, why had she not simply gone into accounting like her mom had wanted?

But she knew why.

She was a cop because she wanted to fight for those who could not fight for themselves.

In the same way, she worked as a dragon because she wanted to share the privilege so many enjoyed.

There were bad cops and bad dragons, but the good ones—the best of them—were real heroes.

But they would never get to be that, not as long as the Masked One went free.

“What will we do now?” Amy asked. “The peace talks fell apart. The Masked One is gone. Maybe we should hide in Nova Scotia with the dwarves.”

“We could never hide from him,” Kristen said and turned to her team. “Hiding is his way. Secrecy is his strength. Now, we know who the Masked One is. A wimpy old dragon named Lord Boneclaw did this today. He took Lumos from us. He’s the one we have to stop if we ever want this world to be a more just place. We won’t have peace until the Masked One is gone.”

She looked at the night sky. Yes, it was filled with darkness, but it was also filled with thousands of twinkling lights, plus the glow of all the mages working together to illuminate it. Some people might have seen an overwhelming blanket of blackness, but she knew that Lumos would have seen something different.

He would have seen the light.

The golden dragon would have seen every pinpoint as a source of hope and every magic orb as a person who was willing to forsake their comfort and their wealth so they could make the world a better place for others.

Some would have no choice but to see the dark. But some—the privileged few and people like Kristen—could choose to see either the good or the bad. And they could choose which side to fight for.

“Lumos, I promise you he won’t go free,” she said to the sky above. “I promise that we will stop the dragon who took you from us. We won’t rest until we do. We’ll turn over every stone and shine the light in every shadow until he is finally stopped. Then, Lumos, you can finally rest in peace.”

THE STORY CONTINUES

The story continues with book fifteen, Of Scale and Teeth, 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

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