THE MASKED ONE

STEEL DRAGON™ BOOK ELEVEN

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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LMBPN Publishing

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Version 1.00, March 2022

Previously Published as part of the megabook Steel Dragon 4

eBook ISBN: 979-8-88541-352-7

Print ISBN: 979-8-88541-353-4

THE MASKED ONE TEAM

Thanks to the JIT Readers

Dave Hicks

Deb Mader

Diane L. Smith

Dorothy Lloyd

Jackey Hankard-Brodie

James Caplan

Jeff Eaton

Jeff Goode

Kathleen Fettig

Kelly O’Donnell

Kerry Mortimer

Paul Westman

Peter Manis

Veronica Stephan-Miller

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

Editor

The Skyhunter Editing Team

CHAPTER ONE

The opera soprano wasn’t bad, but she was exceptionally dull—boring enough that Lord Boneclaw couldn’t even find pleasure in watching her beg for her life.

“Please…please, I didn’t sing any wrong notes and my voice didn’t crack. Please,” she pleaded.

He sighed. Her response was so predictable. “It wasn’t that you sang poorly, merely that it was boring.”

“Please, I can do better—please!”

The dragon, in his human form, grimaced. It was pathetic to watch humans grovel for their lives like this. For all intents and purposes, she was already dead. Couldn’t she see that? There was no point in prolonging it, he thought before he ripped the woman’s skin from her face.

She screamed as she bled from the massive wound, a vibrant high note full of pain and the terror of losing her life.

“There! Why couldn’t you sing like that?” he asked rhetorically.

The soprano didn’t answer, of course. She had either died or passed out from the pain and crumpled into his arms. He removed her head from her body with one of his claws and skinned her skull deftly, separated the part that held her brain, and donned the front as a mask.

“Ah…” He sighed and relished the sense that he was once again like his true self, The Masked One. Truly, it wasn’t the soprano’s fault she had bored him. It was the cursed Steel Dragon who robbed him of his pleasure.

Once he’d left the opera house, he headed through the streets of Paris toward one of his many penthouses. All around him, the city of lights glowed and turned the night into an effervescent dreamscape. The Eiffel tower gleamed in the distance, a reminder of what humans could accomplish with time and a little steel.

Steel.

It seemed that everywhere he looked, he found reminders of the damn Steel Dragon.

He continued to his penthouse, a little petulant as he traversed the gleaming streets. He considered himself an American. America—and the United States in particular—did a wonderful job of shirking tradition. It was something the Masked One agreed with. In Paris, it seemed the continent of Europe couldn’t do anything with their weighty past besides glam it up somewhat.

The mages there, at his instigation, had tried to eliminate the Steel Dragon and thus bring about their little revolution that much sooner, but they’d failed. Their lack of success had been because they hadn’t been able to improvise the way she had.

Although there had been one member of the last battle he had not anticipated. He entered his penthouse and gestured for one of his servants to turn the television on.

As expected, footage of the other dragon no one had heard of until now—the iron one—was cued to play. He studied her and had to concede that despite all the centuries of tradition, it seemed some of the European mages could innovate.

“Where did they find her?” he mused. His servant had been with him long enough to know better than to answer.

The Masked One sank into his Italian leather sofa and re-watched the battle between The Steel Dragon and this new iron one, captured on the security footage from the Uffizi museum.

He had become quite familiar with Kristen’s battle prowess and had watched her battle with the dragons while in dwarf-controlled Canada, although everyone had seen that. This had been as enlightening as the footage of her in combat with one of the technomages to save most of the Dragon Council high above the streets of Detroit. He’d been there when she’d stopped Constance and her technomages from blowing up the meeting venue of their Full Council Meeting.

These were the significant conflicts she’d been involved in but he had seen other battles as well, fights that hadn’t been televised or recorded. He had only been able to see these because of his talents. No other dragon but him had seen the Steel Dragon defeat Shadowstorm in the bowels beneath the incinerator and the fuel tunnels of Detroit. He’d seen her face Shadowstorm’s mother Obscura in the infantile maze she’d wasted time constructing.

In all those fights, Kristen had demonstrated an ability to control her human form that most dragons simply didn’t possess. Yes, she was formidable in her dragon body, but the true threat of the Steel Dragon was that she didn’t simply assume that one body was stronger than the other. She could—and did—use her human form to escape situations, minimize damage, and even deliver devastating blows against her opponents.

The Masked One had never seen anything like it until now.

While the Iron Dragon was every inch the steel one’s equal in physical prowess, it was her combat abilities that made her excel.

He watched her—what was the human phrase for it? Ah, that’s right…he watched the Iron Dragon pick Lady Steel apart. It was amazing to see this warrior battle her opponent and brutalize her so effectively. She used her iron body efficiently and showed an adeptness in martial arts so refined that even he—someone who had never bothered to learn the various forms of combat in his human body—could tell that she was a master of combat.

Intrigued by her, he had already sent operatives to ferret out the new hiding place of the European technomage cell the Steel Dragon and her mongrel horde of dragons, humans, and mages had disabled. He was rather annoyed that Havington hadn’t told him about the Iron Dragon, but it was also easy enough to see that she hadn’t been his to begin with.

In truth, despite the obvious strategic value of the Iron Dragon, she simply didn’t hold the Masked One’s interest like the Steel Dragon did. There was something about Kristen, something indelible to his ancient mind. Maybe it was that she was raised by humans, perhaps it was that she was a law enforcer, or maybe it was her stubborn refusal to accept the world for how it was. Whatever it was, it drew him in a way that nothing else could. Not even the opera captivated him like it once did.

He knew, logically, it would make more sense to target the Iron Dragon. If he could convince her that he was like her—a dragon determined to destroy the dragon-controlled global culture—he might be able to make an ally out of her.

Of course, he also knew that simply would not happen. He wouldn’t expend any of his personal energy to hunt the Iron Dragon. Yes, if his operatives brought her to him or gave him a location that proved to be convenient enough, he might follow up, but she didn’t hold his interest.

The Steel Dragon did.

Part of him knew that despite the sway she held over his mind, he should eliminate her once and for all. She was an undeniable impediment, a thorn in the plans he had been laying for decades and might prove to become infected if he left it to fester.

And yet, her unraveling his plans—even the clumsy, boorish way she often went about it—provided the Masked One with something he desperately needed after living for thousands of years—entertainment.

To a dragon like him, there was only one constant threat and one existential drain on his mind that was constant and ever-present—boredom. For the first time in decades, he had found a cure to that in the Steel Dragon.

He finished watching the recording of the battle, his mind made up. Kristen would live for a while longer, but his time of watching from a distance was coming to an end. He wanted to be closer to the action and in the shadow she cast with her infernal light.

Better still, he wanted to watch her dance on a web while he pulled the strings. He’d snare her, of this he was certain, but how long would it take? How far could she be pushed? Questions swirled through his mind. If his servants could see past the skull mask he always wore, they would see a vast diversity of expressions on his face—delight, concern, worry, and intrigue all vied for dominance. Yes, he would enjoy these next few days and when he was done, he’d decide what to do with the Steel Dragon. If there was anything left to decide about, of course. Because, like the spider who sat at the center of its web, the delight of trapping one’s prey wasn’t truly over until they were dead, beaten, and being digested by their betters.

That would come, though. Oh yes, it would happen, and the Masked One would bring it about.

It was time to set in motion events that would create an opening for him. He would investigate the Steel Dragon's power up close, perhaps even with his own hands.

Yes, that had a certain justice to it. He had a brief but satisfying image of bone claws choking the life from a silver neck…yes, he could enjoy that.

He gestured to his servant, who brought him a phone. As the man turned, he caught his wrist and drew him close to the skull mask he wore. His retainer had good bone structure. Maybe he would honor the servant by wearing his skull when he went to face the Steel Dragon.

When he released the man, he noted how quickly he spun and hurried away. The Masked One only smiled—not that the servant could see past the skull he wore on his face—before he picked up the phone and made a few calls.

It was time to set his web a-twitching.

The time had come to watch the Steel Dragon dance.

CHAPTER TWO

Kristen Hall wondered if most people felt the same sense of palpable relief upon returning to Detroit after spending a week in Italy. She reasoned that if they didn’t, they were fools.

Although she and the rest of her team had only been home one night, she was already in love with the Motor City again. Her brother Brian still tried to determine exactly how deep her pockets were. She was well past millionaire and into the multi-category, but he thought that based on the real estate holdings Windlock had given her, she might even make it into the low billions. That made her more than comfortable enough to take her team out to a hip-hop show and let them enjoy her open tab, followed by Detroit-style pizza after the show at Buddy’s. She hadn’t even let them pay for the beer.

Which probably explained why every human in her employ currently held their heads and threw back cups of coffee.

“You poor humans and your hangunders,” Emerald said and shook his head sadly at Butters.

“They’re called hangovers, you big green dragon, and I hardly see how it's fair to complain about me having one when you were the one who continually brought whiskey from the bar at that concert,” the sniper protested.

They were on the bottom floor of the largest of three warehouses she had purchased for her base of operations in Detroit. Despite Timeflash setting up the top level with office spaces, meeting rooms, and everything else an operation like the Steel Dragon’s would need to run efficiently, everyone preferred to spend their time on the cavernous first level of the warehouse with its thirty-foot ceilings and windows high on every wall.

Not that she blamed them. Although they’d only been gone a week, Timeflash had made a ton of progress toward making the base seem more than a recycled auto parts factory. True, she’d spent considerable time and money on the second floor of the warehouse and filled it with necessary office essentials, but the first floor had been transformed as well.

The concrete floor was now stained a rich brown. The walls had been repaired and painted in reds and oranges—traditional dragon colors—although Kristen didn’t fail to notice that much of the electrical and plumbing had been left bare and chromed. The bright silvery flashes throughout the area drew a smile from her. She was the Steel Dragon, after all. It wasn’t too much to have a few touches here and there to remind visitors of such things.

Butters finished his cup of coffee and promptly proceeded to make another pot. He had converted a corner of the space into a kitchenette. The other former members of human SWAT crowded around him and watched the steaming black liquid drip into the coffee pot.

“You know I was waiting for coffee before all of you, right?” Emerald told the assembled crew.

“I heard you joking about not having a hangover. That’s because you dragons can metabolize more quickly, right?” Hernandez asked. Kristen was impressed that no profanity had been included in that question.

“True, although we’re not immune. We merely have a greater advantage.”

“What about C4? If you steal my coffee and I jam a handful of C4 down your throat, can you burn that off too?” The woman smiled sweetly to accompany the threat.

It proved how far human and dragon relations had come that Emerald didn’t transform into a dragon right then and there. Instead, he simply laughed. “You can go first if it's that important to you. Butters’ coffee doesn’t taste much better than C4 anyway.”

“I think he’s asking for you to feed him the C4,” the sniper grumbled and earned another chuckle from his dragon teammate.

“Hey! Look who it is, the Steel Dragon herself!” Keith called from near the coffee station.

The assembled humans plus Emerald uttered a ragged cheer.

“Why are we celebrating?” Kristen asked.

“Forgive me if I missed part of the conversation, but didn’t we break up a European cell of technomages?” Stonequest asked as he transformed from his dragon body to his human one and walked across the warehouse to the assembled coffee-drinkers.

“We might have pushed them underground and possibly derailed their plans for a while, but I don’t think we broke them up. There’s no indication where they might have gone or what other resources they could have to assist them to regroup. We failed to capture their leader, the Iron Dragon Katrina, or the captive dragon they presumably had,” she pointed out.

No matter how her team tried to spin it, she couldn’t see their last operation as anything more than a temporary stalemate. Yes, they’d driven the group out of Europe—presumably, as there had been no more attacks—but they hadn’t taken any of the most important pieces off the board.

“You still did a good thing out there,” Lumos said. Only he and Timeflash had stayed behind during the team’s trip to Florence, Italy.

“I appreciate that, Lumos, but I’d feel much better if we had another of my siblings to take care of,” she replied.

The old dragon nodded. He had been caring for Stella, whom they’d found imprisoned in a mage cell, her body continually harvested over decades by the technomages so they could make weapons to start the war that would initiate their new world order. “We won’t stop until we free them all,” he said, his voice like stone. “That’s what I tell Stella every day, and I only feel confident enough to say it because I know you won’t stop until it’s true.”

He spoke with such conviction that Emerald and Stonequest, as well as Keith, Butters, Hernandez, Beanpole, and Drew all saluted her. Kristen shook her head at them and fought back a smile. Good gracious, it was hard to be down on yourself for failing as royally as she had when you had friends like these.

“Did the Steel Dragon fart or something? Why are you all saluting?” Heartsbane asked after she swooped in through the hangar door on one side of the warehouse and landed gracefully. “Ooh! Coffee. Yummy.”

“Lives will be lost if you jump the line,” Hernandez shouted at the dragon as she transformed into the woman with tightly braided blonde hair that she was in human form.

“Yeah, yours,” the dragon retorted but she didn’t jostle for a cup of coffee like the others did. “But seriously, why was everyone saluting? Did Lady Hall come up with a plan to beat the Iron Dragon or something?”

Kristen scowled. “I wish. I don’t even know who she is, let alone why she’s working with the mages.”

“And you’re sure she was working with the mages? It’s not unheard of for one dragon to attack another. Yes, she helped the technomages, but maybe that was incidental. Are you certain she’s not someone with a grudge to settle against you?” Stonequest asked, even though they’d been over this again and again on the flight from Europe.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to answer for the hundred and first time because Heartsbane fielded it. “You’re damn straight we know she was working with the mages. Kristen and I almost grounded her outside the Uffizi before the mage she was rescuing opened a damn teleportation gateway and got her out of there. If that’s not collaboration, I don’t know what is.”

He nodded. “You’re right, of course, although it’s hard to comprehend. She held all three of us off in their base. She’s one hell of a fighter. Too bad we can’t locate her.”

“Something tells me we won’t need to. I don’t think she was Havington’s to boss around. I think she came from another cell. My hunch is that as soon as we start knocking the other technomage cells around, she’ll show up,” Kristen said.

“Lucky us,” Drew said mirthlessly. He had been hit hard by Katrina.

A moment of silence swallowed the previously happy moment. No one sipped their coffee. A blue jay screeched somewhere in the parking lot. Apparently, in the week they’d been away, Timeflash had some of the asphalt demolished and had planted a number of saplings. It wasn’t like Kristen couldn’t afford it.

Finally, her brother dared to break the silence that previously only a blue jay had been brave enough to intrude on.

“The mission to Florence wasn’t a total bust, though,” he said as he sauntered closer from his corner of the warehouse.

“Is that right?” she asked him and noticed that he wore slacks and a jacket over a shirt with actual buttons. No tie, but they were all cops and no one wore ties.

“As a matter of fact, it is.” He beamed, obviously proud of himself.

“Show me,” Kristen ordered with a grin that dared him to argue with his sister for the ten-thousandth time.

Brian only winked and said, “Right this way, Investigator.”

Butters shoved a cup of coffee into her hands and she smiled her thanks and hurried after her brother. As she walked across the stained concrete floor of the warehouse, she once again admired the work Timeflash had orchestrated while the team was away.

They reached Brian’s intelligence corner. Again, despite Timeflash providing generous office space on the top floor, he had chosen to house a large part of his intelligence operation on the main floor. Three huge monitors and a projector display took up a corner of the room. In front of them stood a table with a few smaller monitors and keyboards for workstations.

She noticed there weren’t any fast food wrappers or remains of uneaten freezer meals. The only item that marked the area as anything other than professional was a small framed photograph of the two siblings and their parents at a Detroit Tigers baseball game. Once, she might have remarked on how the photo could be used to link her and their family if the base were broken into but given that her family had already been attacked multiple times by dragons and technomages, there didn’t seem much point.

Larry Brockton sat at one of the workstations in front of the monitors. He nodded at Kristen as she approached. “Investigator.”

“What do we have?” she asked.

The keyboard in front of the mage began to type despite his arms being folded and one hand stroking his chin. She smiled at the subtle show of magic. Before, when she had met Windlock, the mage had worn a power-dampening cuff and didn’t use magic as much as he did now. Although he still wore the broken cuff that Windlock had given him before his old boss died, now modified as a necklace and with no magic to hinder him, Larry seemed pleased with the freedom.

“We already found plans for further attacks on dragons in Europe,” he said. “We had to uh…de-encrypt the erm…cache of bytes because those are always the first to um…” He frowned through a long pause as he searched his memory. “Malfunction.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked and looked from him to her brother.

“Larry helped…some. Although he’s still learning the ropes around computers,” Brian confessed. “Keith helped more, though.”

“Score one for the Rookie!” the man shouted out from across the warehouse.

“I thought you hated to be called that,” Hernandez snapped at him.

Keith shrugged his most rookie-ish shrug.

“I identified the streets,” Larry said as if that explained anything.

Brian nodded approvingly at the mage. He had grown up so much, she thought with a rush of emotion. His co-worker had served up a fantastic opportunity for shit-talking and he had simply left it on the platter.

“Larry did identify the streets, what with him and his rich-ass benefactor jet-setting all over the world on the dime of the Dragon Council.” Brian grinned.

Kristen couldn’t help but chuckle at the dig, even if Larry’s benefactor had left her everything when he died and she had since used his private jet to do a little jet-setting of her own. “Streets for what?” she asked.

“At first, we didn’t know,” he replied and obviously relished his new role as their master of intel. “I thought bases, maybe. The thing is, there weren’t numbers or much else to go on, so we were kind of guessing—looking for a pattern.”

“But they weren’t on any farms,” the mage interjected, eager to explain how he had contributed. “I recognized some of the streets as sites of famous dragon landmarks. Windlock’s hobbies included visiting historical dragon sites—yawn—but that’s what some of these places were.”

“Once we knew what to look for—places important to the dragons—we found a pattern. We think it’s a list of all the possible targets the European dragons wanted to hit. There are a few private dragon residences but it’s mostly public places. We think they will try to target events and assassinate multiple dragons like Constance did.”

“You mean you thought they were target events,” Kristen corrected. “We dealt that cell a fair amount of damage. Do you really think they’re ready to strike again?”

Brian and Larry shared a look that said, “Yes, yes, we do think the fucking crazy-ass technomages might attack again.” They didn’t need to voice it. Instead, her brother cleared his throat and tried to steady his voice.

“Although we believe those plans might be foiled or at least on hold now that the cell is disrupted, we still advise forwarding the intel to the Dragon Council of Europe in the hopes that it will help them prevent further deaths. The targets are all well-considered, and if the Dragon Council hasn’t thought about keeping a better watch on things over there, maybe this will serve as a reminder for them. I’ve put it all together in a briefing I can send as soon as you green-light it, Investigator.”

Kristen smiled at him. She was so proud of him. At first, she had thought it a terrible idea to bring him on board. While she had been worried about him getting hurt, slowing her down, or any number of things, he’d proven to be extremely useful.

“Send the report, Brian.”

“Zed’s my name when we’re on duty, Investigator,” he said.

Kristen rolled her eyes. At least Brian was still Brian deep down. “Right, Zed. Send it— unless you need me to make you a letterman jacket to show you’re part of the team first.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he responded. “That would be cool but it’s not necessary, ma’am. Wait—do you guys have jackets? Because if you do, I totally want one but not until I lose enough weight to fit into an XL.”

She knew her brother keeping it professional for more than a minute was too much to ask for, but she made a note to try to get something to make the team look more cohesive. Patches, maybe? She wasn’t sure and made a note to have Timeflash look into it.

“What else do we have?” Kristen asked and scanned the room to see if anyone on her team had more leads for her. It was amazing to lead a force of people as large as this group. She had always been a follower—a cop and someone who understood the value of orders—but she didn’t mind her leadership role at all. The trick was to make sure you trusted your people. If you did, anything was possible.

“The cell in Texas fell off the map,” Keith said. “I think that’s good because it means they’re not killing people, but it’s also a pain in the ass because now, we don’t know how to find them.” He sipped his coffee.

“About that,” Stonequest interjected. “I think we might need to bring more people in.”

“Just when I was finally coming to trust my whole team,” she muttered in a tone low enough to not be audible to the others. Stonequest didn’t hear her, but he felt her aura with his dragon abilities and gave her a small smile. He, more than anyone else in the room, knew what it was like to be in leadership and had extended his trust to her long before she’d done anything to earn it. It didn’t surprise her that he now expected her to do the same with a fresh crop of recruits.

“It has to be people we trust, of course,” Stonequest continued, “which might be a hard thing to vet given that we have humans, mages, and dragons and probably should have more of all three. But there is an advantage to having more numbers that can't be discounted.”

Kristen nodded and rubbed her face at the prospect of even more people to command, but he had the right of it. When they’d gone to Florence, they’d left the base almost abandoned. Only two dragons had stayed behind, no one from Detroit SWAT, and no mages. That wasn’t optimal, especially if they were successful in their missions and made themselves a larger target for the technomage cells.

“Stonequest, what if you look for volunteers among the dragons on this continent? I know it’s considerable ground to cover, but I don’t want you to take too many from Dragon SWAT and I don’t want a language or cultural barrier. It’s hard enough getting dragons to work with humans and mages. If we get someone hell-bent on shitting on America, I don’t think I could stomach it.”

“I think I know a few.” He nodded, his response not surprising given that he had raised the idea of them bringing more people into the operation. “But I can’t exactly call them and expect them to come to Detroit. It’s been some time since I’ve had contact with them.”

“If you need to make house calls, make them,” she said. “If they play hardball, move on. We can send you on another attempt if we need to.”

“Yes, ma’am, although I think we’ll need more than only dragons—”

“I know. Jim! Is Jim here? Has anyone seen him?” Kristen asked her crew.

“I’m upstairs in the actual offices,” Jim said, emerged from one of them, and hurried down the open staircase to join them. Despite the warehouse-turned-base having only two stories, the second was much higher than the first at more or less the same level as an apartment building’s fourth floor.

“I hope your legs are rested,” she quipped, “because I want you to make the rounds and maybe find some old military buddies to help. I know you guys saw action with dragons and that some of you took it harder than others, but that’s the kind of experience we might damn well need.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Wonderkid said. You’d never guess by his chipper tone and professional demeanor that when he’d first met her, he’d been involved with people trying to kill her.

“If anyone gives you anti-dragon attitude, let them know that won’t work, but if you think they can be converted…well…” She looked at her hodge-podge group of dragons, mages, and regular humans. “I think this might be the place to do it.”

“I can go to Detroit PD and get people,” Drew volunteered. “Hansen has always worked well with dragons and now that one of her former cops is a dragon Investigator, I’m sure she wouldn’t say no.”

“I thought of that but I don’t like it,” she said. “Hansen would give us people and I’m sure we could trust them, but I don’t want to weaken the police force of this city. I already took Detroit’s best SWAT team away. I don’t want to poach the talent from the rest of its teams. Us being here will turn this city into more of a target than it was before. We need to know that the local police will be able to handle themselves.”

“Right,” he said and remained professional despite having his idea shot down.

“What about the rest of us?” Heartsbane asked. “Something tells me you’re not the let-them-come-to-us kind of boss.”

“You’re right about that. I think we head to Texas. They’re our most solid lead and the biggest threat to us right now. I’ll take a team down there—Emerald, Hernandez, Keith, and Butters.”

“I can’t go without Beanpole,” the sniper protested.

“Fine, fine. Beanpole comes too, but then we’ll need another dragon, so I guess Lumos can—”

The phone rang but she continued to detail the orders. She broke off, however, when Timeflash answered it and her face dropped.

“What is it?” Kristen asked.

“There’s been another attack.”

CHAPTER THREE

Timeflash took the call in the middle of the room, while everyone crowded around and tried and failed to hear both sides of the conversation. As she spoke, she took notes on a tablet that was linked to Brian’s station. While they’d been out of town, the dragon had apparently taken time to do the admin shit that no agency could exist without, like setting up a phone line.

“What’s up?” Kristen demanded when the woman hung up.

The dragon gestured to her scribbled notes on the screen. “I put it there so you can all see.”

“Erin, I think that’s Latin,” she said patiently. Sometimes, it could be odd working with beings who were centuries old.

“Oh, right. Everyone and their English.” Timeflash shook her head. “There’s been an attack at a manor outside Bogota, Columbia.”

“What happened?”

“A dragon ball was bombed. They’re not sure who did it but three dragons are dead and another four injured. They’ve taken shrapnel out of the wounds and it’s made from dragon pieces, so the attack matches our technomages.”

“You’re damn straight it does.” Heartsbane growled.

“Official paperwork just came in,” Brian said. He typed faster on his keyboard and manipulated his computer with greater alacrity than Larry had been able to even with his telekinesis. A whirring noise issued from under one of the tables.

He leaned over, kicked something, cursed, and kicked it again. “Damn printers,” he said finally as he straightened and put the official request for assistance in her hands.

She read it quickly. It was as Timeflash had said and it looked urgent.

“All right, we need a new plan,” she told them.

“All hands on deck?” Jim asked and looked eager for more action.

“No, I don’t think that’s smart,” she countered and took the wind from his sails. “Now, we have two targets. This demonstrates that we absolutely need more people. I still want you and Stonequest to follow up on any leads you have.”

Kristen appraised the room. “Drew, Larry, and Lumos, I want you three in Texas. I want you to scout only. Do I make myself clear?”

The old dragon nodded eagerly, Larry grinned, and Drew looked disappointed.

She ignored the look the team leader darted at her. “We have no idea what’s down there, and I don’t want you in trouble without more of the team to back you up. Once you find something—and I am confident that you three will—contact us and we’ll send in reinforcements. I’m sending you three because you are wise and experienced.” She couldn’t help but laugh, even if it was true. “And I don’t want anyone shooting from the hip, am I clear?”

“As vodka,” Larry said.

“Everyone else is with me. Timeflash, do you mind staying behind with Brian? You seem to have a vision for this base and…well, I want to see it finished.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the woman answered.

“What? Why do I have to stay? I did great in Florence if I may say so myself!” her brother whined.

“Because we’ll have two active teams and you need to be here to support both. I won’t jeopardize either group by sending them in without Zed’s intel.”

He nodded and blushed at the compliment.

“If there’s nothing else—”

Kristen’s cell phone rang.

She retrieved it out of reflex and was surprised to see the three-digit area code that indicated it was a dragon calling her. It seemed to her that kind of call should go to the building itself, not her cell. But even she hadn’t known they had a building phone, so maybe it was too much to ask that every dragon on earth knew about it already.

She answered briskly.

“Lady Hall, this is Remus, one of the chief mages of the Dragon Council of North America. We’re awaiting your report on your activities in Europe.”

“Sure. Romulus, was it? I sent the report.”

“Very funny, and if you sent it, we didn’t get it.”

“I’m sure we sent it—”

“Look, the Dragon Council doesn’t exactly go in for the latest plugins, all right? It’s possible they lost the report. There’s no need to make a big deal about it. They’ll straighten out whatever happened as soon as you report.”

“Okay, well, we just received news of activity in Colombia. We were about to head out.” She didn’t mean to be rude but she had sent the report.

“Lady Hall, I am only the messenger and the Dragon Council wants to see you now, not at your earliest convenience. I was to deliver this message and the coordinates, that is all. I hope to see you in Kentucky.”

“Kentucky?” Kristen asked, but the line had already gone dead. On the screen of her phone was a message with GPS coordinates that were, indeed, for somewhere in Kentucky.

Fuming, she glowered at the message. How like the Dragon Council to continue to pull at her strings and expect her to jump. She was about to give in to her internal prompting to fuck it when Lumos stepped up.

“Pardon me for being impertinent but I overheard your call,” Lumos said.

“Damn dragon hearing,” she muttered.

“I heard that too.” He chuckled. “I’m sure you don’t want to go—”

“You’re damn straight I don’t want to go. Hell, how do I even know it was really from the Dragon Council? It was a random phone call with a dragon area code. That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Was it Remus who called?” he asked.

“That’s what he said,” she confirmed.

“Then you ought to go,” Lumos told her. “I know he’s a sniveling little punk but they do expect him to handle anything that involves technology more modern than electricity.”

“If they’re so damn antiquated, you’d think they’d have better manners,” she retorted.

“That”—the old dragon winked—“is an excellent point but it doesn’t change my opinion of what you should do.”

Kristen sighed. “I thought being an investigator would mean I could make all the decisions.”

Lumos smiled warmly. “I’m afraid not. Being the leader merely means you have to say no to your team while saying yes to everyone else.”

She nodded at the nugget of the wisdom, bitter though it was. “What do you advise?” she asked but she could already see where this would go.

“Take the meeting, enjoy the flight to Kentucky, and let us handle this. If you anger the council, they might decide to start their war anyway and not give us more time to resolve the situation. I know it’s not the most glamorous option, but if you show them that you’re still working with them, it will go a long way. Don’t forget, it's been less than a month since Windlock made you an investigator.”

Less than a month since Windlock died, she thought.

“The Dragon Council no doubt saw the headlines and the er…photographs. Now, they want your story. Oh, and probably to bill you for some of the damages.”

“What? We were there protecting people.”

He shrugged. “People’s homes were destroyed and you can afford to fix them. If you want peace between our kinds, you’d better be willing to pay.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Kristen nodded reluctantly and gestured for her team to assemble. “All right, it looks like we’ll have to change the marching orders. Amy, I want you with Drew and Lumos on the Texas investigation. Drew has final say down there. Amy, stay defensive and stay sharp. There’s a good chance your ability to sense mages is what will give us our lead. Larry.”

Larry hung his head like a dog that had torn through the trash. “I know, I know. I’ll hold down the fort here while the rest of you head off to beautiful Bogota.”

“No, Larry, I’m placing you in charge of the team going after the active cell. Emerald will be your second, then Butters.”

“I’m sorry, but did I hear that right? You put me in charge?” He looked both extraordinarily proud and completely mortified. “Like, as in I’ll boss everyone around? You know I talk too much, right?” He turned to Keith, who stood next to him. “She knows I talk too much, doesn’t she? Are you sure—I mean, I’m honored, but, well…really?”

“I second his extreme doubt at this decision,” Hernandez said.

“Are you sure you don’t want a dragon on point?” Emerald all but hissed. He had made considerable progress but he still had anti-human prejudices behind those green eyes and dark skin.

“I’m sure,” Kristen said matter of factly. “Larry has a cool head. He spent ages working with Windlock so he knows how to investigate. Besides, with his magic unlocked, he can probably keep you dragons in line better than anyone else until I get there.”

“Windlock must be rolling in his grave right now.” Heartsbane ground the words out.

“Larry has my confidence, so I trust he’ll have yours, but don’t worry about it too much. I need to meet the Dragon Council, but at least they’re south of here, which is on the way to South America…kind of.”

“We planned to take the jet,” Larry said and stepped quite comfortably into his new role.

“That’s fine. I’ll fly to my meeting. It’ll be quicker than booking a flight anyway. When I’m done, Brian will have a ticket ready for me to meet you guys in Bogota.”

“I will?” her brother asked and didn’t quite take the hint. In the next moment, his eyes widened at his obvious gaff. “I will.”

“Then it's settled. Brian, tell our pilot they’re on their way. I’ll see you guys soon.”

“Are you sure about this…leadership?” Emerald asked again.

“No, not completely,” Kristen replied. “In fact, my gut tells me this Dragon Council meeting will be a waste of my fucking time and by the time I get to Colombia, you guys will already be in a world of hurt. But Lumos pointed out that I don’t exactly have a good track record with the Dragon Council. If any of you dragons advise that I skip this meeting, please say so because I would be more than happy to oblige. Better yet, maybe one of you could go in my place.”

“To speak to the Dragon Council?” He looked aghast.

“Precisely.”

Emerald shook his head, walked to Larry, and threw his arm around him. “If it's all the same to you, I’d rather take orders from the blabbermouth, boss.”

“That sounds good to me,” she said and dismissed her team.

If she felt lonely with all of them going on missions while she had to turn in her homework, she didn’t let it show.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kristen thought the flight to Kentucky might be a lonely one, but it wasn’t. It was a beautiful day—warm for fall and getting warmer as she pumped her wings and caught thermals that worked in her favor as she flew across the Midwest to Kentucky. The trees were already starting to turn below her. Most were green but here and there, vast swathes of forest were tinged with yellow or displayed hints of orange.

As she flew, she thought about the challenges they faced. At first, she tried to focus on the mission at hand—although mission was too strong a word. This felt like a glorified high school report, but she reminded herself that even senators and scientists made presentations. Maybe that was simply the way of the world. She had researched the location itself and found it odd that it wasn’t in any of the major cities. While she could understand why it wasn’t in Cincinnati or Louisville—dragons liked their privacy and could always fly into a major city for whatever entertainment they desired—that it didn’t seem to be in Bowling Green or even Elizabethtown seemed weird to her.

Then again, the last time the Dragon Council had met, it had been in a remote northern region of Canada. Maybe they had finally taken the threat of the technomages seriously. Hopefully, the meeting would be at another old hotel built before cities were the true destinations, places where people would stay before the marvels of technology drew everyone to the city lights like moths to flames.

But the task at hand could keep her occupied for only a limited duration. Before too long—somewhere over Indiana that seemed little more than cornfields—she began to think about all she’d been through.

Becoming a police officer, discovering she was a dragon, and then defeating Shadowstorm and later, his mother Obscura, all seemed like a distant memory. Those were simpler times when all she had wanted to do was fit in.

Even in those days, though, there had been hints of the conflict to come. The most notable had been the dragon assassin Death, who had been armed with dragon bullets. She was dead now, killed by her hand, but she still wondered about her from time to time. Had she been the one to pioneer the bullets made of dragon scales? Or had that particular revolution in murder come from Constance, the former leader of the cell she had first gone up against, time and time again.

Kristen wondered about Constance, even after facing another cell with another group of arguably even more powerful mages, not to mention the Iron Dragon—and her sister—Katrina. What had the Dragon Council decided to do with the technomage leader after she had captured her? Had she been executed? That would be the logical thing to do with her, given all the dragons she’d killed. But she had a hunch that if anyone could talk their way out of an execution, it would be Constance.

She could imagine her, bruised and bloodied and beyond exhausted from whatever the callous dragons might have done to her to try to obtain information but still with her head high and her back straight. Despite the fact that she was Kristen’s most dangerous foe, she was also the enemy she found she could relate to the most.

It was insane, honestly. The woman was a murderer, period, and yet her motivations were so close to hers. She wanted a better world, a world where everyone didn’t have to ask, “How far?” when a dragon said, “Run!” She had gone about it the wrong way, of course. But even when she’d fought her and her team, even when her actions had killed Windlock, there had been something more to her. An inner compassion, maybe.

Kristen hadn’t sensed any of that in Katrina. The Iron Dragon’s heart had seemed as hard as her skin. The technomages she worked with might have been conflicted but she did not seem to be at all.

She paused her thoughts for a moment and vowed to ask the Dragon Council about what had happened to Constance. She knew that—at the very least—Decimus Aurelius would answer her. After all, she’d saved the dragon’s life and he’d knelt before her in gratitude. She might not have risked the question in front of the Full Dragon Council but if it was only the seven from North America, she felt she could rely on him to shield her from any aggression the others felt.

Although there was one member of the North American Council that made her uneasy. She tried to tell herself not to judge the dragon because of the curious scars on his face or his name—Boneclaw—but there was something unsettling about him. It seemed to be in the way he looked at her and in how he’d fled from the threat of Constance’s bomb while the other dragons had stayed.

The Steel Dragon took a deep breath and refocused on her flying. It would still be better to say something to the North American Council rather than all the councils. Not that they would all meet again anytime soon. Hell, given the remoteness of where the North American Dragon Council had asked her to meet, it seemed likely that council meetings would be rare indeed until she stopped the technomages for good.

She pushed on and drew closer to the destination the GPS coordinates pointed her to. Not that she could manipulate a cellphone in her dragon form, but she had an earpiece and Brian to redirect her if she veered off course.

He gave her the ten-minute warning and things began to make sense. She now flew over a forest that was so thick and untouched that she knew it had to be a national park. Sure enough, she passed over a winding road with a billboard that said Explore Mammoth Cave.

That was obviously the meeting location. Caves had long held significance for dragons, and Mammoth Cave was the longest known cave system in the world. Kristen had been on enough road trips with her family to have visited it a few times. There were parts of it that were open for humans to go sight-seeing and spelunking, but there were huge areas of it that were cordoned off. As a kid, she had assumed it was as the tour guides had said—to protect the formation of rock structures—but after her time with dragons, she knew there was probably more to it.

It was more than likely that the sections that were off-limits to people were entirely available for dragons. As far as she knew, a dragon might even live there. For that matter, multiple dragons might call the cave system home on account of how large it was. Now that she was there, it made sense that it was the meeting place for the Dragon Council.

There were likely multiple entrances, she acknowledged. It was large enough to hide them, and—although it might have seemed strange at first—it being a tourist destination was probably an advantage. The technomages would no doubt look for isolated places coming online. Old hotels, long-abandoned buildings, or any building that came alive with electricity, Internet connections, and delivery vehicles would be obvious to anyone looking for them. If the other technomage cells were hunting dragons, they’d be on the lookout for isolated locations that suddenly became active.

Brian gave her final confirmation and she knew she was at the coordinates, only she didn’t see anything. Well, nothing like a Dragon Council Meeting. Other things were visible like camping grounds, parking lots, a few buildings to house the staff, and gift shops and the like. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people walked the trails, meandered about the grounds, and waited for their turn to enter the cave or for someone to come out.

They saw her too. At first, it was merely the regular ripple of activity from people who saw what might be a huge predator overhead. Even though dragons hadn’t hunted and eaten people for tens of thousands of years, how people first reacted to a dragon flying overhead was so deeply ingrained that it might have been called instinctual.

When her shadow passed over them, they glanced first at whoever was nearby as if to confirm there was a threat. After that, their reactions were different enough that she couldn’t generalize their behavior, but she saw some of the more typical responses in the park below her.

A group of young men walked faster and their shoulders flexed involuntarily—not that fighting would accomplish anything against a dragon. A woman called her children to her and either intentionally or instinctively took shelter under a tree. Many simply froze, craned their heads, and watched the dragon soar above them. They seemed to try to assess if it was a threat to run from or whether it was better to stay still and not draw her ire.

A little girl cut through all that, though, and proved that humans had indeed come a fair way since their time in prehistory when somehow, they’d managed to claw a civilization out of the world they shared with dragons.

“That’s Kristen Hall. The Steel Dragon. I saw her on TV,” the girl shrieked in delight and began to run down the path after her, despite it being impossible for a human, let alone a child, to catch up to a dragon who was already airborne.

Kristen debated briefly whether she should land. This seemed to be her destination but she didn’t see any dragons so she couldn’t be sure. Part of her didn’t want to land at all. She had already made enough of a scene to possibly give away the location of the council meeting, but she also reasoned that the Dragon Council had sent her there while the place was crawling with tourists. If they didn’t want her to be seen, they should have said something about the cover of darkness or sent her to coordinates that weren’t easily visible from the ranger station.

Not wanting to make the Council wait any longer and recognizing an opportunity for good public relations when she saw it, she landed near the welcome center.

It turned out that she had been wrong about the ground speed of a small yet motivated child. She had barely landed and was still in her dragon form when the girl emerged from the woods. “Oh, my God, she’s my hero,” she screamed at the top of her lungs as she sprinted toward her.

Despite all the practice Kristen had transforming to her human form as quickly as possible, she didn’t think she would be able to do it in the amount of time it would take for the little girl to reach her.

As a result, the child leapt onto the chest of a massive steel-scaled dragon.

“Oh, my God. I have all your comic books and I always told my mom I would meet you one day and she said you’d never come to Florida—that’s where we live, by the way, Florida—and I didn’t believe her but I guess she was right because now we’re in Kentucky and you’re here.” The sprinting plus the run-on sentence finally winded the girl and she took a breath and proved that the kid had typically human tendencies.

“Mom! Mom, can you take a picture? It’s okay, she has her clothes on this time,” she shouted at a woman who hurried across the field toward them using the undignified slow jog of a parent who didn’t want to run but knew they couldn’t saunter either.

Kristen was glad she was still a dragon because at least she couldn’t blush. Truly, had everyone seen the picture of her in Italy? She sighed. Probably. Naked dragons holding kittens weren’t exactly everyday occurrences.

While she waited for the mother to arrive to take the obligatory picture, she grilled the doting girl. “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Are you kidding me? I want to be a cop.” The girl said “cop” the way most kids would say Batman.

She couldn’t help but smile and show some of her dragon teeth. At least she had made a positive impression on someone.

“You’d better be careful or that dragon will eat you,” a skinny boy with dark kinky hair and thick glasses told the girl.

“Are you serious?” She made it sound like he had said ice was hot.

“She is a dragon,” he pointed out smugly.

“She is not a dragon. She is the dragon! This is Kristen Hall. She’s from Detroit and she’s a hero. She would never eat a kid like me—or you, even though you’re rude.”

“I am not!” He looked like he wanted to protest further but then thought of something more important. “Wait, we can climb on you and you won’t eat us?” he asked.

“I don’t know about all that,” Kristen mumbled. How funny, she thought. She had faced dragons and mages armed with bullets that could shred her flesh like paper, and two children seemed unstoppable.

It being funny didn’t make her any more capable of stopping the two tyrants from climbing all over her. The boy had scrambled up her tail in mid-mumble and now scaled her back.

“Whoa, cool!” shouted a child with a pale face between his freckles and a body type she could only think of as beefy. He ran to her as well and without asking for permission or anything else, climbed on.

She doubted the wisdom of dragons going to a national park. Kids saw her in Detroit all the time. They asked her questions, demanded autographs, and a dozen other things but they did not climb on her. It seemed that kids who spent their time running around national parks and climbing trees rather than playing in the urban jungle that was any modern American city had a different sense of both propriety and safety when it came to dangerous things.

Soon, they grew bored with this adventure—all except Maria of course, who was from Florida even though her parents were from Cuba. Although she’d been on Kristen for hardly a minute, the dragon already knew her favorite food was fried yucca, and even though her mommy made very delicious Cuban sandwiches, she wouldn’t eat them because she didn’t like meat. She thought it was okay if Kristen ate meat because she was a dragon and besides, it was fine if people liked different things.

While the other children climbed down and Maria prattled on, the adults descended for their turn with a celebrity.

Kristen didn’t think she’d ever heard the word “selfie” as many times as she did in the next five minutes. It made sense, though. People came to places like these to take pictures, but there were only so many trees and caves you could show people on social media before they grew bored. Meanwhile, an image of you near the Steel Dragon almost guaranteed that the likes would simply roll in. It was inevitable.

A park ranger approached and she had never been so thankful to see another member of law enforcement.

“Sorry about the crowd, sir. I was telling all these kind folks we should probably move on off the grass,” she said.

“Are you kidding?” the man responded. His big bushy beard did nothing to hide the grin on his face. “The grass will grow again. Do you mind if I get in there? I bet my buddies in Pig that this job would be exciting and those fatsos didn’t believe me.”

She couldn’t help but wonder at the size of the other men if this ranger—who was certainly not skinny—deemed them fatsos.

“I bet them assholes a meal at the Porky Pig Diner that working here would be better than moving to Louisville with a horde o’ damn liberals. It looks like I’ll eat pork sandwiches smothered in gravy for life after all this.”

Kristen smiled for a photo with the man—not that most people could read dragon facial expressions any better than they could read the facial expressions of crocodiles.

“Do you get many dragons around here, then?” she asked the ranger.

“Are you kidding me or something?” He grinned. “I haven’t seen a dragon ʼround here ever. Some of the old-timers say dragons live deep in there. They have gold and stuff and that if you can go into some of the unused parts and fetch a piece, they’ll buy you a beer, but no one ever done did that. It’s only a passage like all the others.”

“The caves are that deep?”

“Oh yeah. Longest caves in the world, but everyone knows that. There are whole sections humans have never explored. It’s too tight or too dangerous, or there’s formations or rocks we don’t want damaged. Damn liberals with their damn smartphones, always trying to take pictures with the rocks and getting their fingerprints all over them. Do you know how much damage the grease on your fingers can do to a crystal formation? It’s a damn shame. God put these things here for us to enjoy and the least folks could do is conserve them.”

She studied the man more closely. Conservation didn’t seem to be part of most conservatives’ agenda, but she began to see there might be more to him than he let on.

“Would you be able to give me a tour?”

“Well, hot damn, of course I can. The boys will never believe this. Name’s Miller, by the way. Joshua Miller. You can call me Ranger Jay.”

“Sure thing, Ranger Jay,” she said and transformed into her human body once Maria had reluctantly abandoned her dragon perch.

“And you are?” he asked.

“I am an investigator for the Dragon Council here on a covert operation—” She began to build some semblance of confidentiality before Maria interjected.

“She’s Kristen Hall, the Steel Dragon. She’s the most famous dragon there ever was.”

Ranger Jay looked more closely at her. She’d worn a designer suit to meet the Dragon Council—she could afford such things now, so why not?—plus heels because if she decided she didn’t want them, she could always go barefoot and turn the soles of her feet into solid steel to protect herself.

It was her red hair that caught his attention, though.

“I…uh…you didn’t happen to go to Italy, did ya? There’s some…uh, websites I follow that have pictures of someone who looks like you…” He somehow managed to keep his gaze on her face rather than lowering it to her chest.

Not that there was much to see. Even in a designer suit, her body didn’t look as good as it did when she wore nothing but a pair of kittens clutched in front of her breasts. It seemed the whole world had seen that damn photo.

“I can’t say I have,” Kristen said and gestured for Ranger Jay to take her on a tour of Mammoth Cave.

CHAPTER FIVE

Afew minutes later, they had blessedly moved away from the crowds. Ranger Jay paused every few minutes to snap pictures of him and Kristen—kind of odd given how much he’d railed on liberals for their cellphones, but she didn’t mind the guy. He was outgoing and shockingly knowledgeable about the cave system.

“See, these stalactites form from water dissolving rock—calcium bicarbonate, specifically—and when it touches the air, the carbon is precipitated out and leaves a tiny ring. Over time—and I’m talking considerable time, longer than dragon lifetimes even—it makes these wild formations.”

“And the colors?” she asked, although her real focus was on her attempt to find some sign of the Council. They had told her to come there, but where were they?

“Oh, that’s merely impurities. It’s all basically the same process, but once other minerals get in, it’ll make crystals of different kinds and—you’re not listening, are you?”

Honestly, she had tried but she wasn’t paying him any attention. She’d stopped walking, even though she finally knew she should indeed go deeper. After searching and searching, her dragon aura had finally identified another draconic presence. The Council really was paranoid. True, it made sense to use their auras to guide her as humans and mages couldn’t sense them, but it still seemed like a level of caution they had never previously imagined.

Their last meeting had involved feasting. Somehow, she didn’t think they would manage to get a catering team down there. Had they changed so much? She thought it was possible. Humans were certainly capable of a paradigm shift after years and years of living by the same codes. She only had to think of World War II as an example.

Her father had told her again and again how Detroit had completely retooled itself to help fuel the war effort. Maybe dragons were more similar to people than she had realized. Despite being capable of living for millennia, they had undergone shifts in their culture’s paradigm. She had hoped they would adjust their ways for something besides violence aimed at dragons, but she had already accepted that it was a dream from another era.

Kristen glanced at Ranger Jay. He’d stopped talking and looked back the way they came as if he’d remembered there was something very urgent he needed to attend to.

“Did you forget something, Ranger Jay?” she asked demurely. She knew he had not—or if he had, it wasn’t what made him look toward the entrance right now. He did so because she had used her aura to make him feel like he’d forgotten something important.

“Yeah, that is… We might have another wave of visitors. I…I think… Maybe I should get going? I mean…you are a dragon and there ain’t nothing down here can hurt you.”

“If you insist,” she said, proud of herself for finally being able to control her aura enough to make it do something besides what she outwardly felt. “Are you sure you’ve never seen dragons here or any evidence of them around Mammoth Cave?”

“I’m certain, ma’am. You’ll be the talk of the—well, not the town as this is a national park, but you’ll be the talk of it all the same. When you’re done having a look around, follow the path out. It’s lit and has guardrails so you can’t miss it.”

“Thanks, Ranger Jay.”

“Oh, and…well, this is kind of embarrassing trying to give a dragon investigator rules, but…uh, don’t touch the crystal formations. They really do take a long-ass time to form and when you touch them, the oils from your fingers interfere with the whole process and can even stop the entire—”

“Ranger Jay?”

“Uh…yeah?”

“You already told me all that. Twice.” After another pulse of her aura, he looked like he was worried about missing the greatest tour this park had ever had. Kristen couldn’t affect thoughts with her aura directly—not even Heartsbane could do that—but she could affect emotions, and the human brain wasn’t so sophisticated a piece of machinery that it could always parse thoughts from emotions.

Ergo, he had thought about another wave of visitors and the aura she sent reminded him of his own thought. She hadn’t put it there, only recognized the intellectual reaction his emotion had caused and stuck with that same tack— it seemed useful to get rid of the ranger—rather than switching to another one. After all her time working on her aura, it seemed elementary, but there had been a time when it would have been impossible.

She proceeded down the path alone. Mammoth Cave was beautiful. Amongst the stalagmites and stalactites were countless crystalline structures. Some looked like frost and others like chains of murky diamonds. Here and there, giant crystals protruded from the walls as if placed there by a Hollywood movie director. She moved past them all, noticed idly, but used her aura to sense the way ahead of her.

There was a dragon down there. She was sure of it. And the closer she got, the more certain she felt that this was where she was supposed to go. There weren’t any people—not rangers or tour guides or anyone else. The only things her aura sensed were the occasional blips of insect life and once or twice, an essence she decided could only be a fish.

This suspicion was confirmed when she emerged into a room—she should have brought a map—in which a river or lake wound along the bottom. Stalactites hung from the ceiling and here and there, they poked from the hazy blue water. Fish swam in the lake, pale creatures with long whiskers and no eyes to speak of.

The dragon aura was still ahead and while it grew stronger, it remained out of reach. She followed the elevated path above the lake and wondered where the Dragon Council—or perhaps only a single Councilor?—planned to hold their meeting.

After a time, she sensed she was as close to the aura as she could be at this elevation. Before her was a gaping hole in the rocks that looked like melted snow with lights mounted around it that did nothing to illuminate its depths.

The aura emanated from below. Kristen smiled. This was beyond the pale. The hole was large enough to be intimidating, even to a woman with dragon powers, but not so big as to accommodate a dragon. She reasoned that it was a perfect choke point, especially if the Council was afraid of Katrina and what she could do to them. She and anyone else would have to jump down blind. They’d land—dead if they were a human and likely injured if they were a dragon—while whoever waited down there would be able to assess them and either finish them off or retreat further.

For the briefest of moments, she felt this was too much. There was no way someone from the Dragon Council could be this paranoid. The thought was pushed from her head as quickly as it had come. She wanted to go down there and meet the council member and wanted to report. That’s why she’d come this far after all.

There was nothing else to do but jump into the pit.

Kristen looked around to check once more if there were any people, but she hadn’t needed to. Her dragon aura made quite sure nothing else was around that was any larger than a cricket.

With a deep breath, she swung over the railing and into the pit. She let herself fall for a count of three before she turned her legs to steel and counted another two before she splashed into a pool of water and promptly transformed into a body that would not sink.

Quickly, she swam to the surface and emerged from the water to drag a breath of the warm, slightly stale cave air. Above her was only blackness with a few motes of light from the fixtures at the very top of the pit.

Seeing that distance made her doubt her decision to jump. Up there, she had been so certain that this was what she’d wanted to do but now, she was unsure. Even with her dragon strength and steel hands, it would take a long time to punch holes in the walls of the pit and climb out. Plus, Ranger Jay had made it very clear that destroying the crystals was not cool. If there wasn’t another way out, she would be down there for a long time.

She swam to the edge of the pool and climbed out, then looked around the gloom. Already, her dragon eyes had begun to adjust to the extremely low light and located a few passages that led from this fairly large chamber. They all looked like they’d been carved by water over centuries. She didn’t see any signs of paths, either human or dragon-made. Honestly, she didn’t see much of anything. But when she looked down one passage, she felt the aura again. No doubt whoever’s aura it was could sense her too, as it seemed directed at her like it wanted her to find them.

That made sense. She was there to find the Dragon Council, but it also made her nervous. Despite her growth, she was far from the most adept at controlling her dragon aura. She’d come a long way but compared to her combat abilities, her aura was fairly weak. Meeting Heartsbane had only further stunted her growth because she was so proficient with her powers that Kristen hadn’t needed to use her aura much at all.

She knew enough about how it worked to know that it was difficult for a dragon to manipulate another dragon, although not impossible. Had someone convinced her to jump with their aura? She couldn’t be sure.

But she did know that it ultimately didn’t matter. If it was the Council…well, she had to meet with them. If it were some foe who wished to lure her to her doom…well, she’d meet them like she did every challenge with a pair of steel fists.

Cautiously, she started toward the aura, moving along a narrow rock shelf that hugged the edge of the small lake. Before long, the water formed a narrow lip that created a small waterfall completely made of crystal. It fell into the abyss and the lakebed dropped away, taking the water even deeper into the earth. The plunge was so deep that even with her dragon hearing, she couldn’t hear the drops of water hit the bottom.

The aura was ahead, though, not down, so she clung to the lip and negotiated around a bulwark of stone.

She rounded a corner and stopped at a thin aperture. It was too narrow for her but it was also undoubtedly the way toward the aura. She sighed, knowing Ranger Jay would most definitely not approve, and turned her fists to steel to punch a hole in the limestone big enough for her to fit through.

Moments later, she stood in a room with a ceiling of hanging crystalline spikes. She imagined they might have been a shade of blue but she couldn’t tell. Her dragon eyes could function in the almost nonexistent light, but there wasn’t enough illumination for her to register color anymore.

More important than the color of the stalactites, though, were the pits beneath them. To her mind, it looked like someone had cranked the roof of the room off the ground and left the giant holes in the floor, but she was sure there was a more scientific and far less exciting answer.

Again, she made a silent apology to Ranger Jay and started through the room.

The first thing she discovered was that the floor was not sturdy. With one wrong step, the crumbly, porous limestone gave way to open air and her footing was gone, but she managed to leap forward and landed on another platform of stone.

This proved to be far sturdier than the last—it supported her for an entire three seconds instead of the scant moment the first had afforded her. That was more than enough time for her to tense her muscles and vault farther across the room.

The force of her leap was enough to jostle the stone and it tumbled away sooner than it would have otherwise. In turn, it ruined her trajectory.

Rather than careen past one of the massive crystal stalactites, she was on a course to go through it.

No matter. Steel was harder than rock. She had proven that many times.

In the split second she had before she powered into the rock spike, she turned her fists to steel and struck the obstacle. It exploded in a shower of whitish powder and crystalline shards. Kristen would have liked to pause to take in the beautiful effect but the piece of stone she found herself on was no sturdier than any of the others.

She surged forward and no longer tried to avoid stalactites now that she knew how little force her steel fists needed to clear her path.

After a moment or two of what should have been almost impossible acrobatics and rock-destroying punches, she finally crossed the odd room and stood on more stable ground.

Regretfully, she looked at the damage she’d caused deep inside the earth. She knew Ranger Jay wouldn’t like it but in a thousand years, this room might grow into something with an actual path through it now that she had cleared the stalactites. The future caretakers of the cave would have to build a bridge there after all Kristen had done, but they’d done that over the crystal lake so they could do it there too.

The next part of the cave wasn’t so much a room as a hallway or tunnel. She followed it, broke entrances open when she needed to, and turned her body to steel and forced herself through tight passages whenever she could.

Once or twice, she stopped to look behind her. She swore she could feel something there—not the dragon presence she was pursuing but something else—but whenever she turned, the feeling dissipated. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling she was being tested.

Was a mage watching her traverse the route so they could report to the Dragon Council? Was there a dragon who could move through stone as easily as she’d seen some of them swim? She didn’t know.

All she knew was that the path before her wasn’t a true obstacle.

Where it was small, she broke it.

When it grew too steep, she changed to steel and simply slid down the ledge and broke rock formations with her feet as easily as a child might crush fresh snow.

After ten minutes of traversing the tunnel, she’d worked up a sweat and couldn’t help but enjoy herself. She was deeper in the earth than a human could be without proper tools, and she hadn’t even slowed. It made her realize how far she’d come and how much she’d grown both physically and in confidence.

If this was indeed the test she assumed it to be, she was knocking it out of the park.

Kristen stepped into a large chamber at the end of the tunnel and looked up. For the briefest of moments, she had a sense of déjà vu before she realized that she had seen something like this. When she’d jumped down the first pit, the view from the floor had been the same—inky blackness with a few artificial lights to stand in for stars.

Except this was a different pit obviously, as there was no pool beneath it.

Furthermore, across the passage, a low overhang opened into a cavern with a table placed in its center and orbs of lights floating about.

She shook her head at her foolishness.

In her impatience, she had jumped down the first pit she’d seen simply because the aura had been lower than her level had been. But she’d chosen the wrong one. If she had been a little more patient, she might have found this one and not had to cause so much damage to the environment.

With a deep breath, she shook her head at her foolishness and started across the room.

Without warning, the three lights far above her ignited and hurtled an avalanche of rock that crushed her before even her dragon reflexes could move her out of the way.

CHAPTER SIX

Drew, Amy, and Lumos boarded a flight to Dallas and disembarked two and a half hours later.

The SWAT leader was surprised at how much he already missed Kristen’s private jet. He wasn’t much of a flyer—he never had been and never saw the point of going somewhere he couldn’t drive to where there were people who didn’t speak his language—and yet he had already grown to appreciate the spaciousness of the private jet.

On her plane, they had been served hot meals and been given hot towels. There had even been a masseuse. On their flight down there, he’d had a TV screen in the back of the seat in front of him that didn’t work. He was the only one of the three who hadn’t sprung for first-class and now, reunited with Amy and Lumos, he could see that for the mistake it was.

While he was tired from the flight, his back sweaty, and his shoulders tight from hunching them so as to not spill into either of the seats beside him, his teammates seemed refreshed.

“Are you all right, Drew?” Amy asked almost dreamily.

“I’ve been better,” he replied.

“Are you ready to fly?” Lumos asked as they retrieved their luggage and left the airport.

“I thought we did…” Drew said before he trailed off as he looked at the dragon in human form and the mage. The two of them grinned like fools.

He sighed. “We won’t rent a car, will we?”

His teammates shook their heads and he rubbed his chin. At least he had extra motivation to catch the technomages, he decided

“So, do you want to ride with me or with Lumos?” Amy asked.

“How exactly do I ride…uh, with you?” Drew asked. She was at least fifteen years younger than him, and although he found her plain features pretty enough, he would in no way feel comfortable mounting her like a sea turtle as they flew across Texas.

In response, she opened her luggage and removed a huge beach towel.

“You know they usually have towels at hotels, right?” he snarked.

“This one’s not to keep us dry.” She spread it out on a patch of grass outside the airport. “So?” she asked as he realized exactly what she had in mind.

“You want me to ride on that?” Drew balked, his expression one of horror.

“What? I would have thought the whole magic carpet concept would work for you. Okay, no, this isn’t a carpet, but it’s as stable and easier to clean.”

“I don’t know…”

“You’re always welcome here,” Lumos said before he transformed into his true form—a resplendent golden dragon. He stretched his wings in the afternoon sun, yawned, and twitched his tail. “It looks like a beautiful day to do loops.”

“I think I’ll stick to the carpet,” Drew said and studied the towel warily.

The dragon’s tail twitched to his face. He had been with dragons long enough now to recognize that as embarrassment. Before he could ask what had upset him, Lumos flicked his suitcase open with the deft movement of a claw and tossed a small sack to Amy, who caught it gleefully in midair with her telekinesis.

“What the hell was that?” Drew asked and stepped onto the towel. Despite her promise of it being a magic carpet ride, it didn’t feel like magic. It felt like a towel spread on the grass.

“A bet I won,” she said smugly.

“Yeah, yeah, I messed it up when I mentioned the loops.” Lumos looked chagrined.

“I hardly find that—” He wasn’t able to say appropriate because the carpet beneath his feet elevated sharply without warning.

Ten feet, twenty, thirty, fifty…a hundred feet in less than five seconds.

“Let me sit, at least,” he sputtered when they leveled out and began to fly south.

“There’s no need. I’m using my telekinesis to keep your boots stuck to the towel. You can’t fall—well, not unless your shoes come off.” To prove her point, she spun them in a barrel roll. Sure enough, although he felt his clothes pulled away from the towel, his feet both remained firmly in place as if they were stuck there with glue. It was extremely unsettling, to say the least.

Amy only laughed.

He gave her a grim smile. At the very least, he could respect someone who was willing to fuck around before they entered a potentially life-threatening mission. Then, he sat carefully and tied his boot laces tighter.

“Beautiful country,” Lumos shouted to his teammates.

Drew realized he could only hear him because the young mage manipulated the air so there was a bubble of stillness around him. A strong gust broke through her subtle shield and became nothing but a swift breeze.

“I had no idea it was so green,” she replied to the dragon. “I’ve never left the northeast as a kid. When I think Texas, I think cactus and oil wells.”

“You’re not wrong about that,” Lumos said with a chuckle, “but that’s the other half of the state.”

“We’re going to Elgin,” Drew interjected. “It’s between Austin and Houston. Zed traced it as the last location of what we think was a shipment of dragon scale munitions. After that, the trail went cold.”

“No dragon killings? That’s a relief,” the dragon commented.

“No dragon killings yet,” he replied. “But we know how these people work. They’ll want to use the momentum they’ve been building.”

“What do you think we should do first?” the mage asked. “I’ll admit, I didn’t exactly read the mission brief. Shouldn’t we start with any big meat farming operations around here? It takes huge resources to feed a dragon, especially if they’re actively using their abilities, and the one they probably have has been continually…harvested for pieces, right? That means they’ll need hordes of cows or whatever. Let’s follow the cows.”

Lumos laughed so hard he snorted fire. “My dear, we are in Texas. The only thing they have more of in this state than cows are guns.”

“Wait, seriously? I thought it was a desert. I thought cowboys drove cattle across Texas because it was as empty as shit,” Amy said and stroked her chin while she guided the magic-powered towel forward.

“The briefing mentioned there are 4.95 million cattle,” Drew said. “We can’t follow the cows.”

“We can have one or two, though.” The golden dragon snickered and gestured toward a field filled with dark-red, heavy shouldered cows with short hair that looked as thick and as soft as moss. The SWAT leader knew nothing about cows, but even he could recognize that these were healthy.

That fact made it a little more distressing when Lumos tucked his wings and dove toward the herd. They immediately stampeded away from him and the ancient gold dragon only laughed as his long mustache flicked in the wind.

“Lumos, what are you doing?” Amy demanded and guided her towel toward the dragon without letting Drew know. His stomach lurched all the worse for not having warning.

“Having a snack,” Lumos answered happily as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

He flapped his great wings and banked into a glide above the cows. With the ease of centuries of practice, he followed them as they ran, slowed his speed, and used his wings to guide the herd around the huge grassy field they called home. With careful flicks of his tail, he separated a cow from the rest of the herd. To Drew, it looked like the fattest of them all.

Now that the golden dragon had his dinner in his sights, he opened his jaws and swooped at the creature—only to have a metal water trough careen into his mouth and wedge it open.

He sputtered as the trough dumped water down his throat, which unbalanced him and made him fall given his slow speed. His landing precipitated him into a tumble through the field and he gouged great swathes of grass and wildflowers with his huge wings and pointed tail. He came to a stop by powering into a massive pecan tree. It rattled when he struck it and since it was fall, hundreds of nuts rained on the disgraced dragon.

“Are we under attack?” Drew asked, although if they were, the technomage group responsible seemed closer to clowns than terrorists. How could anyone stop a dragon with a water trough?”

“No,” Amy said, her voice tight as she guided them down and landed her towel in front of Lumos. “What the hell was that about?” she demanded.

“What? The cow? I didn’t want to simply blast all of them. One is plenty,” he explained as if it was obvious.

“Are you crazy? That’s someone’s livelihood. That cow is probably worth a hundred or a thousand or— I have no idea how much cows are worth but that was a big one so it must have been a lot,” Amy sputtered, furious with him.

“I would’ve paid the man for his trouble. Better than whatever he gets from a cattle yard, I assure you,” Lumos protested and sounded hurt. “I spent time in Texas when it was Spanish land. We’ve had a way to do things here for a long time. Beef for silver is—” He once again opened his suitcase deftly to fetch something but this time, found nothing.

Abruptly, he transformed into his human form, an older man with a brilliant mustache and pointed goatee. “Where is it?”

“You mean the sack of silver you gave me?” Amy said and held up the leather bag he had given her when Drew decided that a towel was safer than a dragon. He realized now after watching the hunt that it definitely was.

“Er…may I borrow a little?” Lumos asked, his human face a brilliant red.

Amy held the bag up and it levitated to his hand but didn’t fall. “You can ask a farmer and offer to pay, and if he says yes, you can eat as many as you like.”

The dragon frowned. “But there’s no fun in that. They don’t like it when we stalk the herd like that but they don’t complain either as long as we pay well.”

Drew was surprised. Lumos—despite his age—had seemed like one of the more progressively-minded when it came to human-dragon relations, yet this seemed like a cruel and arcane way of hunting to him.

“If they don’t like it you should do as Amy says,” he pointed out.

The mage nodded and dropped the bag of silver in his hand.

Lumos grumbled, but he followed his teammates to the farmhouse after which—after a few minutes of deliberation with the woman of the house—he left with a far skinnier cow. Part of their deal was that he’d kill it quickly rather than hunt it and scare it half to death, as Mrs. Mendez-Mangum didn’t much like seeing the poor cows get scared.

The dragon obliged her sullenly and led his cow out behind the barn so the others wouldn’t see.

Drew couldn’t help but grin at his embarrassment. He knew they were fighting for huge stakes—the very world if one was being grandiose—but these were the things he sometimes reminded himself he was fighting for. Why should a dragon have the right to terrify a herd of cattle simply because they were a dragon? Why should a person have to live knowing that a dragon could destroy their house, their car, and even kill their wife while he was at work, but—not to worry—you would be given a sack of gold for your trouble. Dragon dominance was everywhere and in every part of culture. From cities like Detroit to the middle of nowhere, Texas.

Once Lumos emerged—in human form and still sullen—they thanked Mrs. Mendez-Mangum and continued their journey.

“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Amy gloated in as kind a voice as Drew had ever heard.

“I saved a little silver, yes, but it cheapens the whole experience. It’s nice to hunt.”

“Whatever,” she replied with no trace of sympathy for the dragon.

“What do we do now?” she asked Drew.

He swallowed. “I think we should get dinner.”

His companions laughed.

“There’s a fast food place. I could eat a burger.” The mage pointed at a parking lot with a glowing yellow and orange building in the middle.

Lumos clicked his tongue in disapproval. “My dear, as I said, we are in Texas. It will not do for us to not do as the locals do. And although, yes, burgers can be delightful, we’re heading to Elgin. I know people there who have done the same thing for a very long time.”

“And what’s so great about that?” Drew asked.

“What they do is Texas Bar-B-Q.”

He nodded toward a building that looked like a barn that had been repainted and set on fire. A steady plume of smoke billowed from it, and it took the man a second to realize that the smoke was being used.

They landed in the parking lot. Amy stowed her towel in the duffel bag she’d brought for herself. On the journey, Lumos had carried it but now, she levitated it off the ground and hurled it into the sky.

“What did you do that for?” Drew asked. It looked like she had thrown out all her clothes.

“Oh, it’s for safekeeping. No one will take my things a hundred feet up. Do you want me to do yours?” Amy replied.

“You can do mine,” Lumos said and nodded at his suitcase.

She obliged him and rocketed it up and out of sight. “Drew?”

“Are you sure you won’t drop it?”

“Positive,” Amy replied. “Larry’s made me work on my control. This is a great way to focus. As long as we don’t come under attack in there.”

Lumos chuckled but Drew only clenched his jaw. There was no better way to ensure you would get in trouble than to ask for it.

“It’s not likely,” the dragon elaborated as they walked toward the swinging doors at the front of the converted barn. “Smoked meat is like the sacrament in Texas. If whoever we’re tracking is from here, they won’t stir the pot. And if they’re not local, we’ll have the crowd on our side.”

The SWAT leader didn’t know about all that. Lumos made it sound like this was some kind of experience rather than merely dinner.

They walked inside and he quickly reassessed his original opinion. Rather than the clean tiled floor and bland paintings of a regular diner, this venue had a concrete floor sprinkled with sawdust and nothing on the walls but the heads of dead animals. Deer mostly, although he noticed a few people had been proud of the boars they had killed. He wondered if they were cooking one in front of him.

About a dozen people stood between him and the longest chain of sausages he’d ever seen. A cook—chef or grill master?—opened a metal box to release another great gust of smoke and reveal ribs large enough to either be from a cow or the aforementioned wild boar. Amy looked about as flabbergasted as he did. Lumos, though, looked positively delighted.

“Oh, I do like Texas Bar-B-Q!” He was more preaching than explaining. “You don’t need sauce, you know. That’s the secret. They smoke it to perfection after they rub it with all kinds of spices. You humans…” He shook his head in amazement. “For creatures who are supposed to mostly eat plants, you have a way with flesh.”

“How can you even be hungry?” the mage demanded. “You ate an entire cow.”

Lumos shrugged. “It wasn’t a very big one.”

Drew grinned and helped himself to a beer in one of the standing iceboxes that the line snaked past. He had begun to like Texas.

Faster than he had expected, they were at the front of the line and the dragon was ordering. “Five pounds brisket, six of those beef ribs I saw peeking out, and all your sausages. Oh, and a couple of chickens.”

“Yes, sir. Do you want that whole sausage cut in half?”

“I’m sorry if I misspoke. I meant I want to eat all your sausages—as in every single one.”

The woman gaped. “You want… Hold up.” She turned to one of the pitmasters. “How much sausage do we have left for today?”

“Salchicha?” a man with a mustache asked. She nodded and he checked. “Twenty-five pounds.”

The woman turned to Lumos and raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want all that?”

“Yes please.” The dragon nodded happily. “Oh, and a half-gallon each of beans, slaw, and banana pudding.” The assistant shrugged and tallied the bill.

“Are you gonna borrow silver for this one too?” Drew asked and elbowed Amy, who laughed.

“I intended to charge it. That usually works better in these kinds of places,” Lumos said and took a credit card out. “Timeflash set me up with an expense account. There are advantages to missing out on the Europe trip.”

His teammates nodded. He made a good point.

The woman accepted the card and gathered the food he had ordered. “It’s gonna be a minute with the sausage,” she said, retrieved a long stick with a piece of chalk on the end, and scratched out the line for sausage on the menu above the counter. A few people groaned.

The dragon took one of the trays of food. “Aren’t you two going to order anything?” he asked.

“You’re not planning on eating all that.” Drew couldn’t believe it. He’d shared meals with Butters, who could pack it away, but Lumos practically had an entire animal on the trays they all carried to the table.

“I guess I can share,” the dragon said, although given the speed with which he dug in, those might have been false words.

Despite watching him inhale what appeared to be his body weight in smoked meat, the meal was exceptionally good. The brisket was insanely tender and beyond flavorful. Drew wasn’t even tempted to add sauce. The chicken was perfect, although it paled in comparison to the beef ribs, which—while delicious—were a real treat because they made him feel like a caveman. Maybe there was something to hunting and eating your own meat, he thought as he attacked the rib with gusto.

The only sore point in the meal came toward the end when three young men approached the table. From their patchy facial hair and bratty expressions, boys might have been more accurate.

“Are you the high-falootin’ out-of-towners who ate all our damn sausage?” one of them asked, a red-faced boy wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves torn off.

“I’m afraid so,” Lumos said and brandished his toothpick. Once they’d brought the chain of sausages, the dragon had not stopped eating until they were completely gone. “We still have chickens and ribs, though, if you boys are hungry. It appears I overestimated my appetite.”

“Yeah, probably because you already ate a cow,” Amy quipped, although Drew could tell she wasn’t angry and merely teasing.

“I told you, Colt,” the boy with the sleeveless plaid said.

“I guess you were right, Vince. Dinner’s on me on account of the dinosaur.” Colt wore a red baseball cap backward with something written on the front that Drew couldn’t make out. His sideburns would look good on someone who might pride themselves in being a dumbass.

“Is that a reference to my species?” Lumos asked and dabbed his chin with a napkin.

“You’re damn straight it is!” said the third man. He had no fear of denim, apparently, as he wore it from head to ankle and only chose a different material for his wide-brimmed, bleached white hat and his black leather boots.

“Easy, Dusty,” Vince said, although he didn’t sound like he meant it. “You wouldn’t want to piss the great and powerful dragon off.”

Lumos merely smiled as one might at a puzzle to be solved. “However did you know I was a dragon?” he inquired politely.

“It’s fuckin’ obvious,” Dusty said. “You’re the only asshole in here wearing a fucking gold suit. Are you his mage or something?”

Amy stood quickly, insulted. “I dress this way because I am a skater, not because I am a mage,” she told the men, although from her tone, she also agreed they were little more than boys.

“Whatever. You three look like you’re from the wrong end of a dog’s dick,” Vince said and laughed like that was supposed to have made sense.

“As opposed to the right one?” the girl asked coolly.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Vince demanded.

A moment later, three suitcases fell from the sky into the parking lot.

“Oops,” Amy said, although the boys didn’t notice.

“You three should move on, all right? We’re from out of town, yes, but we’re here on business. Do you know anything about dragon bullets?”

Colt and Dusty shared a meaningful look before Vince punched them both in the arm and replied for the group. “Fuck no! Come on, boys.”

“Thanks for the food by the way,” Colt said and picked up one of the trays of chicken and ribs.

Lumos stood at that, ready—by the looks of it—to eat them, but Drew put a hand on his chest quickly. “It’s all right. We might have found ourselves a lead. Even money that they go to their car.”

His instincts proved correct. Vince, Colt, and Dusty all piled into a massive truck on jacked-up suspension. The guard in the front looked like it had been added to and the entire vehicle was painted in camouflage, while two smokestacks protruded high above the cab. Two of them climbed into the front and the third went into the back and raised a Texas flag.

“Have a nice night, assholes!” he shouted, tossed an empty beer bottle in the air, and shot it before Drew even saw him draw a gun.

“Should we follow them?” Amy asked. “They reacted when you mentioned the munitions. Do you think they know about them?”

“I don’t know. It’s been big in the news recently. I could see many people flinching if they thought a fight might come to their town. I think I want to try to dig something up on them before we go further,” he replied.

“You’re not worried they’ll get away?” Lumos asked.

“Nah. Those three don’t exactly look like they know much about keeping a low profile.”

“I still don’t think you should have told them about our mission,” the mage commented.

“Well, if those assholes are anything more than assholes, at least this way, they’ll come to us.” he countered.

They ate in silence for a minute before he wiped his face and stood. “Lumos, thanks for the meal. Amy, thanks for dropping our luggage. I’ll have a talk to the local police and see what they know about our boys in the big truck or if there’s anything else around here while I’m at it. Can I leave you two to get us a few rooms over there?” He pointed at a motel across the street.

They nodded. “That shouldn’t be so hard,” Amy said.

“You say that,” Drew said, “but something tells me you two will find a way to make it difficult.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The flight over the Colombian countryside filled Larry with both hope and dread. Hope persisted because there was still so much green in the world. After they’d left the airspace over the Gulf of Mexico and passed Medellin, the landscape below was completely jungle with the occasional town or ranch carved out.

It was the ranches that made him uneasy. Last time he’d been down there five years before, there had been fewer of them. He had no doubt that the next time he came, there’d be far more. Part of him sometimes wondered if the dragons were right about people—that if left unchecked, they’d simply continue to spread like any other pest.

From his perspective, though, he didn’t see why that same logic did not apply to dragons. After all, they were the ones who liked eating the cattle grown on those ranches of cleared rainforest.

But he’d have time enough for philosophy when this mission was over. One thing he certainly agreed with was the idea that the only way out of the mess the world had become was by working together with everyone. Step one of that process was to stop the mages from killing more dragons.

The pilot banked their private jet and descended to the airport, where they made a surprisingly gentle landing. It seemed it wasn’t only the ranches that had been improved since he had last been here.

They disembarked from the plane to find no one waiting for them. He saw no sign of a welcome wagon filled with local fruit and coffee as had been typical when Larry had come with Windlock. Instead, they had to walk across the chilly tarmac through the gentle mist on their own.

“I thought it would be hot,” Keith said. He wore a police uniform that had short shorts instead of pants. In the cool air, he looked profoundly out of place.

“Bogota is above twenty-five hundred meters,” Larry said. “The weather here is like San Francisco, which makes us not having a ride all the more inconvenient.”

“You don’t suppose the local dragons are busy or something?” Butters ventured. “It is a city of millions, plus the report said the attack came from outside the city. Maybe they’re stretched too thin.”

The mage shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. An airport is an ideal place for an ambush. They should have been here to clear the area, especially given that we’re dealing with SWAT for this part of South America. They oversee not only Colombia but also Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and even Bolivia. They’re a huge team.”

“Still, it might be an all-hands-on-deck scenario,” Beanpole pointed out.

Heartsbane shook her head. “Larry’s right. This is a huge lapse in protocol. If they’re stretched that thin, they should have called for help from law enforcement in other parts of the continent, not to mention moved the dragons to more secure areas. Them not being here is weird. Something is wrong.”

“So what do we do about that? Fly home?” Hernandez asked in a huff.

“No, but we shouldn’t go into the airport either.” Larry took his cellphone out and called a private security firm for armored cars to escort them. “All right, they’ll be here in ten minutes. Let’s try to circle to the front of the airport. Everyone stay alert and watch the perimeter. I’ll call Bogota SWAT.”

He dialed the local number and a mage answered. It was easy to tell it was a mage and not a dragon because the man sounded nervous. Dragons rarely sounded anything but smug.

“This is Larry Brockton. I’m here in Bogota under orders of Investigator Steel.”

“Oh! It’s an honor to have you here, sir. What can we do for you?” the man responded.

“What can you—” He shook his head. “Your office said there was a dragon murder and requested that one of our teams respond.”

“A murder?” The mage sounded genuinely surprised.

For a moment, his heart pounded and he considered sending everyone into the jet then and there. Before he could speak, a startled squeak suggested his contact had remembered what was happening in his city.

“Oh! You must be here about the dragon death. Lord Alanegra was caught in an avalanche. Do you think it was foul play?”

Before Larry could answer, the mage seemed to remember himself. “I’m sorry, sir. Where are my manners? If Investigator Steel is here, we can’t have you all waiting while a couple of mages dither on the phone. I’ll send a few cars and we’ll talk about this somewhere more secure than a cellphone signal.”

“There’s no need for that. I already called a company—Seguridad. We’ve worked with them before.” He saw no reason to tell him that Investigator Steel wasn’t with them at the moment.

“They’re a good one. You can trust them,” the man responded cordially. “I do apologize for the inconvenience, sir. We simply didn’t expect visitors. It makes sense, I suppose. The avalanche could have been foul play.”

“That was what we thought,” Larry lied.

This seemed too strange to him. How did the Bogota team not know about them? They had requested them to come. Was this mage merely incompetent and hadn’t heard the orders? He didn’t think so. It wasn’t like the guy who answered the phones would be in charge of detailing a welcome committee, which made it seem like no one knew about them. If so, who had asked?

“Are you all right there, boss?” Emerald asked and used the word “boss” with a slight barb to it. At least he used it, though.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine. I’ll have a long list of questions to be answered once we reach their local headquarters, but there’s no point in getting all worked up when there’s probably an explanation for all this.”

“Sure,” Emerald said, although he didn’t sound mollified by the weak attempt to calm his nerves.

They walked around the airport, past palm trees and exotic birds, and through the smells of coffee and car exhaust until they reached the street and found three armored SUVs waiting for them with Seguridad signs.

Larry noted the bulletproof glass and ordered his team to get on board.

Everyone complied and they drove to the local SWAT office, hoping for more answers. He had a feeling in his gut that all they would get was more questions.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The chamber Kristen was in was wide enough that she couldn’t escape it before the rocks struck her. As it was, she was barely able to get her steel skin into place. She felt a stone thunk onto her head and knew that without her steel skin—even with her dragon abilities—she would have been killed.

She tried to move out of the way of the falling boulders but there were too many. One landed on her leg to pin her in place—again, possibly breaking the bones if not for her steel skin. She held her hands up in a pathetic defensive gesture as more and more rocks rumbled into motion and pummeled her body.

Another deluge of boulders followed the first and soon, both her legs were trapped. She fought with her arms and struggled to thrust rocks away before they struck her head, reminding herself all the time about what she knew about her dragon healing ability.

Windlock had said—when they’d first found the wreckage Amy had caused with her mage powers—that dragons could only sustain a finite amount of damage. They could heal most injuries—other than those to their brain or heart—but if they suffered enough injury, their healing ability would be overwhelmed and they’d die. That was what had happened to the dragons who had been killed by Amy, and that might be about to happen to her.

The avalanche of rocks continued and she struggled to defend herself. If she processed at the speed of a regular human, she’d no doubt have already been crushed. But with her dragon speed to aid her, she was able to consider her arrogance and hubris. She’d run through this now obviously abandoned cave and disregarded the signs that this was a trap. When the corner of a rock finally caught her temple, she plunged into unconsciousness.

Kristen awoke sometime later and even that was a pleasant surprise. Her last thoughts had been of being overwhelmed by her injuries and rotting to nothing in the cave. Her dreams were of either being fossilized or rusted. She didn’t know enough about geology to guess which would happen, so her subconscious had put Ranger Jay in charge of describing the process to a group of bored tourists while she watched, a rusted fossil from the past.

After a moment, she took a deep breath. That was also a surprise. Before she’d been knocked unconscious, the rock debris had been so thick that it made it difficult to fill her lungs. Now, she could breathe easily.

She pushed on the ground and registered the biggest surprise yet as she rose from the rocky surface. There was no rubble on top of her—as in none at all. Startled, she jerked her head from side to side to study her surroundings. Surely she was mistaken?

But no rubble was in evidence. In fact, she didn’t think she was in the same part of the cave. From what she could see, she was in a fairly small chamber rather than the cavernous pit the rocks had come from.

That was bad—extremely bad. An explosion and being buried in an avalanche was one thing. Kristen knew she had enemies in both dragons and mages—hell, probably disgruntled humans as well because they could also be like that. But to have been buried beneath the rubble and then moved? What did that say about whoever set this up?

That they were confident in their abilities was the first thing she thought. The obvious culprits were the mages. She had actively thwarted them, after all. But this didn’t seem like their work. If they had placed the boulders, why not use bombs with dragon shrapnel and simply kill her? Whoever had done this to her wanted her alive for some reason.

Plus, there was the dragon aura she’d sensed. As far as she knew, that could not be faked. She was sure that if it could, she would know already, what with the enemies she’d collected. The facts meant there had to be a dragon involved. But who? Could it be the Iron Dragon she’d met and battled in Florence?

Kristen didn’t think so. Katrina had been a powerful warrior and ruthless in her efficiency. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman to bury an enemy, dig them out, and move them. Her actions suggested she was more like the kind of person to find an enemy and slit their throat at the first chance she had. No, she didn’t think it was her.

She realized with growing dread that it couldn’t be. Whoever had set those charges to bury her had known she would be down there. It meant that the entire call to report to the Dragon Council had been a trick.

How could that be?

Lumos had recognized the mage who had called. It was one of the reasons she felt so compromised. Did that mean the council themselves had a mole among their advisors?

This train of thought didn’t appeal to her at all, primarily because it made so much sense.

But how else could someone have convinced the mage to talk to her? And they led her on this merry chase through the caves with their aura. The more she thought about, the more she reasoned it had to be a dragon. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, no matter which way she looked at it.

But damn, it made sense.

It should have dawned on Kristen far sooner, but it was entirely possible that there could be elements of dragon society who were as eager to start the war as the mages. She knew there were those who saw humanity as little more than cattle. While most didn’t want to obliterate people, it seemed there was a fair share of them who thought “culling the herd” was an acceptable solution. Maybe her recent publicity had set her against one of these dragons.

Trying to play devil’s advocate while she got her bearings—not an easy task given that she was in a tiny chamber with five more or less identical tunnels leading away from it—she forced herself to consider the possibility that it was mages.

There might be a spell they could have cast to trick her. Dragons didn’t know everything about them, and Amy’s formidable powers proved there was much mages could do when unbound—which all the technomages were. But again, the nagging question of why not simply kill her remained. Why would any of the mage cells leave her alive?

No, she didn’t think mages had done this. The whole plan had the stench of dragon all over it. Whoever did this to her wanted her alive and trapped there for some reason.

Well, maybe not even for a reason, she realized. Maybe simply for their sick desire. Not long before, the dragon Obscura had captured her brother Brian and put him inside a “live” version of the old game Pac-Man. There had been no reason for that. Ostensibly, she wanted him to suffer and by extension, the Steel Dragon to be wracked with fear. But there were a thousand simpler, less elaborate ways to do that. She could have simply sent fingers or a video of her eating him, for Christ’s sake, but she hadn’t. Instead, the dragon had constructed an elaborate maze and dropped her brother into it so she would rescue him.

A maze exactly like the one she was in now.

Dumb realization dawned on her and Kristen reached instinctively for her cellphone, only to discover it was gone.

Seriously, this had become horribly creepy. It was supremely uncomfortable to think that someone had dug her out of the rubble, moved her there, and gone through her pockets, all while she was unconscious. Whoever it was could have easily killed her, even with her steel skin. She could have been drowned or crushed or any number of things, but she hadn’t been.

Why not?

Kristen could already feel the walls closing in. What kind of a freak had done this to her?

Maybe someone who wants to see you crack, her mind answered.

Oh, shit. She was already talking to herself, which wasn’t exactly a good sign. Her stomach grumbled and joined the conversation. Although it might have scared her a year before, her hunger grounded her.

She didn’t know who had trapped her down there. Hell, she couldn’t even be certain it wasn’t some kind of demolition activity gone wrong—although they were in a national park so that seemed unlikely. All she knew was that she had sustained some injury in that avalanche. If she wanted food so she could better fuel her dragon healing abilities, she needed to get out of there as soon as possible.

With that decided, she looked at the tunnels and tried to determine the best choice.

Despite her feeling more and more confident that this was a trap, her first instinct was to search for the dragon aura. Whoever had done this to her had to be down there. Given that they had moved her, they were probably nearby. She didn’t care if they were hunting her or testing her or whatever. If she could find them, she would turn the tables on them and make them rue the day they targeted the Steel Dragon.

She sensed nothing. No dragons, no humans, and not even any of the cave crickets that had been present in the upper level.

All the tunnels were the same uniform pitch black and gave off the stagnant smell of being buried deep under the earth. One of them appeared to slope up slightly, so she chose that one.

She walked for a few minutes and immediately began to feel better. Moving helped her think, helped her feel less trapped, and helped her feel less stupid for being tricked into being trapped down there.

All those warm and fuzzy feelings evaporated when the tunnel forked a little farther on. It was hard to see much as there was no light at all, but her dragon eyes could do things human eyes could not. They glowed ever so slightly—fueled by the same ability that let her breathe fire, possibly, but she didn’t know—and that cast the faintest gleam that her vision could pick up the reflection from. It sounded cool in theory but in practice, it was about as useful as stumbling in your bedroom when the television was on in the living room. Still, it was enough to see that both tunnels were poor choices based on her criteria of wanting to return to the surface.

The tunnel on the left was little more than a sheer drop. The one on the right also slanted deeply into the earth. Kristen didn’t want to go any deeper than she already had, so she retreated to the room where she’d woken.

She returned without incident, although her brain did try to tell her to panic. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t—and knew that if she let her fears take control, she’d starve down there. Which meant she had to keep moving, but which way?

Finally, she had an idea. Kristen turned to steel, earned another growl of hunger from her belly, and used her fingers to gouge an “X” above the tunnel she’d returned from. That done, she gouged an arrow into the wall of the next corridor. At least this way, she could tell which way she’d been and find her way back if she lost her bearings—something that was already beginning to feel inevitable in the darkness.

A heavy feeling had begun to grow in her gut that working her way free of this mess might take a while. That sense of forced patience argued with the other sensation that demanded food.

The trick would be to work to get out of there quickly and efficiently but not waste energy doing so. It wasn’t impossible, merely difficult. Still, there was nothing to be gained by sitting there thinking. She had to get out and to do that, she had to keep moving. Accordingly, she set off down a corridor and marked her path as she strode ever deeper into the darkness below the surface of the earth.

CHAPTER NINE

Though Drew felt a little uncomfortable leaving Lumos and Amy after the confrontation with the three boys in the barbeque joint, he wasn’t exactly worried about their safety. Yes, they were looking for technomages armed with weapons that could kill dragons, but if those three boys were the best the technomage cell had to offer— He chuckled at the notion. Talk about a lucky break. It was far more likely they were simply unaccustomed to seeing dragons in their small town and weren’t used to having a bigger fish in their pond.

He walked down the road and into the police station. Compared to the Detroit station, he found it delightfully small and simple. An officer manned the front desk instead of a designated receptionist. It looked like the little Elgin station might be able to hold two criminals but could surely process as many speeding tickets as they needed to in a day.

The police officer seated near the front of the station looked up from his newspaper. “What can I do for ya, partner?”

“Name’s Drew—Officer Drew Manns from Detroit PD, SWAT division.”

“Is that right?” The man put his newspaper down and replaced the expression of concerned curiosity he must normally have used on the little old ladies that came in asking for help with one that seemed less condescending. Drew appreciated it. “And what, may I ask, is an officer from Detroit PD’s SWAT division doing all the way down here in Elgin, Texas? Did you get some brisket and come to ask if we could arrest someone for making something taste too damn good?”

He chuckled good-naturedly at the small-town pride as another officer walked up, his thumbs hitched on his belt. “Nothing like that, sir, nothing like that. Although I will say that spot you have over there is something special.”

“Ain’t it though?” the first cop said. McMurtry, his badge said.

“What can we do for you, sir?” the other man asked. His badge said Ramos, and although he seemed about as cool-headed and professional as his teammate, he lacked the small-town charm or maybe he simply didn’t turn it on for a fellow officer of law enforcement. “Business or pleasure?”

“Business,” he said firmly but pleasantly, “although I hope that if you boys can help me out, I can wrap it up quickly and move on to pleasure.”

McMurtry chuckled at that.

Ramos obliged him with a tight smile and nothing more. “And what business would that be, Drew from Detroit PD?”

He didn’t want to divulge the whole story quite yet. Although he’d told the boys in the restaurant, it was because they looked like hotheads who would drink away all the thoughts they’d had that day. There was something about Ramos, though, that didn’t sit quite right with him. He couldn’t say what, exactly, so it was probably nothing, merely a cop putting up a professional wall. Even so, he didn’t want to tell them everything.

“I’m looking for illegal arms dealers, actually.”

The two men shared a knowing glance that he didn’t at all care for. “Illegal arms, huh? It doesn’t sound like a Detroit PD kind of job to me,” Ramos commented. “It sounds more like an FBI case. Is there a reason you’re here instead of the Rangers?”

Drew shrugged. “I don’t choose the assignments. My boss sent me here to ask questions and stir up clues and bring these boys back to Detroit. I don’t want to horn in on anyone’s turf.”

McMurtry smiled broadly at that but again, the other man only managed a tight nod.

“But I can tell you guys don’t know much about it, huh?” he said.

“Nope,” Ramos said.

“I’m afraid not,” his fellow officer agreed, all smiles. “But why don’t you go ahead and tell us where you’re staying and we’ll let you know if anything comes up?”

“Wouldn’t a cell phone be more useful for that?” he asked. “My partners were getting the accommodation so I don’t know where it is yet.”

“Sure, sure.” McMurtry handed him a piece of paper to write his information down.

As he wrote, he could feel Ramos’ eyes boring into him. “What kind of arms did you say those were? Not them dragon bullets?” the man asked.

Drew looked at him but if the cop had a tell, he wouldn’t know it. He didn’t look like the kind of man you’d want to play poker with if you liked to keep your money.

“I didn’t say. Why do you ask about the dragon bullets? Do you know something about them?” he asked and hoped that such a pointed question didn’t goad the man too much.

“Nothing. At. All,” Ramos replied. “But seeing as how you’re from Detroit and all and there’s that dragon there who’s on a crusade to stop them mages, I thought this might be about that.”

“Speak of the devil,” McMurtry said, picked up a remote control, and pointed it at a TV in the corner.

Drew turned to look and was surprised to see Kristen on the television. She was in her dragon form—he knew it so well at this point that he could recognize it as easily as he could her human body. He’d never seen children climbing on her before, though, nor so many people posing for selfies.

“I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, that’s simply not right,” McMurtry said, still smiling as he stared at the screen.

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“Parents letting their kids clamber all over that lizard. What next? They gonna let them swim with crocodiles too? It’s crazy, I tell ya!” The officer laughed.

“Actually, I’m sure that’s the Steel Dragon, Kristen Hall,” he said casually so he didn’t betray the fact that he knew beyond a doubt exactly who it was. “She wouldn’t hurt those kids.”

“Are you sure about that?” McMurtry asked. “Them dragons used to eat people. In fact, I have it on good authority some of them still do. You can’t trust any of them.”

“You can’t believe everything you hear on talk radio,” Ramos said to his colleague.

Drew merely nodded and watched the two officers.

After a moment, Ramos glanced at him with a forced expression of boredom on his face. “Say, that Steel Dragon—she was on Detroit PD, right? Did you ever meet her?” His tone said he barely cared and that he was only making small talk, but his eyes betrayed him. He was very interested in the Steel Dragon.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did,” Drew replied. He knew he couldn’t lie about knowing her. Even the most cursory of Internet searches would bring up news articles about the two of them working together or photographs of them after busts. It was better to tweak the truth than to lie about it completely.

He assumed that was what these two cops were doing to him.

“Is she as bad as they say?” the officer asked, again as casually as possible.

“I worked with her on a couple of bad busts.” He shrugged. “She was a little…arrogant. Hot-headed, I guess you could say, but she saved my ass more than once. In fact, I’d go so far as to say every cop in Detroit owes her something one way or the other. She uses that steel skin of hers to stop us from getting shot more than anything else.”

“Is that right?” Ramos responded. Nothing about the police officer had outwardly changed. He still had his thumbs hitched on his belt and wore the same forced, polite expression. But at the same time, he’d changed completely. Drew recognized the shift in behavior as similar to a criminal finally deciding not to confess. It wasn’t anything obvious unless you looked for it, but if you knew what to look for, it was plain as day.

“It is,” he confirmed.

“I suppose I’d like a dragon to take a bullet for me too,” McMurtry joked, and the three men laughed, although they also all knew they were all faking it.

“Yeah, I helped her bring in a technomage, actually—the leader of a cell. It was a crazy mission. Them mages think they’re as smart as can be, but they make mistakes, exactly like everyone else.” He watched the other two carefully, but they didn’t give anything away. They were both frozen like deer in headlights.

“You did, did you?” Ramos asked. He still sounded friendly but no longer attempted to smile.

“Yeah, I did.” Drew forced himself not to bristle.

“And you liked it?” McMurtry asked and made less effort than his fellow officer to hide his emotions. While Ramos seemed to hide some deep rage, his colleague seemed to be overcome by something more like gleeful, disbelieving curiosity.

“Yeah…it was all right. It didn’t get boring, at least. I never had to bust dumb kids with her around. Oh, hey, speaking of kids. Do you fellas know three boys who go by Vince, Colt, and Dusty? They drive a big truck with a Texas flag.”

“Yeah, what of them?” McMurtry asked and looked less than amused for the first time.

“You’ll have to excuse my partner’s temper,” Ramos said coolly. “One of them is his nephew. We’ve talked to those three so many times. Did they give you trouble?” There was something in the way he asked the question that told him the answer had to be no.

He shook his head. “Nah. They talked some mess when we got here on account of one of the folks I’m with ordered the last of the sausage. I wanted to let you guys know in case they do that to regulars.”

“Oh, we’ll have a talk with them,” McMurtry said. “Rest assured, they won’t bother you at all while you’re here.”

“I wouldn’t worry about all that.” Drew waved away the empty promise. “We’re leaving town tomorrow anyway.” It was the truth, technically. They would go to see other towns the next day, which meant they had to leave this one. What he didn’t say was that—after talking to these two—he had a feeling they would come back. There was no reason for them to know that.

“Well, make sure you get something for the family back home,” Ramos said. “The antiques here are to die for.”

“Is that right?” he asked and didn’t miss the poorly veiled threat.

The officer nodded and he made his way out of the station.

Something wasn’t right there. He didn’t know much about mages, technomages, or dragons. In fact, everything he’d learned, he’d learned from Kristen, who was the first to admit she was far from an expert. But he didn’t need to know mages to see suspicious behavior.

If he had to guess, he thought that maybe the two police officers did know a thing or two about the mages. Maybe it wasn’t anything more than they knew where the shipment had been headed next, but maybe it was something much deeper. He couldn’t be sure but given the way they’d been so quick to cover for the three rednecks in their truck, he didn’t doubt for a second that these two knew a thing or two about keeping quiet when they were supposed to.

Still, Drew was a cop first, a police officer. He had nothing to work with except suspicion and an uneasy feeling in his stomach, and Hanson had told him a hundred times that wasn’t enough—even if he ended up being right most of the time.

He glanced at his surroundings, not afraid to look like a sightseer. After all, the cops and the boys in the truck had known he was from out of town. They’d expect him to look about.

Which meant that when he noticed an unmarked car with Ramos behind the wheel, he was fairly certain the man only thought he was gawking at a display of antiques.

Shit. If they were following him, they were much more interested than they let on. But what did that mean? Could these two small-town police officers be involved in the mage cell? It was far more likely that they were merely paid off, but that spoke of a larger organization than their intel had led them to believe was down there.

None of it was good, but the worst was guesswork without intel and grasping at possibly baseless ideas.

He kept moving and noted that the car followed as well but hung back in parking lots. Ramos was doing a fairly good job of tailing him. Unfortunately for him, Drew was a cop and knew about tails.

When the man followed him all the way to the motel they were staying in, he also knew he was in trouble. He took a deep breath and prepared himself to fight or tell the cop off. It was either that or wait to be arrested later, but for some reason, the officer drove away without confronting him.

Which meant the horrible feeling growing in his gut didn’t go away at all.

CHAPTER TEN

Kristen had lost count of how many dead ends she had found. Fortunately, she had continued to scratch marks into the stone so she could simply count them.

Six, dammit. She’d traveled down six tunnels—sometimes for up to a mile—before she reached a dead end and had to retrace her steps.

In doing so, she’d wasted precious time and energy and found no way out, no water, no food, and nothing to aid her.

Thankfully, she wasn’t hurt. Even after being pummeled by an avalanche of boulders before being transported there, her dragon healing abilities had kicked in. But continually keeping her hands steel and having used those dragon abilities had severely drained her energy reserves. She found herself thinking about how many pizzas she could eat in her human form and what she would get on them. Sausage, definitely, plus peppers and onions and—

Now wasn’t the time for that, she told herself forcefully and pushed the thoughts aside. She stood wearily, knowing she had to keep moving.

Her stomach grumbled as she looked into one of the passages that led down instead of up. She’d already explored one and hadn’t found anything except a steep slope to climb on her way back.

Maybe I’ll have better luck down there. She shrugged and started down the path while she tried to push hunger and thirst out of her mind.

After ten minutes and fifteen fantasy pizza toppings, she noticed something. It wasn’t much or anything to celebrate, but she realized when she tried to gouge an arrow into the wall that this particular rock face was wet.

Moist was a better descriptor, as there wasn’t enough water to drink. Still, she found it encouraging. The upper portions of the cave system had water everywhere. It was water, after all, that created all the crystal formations. Maybe this trace of moisture would lead up eventually.

Kristen proceeded down the path, her spirits raised slightly. After another few minutes, she began to doubt her sense of direction, though, as she began to see light.

“I can’t be that close to the surface, can I?” she muttered. Logic told her she was still deep in the earth but she hoped she was about to find herself in a canyon or a hidden grotto somewhere in the backwoods of Kentucky.

She walked around a bend in the path and found that—unfortunately for her prospects of escape but fortunately for her sense of direction—she was right. It wasn’t sunlight providing illumination in the tunnel but a kind of luminescent fungus that cast the faintest of glows.

To her dragon vision, after hours and hours of only the muted grays of pitch-black she could discern, it was like stepping into the sunshine.

The fungus grew along the walls and followed hairline seams in the porous limestone through which the water seeped. Here and there, tiny rivulets ran down the wall, enough water for her to drink if she was willing to lick the glowing slime.

As tempting as it was, the strange blue glow was enough to help her to resist. She reasoned there’d probably be more water nearby, as the ground in this tunnel was wet from the leaks in the walls. Plus, there was still the question of why she was there in the first place. Someone had moved her to the room nearby, and while she still wondered why they hadn’t killed her outright, she had assumed they would spring some kind of ambush after she’d expended so much time and energy walking the tunnels. Now, though, it seemed more likely that they simply wanted her to starve to death.

A third possibility entered the equation—death from poisonous mushrooms. She didn’t know much about fungus or dragons, but maybe it was possible that the bioluminescent fungus had some kind of compound that would be deadly?

Kristen realized she might have to test that hypothesis, but she would have to test it much sooner if she stopped moving. With her gaze focused on the slick rock beneath her feet, she proceeded cautiously and watched the rivulets of water trickle into tiny streams that ran across the floor.

As she walked, the angle grew steeper while the floor grew more slippery with both the bioluminescent fungus and another variety that either helped the glowing one or consumed it.

Kristen knelt to look at this new organism and one of her feet slid out from under her. Her butt landed hard and before she could recover, she began to slide down the path, dislodging the two kinds of fungus with her feet and her hands as she tried to gain purchase on something.

Her efforts were futile. She tried to turn her hands to steel but that only made her heavier, which negated the additional grip strength it provided.

She gained speed at an alarming rate like she was riding the world’s deepest and slimiest water slide. Finally, a stalagmite in the middle of the path offered her a way to stop.

Resolute, she gritted her teeth, turned her body, and careened into the rock spike. She refrained from turning to steel out of fear of breaking it, so her ribs and abs took most of the blunt force.

Still, she’d suffered far worse wounds in the line of duty. She unwound herself from the stalagmite and immediately thanked it for saving her life. A little beyond the piece of rock was a small, shallow pool. Hardly an inch deep and filled with all the fungus she had dislodged, it didn’t offer much in the way of respite from thirst. Worse still was that beyond it was nothing but another plunging pit. If she hadn’t caught herself, she’d have plunged…she could only guess how far.

Kristen looked at the pool of water collecting around her feet. It couldn’t be that bad, right? Surely the fungus wouldn’t be too dangerous, and she was so thirsty. Even the sound of the tiny pool of water dripping over the edge made her want to fill a glass and drink. She could almost imagine the drips falling and landing in a creek or a river.

Wait.

Was that her imagination?

Frozen, she listened intently.

She could hear water flowing below, not only a trickle but an actual sizeable body of water. Surely that couldn’t be contaminated? She shrugged after a moment’s thought. Soon, it wouldn’t matter. She was getting thirstier and thirstier but she could make it farther.

Tentatively, she peered over the ledge and saw that the water fell maybe fifty feet into what looked like a choppy pool of water. It wasn’t a straight fall but a series of tiny streams trickling down the rockface.

Kristen considered the odds. She could probably make the jump and reach the water. Months and months of flying as a dragon gave her a way better sense of her own aerodynamics than she once had, but she knew a jump would be too risky. Despite her keen dragon eyes, she still couldn’t see below the surface. For all she knew, there could be a jagged crystal ready to gore her. Given her current condition and reserves of strength, it seemed unwise to push her dragon healing powers any more than she already had.

There was nothing to be done but climb down. She kicked her shoes off and turned her hands and feet to steel. Then, step by step, she descended the slick, slimy surface. Once, she lost her footing but she maintained her handholds and recovered. Another time, she misjudged the flow of water where she thrust her steel fingers into the stone and a trickle of water ran down her arm and into her face.

Despite her trepidation about the fungus, she swallowed a mouthful almost without thinking. It was blessedly cool and tasted more of minerals than mushrooms. If it planned to kill her, it seemed to want to taste good before it did so.

Finally, her forearms aching, she reached a rock shelf free of slime and fungus beside the pool.

The first thing Kristen realized was that it wasn’t a pool at all but part of an underground river. In the low light, her dragon eyes could see that it was the rich blue of glaciers. She looked hastily around her, using both her eyes and aura sense to feel for someone or something that might be here. This was a great place for a trap. Watering holes had been used for ambushes since creatures had first lived on land, but she neither saw nor felt anyone. Unable to resist any longer, she dunked her head in the swift current and gulped the sweet, life-giving water.

She drank until she had to pee and damn, it was good.

With her thirst quenched, she studied her surroundings. Truly, there wasn’t much to them. The slimy cliff wall she’d come down, a tiny chamber at its base, and the river. There might have been another exit, but the water blocked the way. It was simply another dead end.

Well, not dead as there was water, but it still didn’t seem like a way to escape.

Disheartened, she plopped onto her butt and didn’t mind that she got it soaked. She couldn’t help but wonder about the rest of her team and hoped they were all doing better than she was.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The drive to the local Dragon SWAT took longer than Larry would have liked. Traffic in Bogota was insane despite the fact that the entire city reversed the direction of many of its streets to better accommodate rush hour.

They drove past skyscrapers fighting tropical jungle trees for height and sunlight, cafes that filled the air with the heady aroma of coffee, and car dealerships that stacked their cars on the first three floors of their buildings because there simply wasn’t enough area to build a parking lot.

After an hour that felt longer than their flight, the cars finally arrived at the headquarters. The offices were on the top floor of a building that overlooked much of the city, and as they stepped from the elevator, he caught a glimpse of the whole city laid out before him. It was amazing to see so many apartments, houses, shops, stores, and everything else jammed between two mountain ranges. It almost seemed that when it rained, the houses were washed out of the jungle to all grow in the valley between the two mountains.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to gawk. He had a killer to catch.

They were greeted by a female dragon in a perfectly tailored black suit jacket, skirt, and heels. She looked elegant, gorgeous, and imperious as she ignored the mage and the other humans and welcomed Heartsbane and Emerald.

“Welcome, welcome!” she said in English with a touch of a Colombian accent. “I trust your trip was all right.”

“It was long, actually,” Larry replied.

The woman looked at him with sharp disdain before she turned to the dragons. “Please, come sit. I’ve had one of our mages prepare a tinto for you. It’s the true way to enjoy coffee. None of that drip nonsense you Americans are so keen on.”

“I don’t mind if I do,” Emerald said and followed the woman into a large conference room that had been transformed into a jungle at the top of the city. On a table made of a slab of wood that was probably worth more than everything in Larry’s bank account sat a tiny pitcher of coffee, four cups, and a huge platter of perfectly ripe and beautifully sliced tropical fruit. A mage lifted one of the cups quickly and spirited it away to another room.

Emerald settled into a chair and reached for a cup of coffee as the pitcher lifted itself and poured it for him. Obviously, a mage hidden somewhere did the work but it was fairly impressive.

“This is great.” He beamed. “Heartsbane, you have to try this.”

“I would but it doesn’t look like there are enough cups to go round,” she responded.

“Oh, there are enough,” their hostess said and pointed down the hall. “We always keep coffee for the mages, and there’s fruit as well. Off you all go while the masters talk.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Larry protested. “I need to speak to someone in charge.”

“I heard about you,” the dragon replied. “One of the Steel Dragon’s little pets, hmm? Well, I assure you, little mage, that your coffee will taste as good as ours. Now then, like I said, off you go.”

That was quite enough for Heartsbane. She pulsed anger with her dragon aura so strongly that even Larry grew irate. “You do realize you are speaking to the personal envoy of Investigator Steel?”

“A pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” the woman all but purred. “I am known as Muerte de Arbol, although you can simply call me Muerte.”

“Not me, you moron. Him.” Heartsbane shoved Larry forward and he managed to stay on his feet despite the enormous discomfort he now felt.

He had to admit, he’d never noticed how bad the anti-mage bias could be. He’d worked with Windlock for so long that he’d kind of grown accustomed to how things worked. The old investigator had always treated him with more than enough respect—and even tolerated his constant rambling jokes—that he had never noticed any negative attitudes. When they’d been in situations like this, his boss had always made it very clear that he wanted Larry to get as much information as he could from the mages while he worked the dragons. Had there been ulterior motives? Had part of Windlock’s actions been designed to keep him out of the way?

No, he wouldn’t entertain any notions that besmirched the memory of his old boss—or, rather, his old friend. Windlock had been special. He’d seen that Kristen Hall could change the world despite—no, because of—growing up as a human.

Larry needed to make this Muerte see the world in the same terms. He darted his teammate a look that he hoped expressed his cautious thanks.

To Muerte’s credit, she didn’t argue with Heartsbane. She was focused on the mage and her lips worked in confusion while her gaze tried to look directly at him rather than through him. Mostly, she failed.

I might as well make it easier on the poor dragon, he thought. “We’ll need more coffee,” he said, not to the dragon so much as to her hidden mage servants who no doubt waited in the wings of the jungled conference room to bring out whatever was demanded.

Their hostess nodded to add weight to his order, and he sat and used his telekinetic skills to pour himself a cup of coffee and lift it to his lips, all without touching it. He might as well show these dragons that they weren’t the only special ones.

“This is good coffee—as strong as anything and as flavorful as hell. You guys will love it,” he said and turned to the members of the Detroit SWAT team who’d accompanied him.

Muerte didn’t understand the significance of the look, but the team did. Butters took the lead and they all entered the conference room, ducked under the broad leaves of tropical plants, and sat around the massive boardroom table.

“This is nice,” Keith said and drummed on it with his knuckles.

“It should be,” Muerte said and made no effort to hide her annoyance. “It was taken from the largest tree this continent has ever seen.”

“That’s cool, I guess,” Hernandez responded.

The Bolivian woman looked like she intended to say something, but Larry cut her off to guide the conversation back to the business at hand as a mage brought more coffee.

“Look, we don’t mean to intrude here. I don’t know what has you all so busy that you can’t send us an envoy, but we’re here to help. Do you want to show us the intel you’ve gathered on the assassination?”

“Assassination?” Previously, Muerte had looked uncomfortable when the humans pushed into her space but now, she looked downright confused. “What assassination?”

“Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? The request we received stated that a dragon ball was bombed, killing three and wounding four others. That’s why you called us in. The mage who answered my call knew nothing about that and mentioned that an avalanche not far from here killed a dragon..”

“An…avalanche?” she asked.

“Yes, apparently. So, if it’s not too much to ask, I’d appreciate a full briefing on whatever the hell happened so we don’t waste any more time.”

At that moment, an overweight man in a stunningly tight blue suit rounded the corner and entered the conference room with a cup of coffee in his hand. Larry had spent enough time with dragons to recognize that he was one simply by his posture. He spoke without looking up. “Any marching orders today, Muerte, or is it another day of the usual—oh.” He froze when he noticed a group of humans crowded around their table. “I see we have visitors.”

“We’re not visitors,” Larry protested, now a little frustrated. “We were invited here—as in asked to come. We didn’t simply decide to come all the way here when the world’s on the precipice of a war. We’re here to help, dammit!”

“I know this might seem unusual without Lady Steel herself here, but she reports to the Dragon Council and will be here to help soon. We want to be ready for her when she arrives,” Emerald said from his place at the table.

Muerte and the newcomer shared a look.

“Well,” the heavy dragon began, “My name is Hambre, by the way.” He cleared his throat. “We didn’t call for any assistance. We’ve heard of Lady Steel, of course—everyone has—but I certainly didn’t know about this visit. Muerte?”

“The first I heard of it was when you called from the airport,” she said. “Honestly, I thought this would be some kind of spot inspection. The Dragon Council used to do those kinds of things, although it’s been ages.”

“No, this isn’t some kind of spot check,” Larry said and tried to contain his temper. “We responded to the assassination of three dragons at a ball, only to discover that a dragon was buried alive.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Hambre agreed. “But he dug himself out. Oro is obsessed with mining and always has been. He buries himself in an avalanche every few years. The last one had explosives involved, but that’s hardly unusual.”

The mage rubbed his eyes and tried to make sense of all this. “Look, I didn’t want to do this, but I need to speak to Mr. Ham-ber. That’s the man who sent the orders,” he said and retrieved the printout Kristen had given him before they’d left.

Hambre smiled indulgently at him. “I am Mr. Ham-ber, as you say it. In Spanish, it sounds like ahm-bray.”

“Ah, right. Well then, what’s the damn problem? Your signature is right here on the order.” He passed the printout across the wide table and the man took it.

“This certainly looks official,” he began.

“I know it’s official. That’s why we’re down here. We wouldn’t have come all this way if we didn’t get a request from you. So drop the crap and fill us in on what’s going on. I understand that I’m not the Steel Dragon, but I know her damn well at this point and can assure you she’d be pissed at how much time we’re wasting.”

Larry could immediately tell from Hambre’s posture that he had never been spoken to in this way before and especially never by a mage.

“I understand that it looks official and that my signature appears to be on the document, but I never gave these orders. What you have in your hands is a forgery, albeit a very convincing one.”

He frowned at the document, then at the Bolivian. “Well, shit.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kristen looked at the underground river and wondered for not the first time where it went. It had carved a hole in the rock wall and vanished into it, and the aperture was large enough for her body. She hadn’t yet made up her mind to go through it.

Her steel body could take a fair amount of battering. For that matter, so could her human form given her healing abilities. The larger concern was oxygen. How long could she hold her breath down there? It was a question she hadn’t bothered to think about since she discovered that she was the Steel Dragon. After all, steel sank. Water was very much her weakness. Her plan to deal with it thus far had been to get out of it as quickly as possible. Even when she’d faced three dragons intent on killing her in the north of Canada, she’d focused on that strategy when she faced a water dragon. She was still alive so thus far, it had served her well.

The question was how quickly she would be able to get out of the river. Unfortunately, it was one she couldn’t answer. Dragons had many powers that humans did not, but X-ray vision was still something relegated to comic books.

Or so she had thought. She still couldn’t shake the thought that she was being watched down there. It was the only thing that made sense. Why bring her down there if not to watch her? But if she was being watched, she had no idea by who or even what. She’d seen no footprints and no evidence of anyone but herself.

Going into the river wasn’t following a path or fleeing an enemy but a chance to escape. She had to take it, she decided.

But could she?

She decided to test herself and hold her breath to give her an idea of how long she could hope to stay down there. On her first attempt, she managed to count to four hundred and seventy-two. That was almost eight minutes. Kristen was shocked. She had never been a swimmer and had never been able to hold her breath for anything close to eight minutes. While she had no idea how long divers could hold their breath, eight minutes seemed fairly good to her.

Encouraged by that, she decided she still wouldn’t simply hop in without another test. This time, she counted past six hundred before she gasped for air. That was over ten minutes. Yes, her sides ached from the buildup of lactic acid and lack of oxygen, but she knew she could last a while down there.

But would it be enough?

There was no way to know. Based on the speed, she felt like she’d cover considerable distance quickly, but what if the river remained completely submerged for a half-hour? She’d be dead and no one would ever know how she’d gone.

But that was unlikely, wasn’t it? The entire cave system had been anything but uniform. Every tunnel and cavern had heights of different levels and rooms of different sizes. The chances were the river would lead through a place with air. It flowed fairly quickly, which meant it had to go somewhere with room for it. Otherwise, it would merely sit there, right? She wished Ranger Jay, of all people, were with her. He’d probably know the answers to all her questions.

Without him, she had to simply take a chance.

The decision loomed before her but she knew what she would do. She couldn’t wait down there, trying and failing to find a way out again and again and starving slowly while she lost her mind. She was a woman of action and would rather regret the decisions she made than the ones she didn’t.

It was true that the outcome of this particular choice had higher stakes than most, but that didn’t dissuade Kristen. She set a five-minute timer on her watch, thankful that whoever had taken her cellphone had left her with the device, and plunged in.

For a moment, she simply stood in the cold water, her steel hands digging into the rock of the shore while cold water rushed past her steel legs. Was this a good plan? Surely this water had to go somewhere, and wherever it was would have fresh water and maybe something better to eat than glowing fungus.

Procrastinating would serve no purpose, she reminded herself and released her hold on the rock.

She let the current take her and kept her hands, feet, knees, and elbows steel so she could protect herself without using any more energy than necessary. Very quickly—thirty seconds by her watch—she was sucked into a larger tube with even faster-moving water.

As best she could, she kept her feet close to the bottom as the water surged and carried her forward. She thought she could dig in and climb up if she needed to, but when the floor began to angle down, she realized that would be harder than she anticipated. One minute traveling downstream would not equate to one minute traveling upstream.

Kristen couldn’t do the mental calculations to determine how long she could go before the point of no return. Her mind was fully occupied with the water that pushed her at what felt like breakneck speed and the jagged pieces of rocks that protruded and threatened to snag her and drown her.

All she could do was keep her head from impact with the ceiling and hold her breath.

After three minutes, the tunnel widened and seemed to stop. She bulldozed against a wall of porous limestone like a fish caught in a pump. The current pressed her against it and flowed through a multitude of cracks too small for her to get through.

This was it, her point of no return. She could try to climb up the tunnel again and still had seven minutes to do that. Surely she could travel half as fast as the current had pushed her.

She pushed off the limestone that blocked her path and launched herself as far as possible. Her effort didn’t take her far but her pressure knocked a large chunk out of the dam. She took that as a sign that brute force was the way to go, let the current position her against the obstacle, and shattered it with rhythmic blows.

No sooner had she widened a large enough opening than the water behind her thanked her by surging even faster. Now, she moved so rapidly it was hard to keep herself oriented. She tried to dig into the sides of the tunnel and succeeded in jamming her fingers into the soft limestone but not halting her motion.

Every time she gouged a hole in the rock, it simply turned into a long gash as the water used her to erode the tunnel it had worked on for centuries.

Kristen checked her watch. Six minutes. Seven. Her lungs began to hurt.

The steep angle of the tunnel leveled out into a much wider pool of water. She turned her body parts to flesh and swam to the surface, only to find there wasn’t one.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was maybe an eighth of an inch of space in some of the more generous places of the cave. It made her wonder if this room would have been so flooded if she hadn’t broken the obstruction.

She tried to gain air from the tiny layer at the top of the room but failed and only inhaled water and made her lungs scream at her to take in air. The current slowed, which was a bad thing as her lungs were burning and her vision began to close in as her brain protested the lack of oxygen.

Desperate, she checked her watch. Nine minutes. She would drown in a room with a breath of air at the surface that was too spread out for her to use.

When she reached ten minutes, her lungs burned far more than they had when she’d practiced and she knew the need for air was critical. She’d never needed anything so badly. Her brain either saw or hallucinated a fish and her delirious mind thought that if a fish could breathe underwater, why not her?

Oh no, you don’t. She pushed the temptation aside and gritted her teeth.

Kristen continued to swim and tried to move with the current, although her arms screamed at her to stop and her legs tried to sink.

At eleven minutes, she began to black out. Her vision had almost gone and her muscles were essentially useless. Soon, breathing wouldn’t be a problem as once the water filled her lungs, her death would follow quickly.

In the next moment, she realized she was in the air. Water droplets were all around her and below her was a huge pool of water.

She sucked the air in hungrily and managed to fill her lungs before she rocketed into the surface of the underground lake.

The pain made her turn to steel reflexively so she sank like a lead weight, ever deeper into this hell within the earth.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Drew’s old cop instincts told him to move, to change places, and to get the hell out, but he didn’t think it was wise. As a precaution, he went to the front desk of the hotel and gave the receptionist a couple of hundred bucks to tell anyone who came looking for him to go to a different room, but he didn’t see the point of high-tailing it out of town simply because the cops seemed questionable.

It was encouraging rather than disheartening. They hadn’t sniffed around for very long at all and had already found something that stank. It was time to follow the stench to the source.

Amy and Lumos were in a motel room playing cards. She was currently shuffling the entire deck with only her mind and was doing a good job until he said hello. Her concentration faltered and the cards were strewn everywhere.

“How’d the visit with local law go?” Lumos asked, stood, and—to Drew’s absolute shock—went to serve himself some of the leftover banana pudding from the barbeque place.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something’s not right with them.”

“Do you think they’re mages?” Amy asked and scattered the cards she’d spent so much time reorganizing in her excitement.

“I don’t know. Not really. But maybe? They didn’t like that I worked with Kristen, that’s for sure, and they seemed to know something about what’s going on.”

“Do you think we should go back and ask a bit more forcefully?” the dragon asked in an extremely polite tone.

“No, I don’t,” he said flatly. “I think if we show up there and start levitating their trucks and attacking them with a gold dragon, they’ll either lay low or dig in. What I want is a way to lure them out or track them or something, but they know the area way better than we do, so that’s a real risk.”

“It kind of touches on an idea I’ve been working on,” the mage said.

“Oh?” Lumos looked a little put out. “You didn’t tell me you had any ideas.”

“I wasn’t sure you would like it.”

“And you think I would?” Drew asked.

She grimaced. “Honestly? No. I thought you’d like it even less than him, but since you mentioned luring them…”

Her companions looked at her expectantly. “Go on,” Lumos said when she wasn’t immediately forthcoming.

“All right, well…here goes, then.” The young mage grinned, which told Drew that whatever her plan was, even she knew it was a little crazy. “Mages can sense magic, right? So what if I fired a really big burst of magic—ideally at someplace outside of town we feel like we can lock down or whatever. They’d be sure to come looking.”

Lumos nodded. “It’s not…totally insane. I think that based on how Constance tried to track you and recruit you after your powers manifested, it’s not unthinkable to imagine that this cell would also be interested in recruiting someone of your…shall we say power level.”

Amy turned to Drew.

It was his turn to grimace. He didn’t think it was quite as wise a plan as the dragon seemed to. “What happens after we lure them to this location of yours? Let’s assume we actually can find a place where somehow, we’re confident that no one can sneak up on us and have the advantage. What do we do once they arrive? It’s not like we can simply roll out and arrest them.”

“We could follow them to their base?” Lumos suggested.

“Hardly.” He shook his head. “If they sense a magic blast and come to investigate—which I think they would—why would they simply leave when their search comes up empty? Even if they did leave, they won’t go directly to their secret base. And let’s say they did go back to there, then what? We can’t tail them in a truck. They’d see us. A dragon or a woman on a magic towel will probably alert them too. We can’t assume they’re dense.”

“If those rednecks are involved, dense looks like the name of the game,” Amy snarked.

“We can’t count on that, though,” Drew insisted.

“He’s right,” the dragon agreed. “The wise warrior knows his strength comes from hiding it.”

“Okay, well, those are good points,” the young mage said, although her confidence didn’t seem shaken. “So the next part of the plan was that maybe we can try the Chewbacca switch?”

Her teammates shared a long, confused look. Lumos didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Drew was only moderately more aware. “Is that like a skateboarding move or something?” he asked.

Her jaw all but hit the floor. “You two can’t be serious? You don’t know the Chewbacca switch?”

“Let’s assume we don’t,” the old dragon said with a smile.

“I can’t—you’ve never seen Star Wars?”

“Oh, sure. I saw Star Wars,” the SWAT leader said. “Chewbacca, he’s the uh…he’s not the one with the laser sword…so he must be the, uh…the dog thing?”

“He’s a Wookie,” Amy said and almost fell out of her chair in shock. “He’s Han Solo’s—you know what, never mind. Lumos, tell me you’ve seen Star Wars?”

He smiled. “I’m afraid not. I’m more of a mystery man rather than war films.”

“It’s not a war—okay, seriously, when this is all over, I’ll get pizza and you two will come over to watch the trilogy.”

“A trilogy?” Drew started to complain but she silenced him with a look.

“Yes. A trilogy. The greatest trilogy ever made so—okay, moving on. The Chewbacca switch is—Jesus, I can’t believe I’m worried about spoiling something from Star Wars, of all things. Anyway, so the Millennium Falcon is captured and storm troopers come on, right?”

“You understand we only know what half of those words mean, right?” Drew told her.

“Right. I’m working with a dinosaur and a caveman.” The girl shook her head in disappointment. “We pretend we captured Lumos and sent the magic flare up to signal them. It could work because my bracelet looks like a power dampener to mages and dragons. If we put it on him, it would look like we caught him and blocked his powers. I thought Drew could play the part of my bodyguard or something.”

He nodded. It wasn’t necessarily a bad plan. If they could rough Lumos up a little, it might work.

“And then what?” the dragon asked and had clearly not grasped the full implication.

“I don’t know.” Amy grimaced and sank into her chair. “It was a dumb plan. I thought you guys might get it but since you don’t even know who Chewie is… Never mind.”

“Actually,” Drew murmured, “I don’t think it’s the worst plan out there. Lumos, can you control your healing ability? Like, if I gave you a black eye, would you be able to keep it bruised so it looked like your healing powers were blocked?”

“Ugh, I suppose so,” his teammate replied although he didn’t sound pleased at the prospect. “I haven’t had to walk around bruised in quite some time. Not since I lost a bet in the Dark Ages.”

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” Amy asked.

“I think that if we did it, we would certainly be able to get good intel on the cell. There’s a real risk that we could be found out and we’ll need a plan on what to say to those cops if they show up, but Detroit doesn’t have the best reputation. I guess… I guess I could pretend to be a dirty cop.” He couldn’t help but shudder because he hated the stereotype of the corrupt police officer. But if he had to do it to help free another dragon, he could endure. “Do you think they’d be able to capture us if it went pear-shaped?”

“We’ll have to assume they have dragon bullets,” Lumos said slowly, although he looked at Amy.

“I’ve been learning how to sense magic and think I’ll be able to tell if there’s anyone as strong as me. If not…well, not to brag, but I can stop bullets,” she replied.

“Okay.” Drew nodded. “I think this could work. Our plan will be to spring this trap tomorrow, which means we have preparations to make.”

“Like what?” Lumos asked.

“Well, I’ll rent a truck and explore the land around here for somewhere to spring this trap.”

“Wouldn’t that work better if one of us did it since we can fly?” Amy asked.

“I don’t think so. We need cover, which is not something either of you has ever had to think about. I want a location where we can get out without flying through a storm of bullets if possible, which means I need to find it, not either of you.”

“What are we supposed to do while you’re doing that?” the dragon asked.

“We need this cell to know there’s a dragon in the area, so when they see you, they know what you are right away. That means you need to be seen.”

“Can do.” Lumos beamed. “I’d be more than happy to go out dancing tonight. I’ll let myself glow a little.”

“That’ll do it,” Drew agreed.

“And what if he is shot while he’s out on the town?” the mage asked.

“That’s where you come in,” he said. “I want you to get into the character of a bounty hunter. Tail him and keep him in your sights and a glare on your face. If anyone is watching him and they see you, they’ll simply think he’s pissing you off. If anyone tries to intervene, stop them from shooting our golden dragon.”

“What if it’s those three boys we saw?” she asked. “They already saw us together.”

He nodded. In all honesty, he’d forgotten about them.

“I could use my aura on them,” Lumos suggested.

“That could work,” he said. “Or, Amy, you could approach them and ask if the dragon was from around here? Make it seem like you just met him.”

The others exchanged glances and nodded. This could work. It could go wrong but it could work.

“Hopefully, though, you won’t see them tonight, and I kind of doubt that they’re part of this cell anyway. Loose lips sink ships and all that,” Drew said.

“So, we’re doing this, then?” Amy retrieved her duffel.

“I think so,” he confirmed. “I’ll find somewhere for the trap and you two drop a few crumbs. We’ll do this tomorrow, which means I’ll simply camp when I’m done. I’ll call you with coordinates and you can come out when you’re ready.”

“Do you think we should do it in town?” she asked.

Drew gave her a hard look. “I’ve seen what you can do. If this does take a turn, I have no doubt you’ll be able to keep us alive but I’d like you to not destroy the town of Elgin to do it. I feel like the Texas scrubland will better be able to withstand your rage.”

The mage smiled. “As long as you’re doing it to protect everyone else and not me, it sounds good.”

He nodded. That was why they were there, wasn’t it? They needed to protect as many people as possible, even if it meant they had to walk themselves into a trap of their devising.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Idon’t see how the hell this could be a forgery,” Larry said and wished he could feel something besides the terror that threatened to overwhelm his disbelief.

“There’s nothing else it could be,” Hambre said. “I did not send these orders because we do not have a single murder, let alone three. We don’t even have a dead dragon.”

“But someone made it seem like you did. Someone on the inside,” he persisted.

The Columbian stood from the giant wooden table, his hand to his chest in umbrage. “You dare accuse my mages of being traitorous? How dare you!”

The mage felt his year of conditioning snap when the dragon spoke to him like that. Yes, Windlock had always been kind to him, but Larry had spent considerable time amongst dragons. Most of them did not tolerate a mage speaking when not spoken to. Hambre, despite tolerating him thus far, did not seem inclined to do so any longer.

Fortunately, Larry had brought enough people who didn’t have any compunction when it came to challenging dragons.

“Who said anything about mages?” Keith demanded. His tone was careful, controlled, and anything but accusatory, and yet Hambre reacted as if he’d been struck.

“How dare you!”

“Now, now,” Butters said and tried to calm everyone with a placating gesture. “We’ve met a few lousy dragons over our time dealing with all this and one that was raised by mages. Is it so crazy to think that one of them might have somehow infiltrated the SWAT team here?”

“And why assume it was our team?” Muerte de Arbol asked as she reached for a piece of fruit and eviscerated it with a hand transformed into a claw. She barely contained her temper. Strangely, that put Larry slightly at ease. Dragons were masters of deception. They had to be, given their auras. He couldn’t imagine either of these two tricking them into being there and then acting so affronted at the idea. If one of them did this, they’d have things to say to him—false reassurances, weird hypotheses, false leads, and certainly something more than anger and vitriol leveled with such indignation and conviction.

“I have to make a call,” he said and pushed from the table. Despite him being the official envoy to Investigator Steel, they hardly noticed. They were too engaged in arguing with Emerald and Heartsbane, not to mention the uppity humans who didn’t seem to mind responding vociferously to the dragons.

Still, to be cautious, he tapped Heartsbane’s shoulder with an invisible telekinetic poke. She nodded. They’d worked out on the plane what to do if she needed his help—a way she could use her aura that wouldn’t be misread as something else. If he suddenly felt like he was falling in love in the lobby, he’d return to the conference room with his powers ready to batter a few dragon heads.

But when he left, Heartsbane didn’t immediately signal him, which again made him think that whoever had led them to Columbia wasn’t necessarily from there. If the plan was to lure the team there and hurt them, it would make sense to strike when the mage was away. When no strike came, he leaned even more strongly toward the possibility that the Columbians had been used.

Larry didn’t waste time, however. He dialed Drew and urged him to pick up his cellphone from thousands of miles away.

“Larry? How’s it going down there in the jungle?” the man said and wasted no time, which was much appreciated.

“We’re getting in too deep to see the whole thing. All I see is trees,” he replied.

“That doesn’t sound good. What’s happening?”

“We’re on a false lead down here. The Bogota office said the marching orders we responded to were fakes.”

Drew didn’t respond at first. Larry realized it was because he’d taken the phone away from his face and cursed up a storm away from the receiver. A few moments later, he came back on the line. “I don’t quite know what to tell you, Larry.”

“How’s it going in Texas? I’m worried we were all sent off to split the team up. Are you guys all right?”

“Yeah… In fact, we’ve picked up some leads here and I think that if this is supposed to be a trap for us, we might as well spring it.”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, I went to the local police who are obviously in on something that doesn’t help dragons. They ain’t exactly masters of discretion. I think since we’re on the hunt and this intel is a little older, whatever took you down there doesn’t have much to do with us.”

“Have you talked to Kristen?” Larry asked.

“No. But I think you should call her. If someone tried to split us up, they did a good job of it and she’s by herself.” The statement immediately made his pulse pound a little faster.

“And you’re sure your team is all right?”

“I am. I don’t think they expected us here at all. We’ll keep at it, but let me know the minute something changes and we can abandon ship. It’s only…well, I’d rather not. I have a feeling we have them on the run here. I’d rather scare them into a fence than give them time to dig their way out.”

“Fair enough,” Larry agreed. “We’ll be in touch.” He hung up and immediately dialed Kristen.

It went to voicemail so he tried again with the same response. When he called a third time, there was no answer.

He knew some dragons would ignore a phone call from a mage if they were addressing the Dragon Council. Hell, most mages probably thought that was the right thing to do, but not Kristen. She always picked up when one of her team members called, especially if they called again in quick succession. Nothing could have induced her to simply let her phone go to voicemail. She knew they were heading into danger—or she thought they were heading into danger, as she didn’t know that the whole thing had been a false lead—and would have made herself available in case they needed her.

The mage swallowed and felt both frustrated and helpless that he was in a different hemisphere than his boss.

Larry walked into the conference room to find that the argument between the dragons had escalated and little progress had been made.

“We all know there are dragons who don’t have the interest of our society at heart,” Emerald stated. “The whole damn reason we’re on Dragon SWAT is because of dragons like them.”

“But the dragons who are capable of sending you that message can be trusted,” Hambre protested, his words like jagged stone. “It’s far more likely that someone…what’s the word for it—hacked into the system.”

“I don’t think so—” Keith, the closest thing they had to a tech guy, tried to say but the dragons ignored him.

“Kristen didn’t answer,” Larry said. The South American dragons paid no attention to him or his statement, but Heartsbane and Emerald immediately shifted their focus to the mage.

“What do you mean she didn’t answer?” Emerald asked.

“Excuse me?” Hambre said as if he hadn’t heard the lowly mage at all.

Heartsbane noticed the slight and proceeded to completely ignore the dragon.

“You tried her more than once?” she asked.

He nodded. “Three times.”

She nodded grimly before she mustered enough bluster to say, “Maybe she’s out of cell range.”

“Or she could be somewhere indoors with bad reception,” Emerald added, although he didn’t sound like he believed his attempt at an excuse any more than she had believed hers.

“They could be in an area with cell-blockers,” Keith added with a shrug.

“How in the cotton fields of Georgia is that supposed to make us feel better?” Butters demanded.

The Rookie smiled his goofy grin. “I mean that the Dragon Council might have cell phone blockers. If they are that paranoid, it means they’re finally taking all this seriously. I don’t think the mages would go through all the effort to block her cell when they could simply…” He swallowed, his discomfort obvious, and didn’t need to finish the sentence for everyone to know exactly what he was talking about.

Muerte and Hambre’s jaws hung wider in utter disbelief as the humans, mage, and dragons all ignored them. Larry couldn’t help but smile at their discomfort. This was probably the first time in centuries—maybe ever—that they had received that kind of treatment. It was good to give them a taste of what the rest of the world felt like with dragons on the top rung.

But the feeling was short-lived. Kristen still hadn’t answered, they were still there on false orders, and all of it still felt wrong.

“I hate to be the one to be a downer, but we can’t make any of those assumptions given that we’re here on false pretenses,” he said.

That startled the table into silence. Even Muerte and Hambre looked like they weighed the implications of what their SWAT division had been roped into.

“I’ll make another call.” The mage retrieved his phone and dialed Brian. This time, he didn’t bother to leave the conference room since everyone simply stared at him anyway.

“Zed speaking.”

“Who?” Larry asked.

“Brian. Come on, man. You’re supposed to use my codename.”

“Whatever. I have bad news, Zed. Have you heard from Kristen?”

“Not since she left,” he said and his voice dropped from know-it-all amusement to terror in the span of four words.

Larry filled him on what had happened, how they’d found nothing, how Drew was all right, and how Kristen was missing. As he spoke, something seemed to roar across the phone line. His imagination—filled as it was with a history of battling dragons and mages—conjured images of furious dragons and angry spellcasters, but it was something far more innocuous for the modern age—Brian typing.

“She’s not responding but I’ll get as much data from the cellphone as I possibly can,” the techie said. His voice sounded both urgent and strangely vacant as his brain shifted into the ever-hungry mode of a man who devoured information from the Internet.

“Anything?” Larry asked after a moment.

“It’ll take me more time than that,” the young man mumbled. “I got a hit on a Facebook page for some guy named Ranger Jay. He took a photo with her. I’ll see what else I can get. When I call you, pick up.”

“Of course,” he replied, but Brian had already hung up.

The mage had hoped that the conversation would help to calm him. He’d wanted Kristen’s brother to tell him that she was sick of talking to him, that she was testing him, or that she did this kind of stuff all the time. What he hadn’t expected was for him to devolve into panic-controlled research-mode so quickly.

“What’s the plan?” Heartsbane asked.

“Thank you very much for having us here and for the, uh—”

“Fruit platter!” Butters interjected and saved Larry’s ass from seeming rude.

“But we need to go. Did you send those armored cars away or are they still here?” he asked.

“They’re still here,” Muerte said.

“Dragon wings will be faster with the traffic here,” Emerald said.

“We can’t risk going airborne,” Beanpole said.

“May I remind you that there was no murder here,” their hostess said and sounded imperious.

“Our intel still says there was a cell here, though,” Keith told her. “They might be waiting to spook us into flight so they can pop off a couple of shots.”

“Damn it,” Larry cursed. “Keith’s right. We take the cars, head home, and hope to hell that Brian can get us a location before we reach Detroit.”

The team nodded, seemingly mollified by his orders and urgency. That was good. It meant he was at last being a somewhat competent leader. Windlock had always had that effect on him. They could face a team of murderous dragons and the investigator would talk about his coffee like there was nothing dangerous in the world.

The mage hadn’t quite managed that level of control, but his team at least looked somewhat calmed. Lucky them. A tornado of panic swirled in his gut and he worried that it wouldn’t go away until he found the Steel Dragon’s body after she’d been murdered while she was all alone.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Kristen plunged into the frigid lake and sank like a stone. After being trapped alone and in the dark for so long, the embrace of the ice-cold water was immensely refreshing and the shock of the sudden contact made her gasp with a split-second of exhilaration.

She tried to change her steel skin but her strength was insufficient. Her body defaulted to her dragon form, expanding quickly in the subterranean lake, and filled it with glittery shards of silver that vanished once the transformation was complete.

Knowing she had only seconds before her weight became an issue, she pumped her wings and drove herself to the surface. Her stomach reminded her how hungry she was but she ignored it. She burst through the surface of the lake and into the largest room she’d been in yet, although it was still too small for her to stand as a dragon, let alone spread her wings. While the pool was deep enough to completely hold her form, the part where she could breathe was noticeably less spacious.

Her dragon eyes narrowed in the gloom, unable to make sense of the space. She knew it might not be the smartest idea, but she released a few tiny balls of flame so she could get her bearings in this odd cavern.

It was enormous. The size of a huge lake—being from Michigan, she was quick to tell herself not a great one—the room was mostly underwater. Only a handful of feet of air stretched from the surface to the ceiling. She would be able to stand if she reverted to human form but wouldn’t be able to do so as a dragon, let alone fly.

As she changed into her human form once more, Kristen realized how tired she was. The ordeal through the tube had battered and bruised her body, and her healing powers had difficulty taking care of it. She swam to the shore and the effort left her almost winded.

Shore was a generous word for the edge of the underground lake. It was more like a stony shelf that ran up at a slight angle to the wall. Stalactites and stalagmites grew from the ceiling and the floor. Here and there, they joined into columns that were wide enough to hide a man’s body behind them.

An unnecessarily paranoid thought, she tried to tell herself. If someone was following her—and she didn’t see how they could, not after her little water slide adventure—why had they still not attacked? Theories began to swirl in her mind like eddies in the cold water. She shook them resolutely from her mind and the cold water from her skin as she scrambled out.

One of her school teachers had once told her that under the earth, the temperature was always the same, but she felt ice-cold. It was probably the water plus her lack of food and strength. She tried to remind herself that dragons rarely froze to death or died from hypothermia. They were hot-blooded, after all, with a much higher internal temperature than mammals, but she couldn’t stop shivering.

So, as unwise as it might be, she transformed into her dragon form again and blasted one of the wider stalagmites with fire to heat it until it became cherry-red. Once it glowed like a stone in a sauna, she reverted to her human body and leaned against the heated stone. A normal human would have probably burned themselves but she was a dragon. Besides, she was cold.

It felt good to be warm, a human comfort in an inhuman place. Kristen realized that she was no longer thirsty either. She’d inadvertently swallowed water in the tube and drank some while paddling to shore. But she was still tired, bruised from the tube, and hungry—and getting hungrier.

The warmth helped, as did the warm light coming off the stalagmite and her lack of thirst, but her hunger would do her in. Using her dragon powers demanded energy, and her body would need to get it from somewhere. She would starve to death far sooner than a human would. A bitter, cynical part of her pointed out that she at least wouldn’t be cold, but she couldn’t chastise herself for trying to get warm. She had been so cold her chattering teeth had made it difficult to hold a thought in her head, let alone devise a rescue plan for herself.

But at least she was alive and in need of a rescue plan. If that tube had lasted any longer or if she hadn’t been able to break through the dam, she’d be dead. Yes, she was trapped, alone, and hungry, but she was alive. She would get out of this because she had to.

Kristen pressed more firmly against the rock and tried to take stock of her situation. Moving back through the tunnel of water was out of the question. From there, it looked like little more than a hole in the ceiling with water gushing out of it. Her dragon powers were formidable but she was not a salmon.

There were undoubtedly dragons who could swim up waterfalls, but the Steel Dragon did not have that particular ability. Besides, even if she could manage it, what was waiting for her there? Dead ends and glowing fungus? That didn’t exactly sound like the kind of environment she wanted to die trying to get to.

But she didn’t see any other way out. She noticed a few dark holes in the ceiling but trying to climb up through one sounded daunting to her in her current condition. Plus, there was the threat of more dead ends. No, it was better to find another solution, but what?

Kristen looked at the water that gushed into the chamber. With a flow like that, she thought, the entire room she was in should be full.

She had gained a sense of the size of the room when she’d used her fire breath to illuminate the space, but she hadn’t paid much attention to the actual details of the walls themselves. Could there be a hole in one of them that drew the excess water from the lake? If there was, she could use the path to escape this part of her subterranean prison.

There was always the possibility that the hole where the water drained was under the lake. For that matter, there could be a series of small holes similar to the dam of debris she had punched through. If that was her only way out of there… She didn’t want to think about that.

With a heavy sigh, she studied the wide lake in front of her. How odd it was that less than an hour before, she’d been concerned about not having water and now that there was a lake of it, her brain had forgotten about how thirsty she was. She needed to escape, get out of there, and find out what the hell was happening with her team.

A splash in the water shattered the still surface and she launched to her feet, her fists raised, and turned into steel. Nothing confronted her immediately so she reached out with her dragon aura and sensed for the source of the disturbance. She almost wished it was whoever had trapped her down there so the suspense could at least be over and done with.

After another splash, she realized it wasn’t a dragon, a mage, or even a resourceful regular human armed with explosives and night-vision goggles. It was something far better—a fish!

Kristen plunged into the water, heedless of her only recently dried clothes. She belly-flopped and scared her quarry away and out into deeper water.

She took a deep breath as she stood and focused on her dragon aura sense rather than her vision.

There were more of them out there. Her stomach grumbled at the thought. Most were fairly small but a few were a decent size. The larger specimens seemed to remain near the bottom of the lake, which—given her already empty stomach—seemed too far for comfort.

Rather than swimming after the larger ones she really wanted, she waited in the shallows and remained utterly motionless as only a woman who often turned to steel could.

Realistically, she expected to be there for an hour or more and glanced at her watch. She realized only a few minutes had passed before a fish came up to her from the depths. It was some kind of sightless catfish with pale skin that almost showed its muscles beneath and long, grasping white whiskers. It spoke volumes about her current condition that seeing it made her think of deep-fried fish sticks rather than trying to banish the creature to the depths from which it had come. While it wasn’t a particularly large one—less than the length of her forearm—her current hunger decided it would be more than welcome.

It approached her and moved as directly as it could with its tail pumping its pale fleshy body through the water. Kristen realized it must be like her in that it had senses that most humans simply didn’t. She recalled sharks having an electromagnetic sense that told them when fish were near, and from the way the catfish moved, she thought it must possess some way of sensing for sources of food. It certainly seemed unerring in its approach.

It required tremendous willpower to not tremble in anticipation as she waited until one of its long white whiskers brushed her ankle.

She lunged and tried to snatch it out of the water.

Unfortunately, she failed miserably. She had relied too much on her vision and with the refraction from the surface of the water and the low lighting had succeeded in doing little more than scaring the fish into deeper water.

Disgruntled, she took a deep breath and tried to comfort herself with the feeling that she could fill her lungs even more than usual given that there was no food inside her. Grimly determined, she settled in to wait again.

It didn’t take long for another of the blind catfish—this one slightly longer—to approach the new obstacle that had suddenly taken up space in its pond.

Kristen stood still as it approached. The only movement she made was the slow elongation of the fingers of one hand into the steel claws of her dragon form.

She waited as the creature probed her with first one whisker, then another. It wouldn’t do to spook this one—for all she knew, it might use some kind of undiscovered catfish communication to tell its friends to stay away. With a mental litany to remind herself to be patient, she let it probe her ankles with its whiskers. Finally, it swam under her legs and she snagged it out of the water with her claw.

Triumphant, she raised her prey aloft. It thrashed once or twice and died, dropping scales and fish blood into the water that then called the other catfish. That effectively disproved her vague theory about the catfish somehow being a community and replaced it with the more somber truth of cold, hard survival of the fittest.

Still, she thought, as she gutted it and left the offal on a rock near the lake, she could use the parts she didn’t eat to catch more fish. She wouldn’t starve, which was all that mattered.

Her mouth watered when she put her prize on the superheated rock and it sizzled. Once it had cooked through, she took a bite. It was rubbery, bland, and tasted far worse than the already less than appetizing taste of mud so common in many catfish, but to her, it was undoubtedly the most delicious piece of fish she had ever eaten in her entire life.

She soon finished the hopefully nutritious meal, having eaten it quickly both because she was hungry and out of fear of registering the flavor and realizing how disgusting it was. That aside, she’d managed to eat it all and wasn’t grossed out about the idea of eating more of them if she needed to.

Kristen smiled as she leaned back against the warm rock that had doubled as her stove. She had water and food. All that was left to do was get out of there. She was confident that she would make it out because she was done doubting herself, done worrying, and done thinking about whoever had done this to her. This was about survival, nothing more, and she was a survivor. Period.

Nothing could stop her from finding a way out of this mess.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Masked One was there with Kristen from the moment she entered the cave with the laughable schoolboy of a ranger to the moment she dove into the stream and escaped his sights.

He had trapped her beneath a mountain of rubble and then dug her out and moved her to where he might better watch her. Often, he had been only paces away from her as she moved through the tunnels, talking to herself and wondering who had done such a thing to her.

The dragon relished her powerlessness. She was in his domain—the dark.

Lord Boneclaw’s powers were not what one would think. His dragon form looked bony and wretched—even he could admit this—but his powers… Ah, his powers were a special thing.

Now, he used them to move through the passages and followed the stream she had dove into. In the tunnels, it had been easy to stay close to her. He could dissolve into shadow as easily as a cloud could dissolve into the air. In the darkness where he had put her, he could walk around as easily as a human in a market square. He never had to return to his corporeal form like some of the lesser dragons she had faced. With his abilities, he lived in the shadow, breathed in the shadow, and was the shadow.

Even when she had found the passage with glowing fungus, the Masked One had not been dissuaded. He had moved behind a stalactite and could have stayed there for days if he had wanted to, watching her from a place no one could see, not even a dragon—the heart of the dark.

Thus far, he had not been much impressed with this world-famous dragon who had survived on nothing but dumb luck. She had not thought of a way out of the maze he had devised for her, nor had she used her brute force to simply force a path up.

Diving into the water had shown some…courage…he supposed, but not much else and certainly not wisdom.

He didn’t even know if she had survived. Although he had followed her closely thus far, he wasn’t so curious as to risk his life by simply diving into an underground stream.

Besides, why would he dive in when he had more efficient methods.

His body shrank until it was nothing but a magical veneer in the darkness. In this state, stone was hardly a barrier for him. He found cracks in the weathered limestone and flowed through them, moving through tight spaces, reaching out with limbs of shadow, and finding dead ends only to redirect his search into more useful paths.

It didn’t take him long to reach where the Steel Dragon was going. There were advantages to moving like a shadow—many, many advantages. One of which was that he could still feel surfaces, as that was the only place shadow existed if you could even say shadow existed at all. He could feel those surfaces and feel the water vibrating them as he crawled through the spaces between the stone. His seemingly endless descent ended when he emerged on the roof of a cavern that housed a huge underground lake.

And not a moment too soon, the Masked One thought gleefully as a hole in the roof that poured water briefly stopped its flow and vomited the Steel Dragon into the lake below.

She struck the water, made a tremendous splash, and proceeded to sink like an anchor.

He watched with bated breath. Would this be the end of the Steel Dragon? He moved through the darkness and closer to the shore of the lake to watch her asphyxiate underwater.

When the Steel Dragon burst from the surface of the water, no longer in her human shape, he wasn’t quite sure how to react.

Part of him was impressed. He had killed many foes over the millennia in his little tests. It was a rare thing that someone tried something so foolhardy as trying to traverse an underground river without the powerset for it and survived. But still, her success, at this point, was based on little more than luck.

If she had survived through nothing more than dumb luck—if, in fact, that was the secret to her success—the Masked One would be disappointed, but at least he wouldn’t have an actual problem on his hands. Over the centuries, he had learned that luck only lasted for so long before it ran out. Only fools relied on luck.

What was better was understanding the odds and playing them again, and again, and again. He had not spun a web of connections that reached to every continent of this planet by luck. If anything, he planned for bad luck and that way, when things did work out better than expected, it was a true boon rather than one’s only chance at survival. If luck was all she had…well, it was better to watch and study than speculate.

The Steel Dragon moved through the cave, swimming on her back as she tried to pierce the gloom and failed. He stood impassively on the shore. His arms were folded, but being a creature of shadow who existed in this state without corporeal form, the action was simply a figure of speech.

Still, his body—if it were solid—would be at the lake’s edge, so it was there that he coalesced into his solid body when the Steel Dragon released a blast of fire to illuminate the cave.

The Masked One bit his tongue and scrambled away from the light. Being forced out of his shadow form never felt good. He could move in and out of it at will, of course, but when light shined on his form and he coalesced, it was painful.

Still, it had happened before so he didn’t lose control. Instead, he scurried behind a stalagmite and caught his breath, hiding in the blessed shadow as the Steel Dragon moved to the shore.

He peeked at her again as she crawled out of the water, her human body shivering in the cold. Despite the pitch-black of the room, he could still see. She was bruised and tired, and although she’d survived this far, she was running out of energy and wouldn’t last much longer.

It came as a surprise when she transformed into a dragon and exhaled a massive blast of fire in his direction.

The Masked One dove into the shadows and crawled across the ground like a rat behind a low stone to avoid being seen. What was she doing? Had she seen him? Had she somehow realized he was there and known what to do about his powers? He didn’t know and all he could do was scurry away, farther and farther from the flames, while he cursed himself for letting her into a space where she could transform into her dragon form.

After a moment, the flames stopped. No footsteps came closer to him and he didn’t sense her aura approaching.

In fact, careful prodding of her aura revealed that she wasn’t hunting or ready to fight, merely cold and hungry. So, she still doesn’t know I’m here. Ever cautious, he withdrew his aura sensing abilities. He was a master of his aura, unlike any other dragon. While there were those who could use their control to exert their will over others more authoritatively than him—he knew the Steel Dragon had one dragon on her team who could—no one could mask their aura quite like he could. Even when sensing other dragons, he was able to keep his out of their reach or, if the situation demanded, he could broadcast feelings different than his own. He did this when in Council Meetings because much of the debate was done via aura and it simply wouldn’t do for him to turn his off.

As his aura sense recoiled, The Masked One noticed that the cavern didn’t return to the wonderful embrace of pitch black. It seemed the Steel Dragon had used her heat breath not to attack but to blast a stone hot enough to warm herself.

It was clever and he’d never seen another dragon do it before, but it was also shortsighted because fire breath could be a real drain on a dragon’s energy levels. It usually didn’t matter much, what with dragon kind’s unfettered access to whatever food they desired, but there, overusing one’s fire breath was a truly foolish thing to do.

She had a place to warm her bones and a little light, which probably warmed her spirits as it seemed to do for so many humans. He knew the Steel Dragon still considered herself human, as disgusting a thought as it was, but she would inevitably starve to death. The eternal cold of death might even come sooner with the energy she’d expended.

The Masked One almost decided to end it then and there. This little whelp has survived on nothing but luck. It’s time to end her streak. Before he could slink from his position behind the stone ridge, Kristen—still in human form—plunged into the water. She waded out into it and froze, waiting for something.

An unexpected splash startled him and he realized she was fishing like she was nothing more than a bird. He couldn’t believe it. Of course, he had seen dragons fish in their dragon form over the ocean, where they could catch tuna or dolphins or something worth the effort, but he’d never seen one use their dragon claws to spear a fish the way the Steel Dragon did on her second attempt.

She took her meal to her hot stone and cooked it there. He wrinkled his nose at the stench of the white-fleshed fish cooked without salt or seasoning deep in the bowels of the earth, but he appraised the Steel Dragon more carefully.

This was something he had not expected—an enthusiasm for survival, one could say. A penchant for life that, in his twisted mind, most humans simply didn’t have. There was something more than luck to the Steel Dragon, even if it was nothing more than the tenacity of the desperate. But he liked tenacity. In fact, it was through his tenacity that he expected to one day rule this world and all the species that called it home.

Not such a terrible performance, anyway, he thought. There was much more to a foe than an ability to survive, of course. She had not proven that she was any more formidable than the glowing fungus he’d seen in the other part of the cave, but he couldn’t help but settle in and decide to watch her a while longer.

When she lost her entertainment value, he would kill her.

He would let her try to fill her belly with these sour cave fish and perhaps try to find a way out of there that didn’t involve transforming her body into liquid shadow. It would be interesting to see how long she would last.

However long that might be, he would kill her.

It was the perfect finale and he would enjoy it very much.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

When her belly was full and no longer threatened to rebel against her, Kristen felt she could think again for the first time in a while. It was crazy how much hunger could affect one’s mental state. Now that she was full, she felt much better. If she considered where she was now compared to where she had been an hour before, she was in a different world.

Yes, she was still trapped beneath the earth but she was no longer hungry or thirsty. She had managed to get out of the twisting tunnels leading from the room where she had been deposited by an unknown hand. Things had subtly changed and she was moving forward—if not literally, then at least figuratively, and that was more than enough for her.

A year ago—hell, even a month—she might have let this situation defeat her. Now, she wouldn’t. Not because she had become stronger—although she was much stronger than she had been—but because she knew it wasn’t her against the world. She had a team of people who cared for her. A team that was no doubt, at the very least, beginning to wonder where their leader had vanished to. She was certain that they would come looking for her. Until then, she merely had to stay warm, dry, hydrated, and fed.

Another part of her—a darker, niggling corner of her mind—told her otherwise. It insisted that her friends were already dead and she had been trapped there so an unseen enemy could eliminate the rest of the team in one fell swoop. She knew, though, that this was only fear trying to work its way into her brain. Her team had dragons and powerful mages. It included humans—regular humans—who had stood against dragons and mages and lived to tell the tale. They had each other and the knowledge of the truth of that was enough to enable her to push her fears from her mind.

Kristen knew they would come for her. That’s what friends did and it was what teams did. Still, she couldn’t help but want to be on the surface when they arrived.

She decided to explore. Her rock had lost enough energy to reduce its light and was now hardly warmer than the surrounding air. There was no reason to stay near it.

Filled with a new sense of purpose, she followed the shore and used her dragon vision to try to pierce the gloom and look for anything that might provide a way out. It wasn’t easy. The shadows were thick and almost liquid, and although her eyes could make some sense of the darkness, there were still places she could not see. She avoided those edges and corners and had a sense from them that was deeply unsettling.

But there wasn’t anything in them. She felt confident of that and used her dragon aura to try to feel for other dragons, sources of food, animals, or people who might lead her out of there and even for whoever had put her there.

She sensed nothing but the fish in the lake. They swam continuously, always in motion. Most were small, some were middling, and a few true behemoths called the depths home. She felt nothing besides them, though. No rabbits had found their way in and no bats, and nothing that might give her clues to a way out.

Kristen couldn’t help but wonder about how she had gotten down there. Whoever had put her in this place had chosen the narrow tunnels they’d first put her in. Were they leading her somewhere or had they simply chosen a place where she couldn’t use her dragon abilities? Either way, she felt confident that they could not have expected her to go through the water tunnel. Had she escaped them, or had they followed her through the passage? She didn’t know.

“If you’re watching me, show your face already, coward. If you hoped to starve me to death, you fucked that one up.” Her words echoed off the rock ceiling and bounced between the stone structures, only to be swallowed by the placid surface of the lake.

After walking for perhaps half a kilometer—she had counted her paces—she paused to study her surroundings. There wasn’t much to see. This part of the cave was identical in the way that different parts of the same forest felt the same. More stalactites, more rock shelves, and more water were the sum total of her landscape. She paused and scanned the gloom with both her eyes and her dragon aura sense.

Again, she felt nothing but fish. If someone was following her, they were damn good at hiding themselves. But surely she had ditched them, right?

Kristen shook her head, desperate to keep her mind from woolgathering. But what choice did she have? This lake was huge and its shore was monotonous. If she walked around the entire body of water, she wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing besides daydream or whatever you called it when it was a waking nightmare. That wouldn’t do.

She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. Her gaze settled on the lake and she wondered again about how the water was getting out. It obviously was but it didn’t happen on the shore in any easily visible way. It had to take place at the water’s edge or under the surface.

Although it might take more energy, Kristen considered using her dragon form in the water. She could swim although she was normally averse to it, but this might be the perfect place for a challenge. And after what she’d been through, it seemed a low-key one. She was alone with nothing to occupy herself—no challenge when that was what she thrived on.

The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. As a dragon, she could use her fire to better illuminate the area. Plus, she could cover ground more quickly. Yes, there was a risk of depleting her energy, but she could sense a substantial supply of fish in the lake. She knew there would be enough for a few days of survival, at least, and if she couldn’t get out of here by then…

It was better not to think about it.

Her mind made up, she transformed and waded into the water. The chill of the lake was rather pleasant on her dragon skin. Heat constantly came from inside her dragon body, and although Kristen knew it meant she burned calories faster, it felt good against the water. She reasoned that a little pleasure wasn’t so bad given how she’d struggled with despondency and depression since she’d been trapped.

She moved deeper into the water—her body flesh rather than steel, of course—and discovered that she floated quite easily. Of course, she could fly, so floating in the water shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. Still, as nervous as she had been about being in water in her dragon body, this was a surprisingly pleasant revelation.

More confident now, she stretched her wings out—something that was impossible on the shore—and learned that she could use them and her tail to propel her through the water fairly efficiently. It would have been even more enjoyable if there was only a little light.

“Ah, to hell with it,” she muttered quietly and launched a fireball at the ceiling. The shadows danced and moved as the ball of flame ascended until it met the roof and puffed into nothing.

She continued in this way for some time, moving through the water as she tried to find some clue of how the water flowed out of there and maybe where the fish would feed. The chill was much better at keeping her awake than walking along the shore had been, and after perhaps twenty minutes—she couldn’t check her watch in dragon form—she rolled over, floated on her back, and released a fireball simply to watch the light.

It was pleasant to float and stare at the ceiling. Her gaze traced a black scorch mark directly above her.

Except, she realized after a moment, it wasn’t a scorch mark or any other kind of stain.

Her brain told her the mark had moved. Common sense clicked in and told her unequivocally that of course it hadn’t—she had. She fixed her gaze on the mark on the ceiling and held as still as she could. It was possible that she had moved and her motions had caused her to drift, and she wanted to make sure that it really was the current.

Kristen held still, breathed gently, and watched the ceiling as she floated slowly under it. After a few moments, she realized that she was definitely moving—very slowly but the water around her was flowing. The discovery meant she now knew which end of the lake the water exited from. She only had to swim in that direction and find out exactly where the place of egress was.

She knew that might be difficult but solutions already bubbled in her mind. Maybe she could spread something on the surface of the water—scraps of her clothes perhaps?—to see where they floated or better yet, she could kill another fish and use its blood in the water. Okay, perhaps that was a little morbid and hopefully unnecessary. With any luck, there would be an actual stream for her to leave through. Wasn’t that what water did anyway? Erode paths in stone?

Kristen felt her confidence fill her chest as she took a deep breath and spun in the water so she was on her belly again.

She swished her tail and sculled her wings, moving toward the side of the lake that might very well be the last part of this trap she had to see.

In the next moment, something pounded into her spine and bolts of pain surged through her body as she was plunged underwater into the icy subterranean lake.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“So, this is it, huh?” Amy asked, her thumbs hitched on her belt like she’d grown up in Texas rather than Maine.

Drew scanned the location he’d found once again. “Yeah. I think this is as good as we’ll get.”

Lumos nodded. “I think you could have done far worse. What is this place? An old gravel quarry?”

The man nodded. As close as he could determine, that was exactly what it was. “I think we wait in there—near the middle of that giant pit.”

In all honesty, it was more like half a pit. It looked like a hill had been partially scraped away and a giant half-circle cut into the hill. A dirt road led out of the scooped-out area to the highway they had come from. The above-ground gravel quarry was in the middle of nowhere with nothing around except for mesquite trees and scrub.

“They could come up from that high ridge,” he said and gestured to the top of the hill. “It all depends on what kind of mages they are. If they can fly or something, this whole thing could turn into a hot mess damn quickly.”

“What other choice do we have?” she asked.

“None, as far as I can see. If they can fly, they can fly. We won’t be able to choose a location that doesn’t have the sky. At least here, if they come by truck, we’ll know where to watch.”

“I think that makes sense to me,” Lumos agreed.

Amy nodded as well.

“So, are you two are okay with this?” Drew asked.

“Well…it was my idea,” she reminded him. “I won’t back out now.”

“I’m comfortable enough with it,” the dragon confirmed. “The idea of them thinking me captive and breaking free to their utter shock sounds wonderful. Kudos to this Chewie-barker for coming up with that one.”

“Chewbacca,” the girl corrected.

“Chewbatty?” Drew ventured.

“No, Chewbacca.”

“Chewtada?” Lumos frowned.

“I don’t understand how you two can face dragons and mages and you can’t even say the name of one of the most famous Wookie’s to ever come from Kashyyyk.” She shook her head in disgust.

“Then it's settled. We do this,” Drew said.

She nodded. “What, now?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.” He took a few steps back.

Lumos glanced at him. “You might want to take a few more steps,” he said, grew dragon wings briefly out of his human body’s back, and flapped them a few times so he was a good fifty yards away from Amy.

The man followed. “I hope we’re doing the right thing,” he muttered.

“I think the intelligence will prove useful. If we can get faces of these guys and a location for their base, Zed will be able to do a lot with it.”

“You like his nickname, huh?” he said.

“I find it rather dapper, yes.” The dragon grinned.

The ground began to shake and drew their attention to Amy. Drew didn’t know there were earthquakes in Texas and hoped she was all right.

She was, fortunately. In fact, she seemed to be the cause of the earthquake.

The mage stood in the middle of the quarry, her knees bent like a sumo wrestler, her arms at her side, and her fists balled and held away from her body.

All around her, the wind blew to kick up dervishes of dust. That soon became gusts heavy with pebbles and stones. She screamed—a powerful, guttural sound—and when she did, a shockwave spread out from her. It shredded the surface of the quarry pit and hurled gravel everywhere with such force that her companions had to shield their faces for fear of losing an eye.

Still, she kept at it.

Amy took a breath and screamed louder. She raised her arms and released her fists as she brought them above her head. As she did so, the wind blew harder and another shockwave emanated from her body as if she couldn’t control it and it was nothing more than a tremble, a footnote to what she would do, a mistake hardly worth her notice.

Her arms rose until they were only inches apart. She lowered them so they were level with her shoulders and slapped the palms of her hands together. Her fingers remained splayed as a blast of energy erupted through the ground, through her legs, her torso, and her shoulders, and finally blasted out of her hands.

At first, Drew wanted to compare it to a spotlight as he had never seen anything else paint the sky like that. But the colors were more like a firework show without the pops or the oohs and ahs of a crowd. Instead, a dull roar grew in pitch as she threw more and more energy into the sky.

All that energy—every ounce of the column of power—seemed to be focused on one place. Somehow, Amy was able to make it all coalesce on a point smaller than one of the pebbles she had so effortlessly hurled aside.

It exploded in a great, booming shower of sparks of every color of the rainbow.

Drew covered his eyes against the brilliant display, afraid of being blinded.

After a moment, the light no longer showed through his hands and he dared to open his eyes.

He fully expected to find the mage passed out or worse from such a display of power, but she wasn’t. One of her nostrils was bleeding but she grinned like a fool and hopped up and down in a circle that was now devoid of pebbles, debris, and most of the topsoil.

The sight left him gaping in bemusement. How could this peppy little skater punk have used such power and simply dance about it?

“Do you think that’ll attract the mages? I suppose almost everyone in Texas will have seen it, but the mages will know it was more than a bomb blowing up a plane filled with fireworks, right?”

Lumos didn’t answer. Instead, he stared at Amy and the swath of land she’d cleared around her as nothing more than a side effect.

“Lumos…Lumos buddy? Do you think we’re good?”

“I am stunned,” the dragon said simply. “There is a spectrum to the abilities of mages, and yours are about as far along it as I have ever seen.”

“So they’ll come, then?”

“The amount of power released must have felt like a bucket of cold water dumped on every mage within a hundred miles of here. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some of the more sensitive mages sensed it from even farther than that. I don’t think Larry could, not being in South America but…well…” Lumos trailed off. He really did seem dumbstruck by the enormity of what she had done.

“Have you seen power like that before?” Drew asked, punched him in the arm, and gestured for him to move toward Amy. After all, they had a trap to set.

“Yes, I have, but not for centuries. Not since the Mage Wars.”

He forced a laugh. “It’s a good thing she’s on our side then, yeah?”

That seemed to finally shake the dragon from his stupor. He laughed uproariously. “Indeed it is! To think, if she’d allied with these mages and they had trained her… Well, I don’t know if we would still have a side left.”

“Are you all right?” he asked as they neared her.

She nodded, although she sat and wiped the sweat from her brow. “I probably should have done stretches or something beforehand. Did you see that? It was crazy.”

“Indeed it was, young lady,” Lumos agreed.

“Here,” Drew said. He was about to toss her a bottle of Gatorade but thought better of it and placed it in her hand instead.

The girl opened the bottle and drank the entire contents in almost a single swallow.

Drew, his eyes wide, retrieved some jerky and trail mix he’d bought in town and gave those to her as well, which she devoured with relish.

“Whoa, hey, chew the jerky,” he said.

“Yeah, sorry, but we have to be ready for the next step, right?” She scrambled to her feet. With food and drink in her belly, she looked better, but didn’t everyone?

“That’s right,” he said and looked at Lumos.

“Time to pull the Tzu-zaca,” the dragon said.

“You know, I realize you’re doing that on purpose, but it simply makes you sound dumb. You know that, right?” The girl looked at her wrist and removed the bracelet that made her appear to be a shackled mage instead of the unfettered and powerful one she was.

She stepped forward and put it on Lumos.

“Funny,” the dragon said and studied the bracelet. “I wonder if that’s the first time anything like this has ever happened.”

“Anything like what?” Amy asked.

“I bet a mage has never put one of these magic-suppressing bracelets on a dragon before.”

“This one’s a fake, remember,” she said.

“Yes, of course, but still. It’s a sign that times are changing, isn’t it?”

Drew slapped handcuffs on him as well.

“What the hell are those for? Do you think because a mage shackles me, you will too?” Lumos asked, although his tone made it clear he was joking.

He smiled. “This has to look convincing. The bracelet should help with their…aura abilities or whatever, but the cuffs will make you look restrained.” He couldn’t believe he was seriously talking about someone’s aura. A few short years before, auras had been something to talk about with women who were into yoga. Now, they were merely a part of life.

“What is the point when I can snap these off whenever I wish?” the dragon asked.

“That is exactly the point,” Drew said. “You need to look powerless. Nothing makes someone look powerless like them being bruised and under restraint.”

“Bruised?” Lumos scowled.

Drew nodded grimly. “We talked about this. You can suppress your healing ability, right?”

“Yes, I can, but I don’t have any—”

He swung without warning and punched Lumos in the face.

Although he connected hard enough to make his knuckles ache and the joint in his wrist pop, the dragon barely flinched. He certainly didn’t reciprocate. It was another reminder of the terrible power of dragons. He had punched with everything he had and his teammate seemed unperturbed.

His face, though, had begun to swell nicely.

Lumos sighed. “You might as well do my nose too. Don’t break it, but if you can get some blood out of it—”

Drew obliged him. It didn’t feel good to punch someone he so respected but there was also something unsettling about making a dragon bleed. It was something he had wondered about his entire life. Hell, maybe every normal kid wondered about it. Could a person do a damn thing to a dragon? Given the opportunity, could you even make one of the fire-breathing, winged demons notice you? It looks like someone can, he thought, but that didn’t make him feel anything but uncomfortable.

The world was the way it was partly because the dragons had always been at the top. What would the world look like when those in power no longer held it? Would it be more egalitarian as the mages thought? Or would it be worse? Could a despot be replaced by anything but a despot? Certainly, a small group of people could change the world, but could they change it in any way besides lighting it on fire? He hoped so, but he didn’t dare think he had the answer.

His job was to follow orders. It always had been and always would be. He was lucky enough to follow the orders of someone he truly respected. Kristen Hall had told them to find out about the mages there so that was what he would do, even if it meant punching one of his friends in the face.

“What do we do now?” Amy asked.

Drew smiled. This was part of the plan he knew better than any other. “Now, we wait.”

The time passed slowly in the east Texas scrubland. They didn’t dare do anything like converse. The mages could arrive at any time and it wouldn’t do for them to see them chatting pleasantly with their phony captive.

Lumos sat in the dirt and let the blood from his nose harden into a respectable crust. Amy stood a few feet behind him and practiced with her magical abilities, focusing on control of individual pebbles. Somehow, after seeing such a show of power, even the mage manipulating these tiny pebbles was an ominous activity.

Drew reasoned that if she could make blasts of energy like she had and was able to lift an individual pebble, there was no reason that she couldn’t use every one of these pebbles like a bullet. He shuddered at the thought and wondered about her powers and what kind of limits it had—if there even were limits.

Yes, he’d seen her tire, but he’d also seen her stamina increase. Would her powers grow to such a point that she would be unstoppable? He didn’t know whether to hope for that or not. While it would be great to have a mage-goddess on their side, he was an American and thus believed in a separation of powers. Surely the world would be a better place if powers like hers were spread out rather than concentrated? He couldn’t be sure.

All he could do was stand and wait with his hands clasped behind his back to play the part of the goon in their charade. He fixed his gaze mostly on the road but he made sure to check the ridge behind them as well.

After what had to be less than an hour but felt like a week, he noticed a trail of dust rise from the dirt road.

“Who is coming, servant?” Amy asked and deliberately sounded bossier than he thought she could.

“I can’t tell,” Drew said.

“You can’t tell what?”

He rolled his eyes. “I can’t tell, Lady Amy.”

“Much better.” She giggled. “That wasn’t too much, was it? I don’t want to seem too much.”

“I think it was wonderful, Lady Amy,” Lumos told her.

“Quiet!” she snapped and managed to restrain her laughter this time. “My servant can’t see, so get on your feet, lizard, and see who is coming.”

The dragon complied and staggered and swayed on his feet to make it look like he barely had the strength or coordination to manage it. Although their enemies were still far out, Drew was relieved that everyone was getting into character.

“Oh, shit,” Lumos said and his dragon eyes narrowed to stare into the distance. “You guys won’t believe this, but it’s the boys from the barbeque place.”

“Is that right?” Drew raised an eyebrow. “Those boys were all talk. Maybe we should change the plan and simply overpower them.”

“I don’t think so,” the dragon commented wryly. “They brought friends.”

“How many?” he asked.

“Enough to fill the back of a pickup and leave room for an arsenal of guns?”

“My lady?” Drew asked. “How do you feel?”

“Like these arrogant little pricks won’t know what to do with us.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Larry had long since learned to appreciate the perks of a private jet. He loved the legroom, the full bar, and the real food, but he didn’t think he’d ever appreciated how much easier it was to pace on a private jet than a commercial airliner.

“Are you trying to wear a hole in the carpet there, boss?” Butters asked, his tone light.

The mage swept a glare at him and was ready to snap something about the Steel Dragon’s life being on the line. When he saw the man’s eyes, though, he could see the rotund sniper was as concerned as he was.

“I have some gasoline so we might as well simply burn a hole,” Hernandez quipped. Although she was joking, he could hear the concern in the normally blustery demolitions expert as well.

“Is this the gallows humor Lady Steel told us about?” Heartsbane asked. She did not seem even mildly amused. “Because it’s not funny.”

“Nah, that’s not gallows humor,” Keith said and a devilish grin crept across his face. “It would be like joking that she isn’t picking up because she’s probably already fought the North American Council to a standstill and is installing herself as god-empress.”

“That’s not gallows humor!” Hernandez protested. “That sounds like a good thing to me. Gallows humor would be to joke about how Kristen is probably dead and being melted into swords right now.”

“Oh, come on!” Butters protested. “That’s taking it too far. She’s not dead. It’s more like she’s found another cell of technomages and has already recruited them to our side by eating their leader.”

Larry was about ready to unload on the group of ingrates when his phone rang. He glanced at the screen and confirmed that Brian was calling. As he moved to the back of the plane to have privacy for the call, he wondered if this was how Windlock had felt when he talked so much. It was one thing he had not expected about being a leader. When he’d been the underling, it had seemed fine to say whatever he thought because, at the end of the day, Windlock would either tell him to shut up or take responsibility for whatever gaffes he made. Now that he was a leader—if only for this mission—he realized he had to be much more controlled about what he said.

He'd have to talk to the team later but right now, he hoped the techie had good news. Or, better yet, that Kristen was on the line so she could reprimand her old team for making the dragons uncomfortable.

He answered the call.

“About time! That was, like, nine rings. Why are you wasting my time?”

“Why are you wasting mine?” he retorted. “What’s going on with the boss?”

“Well…I have okay news but it’s also bad news.”

“Just get to it!”

“All right, here’s what I’ve found so far. There are all kinds of pictures up on social media of Kristen at the welcome building at Mammoth Cave National Park.”

“That makes sense. It’s where the Dragon Council told her to go. Where did she go next?” Larry asked.

“I don’t know if she did. The last photo posted is of her and a weirdo who calls himself Ranger Jay. It was taken inside the caverns. After that, there’s nothing else about the Steel Dragon on the web,” Brian explained.

“Okay, but you’re our intel guy. You can’t base everything off social media.”

“Honestly, social media is about the best we have right now,” the other man said defensively. “I tracked her phone’s GPS signal. It shows her leaving Detroit and heading to Mammoth Cave. She stays in that area during what I call selfie-o-clock. After that, she moves about a half-mile away. The signal gets kind of buggy at that point and fades in and out, so my thought is that she was underground at that point and her phone was looking for signal.”

“And then what?” the mage demanded.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. After that, her phone simply goes dark.”

“Do you think she turned it off?”

“It wouldn’t matter. The GPS still runs even if the phone’s off. Unless she ran out of charge, but she shouldn’t for another day or two.”

“So you think she’s there? In the caves themselves?” Larry asked.

“I don’t want to make a guess and be wrong, but I think that’s where you guys should go. If she’s not there, her trail will be.”

“Okay…it makes sense, Zed. Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem. Zed out.”

“Sure.”

“Oh, and Larry, please don’t let anything happen to my sister, okay?”

“That’s the last thing I want, kid, believe me.”

“All right, then.”

“Thanks, Zed,” he responded but Brian had already hung up.

The mage took a deep breath and tried to settle his nerves before he addressed everyone. It helped to think about how Windlock used to behave when they were in high-stakes situations. He’d always valued how calm the old investigator had been and how he had been able to choose the most salient information and share it in the right order. As soon as a question would arise in Larry’s brain, his boss already had the answer. He tried to anticipate the questions everyone might have, took a deep breath, and straightened his spine.

“Ranger Jay is gonna die,” Keith said.

“My money is he has nothing to do with this,” Butters interjected.

When he turned, every single member of his team was crammed into the doorway at the rear of the plane. So much for carefully shared details. They had heard the entire conversation.

“If Ranger Jay does have something to do with this, I’ll blow his damn mailbox up,” Hernandez said.

“We need to go to Mammoth Cave National Park,” Larry said and tried not to sound as dumb as he felt.

“Yeah, the pilot knows,” Emerald told him from the back of the crowd near the door. The mage sighed and decided that at least it was some comfort that he had a competent team. “I already told him to head to the nearest airport.”

“All right then, maybe we should contact—”

“Timeflash?” Heartsbane interjected.

He shook his head in both disbelief and amazement. Were they all really this tight? He pushed through them and returned to the more comfortable main cabin of the jet.

“It’s standard protocol for national monuments like this,” Heartsbane explained to the confused humans. “Her powers let her repair damage done to inorganic objects. If we fuck this place up badly, she can put it together again.”

“She can do that to a cave?” Keith asked. “Okay, yeah, I saw her restore the incinerator that made the fuel for the steam pipes under Detroit after Kristen knocked it onto Shadowstorm’s head, but I thought she could only do that because it was, uh…brick and shit,” he finished with a shrug as if he wished it to be known that he was fully aware he didn’t have any clue what he was talking about.

“Oh, yeah,” Emerald said. “We trapped a dragon once in Carlsbad Caverns—those are in New Mexico—and damn near brought the entire place down on this guy. Timeflash put it all back together once we dragged his corpse out.”

Everyone turned to look at him with awkward expressions on their faces. All seemed to try to fight despair at the potential loss of their boss and friend.

“What? You all get to do this gallows humor stuff and I don’t?” he fumed before he flung himself into a plush sofa with his arms folded.

“From what I understand, gallows humor involves a joke. We really did kill that guy,” Heartsbane said.

She grinned but no one laughed.

“Okay, let’s try to come up with some theories of what we’re up against before we get there,” Larry said, desperate to guide the conversation away from jokes about death from two beings who were basically invulnerable and immortal compared to a human. “Our fearless leader has no shortage of enemies. Does anyone have any theories on this one?”

Glum looks all around followed the question. No one had liked being reminded that dragons, mages, and common thugs had all tried to kill Kristen in the past.

“I think dragon,” Beanpole ventured after a long moment. “Mages have thus far operated from urban centers. This seems more…primordial. I…I don’t like it.”

The mage didn’t like it either. In fact, a pit grew steadily in his stomach when he considered the situation.

“What freaks me out is that we were in South America when she went off the map,” Keith said and swirled a glass of champagne that had loosened his tongue. “Think about it. What if whoever sent us on that wild goose chase did it to get to her? If we lose her—”

“We won’t lose her!” Larry almost yelled the words. He’d bolted to his feet when he spoke and released a gust of magical wind through the interior of the plane that rustled everyone’s hair and clothes. “I’m sorry, but we won’t.”

Truthfully, he was damn scared. They had been away for a long time. There was no telling how deep Kristen might be in the cave or if she was even there. He hated to admit the possibility, but he had to accept that it was very likely she was already dead. Why else would the team have been lured to South America without her if not to remove her from the gameboard? If someone went through all that effort, surely they’d have finished it by now.

But Larry couldn’t share those feelings, not when he headed this team. A leader needed to inspire confidence, not beg it of others. He was supposed to be brave even in the face of impossible odds. In short, a leader needed to lead.

“I’m sorry, but we won’t,” he reiterated, his voice calm. “I haven’t known Kristen as long as any of you have, but I know she’s tougher than any of us.”

“As tough as steel,” Emerald muttered.

“You’re damn straight she’s tough as steel,” he affirmed. “Not stone, not oak, but steel. And I’m not talking about her nifty little skin. We all know a dragon can get through it and that if she is fighting a dragon in her steel form, she might already be seriously hurt.”

Everyone swallowed hard and didn’t contradict him.

The mage realized that maybe it hadn’t been the best place to pause dramatically and take a breath, but he had to soldier on. “I’m talking about her spine and her heart. And I’m talking about her goddamn resolve. Whether she’s trapped underground, fighting somewhere nearby, captured, or worse,” Dead his mind screamed at him. She might be dead. He ignored the voice and set his face into a resolute expression.

“Wherever she is,” he continued, “she’s fighting for the people who need her and that’s what we need to do right now too. It’s simply a dumb coincidence that the person who needs help the most happens to be Kristen.”

“Goddammit, Larry,” Heartsbane said, her jaw tight and her eyes moist. “That was fucking beautiful.”

Everyone nodded and slapped him on the back, high-fived, or started to pump themselves up. They didn’t have long before they landed and it seemed that no one wanted to simply enjoy the luxuries of the private jet when every second took them closer to their united purpose.

The regular humans checked their weapons. They disassembled and reassembled them with intense, almost uncomfortable focus.

The dragons were no better. Their warmups for the fight to come involved sparring with each other at speeds no one could track. They stopped their impromptu workout only long enough to eat meat, which they consumed in vast quantities even in their human form.

Larry closed his eyes, pleased that he’d helped the team into the right state of mind and acutely aware that all the pressure still might very well end up on his shoulders. He was the only mage there. That was a simple fact. He had grown to rely on Amy’s insane power levels—they all had—but she wasn’t there now. She was in Texas, hopefully on a real mission. He assumed that if her team was also on a wild goose chase, Kristen’s entire operation might as well let the war between dragons and mages break out. It was a sobering thought and he prayed to whatever power had given him the gift of magic that it wasn’t the case. That aside, he was all the team there had.

Yes, his power was much greater now than it had been when he was shackled. And yes, he had a level of control that far surpassed Amy’s, but what if it wasn’t enough? Or if they met a cabal of mages stronger than him? What if they met a dragon who simply shackled him to block his powers and devoured him whole?

He shook his head. It might all happen but it wasn’t like he would face it alone. He was part of the team Kristen had built—hell, he could be considered a founding member of this iteration of the team—and together, they would save her.

Or avenge her if that was all they had left by the time they discovered the truth of her situation.

Whatever they found, he needed to be ready. He pushed all thoughts from his mind and focused his energy. While he knew he wasn’t capable of blasting away with an insane amount of energy, he did have focus. What he tried to do now as the plane raced ever closer to their destination was to focus all the power he had into as fine a point as he could. A marble, the nib of a pen, a needle, a mote of dust. He didn’t use his power—he had limits and he knew them well—but he did see exactly how dense he could get it.

His reasoning was simple. If he couldn’t obliterate a dragon, he could at least blow a hole in one.

“Sir, I’ve taken the liberty of ordering cars for your team,” the pilot said. “We’re coming in for a landing.”

“You can cancel them,” Larry said. “It’ll be faster to fly. That is unless it’ll be a problem, Heartsbane.”

“It’s fine,” the dragon said and her face lacked its characteristic scowl. “I’ll take Hernandez and Beanpole, though.”

“I have Butters and Keith, then,” Emerald said. “Larry, are you gonna need a ride?”

“Nah. I’ve been practicing. But look, how good are y’all at changing shape? If we wait to land and all that, it’s gonna burn twenty minutes we didn’t have three hours ago.”

Emerald grinned. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

He nodded. “Windlock called it ‘riding with the wind’—or he did once, anyway.” He punched a callbox and gave the order to the pilot.

The man sighed but acknowledged the command.

In the next moment, he opened the door to the plane.

The wind rushed through the cabin and made the gust Larry had produced earlier look mild by comparison. That had been a breeze. This was a hurricane.

“Are you serious?” Butters demanded as the mage approached the open door.

“Deadly,” he said.

“Shouldn’t we at least have parachutes or something?” Keith asked.

“Nah,” Emerald said. “It makes you harder to track. This way, we all plummet at the same speed.”

“Plummet? Did you have to say that word?” Keith demanded and sounded frantic.

“Oh, is the Rookie afraid of heights?” Hernandez purred, walked up to him, and put an arm against the wall to lock him in.

“Maybe,” he conceded.

“Oh, honey.” Hernandez made it obvious to Larry at least that the two must have been more than coworkers or maybe even still were. “Will this make it better?” She kissed him on the mouth.

He returned it but that was his downfall. Hernandez caught him round the waist and power-lifted him onto her shoulder. “Never kiss a pretty girl who you know wants to throw you out of a plaaaaaaane!” she shouted as she shoved Keith out the door and launched out after him.

“Stupid bitch,” Heartsbane growled. “Change of plans. I’ll take those two.” She surged through the door, transformed to her dragon shape, and used her improved aerodynamics to get beneath the couple. Hernandez, unbelievably, had resumed making out with Keith and the dragon caught them in her claws before she tossed them unceremoniously so they landed on her back.

“Boys?” Emerald said to Butters and Beanpole.

The sniper darted a warning glance at his spotter. “There’s no need to kiss me.” He jumped and the other man followed.

“See you in the air.” Emerald leapt after them and managed to get below them before he assumed his dragon form. He broke his skydiver’s position as he transformed and caught them on his back.

Larry stepped to the door. He’d never done this before but Amy had taught him. By using his telekinetic abilities on his clothes, he could fly. He knew it was true and had seen her do it multiple times.

Still, it was easier said than done.

He hurried to the door, extended his foot, and stepped out into nothing.

The wind whipped at his robes before he gained control and registered the fact that he’d done it. He was flying, but the moment of joy was short-lived. The reason he had attempted this was because time was of the essence. There’d be time enough for joyrides later.

The mage fell into formation behind Emerald and Heartsbane as the team flew toward Mammoth Cave. It was a comfort that he seemed to be leading his team capably. They worked well together, followed his lead, but still acted independently, all good things in his book.

He only hoped he didn’t have to keep the position because Kristen was already dead.

The thought spurred him forward and he urged the dragons to hurry. Every second counted.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kristen barely had time to suck in half a breath before whatever had bulldozed into her shoved her under the surface. It had hit her hard and forced the precious air from her lungs. She struggled to rise, pumped her wings, and discovered that they didn’t work quite as well underwater as they did on the surface. Her tail did, however, and she drove it through the cold water to propel herself upward to breach the surface.

She gulped air, her dragon body far more reliant on it than her human one. No sooner had she inhaled when something once again pounded into her back. Jolts of pain raced through her body and made it hard to focus on what she needed to do to survive—push toward the air and breathe.

It took willpower to look around underwater because it burned her eyes but she didn’t want to go to the surface until she had some clue about what had happened. The water was turbulent from her splashes, but no boulders were visible sinking toward the bottom of the lake, and no broken stalactites to spear her were in evidence. If this was whoever had attacked her earlier using bombs to release debris on her, they had changed tactics.

Carefully, she scanned the water with her human senses. She could see well enough—better than a human in a swimming pool but not by much—but saw nothing. No mages in scuba gear, no aquatic dragons, and no demons from the deep.

The response from her other senses was even worse. She felt nothing but the cold of the lake and heard nothing but the pounding of her dragon heart in her ears. Although some dragons could smell underwater through gills, she could not. Even her aura reported no sense from a new life form and no buzz from a dragon perched upside down on the ceiling.

But something had struck her—and it had done so twice. This wasn’t simply a random coincidence. It meant an organism of some kind and if she couldn’t read its aura, it meant it was blocking her. That, in turn, implied intelligence. Which meant Kristen had to outthink whoever—which seemed more logical than whatever—the hell was out there.

Her lungs reminded her that while she could hold her breath for over ten minutes in her human form, her dragon body demanded far more oxygen and would allow her less time beneath the surface of this frigid lake. She pumped her tail and moved horizontally through the water, hoping that whoever had attacked her perhaps couldn’t see through the turbulence she’d stirred. As expected, she didn’t make it far before her lungs demanded insistently that she breathe. She listened intently and rose slowly, careful not to make much of a wake with her massive dragon form.

When she reached the surface, she poked only the tip of her snout out so her nostrils were able to draw in another sweet breath of air.

But her lungs were still filled with her spent breath as she hadn’t wanted to make bubbles and tip off whatever was hunting her. Rather than inhaling—much as she wanted to—she blasted fire from her nose high enough to strike the ceiling and spread but not so much as to heat the stone enough to glow as it had before.

Then—consequences be damned—she sucked in another precious breath of air and dove underwater.

Kristen prepared herself to once again be pummeled by whoever lurked above the lake, but the strike didn’t come. Not immediately, she reasoned cautiously because it might still come, but the delay was something, at least. It wasn’t a victory, obviously, but a respite, however temporary, that she would try to use.

Was it possible that she scared her attacker off? Or had they simply not followed her to the other side of the pool? Had her blasts of fire dissuaded them from further attempts to hurt her? Or had she simply alerted whoever the damn thing was to exactly where she had moved to?

The answers to these questions could save her life. It was frustrating to have none of them.

She didn’t know what else she could do except try to get out of there. Obviously, she couldn’t attack an invisible foe who trapped her underwater. She was completely out of her element and none of her abilities seemed of use. Out of options, she continued to swim an inch or two beneath the surface and released little balls of flame out of her nose when she needed to draw breath.

Her reasoning suggested that whoever had brought her down there liked the dark, or else they’d have taken her somewhere else. They’d used a surprise attack against her, which implied that they might not be able to beat her in an outright contest of strength—or so she hoped. It meant that if she could get out of the caves, maybe she could face this opponent on a level playing field. Thus far, the only clue to a way out was the flow of the water.

Even with this simple plan, the execution proved difficult. She had to constantly shift her gaze from the ceiling to below so she could see the lurking foe and also her escape path. Not only that, she had to both refill her lungs and exhale small balls of fire, as that seemed to keep the unknown enemy at bay. She had to move swiftly through the water and also pay attention to the current, lest she overlook an exit.

All these factors made her progress slow, and she felt more and more anxious as she proceeded. Swim, fireball, breathe, look at the ceiling, look below the water. Swim, fireball, breathe, look at the ceiling, look below the water. She repeated the mental guide until there was a rhythm to the manic survivalist behavior. It became her mantra as she drew closer to the shore the water appeared to be moving toward. She settled into the repetitive cycle and seemed to find encouragement in it until something plummeted from a pool of darkness on the roof of the cave and careened into her yet again.

This time, Kristen caught a glimpse of her attacker, although it answered none of her questions about their identity. It looked as if the shadows on the ceiling had coalesced into a massive blob—like one of the drips that formed the ubiquitous stalactites—only this one was ten thousand times their size. Rather than being filled with dissolved minerals, it looked like it was filled with nothing but the night itself.

As expected, when they made impact with her back, they thrust her deep beneath the water. Something sliced into her and the pain was intense and somehow even colder than the water through which she swam. The blob pushed off her and left her at the bottom of the lake to thrash in the darkness.

Although she couldn’t see much of anything, she knew she was bleeding. She could sense it in the water through pits in the front of her snout she hadn’t even known she possessed. The light was dim but her scales were pale in color so she could see the clean injuries on her flank that sliced through her scales like they were bologna.

Without a doubt, they had been inflicted by the claw of a dragon.

She searched the water for her dark attacker, convinced now that it was indeed a dragon.

Unfortunately, she felt much worse about her odds if that were the case.

Kristen had hoped mages were behind this and that they had attempted to lure her into the world’s greatest trap. If that had been the case, she had already as good as thwarted them.

If it was a dragon down there—a dragon who had effectively hidden their aura—she might be in serious trouble. Her logic had previously assured her that the reason she hadn’t been able to sense any auras was because the mages had developed some new kind of cloaking spell. It made sense. Constance had never been easy to track via aura. A dragon who could hide their aura so perfectly was a graver threat, if only because she couldn’t guess at their motives.

Mages would have actively tried to kill her. A trap like this would have been meant as a funnel to draw her to where they could launch a concerted magic attack.

A dragon with the ability to become darkness could have killed her long before.

She returned to the surface but remained in the same place and alternated between breaths and fireballs released from her nostrils. That was the only thing that seemed to keep the dragon away. It had to be a dragon because nothing else made sense. A mage would have shot her by now. That was what this war of theirs was about—using dragon-based ammunition to kill dragons.

But what dragon wanted her dead now? She had killed Shadowstorm and his mother Obscura in brutal combat and had eliminated the dragon assassin Death as well. Later, she had saved the North American Council twice and the Full Dragon Council as well. What dragon was so determined to kill the woman who was intent on saving dragon kind?

Something clicked in her brain. Maybe it was the council member who had so unsettled her, she thought as she continued to breathe and launch fireballs toward the ceiling. That would explain how they’d directed her there and managed to separate her and her team. Hell, it might also explain how their technomage foes in Florence had always seemed to be one step ahead of them.

There were factions of dragon society that wanted a war. They believed that the herd of humanity had grown too numerous and must be culled. These factions would work with or against mages as long as it served their own ability to amass even more power.

It only made sense that one of these dragons was on a council. Their society was rife with the cruelty of inequality and the reductive logic of racism. Why wouldn’t a council member on one continent not work to further those goals? It didn’t even have to be a North American, she reasoned. Merely someone with an obscene amount of power who craved even more.

And whoever it was, they were toying with her. That, more than anything else—more than the frigid water or the wound that felt like a dagger of ice—made her blood run cold.

If it was a member of a Dragon Council, they had access to her reports and intel. They had known her team was looking at Texas but had also scanned the horizon for action in South America. Not only that, but they had also known how to get Kristen to Mammoth Cave. They were playing a game and she was merely a pawn. Logically, they could have killed her the second they trapped her beneath an avalanche and knocked her unconscious but instead, seemed to want to take her apart slowly.

But why? What kind of person did this?

Not a person, she reminded herself. People lived a century if they were lucky and achieved immortality only through their children. They had goals with timeframes established for lifetimes. People feared others, cared for others, and saw the world as something more than a source of entertainment.

It was not a person hunting her but a dragon of unknowable age. The being could have been planning her downfall since before she knew she was a dragon. They were a beast who cared only for their own aspirations and were willing to burn the world for a little more fresh meat.

In a word, she faced a monster and was trapped in there with them—a monster of fiendish intelligence with godlike powers. They not only used darkness to hunt but also to plan and plot and scheme. Without a doubt, they saw her as little more than an insect whose wings they could pluck at their leisure.

And she was trapped in their lair—or their playground, which was even more chilling.

She had to turn the odds against this dragon of the dark, but how was that even possible when she couldn’t so much as take a breath deep enough to blast a plume of fire without being attacked?

How was she supposed to survive this?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The truck didn’t slow until it was in the quarry itself. Even then, rather than stop conventionally, the driver threw it into a sideways skid. He only braked at the last possible moment so the wheels kicked up massive amounts of dust and pebbles as the vehicle careened toward the three team members.

Amy floated a foot above the ground, Drew stood three feet behind her, and Lumos sat in front of her. As the dust and pebbles rocketed toward her, she used her abilities to make the dust billow out of her way in dramatic spirals like waves trying to pound against a lighthouse but only breaking on the rocky shore at its base.

Although she felt bad about it, she didn’t afford the dragon the same courtesy. She let the dirt coat him, which made his tattered suit look even worse. He flinched when the pebbles struck him and went so far as to whimper when one struck his face.

She hoped he was simply faking but reminded herself that she knew he was. He was a dragon, after all. As hard as it was to acknowledge, she knew what it took to kill one and it was about a hundred times more than a collision with a truck, let alone pebble.

Still, she wouldn’t let Lumos get hurt, so when the camouflage-painted truck looked like it very well might bulldoze into the dragon who sat bound and cuffed in the dirt, she stopped it with her mind. The vehicle lurched on its jacked-up suspension and raised off its driver’s side wheels before it settled again. The lone star on its red, white, and blue flag above the back flapped as if in protest.

That none of the people fell out of the back after being stopped so suddenly confirmed her suspicion that some of these men were mages.

It made things more difficult, although honestly, compared to the slew of shotguns, rifles, and AR-15s the men carried, having a few mages among them didn’t exactly intimidate her much more.

If these guys wanted to kill her, she wouldn’t let them, of course, but she didn’t think the possible outcomes were worth betting on.

“What the fuck are you doing here? Did they cancel your fucking flight to California?” the driver of the truck demanded. It was Colt.

Amy swallowed. It was time to see if Drew’s gamble about establishing an alibi checked out.

“I am here to find the mages I thought were in the area. What are a couple of dragon sympathizers like you doing here?” she said and tried to sound like one of the evil queens from a kid’s movie. Her first choice was Ursula but she thought she’d come off more like the Wicked Witch of the West.

“Dragon lovers?” Vince demanded and sounded as if she had insinuated that he enjoyed performing sexual acts with farm animals. “You were the one eating brisket with that piece of shit.” He spat at Lumos’ prone form.

“Only to ascertain if he really was a dragon,” she said and made her voice sound like she could barely control her fury. She tried to think about Dorothy and her stupid little dog too. “Something you should have known but did nothing about. I saw you at the dance hall. While this dragon used his aura to persuade your women into dancing, what did you do about it? Nothing. While he tricked your bartender into giving out free drinks, what did you do? Nothing. At. All.”

“We saw you there too!” Colt said. “Why didn’t you do anything about him then if you knew he was a dragon?”

Amy floated to Lumos and delivered a swift kick to his ribs. He responded to the phony blow, rolled over, and clutched his sides. “I delivered.” She sneered. “I captured this beast in the hopes that the cell here would be more competent than the three stupid rednecks you three are turning out to be.”

“Who the fuck are you to call us rednecks?” Vince demanded.

“I will be the world’s foremost dragon hunter,” she said. She’d thought about this and decided it was the best way to go about infiltration—with big, broad, bold lies—but wow, did it feel weird.

“The fuck you is!” Dusty seemed to agree with the alibi lacking credibility as he aimed a shotgun at her gut.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Drew said from behind her.

“Are you her bodyguard or some shit?” Colt demanded.

“Her cleaner. Do you know what a cleaner is?” he asked. He didn’t wait long enough for anyone to reply before he answered his own question. “A cleaner picks your bodies up after you do something stupid like attack the world’s most powerful mage.”

“I know who you are,” another man said from the back of the truck. “You’re the mage who fought Constance in Canada. There’s a whole fucking video of you fighting her. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t fill your brain with lead right now.”

“I’ll give you five,” Amy said smartly. “One. The bullet will never reach me. None of them will. If you saw the video, you know that. Two. I know Constance. She talked to me before the Steel Dragon bitch appeared. It was she who told me to come here if I needed help.”

She took a breath and continued. “Three. I. Have. A. Fucking. Dragon. He can’t transform into his other body right now because when he was transporting me under the Steel Dragon’s orders, I broke free of my cuff and put it on him. Consider him a gift, a token of—well, let’s not say goodwill but of my commitment to this cause.”

“Four. Dragons killed my parents.” She let her voice crack on that one. “I don’t know how much of my story reached you here, but my powers were activated when I was attacked by two dragons. Not even attacked, honestly. My parents were merely collateral damage to them. I hate dragons. They’re arrogant, entitled monsters—worse than the politicians in Washington.” That statement drew a few nods. She didn’t know much about Texas, but she knew they didn’t like the Feds. “And Five. I’ve met the biggest threat to your organization. I’ve spent the last few weeks with the Steel Dragon herself. If you want to know how to bring her down, I’m your girl.”

One of the men in the back of the truck chuckled. “Well, shit,” It sounded like shee-it with his accent. “That’s one hell of a sales pitch. Even if we want it to be true, though, how can we be sure?”

“She’s not lying about him being a dragon or his powers being dampened,” said another man. Amy sensed him and could feel magic. Not all of them were mages, then, but this one was.

“So you really are that girl from the TV?” Colt asked and sounded a little awed.

“She is,” Drew confirmed.

“Well…I don’t know. That sounds like a damn good person to have on board,” Colt responded.

“I guess you know our identities so it’s not like we can let you go,” Dusty said. She didn’t know if the young boys merely talked too much or if there was a reason why they seemed to be in charge of this little squad of men.

A ripple of conversation passed through the group before Vince quieted them. “We’ll take you to meet our cell leader,” he said. Amy sensed something she hadn’t noticed before. He seemed to have a touch of magic ability. That must be why he was in charge but it also meant his two friends were probably little more than thugs. “He can decide whether to kill you along with this dragon you captured or if we could use another pretty face.”

“If that’s what you’re after, I’m sure they’ll bring me on,” Amy said. “From the looks of it, the only time pretty would be used to describe your moms would be if someone called them pretty damn ugly.”

“What the fuck did you say?” Colt drew a handgun from his belt that she immediately yanked from his hand. She spun it in the air and clubbed him across the forehead with it.

“Any more takers?” she asked, looked around, and smiled.

A few disgruntled looks fixed on her and a couple of men spat, but no one drew a gun. Neither Vince nor the other mage attempted to use any of their abilities. All right, she decided. She had at least shown them she was powerful.

“Your…cleaner”—Vince sneered the word as if he didn’t believe it—“can ride in the back with the dragon and the rest of the boys. You can come up front with me and help me work the stick.”

“You can take the dragon,” Amy said and lifted Lumos unceremoniously off the ground with her telekinesis to drop him roughly in the back of the truck. Truly, she caught him before he hit the bed and made the suspension rock so it looked like she’d let him land on his face. “But my cleaner stays with me.”

“Ain’t gonna be enough room for all us in the front seat.” Vince smiled the cruel smile of a man with privilege over the law taking power over a woman who had nothing to do with it. It was a smile that had been used through the centuries, and she hated it. “What with the stick,” he finished as if he tried to set a record for how sleazy a human being could truly be.

Amy had already demonstrated her power but apparently, it would take a little extra to get through the vacant spaces where synapses should have been in the young man’s brain.

She reached out with her powers, located the largest, flattest rock in the area, and ripped it from the ground as easily as a ten-year-old could lift a stone to skip it across a pond.

The one she had selected wasn’t flat and thin. The top was as flat as a driveway and big enough to fit two cars. The bottom of the huge boulder was rounded, which made it look like a giant had sliced the top fifth of the world’s largest potato off with a massive knife and planted it in the ground for it to petrify. It levitated from beyond the ridge that framed the quarry pit and came to rest gently beside her. The rounded point on the bottom barely touched the ground. A thousand pebbles swirled to form a flowing staircase around it that she walked up.

Then, as her finishing touch, she scooped Drew up and deposited him on top of the stone like he was nothing but her pet.

It might have been too much—Amy knew it was too much—yet these men had come seeking power and she made sure that was what they found. She wasn’t so naïve to think they had expected a girl. They’d doubtlessly expected a venerable old man with a long white beard or a muscle-bound beef-head. Instead, they’d found her with her recently pierced nose and pulled-down beanie. That she was different than their expectations was all the more reason to be sure they knew the extent of her power. Or, rather, what she was capable of accomplishing merely for her convenience.

The girl also knew that whatever she did now would only grow in the men’s minds.

“Lead on,” she said from the top of the half-ton boulder she now used as a flying carpet.

A few of the men nodded and most of them swallowed hard. The mage who’d spoken out earlier banged twice on the roof of the truck to signal the driver, and they drove away to take her, the dragon prisoner, and her cleaner to their secret lair.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Larry wasn’t sure what he had expected to see at Mammoth Cave National Park. He’d prepared himself for the scorched earth often present in the aftermath of a dragon battle and thought maybe there would be bodies—dragon, mage, and human. In plain and simple terms, he had expected destruction of some kind.

It was a shock—although not necessarily an unpleasant one—to see people walking the trails above the park as if nothing was wrong.

“Are we sure this is the right location?” Heartsbane yelled over the wind before she banked to begin a slow circuit of the grounds. Down below, children and tourists gawked and screamed and pointed at the two dragons and a mage who glided so effortlessly above them.

The mage’s flying skills were not quite to the level where he felt like he could retrieve his phone to check his GPS, so he landed like he had done a few times to check their position.

He looked at the dragons. “This is it.”

Emerald and Heartsbane tucked their wings—and drew screams of terror and glee from the humans on their backs—and plummeted toward the earth. They extended their wings at the last minute to catch the air and land gently.

Hernandez and Keith cheered while Beanpole dismounted in a huff and threw up the lunch he’d eaten on the jet. The mage moved toward a hill. According to the GPS on his phone, he wasn’t far—maybe fifty meters? He saw nothing except rolling grass and the fading flowers of fall on the hillside. And, unfortunately, tourists armed with cameras.

Larry sighed. This was the last thing he needed right now.

“Butters, I want you and the rest of SWAT to maintain a perimeter. I don’t want anyone on this hill at all. This is the last place Kristen was seen and she might, uh…” He wanted to inspire confidence in his team but he also didn’t want to spark false hope or offer a hypothesis that might encourage them all to start to make false assumptions that could blunt their mystery-solving skills.

“Not a problem, sir. We’ll maintain the perimeter and ask around. If any of these people have anything to offer, we’ll find out.”

“Good, thank you,” he said as the humans departed and left him with only the dragons.

“Do either of you sense anything?” he asked. “The GPS sent us here but I don’t see any signs. I guess we should assume she was standing on this hill when her phone broke.”

“Or that she was under it,” Emerald said.

Heartsbane nodded at the suggestion, although her eyes were closed and she was breathing deeply. Still in dragon form, she looked like she was meditating rather than searching for the body of their friend. She inhaled and released a slow breath, then shook her head in frustration. “I can’t sense her aura at all. I don’t think she’s near here anymore.”

This was exactly what he had been afraid of. He sighed heavily. If they lost Kristen, this whole mission—the whole organization she’d put together—would unravel. And if Heartsbane couldn’t sense her, it was time for him to use the skills he had developed working as a forensics mage for Windlock.

He reminded himself that he had specialized in sensing the traces of auras of dead dragons.

Larry took a deep breath and reached out with his powers, desperate to find some clue of Kristen and simultaneously hoping he found nothing at all. The first thing he noticed was that she had indeed been there.

She was a powerful dragon, and while she lacked finesse with aura, he could sense it but not there. It seemed instead that the traces of her came from the visitor center.

“Anything yet?” Emerald asked.

“She…she didn’t stand on this hill,” Larry said. “She was here—or there, rather.” He gestured at the visitor center and entrance to the cave.

“That has to mean she entered the cave,” Heartsbane suggested.

The mage was inclined to agree. “I’ll try once more,” he said. “Now that I know she was here, I’ll reach out farther. This might take me a few minutes. You two try to find clues.”

“You got it,” Emerald said and Larry couldn’t help but smile. Thanks to Kristen, these dragons respected his orders and followed them. What would happen if she died? Would they all rally around their fallen leader or would they fracture, a sculpture portending equality shattered before it could be finished?

He emptied his mind of everything but his breathing. As he inhaled and exhaled, he expanded his tendrils of probing magic every time he blew air from his mouth and focused them like laser beams when he inhaled through his nose. No, Kristen had never stood on this hill, but she had been near there and with people. He could sense her presence on some of them. Campers mostly. Okay, that was good. It meant that when she had arrived, she’d been all right. He sensed one trail that seemed to snake under the earth, but he lost it before he could follow it to its end. It was too faint and too old to be of much use.

But it was also the last clue of her aura anywhere. Larry refocused his tendrils of energy into the subterranean space beneath his feet. He dug deeper and deeper and imagined his magic like drops of water that could find paths through the stone as they looked for some sense of her passage.

Despite his efforts, he found nothing. There was simply too much earth and stone between him and the faint aura that a dragon left behind. He inhaled sharply and tried finally to sense the terror one often felt before they were slain. If he could find that spike of negative energy, he could at least direct his team to find a body.

It almost surprised him that he didn’t find a spike of pain. Instead, deep beneath the earth, he found the steely resolve of her tireless optimism and determination. Its presence confirmed what his heart and mind had desperately wanted to find.

“Kristen’s alive!” he shouted. The cool, professional demeanor he’d struggled so hard to project shattered as he let tears of relief trickle down his cheeks.

Emerald, Heartsbane, and the humans working the perimeter cheered and ran toward him.

“She’s way down there, but she’s alive!” He was talking at a mile a minute but he didn’t care. “I reckon she went through the entrance and encountered something down there—not the Dragon Council, obviously. Something must have trapped her. She’s…” He reached out again and closed his eyes in concentration. “She’s trying to do something. I can feel her focus. I don’t sense anything else, though—not dragon, mage, or otherwise.”

Larry looked at his team and schooled his face into a positive expression. Now they knew where she was, they had to determine how to reach her. He was about to broach this question to the team when a park ranger spoke.

“I told you she was down there, didn’t I? I gave her a tour myself.”

“May I introduce to you the one and only Ranger Jay?” Butters said to the mage.

“A pleasure, really,” Ranger Jay said, extended a meaty hand, and grasped Larry’s in a deathlike vice of a handshake.

“Larry Brockton,” he said and nodded at the man to continue as he wondered if he should have introduced himself simply as Mage Larry.

“A real pleasure, sir, especially if you’re a friend of the Steel Dragon’s.” The ranger had yet to stop pumping his hand. Larry extricated it and felt as if the bones within had been shattered. “Although I have to say,” he continued, “that if you all want a tour, I’ll have to insist on a few other rangers coming with us. We were about halfway through when she wandered off. It was weird. I didn’t even notice until I was almost back at the entrance.”

Heartsbane smiled. “That’s good. It means she’s been practicing her aura like I told her to.”

Ranger Jay flushed crimson beneath his beard. “Are you telling me that dragon used her aura power on me? Well, hot damn. They’ll never believe any of this in Pig.”

Emerald shook his head, his arms folded. “If we’re going through all this trouble because Red went and got herself lost in a cave, I’ll laugh at her forever.”

Larry wasn’t able to joke about all this yet. They’d been sent on a fool’s errand to South America and she was still beyond their reach. He saw the humans had the same concerns. They were used to thinking of their loved ones as mortal but dragons were not. The dragons had probably expected to find a blackened landscape there with a massive corpse still smoldering. Now that those expectations had not come to fruition, they were hardly concerned. The humans knew that death could come in many forms and that despite Kristen’s steel skin, she was a human at her core.

He gasped when a change came to Kristen’s aura. She went from stoic determination to the agony of sheer pain. He recoiled from the intensity of it like someone had stabbed him in the back with a dagger made of ice. It was far more intense than the remnants of aura left by a dead dragon and meant she was definitely alive but suffering. Was she fighting or being tortured?

“What the hell came over you?” Butters asked, his eyes narrowed.

“It’s…Kristen’s aura. She’s badly hurt.” He didn’t want to let go of her aura but also wanted to distance himself from it. The pain was so intense, he could practically feel it himself.

“How long would it take us to get to where you last saw her?” Hernandez demanded of Ranger Jay.

“Moving at a good speed? Twenty minutes. But wait—can you tell where she is? She’s below us?”

“Twenty minutes is too long,” Larry said and pointed absentmindedly to where he felt Kristen was. Her pain had not abated and he didn’t feel the surge of anger, confidence, and determination that often came from her aura when she was in a battle she thought she could win.

“Oh, shit,” Ranger Jay said and didn’t seem to have any problem with inserting himself into the team. “Well, there might be a shortcut or something. Can you tell where she is? I know these caves better than most folk.”

The mage allowed himself a sigh of relief. This was the break they needed. If the man could get them to her quickly, they would have a chance to save her.

He gestured over the hill. “She’s about a kilometer that way and down maybe three hundred meters. Something like that, anyway.”

All gazes drifted to the ranger. Every single one of them let their hope shine through. This was it. If he could get them down there, they’d save the woman who had saved all of them too many times to count.

“Well, shit,” the man said and looked crestfallen. “Are you sure?”

“I am.” Larry tried not to let fear enter his voice and failed.

“That’s where the water drains out. There ain’t no way in there. The stone’s too soft, not safe to walk on, and if you break it, the flow of water would change. That’s how you drown—exploring that way.”

“I thought you said she was alive?” Emerald said. Dragon ferocity bled into his voice and almost made Larry fear him as he had been taught to fear dragons for years.

But no longer, he reminded himself sternly. He was now a free mage and if Kristen was able to lead the world into a peaceful revolution, he might even be Emerald’s equal one day. “She is alive but—” He winced. Something had struck Kristen again and he sensed the same icy pain, fear, and confusion from her rather than the confidence that would indicate she was fighting back. “But she won’t be for much longer.”

The team began to bicker about what to do next. The two dragons wanted Ranger Jay to show them the way in. Emerald said he’d carry the man and that they could use their dragon speed to drastically reduce the transit time.

Butters asked about ways in through the river and wondered if someone—his suggestions were Beanpole or Keith—could perhaps scuba up and find her from the water. Hernandez merely wanted to blow a hole into the cave system, an idea the ranger protested vociferously until Timeflash landed and transformed into her human form. He didn’t know she could undo any damage that was done to the cave and was simply dumbstruck every time a new dragon arrived.

“Seriously, do y’all mind if I get a selfie? They never gonna believe me in Pig. Never.”

Everyone ignored him.

Timeflash approached Larry. “Is she alive?”

He nodded.

“Do we have a plan to get her?”

When he nodded again, everyone stopped their bickering and turned to look at him.

The mage took a deep breath. He knew what he had to do. There was only one option when it came down to it, but it terrified him. He had been shackled by Windlock within weeks of becoming a mage and had never explored his full powers. As weak as it might sound to admit it, being limited had never bothered him.

Larry knew full well what happened to mages who overexerted themselves when they performed magic unbound. He had picked up the mess more than once, although blowing himself to pieces was one of his lesser concerns. Mages who did that to themselves usually died because they didn’t know how to channel their magic effectively. He at least knew how to do that.

What he didn’t know was exactly what he was capable of. He had seen what Amy could do and it terrified him. She could pick cars up like they were nothing but toys, move trees like they were twigs, and had killed two dragons without meaning to because of her formidable powers.

While he didn’t think he had anything approaching the level she did, what if—in trying to do this—he made a mistake? Operating under Windlock had put hard limits on his powers. He had been able to work within those limits because he knew he wouldn’t hurt anyone.

He no longer had that net to protect the world from his abilities. What if—in his effort to get to Kristen—he crushed someone with a misplaced boulder? What if he did some kind of structural damage to the cave itself and the whole area collapsed to kill Kristen and droves of tourists?

Larry realized everyone was still staring at him.

“Do you have a plan or should we start digging?” Keith asked.

The mage forced a smile. “Actually, that’s what I’m going to do.”

His human teammates looked confused and the dragons perplexed, although Timeflash seemed to have some sense of exactly what he would attempt and nodded encouragingly. Ranger Jay was oblivious but he was excited all the same.

“Hell yeah! Do you mind if I record this?”

“Go for it,” he said, “but you’ll need a zoom lens. I want all of you to stay here. I’ve never done anything like this before and honestly, so much could go wrong. I can’t lose Kristen, not when I have the ability to save her, but I don’t want any of you to be hurt either. This is new for me and I can’t even begin to estimate the results.”

“You’ve never tried anything like digging before?” Keith asked, still confused.

Larry tapped the side of his head, the source of his magic powers. “Like digging with a telekinetic shovel.”

“Don’t sell yourself short.” Timeflash smiled. “It’s more like an industrial drill.”

“Right,” he said and elevated himself with his magic powers.

His team looked at him with hard expressions. They supported him in this—what other choice did they have?—but they knew the risks.

The assembled crowd of tourists, though, had no idea what he was about to attempt. They cheered as this man in a robe levitated and flew a kilometer away from them. He glanced at his team again and shook his head when he realized they had joined the cheers.

He only hoped he could do something worth the applause.

The mage landed directly above where he could sense Kristen’s aura. It felt much stronger there, which was good as it meant the lateral distance he’d covered across the surface put him almost in position. He reached out with his magic senses and tried to feel how far she was.

Another jolt of pain made him curse and he knew he had to hurry.

Still, the pain was an easy thing to sense and told him he was perhaps two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet above her. It was hard to be certain because the stone was porous and thus not a uniform density. He knew the direction, though, and it wasn’t like he would be able to do it with one blow.

It would take a concerted effort and everything he had. “Be ready to move!” he shouted, confident that the dragons could hear him with their heightened auditory abilities. “I’ll get through this but I don’t know what I’ll have left when I’m done.”

Larry said that as much for his own confidence as to tell them his plan. It was only porous stone, limestone that had eroded. He could do this because he had to. The thought of expending so much magic terrified him but he had no choice. Kristen would do it for him if she could and he had to do it for her.

He reached deep and pulled all his power from every well of untapped potential he could find within him. With every drop, trace, and speck harnessed, he directed it into a spinning vortex of force in front of him. The whirlwind spun faster, tightened to amplify the force, and continued to increase in speed. When he sensed it was ready, he directed it into the ground but lowered it in rather than striking the surface.

Even with this gentle start to such a powerful force tool, the earth responded dramatically. The turf at the top of the hill shredded. The pieces of grass ignited as they were flung aside, fueled by an energy that might have looked like wind to the people filming it on a hill a kilometer away. He knew, though, that it was far closer to the raw energy of heat and pressure than it was wind.

The earth beneath the turf was ripped away next and geysered up and out, a gout of soil that he hardly even noticed. He was focused on the stone below and when he struck it with his vortex of force, it resisted him.

His teeth clenched, he dug deeper and spun the vortex faster, concentrating all the energy on the bottom of the spinning cone of energy and the point that touched the stone.

For a minute, he made no progress. His energy dislodged a few loose pieces of stone and grit but not much else.

Another stab of pain from Kristen overwhelmed his frustration and he refocused on his task with grim determination.

Larry thrust his energy into the stone and heated it until it glowed. After a few moments, it came loose and was hurled into his vortex and thrown skyward to rain down as molten stone. It didn’t hit him—his magic instinctively protected him from its effects—but he was damn proud that he’d ordered everyone else to keep back.

It meant he could continue his attempt without having to worry about anyone. Now that he knew what to do, he increased the intensity of his power, heated the stone to loosen its molecular structure, and ripped it out before he cast it aside. Sweat broke out on his brow as he cut down two feet, then five, then ten. He gritted his teeth. This would be harder than he had anticipated—much harder—but that didn’t matter.

He owed it to Kristen to not give up on her, not while he still drew breath, so he dragged even more deeply from the well of power within him and threw everything he had into digging the hole.

Even if it burnt his magic out, even if it ruptured his heart, and even if he had to die to succeed, he would break through so his team could rescue their leader.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Kristen tread water and kept her nostrils positioned to pop fireballs at the ceiling while she attempted the impossible task of looking for the exit to this underground lake with her eyes. Not being a brachiosaurus, this was impossible. But even in the few glimpses she had, she wasn’t able to make out any wide, yawning, dragon-sized tunnels for her to escape through. It wasn’t surprising, of course. If there were any, there’d be much less water in there.

Ultimately, it meant escape would not be easy.

She had to face the fact that she would have to fight an opponent she could not even see let alone assess for strengths and weaknesses.

There was nothing she could do about that. Her hidden opponent intended to face her when she wasn’t at her strongest. Yes, she had eaten and rebuilt some of her strength, but treading water in the cold while releasing fireballs slowly inevitably sapped her reserves.

Aside from anything else, she didn’t want to simply wait for the unknown dragon who hid in the blob of darkness. It was better to face the bastard head-on.

Her mind made up, she changed direction and headed toward shore, keeping the balls of fire going until she was close enough to touch the ground under the water again. When her feet felt the silty lakebed, she couldn’t help but draw a deep breath of air in satisfaction at having something solid beneath her feet.

It seemed that was exactly what the dragon had waited for. As soon as she breathed in, something bit her tail. She knew it was a bite because she could feel multiple teeth and knew it was a dragon because each tooth punctured her flesh. Her first instinct was to try to whip her tail free, but the dragon tightened his jaws and gave her no chance to try to break free before he hauled her under the water.

Kristen managed to suck in a precious breath of air before her back legs were yanked out from under her and her jaw struck the bottom of the lake. She was dragged into the depths before she could even try to find purchase and resist.

As the pressure of the water grew around her, her rage blossomed as well. She was tired of this shit. Whoever this dragon was, he had officially pissed her off. A real fight was one thing, but this cowardly, hide beneath the surface and never attack except from behind was pathetic.

It was time to see exactly how much this asshole really knew about the Steel Dragon.

She jerked her tail hard as if in an attempt to free it once more and the dragon responded as she expected. It pulled hard and used her effort to get away to exacerbate the wounds caused by its teeth.

Her purpose, this time, was not to escape from her attacker. She let the dragon yank on her tail—much as it hurt—so she was pulled deeper into the water. Once she achieved that painfully won burst of momentum, she changed into her human body but made sure to retain her steel skin.

Without a tail clamped between her adversary’s jaws, she was free to use her dragon strength powered legs to propel herself toward her foe.

Kristen was at a loss as to how to describe him—except that some deep instinct insisted that her adversary was male rather than female. The beast existed within the darkness of the cave as an even deeper black—like the ink of a squid spilled in the darkest depths of the ocean. He billowed and filled the water, making no shapes and yet moving as if controlled by some hideous intelligence.

Although the suggestion of no shape wasn’t quite accurate. Near the center of the cloud, the unmistakable jaws of a dragon were vaguely visible. They snapped at the water, trying to find the tail that had been snagged between them only a moment before. It was interesting that this dragon didn’t rely on his human form any more than any of the others she’d fought did and hadn’t expected her to transform into what it saw as a weaker shape. That weaker shape, fortunately, allowed her to rocket toward the still confused dragon and strike it with a steel fist.

She drove her steel knuckles into the tip of his snout near the nostrils and the pits she hadn’t known could sense blood until recently. Exactly as she had expected, the blow inflicted significant pain.

Unfortunately, it only made the snout and jaws of the dragon dissipate into the inky blackness that seemed to make up the rest of his body. The entire mass moved away and made her think of a jellyfish or a squid moving through ink. That, more than anything else she had yet to learn about this dragon, terrified her.

The way he moved proved that he didn’t need to keep his body in the form of a dragon or a human. He could take the amorphous shape of a cloud, both in air and underwater. She had battled a dragon with a power that was merely a fraction of this and it had been damn hard. Shadowstorm had been able to extend the period between his two forms so he could move through spaces that neither a dragon nor a human could fit through. It had been a tough fight, but she had won it because she had been able to overcome the limitations of his powers.

This foe didn’t seem to have those same limitations.

Kristen had to get out of the water. If her enemy could stay down there and continue to drag her into depths time after time, she would never win. This was the only option she could see so she took her dragon shape, shed her steel skin, and propelled herself to the surface with every ounce of strength she had.

She burst through and this time, risked a full breath of air. Foregoing the balls of fire as she swam to the shore, she used her tail, her wings, and all four of her legs to drive herself forward. She reached the edge of the lake and heaved her dragon form out of the water without being attacked.

Had her blow stunned the dragon badly enough to slow him or had he simply decided to bide his time again?

There was no way to know, but either way, she didn’t think her dragon form was the right choice for this fight. Although the subterranean room she stood in was massive, most of it was taken up by the lake itself. There wasn’t enough room for her to fly. Hell, there wasn’t enough for her to stretch her wings. Meanwhile, her enemy could become a literal cloud. A fight in tight quarters would only favor him, no matter how powerful she was in her steel dragon form. For whatever reason, her instincts still favored the presumption that her opponent was male, not female.

Quickly, she transformed into her human body and scanned the darkness for him. It was like looking for a blade of grass in a meadow or a tree in a forest. All she knew about this dragon was that he could take the form of a dark cloud, but the entire cavern was filled with darkness. He could be anywhere, she thought and tried not to panic as she backed away from the shore.

Her gaze moved constantly—up, down, anywhere, and everywhere in hopes of locating her foe. Despite her intense focus, she saw nothing. No shadows lurked within the shadows and no darkness surged toward her throat. She knew the dragon hadn’t retreated. He was merely biding his time like the enormous catfish at the bottom of the lake, waiting for his prey to make a mistake, to lose her balance, or to stop focusing for a second. Then, he would strike and the hunt would be over.

Kristen’s back struck the wall and she almost screamed. She was so desperate to locate her adversary that she had forgotten that her slow retreat took her somewhere.

If this was psychological warfare, the shadow dragon was winning. She looked left, then right, and searched for some kind of advantage or anything she could use to defend herself. Stalagmites and columns abounded where the dragon could hide in his inky state and pools of dark and rock shells were interspersed randomly between them. Her gaze traversed a crevasse that might be large enough for her body.

She knew an advantage when she saw one and darted toward the fissure in the cave wall. Her first hope was that the crack led somewhere and out of this damn place, but that hope was dashed as soon she squeezed into the space and almost immediately touched the back wall.

Still, although it didn’t provide an escape, it might provide her with cover against the shadow. It provided sufficient space for her human body but there was no way a dragon could fit inside the tight nook.

Although an attack had yet to come, she turned her skin to steel and immediately felt a drain of her energy. Normally, she had more than sufficient and barely noticed the cost of changing forms. After so much time in this cave with minimal nutrition while her powers were constantly pushed and stretched, she felt the loss of energy like a punch to the gut. She might be able to change to her dragon form once or twice more and maybe use her fire breath a precious few times, but before long, she’d be out. Even using those tactics could prove to be fatal because if she depleted her resources too much, she wouldn’t have the energy to use her dragon healing abilities.

Fortunately, her foe no longer seemed interested in a protracted war of attrition. The entrance to the crevasse she had squeezed into darkened and before she could so much as raise her hands to block, a dragon claw extended through the opening and raked across her shoulders.

Kristen kicked with—she knew from experience—enough force to knock down a three-inch wooden oak door, but the cursed dragon simply disincorporated his claw and she only kicked the air.

She kept her guard up now as her assailant beat savagely at her forearms and raked her again and again with cruel strikes of his talons. When she blocked those, he used his tail against her. The tip appeared from the inky cloud, as sharp as a spear and connected to what looked like black scaly skin stretched painfully tight over bone. He managed to deliver a strike to her face before she caught the tail and squeezed with her crushing steel grip.

The dragon yelped and turned to his inky black form of nothingness once more, and she had a moment to breathe.

A part of her began to think she could hold her enemy at bay long enough for—she didn’t know what. Long enough for her friends to rescue her? That seemed less and less likely. Long enough to learn more about this mysterious dragon attacking her? Possibly, but what would be the point of that? As soon as he revealed more powers, he would doubtlessly use them to slaughter her which was hardly worth the increase in knowledge.

But then all thoughts of anything but survival were thrust from her mind as a vicious blow struck her in the middle of her back. She was hurled from her crevasse and to the floor of the cavern, where she writhed in pain. Her back was on fire. She had no doubt that if she had not been in her steel form, her spine would have been shattered. The most troubling thing about that thought was the idea that maybe it was exactly what her enemy was trying to discover about her.

Kristen tried to push to her feet but Jesus, her back all but screamed in pain. Still, she could do this. She had to do this.

Her teeth gritted in both pain and determination, she managed to get on her knees and finally to her feet before she peered at the crack she had been ousted from. Had there been another entrance she hadn’t noticed? Perhaps there was a tiny fissure the dragon had moved through.

She understood that it was yet another question she would not get an answer to. A massive claw extended from the crevasse where she had been connected to what looked like a dragon arm, only with scales that frothed and bubbled like boiling ink.

Another claw emerged, followed by the massive head and neck of the dragon. It was extremely unnatural to see him unravel out of the slender fissure. How had he fit inside? Did the rules of physics even constrain him?

“Poor little dragon. Did you think you were safe, hiding in there?” he said. His voice didn’t come from a mouth but from the cloud of darkness that poured out of the tiny crack. “I am so very sorry to tell you that there is no place you can hide from my shadow.”

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“I am what hides under mountains and behind the stars,” the cloud of darkness said. “I topple kings and crumble crowns. I am nightmare incarnate and you, little dragon, have piqued my interest.”

“Well, lucky me,” she retorted and realized the dragon’s true power wasn’t his ability to become the dark but rather his ability to make her fear the dark.

The cloud of shadow continued to billow from the crack until his dragon form towered over her. He pumped his wings and when they stretched so high that they might touch the ceiling, he simply turned them into shadow.

“You have disrupted plans that were set in motion long before you were born,” the dragon said as he glided toward her rather than walked. “For a time, you interested me but now, I see you for what you are—nothing but a human. A lucky one who masquerades as one of us but is nothing but a cheap copy.”

“I’d rather be a human than hide from them in the shadows.”

As quick as a snake, his tail struck, swept her legs out from under her, and toppled her with ease.

“You have a disrespectful little tongue on you,” the dragon said, raised a claw, and swung it to crush her.

Kristen caught it seconds before it drove into her chest. The beast’s fingers were like a cage all around her, one that increased in pressure and decreased in size. “Funny. Most dudes like my tongue.”

He lifted her from the ground and hurled her with enough force to drive her through three stone columns before she struck a wall and landed with a clatter.

“I am not a dude,” her shadowed opponent said as he slunk toward her. “I could have been your master—the one who gave you a path forward in this life—but I see now that the only thing I might still gift you with is a quick death.”

She couldn’t see him. Her head had struck the rock so hard that her vision spun, which made telling shadow from animated shadow extremely difficult. “If it’s a quick death, does that mean you’ll stop talking? I’m getting bored.”

“Are you?” He was furious and his shape solidified as he lunged at her and delivered a vicious blow with bony spikes that jutted from his shoulder. They didn’t penetrate fully although she knew a few more blows like that would wear her down enough that they became lethal.

Rather than simply wait for the next attack, she clenched her fists together and swung as hard as she could at the dragon’s spine.

The blow was ineffectual as her adversary was gone.

Despite the fact that she’d been struck by the monster only a moment before, he had already changed his body into its incorporeal form. How was she supposed to battle something like this?

He laughed, caught her by the jaw with one of his massive talons, and threw her across the room. She struck a stalagmite with enough force to knock her out of her steel body and drive the point through her shoulder.

Kristen gasped in pain and forced her body to turn to steel, healing power be damned. She could not let him beat her, and if she remained pinned on the stone, she knew she couldn’t win.

In her steel body, maybe she could get leverage to break it. She tried pushing on the ground but couldn’t get a good foothold.

“Oh, this will be fun!” The dragon approached her from an angle she couldn’t see. The worst thing about all this was that she still didn’t even know what his true form looked like. She would die at the hands of a mystery, slaughtered by its shadow.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the ceiling above her began to glow red like someone had detonated a bomb and it now tried to tunnel in. She knew that wasn’t the case. Far more likely, the shadow dragon had called for reinforcements and this was one of their breath weapons, burning through the stone in an attempt to reach the Steel Dragon and kill her.

She laughed.

“Laughter in the face of your demise?” the shadow asked.

“It’s a little something I learned from my human friends,” she said and made no effort to quell her laughter.

“A waste,” he stated as the ceiling above glowed even brighter. She waited for her death to come, either from claws made of darkness or from red-hot heat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

They traveled for an hour behind the group in the truck. Drew rode atop the boulder and tried to look like he did this all the time when in reality, he was more comfortable on the back of a dragon. How weird is that? What seemed like only yesterday, dragons had been powerful, unapproachable creatures. He’d interacted with them only when they’d come to the precinct and demanded some kind of action. Now, he worked actively with a group of them with such a level of familiarity that one had let him bloody its nose.

Even after all that, flying on a boulder was crazy. The problem wasn’t the big solid surface. It was that Amy thought she needed to impress the redneck mages by racing ahead and freezing in place, or by doing barrel rolls now and then. Whenever she did any of these maneuvers, he stuck firmly to the surface as if his rear had been glued to the rock. That she wouldn’t let him go did nothing to settle the flips in his stomach.

Every time she raced ahead and stopped, he felt like he was going to puke. Each time she did a roll, his fingers dug involuntarily into the stone—not that they could, but they earned points for trying. He’d never envied Kristen’s dragon strength but the idea of being able to cling tightly to the rock of his own volition instead of being stuck there by the whims of a mage—even a mage he trusted with his life—had a comforting appeal.

They followed the vehicle as it bounced along dusty back roads and he watched the occupants as best he could. The men in the back didn’t seem to mind the rough ride. They held on tightly and managed to land where they had been seated whenever they encountered a particularly large bump.

Lumos didn’t seem to be as comfortable, bound as he was with his hands behind his back and curled like a worm pecked by a bird in the bed of the truck. Whenever they hit a particularly large bump, he cried out in pain. It didn’t seem too serious, but Drew had experienced many a bruised rib and he thought the dragon sounded like he was about on that level. A year before, he would have been amazed to see a dragon hurt by people at all. It had been simply unthinkable but now, he hoped his teammate was simply a better actor than he could be in that situation.

After maybe twenty minutes, they reached a dirt road with more traffic than the nonexistent cars on the last one. Amy used the opportunity to launch her boulder vertically—fifty feet, a hundred feet, two hundred, then five hundred.

Drew told himself he didn’t have any fear of heights as his stomach tried to tell him he now did.

“I think this is going well,” she said and sounded far too casual once they were so high that the truck below them was nothing but a pair of lights shining into the night. She stood tall, her arms folded and her feet planted on the stone as if it were a garden variety boulder rather than one airborne at high speed.

“Hopefully, we’ll be there soon,” he said, his voice shaky.

“I guess you were wrong about the cops, huh?”

“Sure, sure, whatever you say,” he stammered.

“Oh no! Is the big bad boy from SWAT afraid of heights?” She laughed.

“Heights is flying on the back of a dragon or rappelling down the side of an apartment building. Being on a gyroscope masquerading as a boulder is a whole different level.”

The mage threw her head back and laughed maniacally as she made the boulder plummet four hundred feet and follow the vehicle down a side street that crossed the road they had followed.

“I think you’re maybe too committed to your role,” Drew managed to say before he lost what brisket remains were still in his stomach over the edge of the boulder.

“Heh. Maybe I am enjoying this too much. Being an evil villain to the evil villains? What could be more fun than that?”

“I don’t know. Flying completely level and at the same speed as the truck?”

“Oh, you’re no fun!” Amy spun the boulder again.

This time, at least, nothing came up. He had already lost everything in his stomach.

They followed the vehicle onto another dirt road.

She was about to do another loop when Drew cleared his throat. “Amy, seriously, if you do any more of this, I’ll be green when we get there. That might blow our cover since your cleaner or whatever the hell I’m supposed to be probably shouldn’t get motion sickness from traveling with you.”

The mage frowned. “It’s a good point, I guess.” She huffed petulantly and—thankfully—leveled out.

After about ten minutes on the dirt road, the truck reached an eight-foot fence topped with razor wire that seemed to separate a dead field from the rest of a dead field.

“That’s weird,” she murmured. “I assumed we’d go to a cattle ranch.”

“This could be one, I guess,” Drew said, but he doubted it.

One of the mages—or mage sympathizers, he wasn’t quite sure yet—exited the truck, unlocked the padlock, let the truck drive past, and locked the gate once more. The process was almost bizarre as if there was something to steal on one side of the fence that wasn’t on the other.

He saw nothing but mesquite, dried grasses blowing in the moonlight, a few wildflowers, and small patches of cactus here and there. He couldn’t imagine why someone would want to hop a fence with razor wire when you could get the same poor assortment of plants on either side. Although it was curious that it was razor wire and not barbed.

They had passed quite a few ranches already and he had to admit, something was odd about this one. There was the fence with razor wire, for starters, a precaution far better suited for people intent on fence-hopping rather than cows who could knock the entire barrier down before they would even be able to touch the wire above it.

On top of that, Drew hadn’t seen any cows as they glided above this fenced-off sprawling acreage. A few of the ranches they’d flown past hadn’t had cows, but those had all been stocked with some kind of creature. Be it bison, sheep, goats, and even ostrich and zebras, it seemed that people in Texas liked their land to be involved in the production of meat. But there was nothing he could see on this land. He hadn’t even seen any deer, which was odd because it was night and—being a city kid—he thought the countryside was basically taken over by deer at night time. Even if that was a little overblown, he should see something, right?

Strangest of all was the fact that he didn’t see any actual structures—no barn, ranch house, or anything even remotely indicative of a human presence. All he could see was endless scrub and a dirt road that led through the center of it all, the literal middle of nowhere.

Well, Drew realized, that wasn’t quite true. Up ahead, he noticed an old grain silo standing on a bluff that overlooked what appeared to be another abandoned quarry. Next to the silo was a shed that looked like it had seen better days—maybe in the last century. Despite how anticlimactic the base was, he still expected the technomages—or their henchmen as he had begun to think of the men in the truck—to take them to the silo. He frowned, puzzled when they didn’t.

Instead, they skirted the base of the bluff on which the silo was built and continued toward what appeared to be the carved-out side of the hill.

“It’s a good thing we tried to meet with them, huh?” Amy said. “We would never have been able to find this on our own.”

“Yeah, I suppose not,” he agreed. “But is this group really the threat? The only difference between this quarry and the last is that this one’s even more desolate.”

As they rounded the corner of the bluff, Drew realized he could not have been more wrong.

It wasn’t a quarry at all but a place made to look like one. Someone had carved into a hill made of limestone and scattered pebbles all around in striking similarity to the location where they’d met these men. That, however, was where the comparison ended.

Under the ridge formed by the semi-excavated hill were a number of military-style trucks and jeeps. He counted seven, including two jeeps with mounted machine guns on the back.

“Fun,” Amy said.

He couldn’t help but disagree.

A massive camouflage tarp ran across the top of the hill so in the daytime, the vehicles could be hidden.

But Drew still couldn’t understand the point. Yes, there was a garage and what appeared to be a termite-infested silo, but so what?

“Why do you think they have this out here, so far from any trappings of civilization, when they could have simply put it on ranch like the cell did outside Detroit?” he asked her.

“This might be the middle of nowhere,” she replied, “but that doesn’t mean nothing’s here.”

She brought her boulder closer to the earth as a huge, hangar style door opened and flooded the scene with light to temporarily blind them.

It was a stupid move in that the light could give away their position, but at the same time, it had disabled Drew’s vision and put him and Amy off balance and at a momentary disadvantage. When your base was miles away from anyone and the closest thing nearby was a derelict silo, you could afford to flex a few power moves.

The young mage seemed to understand this theory well enough. Rather than set her boulder down gently as he knew she was able to, she let it drop the last few feet. It struck the ground hard enough to shake all the vehicles on their suspensions and rattle the men in the back of the pickup they had followed.

He was rattled too, but she didn’t release the magical bond that glued him to the rock until he gave her the signal to let him go. As soon as he could, he scrambled to the blessedly sturdy soil.

The men from the back of the truck grumbled as they unloaded and tossed Lumos to the ground with less grace than he would have imagined a rancher would treat a bale of hay.

Fortunately, the dragon didn’t land as everyone expected.

Amy caught him and lifted the human-shaped dragon, spun him slowly and languidly—upside down, then right side up, as if he were a forgotten doll floating in a pool.

It looked as creepy as hell to Drew, especially with the dried blood on Lumos’ nose, but it had the added benefit of facing the dragon toward his teammates and away from everyone else.

He flashed them a smile and a wink.

The mage dropped him summarily in a pile in front of her. She stood with a bound dragon at her feet and the light from the secret base made her shadow into a much larger version of herself.

The men still at the truck recoiled. Only Vince managed to not look openly terrified, and he only succeeded in that by yelling at the rest of the men to start unrolling the huge camouflage tarp to hide their truck as well as the other vehicles.

That was a mistake. He might not have realized it, but it was. Given what she had proven she was capable of, he—at the very least—should have used his abilities to maneuver the tarp into place. It would have taken a fraction of the time these non-magical humans took and would have kept many more guns trained on the newcomers—including Lumos, although it seemed the men had bought the Chewbacca routine. That Vince hadn’t done it was proof to Drew that he wasn’t much of a mage at all. And if he was in charge of their recon team…well, for the first time since they’d met the group of redneck mage wannabes, he felt comfortable.

Although honestly, being on solid ground certainly helped.

“Are you all rats or is there a reason you all live beneath a derelict old grain silo under a hill?” Amy asked Vince as he stepped into the light that streamed from the interior of the hill with them.

He chuckled and looked smug and in control despite the fact that she scared the shit out of all his men. “I thought the silo would give it away, but I guess not. Right this way,” he said and held a hand up in a gesture that looked far more friendly than he sounded.

The girl lifted Lumos with her telekinesis and made him follow as they walked inside to a room that had the cold, sterile atmosphere of a government building. The floors were off-white tile, the walls concrete, and the ceiling festooned with nothing but fluorescent lights.

At the end of the square room was an elevator.

Drew worked it out before Amy or Lumos did—which, given how outclassed he’d felt so far, was something of an accomplishment.

“Holy shit, this really is a silo, isn’t it?”

Vince nodded.

“How the fuck did a cell of mages get to be in control of a goddamn nuclear missile?” he asked.

The man’s expression soured.

“Oh… It’s an abandoned silo, huh?” he surmised correctly.

“It’s still a fucking great base,” Vince said and sounded remarkably like a whiny teenager.

“Yeah. Wow. I’m sure the latent radiation isn’t causing you guys any problems,” Amy said with a smile as sweet as poison ivy.

“Get in the elevator,” the young man said, but when she darted him a look, he corrected himself hastily. “Ma’am…uh, that is, if you please. My lady.”

She nodded as if this stumbling attempt at manners counted for something and stepped inside. Drew followed and she brought Lumos in, swung him upright, and stood him on his feet. Not one to break character, the dragon sagged and leaned heavily against the wall. Vince entered and pressed the button to close the door, but not quickly enough.

Colt and Dusty raced through the entryway and the former barely managed to wedge his boot between the two closing doors with an, “Ow.”

The doors opened and the two young men both stood awkwardly.

“What the hell?” Vince said and seemed embarrassed.

“The wait’s real long for it to come back up,” Dusty whined.

Their leader snorted in disbelief and this was followed by an uncomfortable pause. “Well, get in, then.”

“Right, sorry!” Dusty said but he paused again. Apparently, his brain had fired at full speed and had gone through the necessary geospatial calculations to realize that he and Colt wouldn’t fit very comfortably with everyone else.

“Dusty!” Vince snapped, and the young man sprang into action. Colt had already stepped forward, so both men crammed in together, which gave everyone barely enough room that they didn’t have to touch.

The elevator started to descend.

“So, tell me about this base,” Amy said and sounded like a villain shopping for real estate.

“It’s kind of hard in the cramped space. I think it might be better if—”

“Tell me!” she commanded.

Drew was impressed that she’d managed to keep a straight face and not laugh at the ridiculous request.

“We…uh, bought it in an auction a few decades ago.”

“You weren’t doing shit a few decades ago but pooping diapers,” Drew interjected.

Vince’s dark skin flushed and he clenched his jaw. “Our people bought it and since then, have turned it into the pinnacle of technology.”

“Why didn’t they expand the elevator?” Lumos asked.

For show, Drew drew his hand back to strike the dragon and bumped into everyone else while doing so. Then, he pretended to punch the prisoner in the gut and stamped on the floor of the elevator for suitable effect. The sound was so loud that even Amy flinched.

“Fucking mages,” Lumos wheezed.

“That’s Mrs. Fucking Mage’s assistant to you.” He sneered.

“It seems kind of a mouthful to me,” the prisoner muttered, so he once again bumped into everyone as he lunged at their captive.

“Enough! Enough!” Amy shouted, pushed Drew back with her magic, and shoved him into the other three men in the elevator with enough force to have knocked them over if there had been space for it.

By the time it finally dinged and opened, he was fairly certain that all three boys had a couple of bruises from him bumping into them so much.

It was a good thing they had managed to rough the boys up and steal some of their confidence, as when the doors opened to reveal the interior of the silo, all the three newcomers could do was gawk.

The interior of the space was vacant. Obviously, a missile had once stood in that position but was no longer there. Around this central cylindrical void were multiple levels—Drew counted five, although there could be more even farther down—all of them bustling with people. With a quick look, he was able to count more than thirty people. He had to assume there might be as many working in offices or rooms that weren’t directly adjacent to the main chamber.

“What, no missile?” Lumos asked.

Dusty turned on the dragon, kicked him in the back of the knee, and made his leg buckle so he fell. The prisoner wheezed and Drew reminded himself for possibly the hundredth time that a physical blow from a regular human was harmless to a dragon. It was like a June bug bumping into a human, more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Lumos straightened, breathing heavily, which made the young man grin cruelly.

“I must say…” Amy looked around the space. “I’m impressed. Are all these men mages? If so, you’ve managed to build a substantial force.”

“No, ma’am,” Vince replied. “Most of them are freedom fighters. Texans and Americans who are sick and tired of the tyranny of dragons.”

Colt cut in, “We’re working to break the yoke and, uh…to get rid of these assholes.”

Drew shook his head. The kid had started so strong. Whatever piece of propaganda he had repeated had sounded vaguely convincing, but then he’d gone and messed it up with schoolyard bad language. Still, he filed the information away for later. If these men could be swayed to fight for the mages, what would happen if they met a real leader like Kristen?

“And you have enough business to use this entire venue?” Amy asked as Vince began to lead them around one of the rings and toward a stairway to the next level.

“Sure, although it’s all stairs from here on down.”

“The basement is where we keep the lizards,” Dusty said.

“We have multiple cells capable of holding dragons like this one. We would have caught him and brought him in ourselves if you hadn’t, uh…”

“Stolen your fish?” she asked sweetly.

Drew didn’t understand the expression any more than Vince seemed to. The young mage merely furrowed his eyebrows before he half-nodded and half-shrugged.

“Should we lock him up now or will he go on the tour?” Drew asked and tried to put as much venom in his voice as Amy had. They’d discussed this, and if there was any indication of a trapped dragon at this cell, they needed to know. Given that they were well past simple recon work at this point, he decided they might as well try to free it.

“We lock him up, of course,” Vince said.

“Are you sure?” Dusty looked dubious. “The commander said we was always supposed to check in first.”

“Well, sure, but—”

Vince tried to reply but Amy cut him off. “And there’s a reason why you three can’t split up?”

Their leader guided them from the level they were on and down through the complex. Each level comprised a ring of deck plates surrounding a circular open space, with rooms leading away from the open center where the missile had been stored.

Drew assumed Vince had been honest about the decades estimate. It looked like considerable time and money had been sunk into the base. It was almost a pity that Amy would undoubtedly try to fuck it up.

A spiral stair led down from where the elevator shaft ended to the very bottom of the complex. The lowest level was all flat and the apparatus that used to house the bottom of the missile had long since been removed. Four large rooms led off from the open space on that deck and all had large caged doors. One was filled with boxes and looked like every moderately organized storage space Drew had ever seen. Two of the cells had been refitted with tons and tons of little tanks of some kind, all of them filled with a writhing black substance.

He didn’t know what the hell was in the tanks. His first guess was some kind of dark magic spell, but the smell was so unabashedly organic that he couldn’t help but think it was something far more pedestrian and far more disgusting.

Amy froze, so he stopped as well. “What is that?” she asked, her words barbed.

“What, the bugs?” A guard who stood beside one of the cages chuckled. “It’s weird the first time you see it, right?”

“What do you mean, bugs?” she asked him.

“They’re crickets, actually,” Vince interjected and relished the look of disgust on Amy’s face.

“Crickets?” she asked, her voice so hard Drew was concerned she might blow their cover.

“Sure,” the guard said cheerily, clearly not realizing that Vince was attempting to look tough and impress the visitors. “Crickets are cheap, easy to house and feed, reproduce like mad, and contain high levels of protein. They make perfect dragon fodder. The damn lizards don’t even mind eating all the cricket shit and cardboard we mix in. Well, not after a while anyway,” he said to Lumos as if that was supposed to make the prisoner feel better.

“You have a dragon, then?” Amy asked, her tone a little less edgy.

“Oh yes,” Vince said, took her cautiously by the arm, and drew her toward the giant grate the guard stood in front of him until the two of them stood in the center of it.

Drew remained with Lumos so couldn’t see inside quite as well, but in the dark, something moved.

“That’s your dragon?” she asked.

“It is,” the young man said and tried to sound tough.

“Sorry, the lazy bastard don’t hardly move unless you put the floods on,” the guard said and flicked a switch that bathed the dragon in light.

Drew didn’t need Lumos’s gasp of horror to know it was in a bad way. At least half of its scales were missing, no doubt ripped out to make bullets. Its claws were gone, as were chunks of its tail, for some reason. A dozen open wounds seeped but none of them seemed to bother it as much as the light did.

It writhed under the harsh glare and tried to escape but failed to even move. Its body was attached to the wall by multiple chains, so it could move only enough to reach the trough in front of it that was half-filled with grey goo.

“That’s it right there,” the guard said and pointed at the gross food. “They eat from that trough over a few days but this one’s not finishing the batch. Eat up, buddy! That’s the only way to get fresh food.” He said the last words like he was talking to a customer about freshening a buffet instead of torturing the poor soul chained to the wall in there.

“That’s why there’s not a ranch above the site, then?” Drew asked, both dumbfounded and horrified.

The guard nodded. “That’s right. Crickets breed fine in tanks. There’s no need to waste perfectly good Texas beef on one of these damn lizards.”

“That’s disgusting,” Amy said, her voice like hot oil waiting for a drop of water to fall in it and start a grease fire.

“I know, right?” the man said, which confused Drew until he realized that he had completely misunderstood Amy’s objection. “To think they sometimes feed these dumb beasts actual meat when they could save a ton of resources by using crickets. It’s not right.”

The young mage began to float—not much, merely a few inches off the ground as if she couldn’t control her magic in her fury. He could understand. This was even worse than what they had seen at the other mage bases. It was more grotesque like the dragon they were holding was simply livestock and nothing more.

“We heard there was some kind of tanks the dragons were kept in—some kind of substrate, I think. Does the dragon prefer the open air?” Drew asked.

The guard shrugged. “How the hell should I know what it prefers? We heard about those tanks. They are supposed to aid in healing or recovery or some shit. It sounds like a group of people getting concerned about shit that don’t matter. When we rip off this fella’s scales, they grow back. And when we rip off his, they’ll grow back too.” He gestured at Lumos and smiled as if he’d given them a guarantee on a used vehicle.

Then he went to the door to the cage to open it.

Drew took the opportunity to look at Amy, who was shaking with rage. Her hair had begun to whip in her unseen fury.

“I guess we finally found a place to lock this dragon up, ma’am,” he said to her, his tone measured and calm.

She looked at him and anger and sorrow warred in her eyes. He met her gaze squarely. He had a handgun holstered that no one had been able to take because he’d been on the boulder with Amy. His mind calculated the odds and he decided he could probably take the assault-style rifle the guard carried before anyone else got down here. If he was armed with that, plus Amy’s magic and Lumos’s dragon abilities, they might get out of there alive.

Maybe.

He clenched his jaw and glanced at the guard’s weapon. She nodded at that and in acknowledgment of his plan and her willingness to crack heads. They both looked at Lumos, who nodded at the cage in front of him and gave them both a flash of his dragon aura that felt like acceptance.

Drew was shocked. His teammate was all right with going inside that fetid hellhole? How on earth could he even consider such a thing? But then he understood. His gaze was locked on the whimpering dragon. He might be able to escape—although he didn’t see how the hell he would be able to if they shackled him like they had the other dragon. But he was willing to sacrifice his freedom so he could offer comfort to this other dragon.

He looked at Amy to try to gauge what she thought. While he had taken point on this mission because he had the most experience in law enforcement—well, human law enforcement, given that Lumos was part of Dragon SWAT—if they had to fight their way out of there, he damn well knew they would need her to lead that fight.

She shook her head at Lumos to indicate that she was ready to attack, but before she could spring into action, Colt spoke from the top of the spiral staircase. “There they are.” The relief in his voice was palpable.

Four men came down the stairway. At first, he felt only relief at seeing Dusty and Colt lead the way. The boys’ barks were undoubtedly bigger than their bites. Having both of them there wouldn’t change the nature of the fight much, especially since neither of them was a mage.

But then he recognized the other two men walking behind them and any relief he’d felt turned to dread.

It didn’t surprise him that his instincts had been right about McMurtry and Ramos, the two cops from Elgin. The only surprise was that Ramos wasn’t wearing his police uniform but a black robe.

“Commander!” Vince said, his voice heavy with forced tones of respect.

“Vince. Welcome. So, this is the mage you told me about on the radio,” the man said as he descended the stairs to appraise Amy. “And this is the dragon she brought us to show her goodwill? Not bad, not bad at all. And you said something about her clean—”

He stopped talking when his gaze fell on Drew.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” McMurtry demanded. He still wore his police uniform but now had a massive assault rifle strapped to his back.

“I told you I was looking for a shipment of weapons,” he said and tried to sound like he was astounded by the developments. “We came to sign up.”

“The hell you did!” McMurtry shouted. “You told us straight, you worked with the damn Steel Dragon. And that mage is her personal puppet.” The officer hauled the gun off his back in record speed.

But not faster than Drew, who had drawn his handgun and pointed it at Ramos.

“You damn fool. The commander can block bullets,” the man said and made no effort to stand down, even under the threat of Drew’s gun.

“So can I,” Amy said as she rose even higher off the ground.

“Well then, we have ourselves a little stand-off then, don’t we?” the cop said. “You have a gun pointed at our boss and we have one pointed at yours. She’s a mage. So is he. It’s about to get real fun when all the rest of our men get here and have their guns pointed at y’all too. Do you know how many bullets you can block, Ms. Mage? Or is that something we was gonna learn today?”

Drew glanced up as the barrels of weapons poked over the ledges of the missile silo to aim down the central chamber at them. Outnumbered didn’t even begin to describe the situation.

“You’re all forgetting something, though,” Lumos said, turned to face Ramos, and snapped his cuffs. “I have the powers of Chumbaca!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Larry needs our help,” Heartsbane said. She could feel his energy fading like he was falling asleep and losing blood all at once. “Get on,” she shouted and turned into her dragon form.

“I must say this is quite the turn of events—” Butters protested before Heartsbane picked the rotund man up in one of her claws and glided from the hill to where Larry was, less than a kilometer away.

They barely made it in time. She dropped the sniper who—despite his girth—landed softly and used his forward momentum to carry him through a clean somersault that trimmed his speed. He found his feet, dove at the mage, and managed to catch him by his collar before he tumbled into the hole in front of him.

“Larry! Speak to me. What do we do?” Butters demanded.

“In…there…” he muttered before he passed out in the man’s arms.

“Well, duh,” the sniper said. “Why else would he be digging a hole to the center of the earth if we weren’t going to use it to rescue Kristen? How thick does he think I am?”

“Too thick for the hole,” Heartsbane said, still in dragon form. Before he could respond, she pumped her wings to hurtle skyward and into a back flip so her nose pointed at the hole. She was far too big in this form, obviously, so at the last moment, she transformed into her human body, tucked her arms in, and plunged through the aperture.

Heartsbane plummeted so fast that if she struck the wall with her head it might knock her out. It wasn’t a good thing when one of the things she’d trained herself to do over the years was to revert to her dragon form if she was unconscious. Before the threat of dragon bullets, when the world had been a simpler place and the only thing dragons had had to fear was each other, it had made sense. Now, it was merely a bad habit she couldn’t shake.

Rather than risk injury in the narrow tunnel, she kicked out with her feet, dug grooves into the stone all around her, and slowed her momentum.

The pit grew darker and she looked up quickly. Emerald had followed her example and taken his human form to plunge into the hole to save the woman who, until incredibly recently, had been the rookie on their force. She was now their boss and de-facto savior of the planet’s stability and that was as good a reason as any for what others might consider suicidal.

Rocks crumbled and broke away as Heartsbane continued to fall. It was astounding how deep Larry had managed to dig, she thought before she approached the deepest layer. It still glowed faintly from the heat generated by the magical excavation.

Heartsbane dropped past it and powered into the rock.

She was on her feet in an instant. Her highly tuned aura senses told her Kristen was behind her. But they also told her that someone else—someone who was something like a dragon but different than what she was used to—was there as well.

“Red? Are you all right?”

“Oh—Heartsbane, thank God!” Kristen replied.

She tried not to roll her eyes.

As Emerald dropped from the tunnel, she took a hasty step back and he landed exactly where she had. He scanned the surroundings quickly before he stepped aside and Timeflash landed as well.

“I have nothing,” he said and searched the darkness in front of them. They were in some kind of underground cavern—an enormous one from what Heartsbane could tell—that was mostly filled with water. “Tell me you have something, Heartsbane, because I have shit.”

“I don’t sense anything down here either,” Timeflash said and moved toward the Steel Dragon. “Oh, Kristen, you’re hurt.”

“He’s down here!” Kristen shouted. “He trapped me here and now, he’s attacking me. He’s a shadow. An inky shadow with dragon claws.”

Heartsbane used her aura to calm their teammate, who was a mess. She could sense auras better than most other dragons could, and Kristen’s was all over the place. She was hungry, tired, and also thankful that the dragons were there but worried for her team. Under it all, like a baseline carrying a song, was terror—unbridled terror that overwhelmed the rest of her thoughts and robbed her of any reason.

“Better, Red?” she asked.

Kristen took a few deep breaths and nodded. “Yes. Yes, thank you. I guess you all scared him away.”

“Scared who away?” Emerald asked as he looked at the hole they’d come through. Even with dragon speed and strength, it would be a long climb out.

“There’s some kind of dragon down here. He has a form like a pool of ink or liquid shadow or something. He… I can’t beat him.”

“That doesn’t make sense, ma’am,” Timeflash said, ever the professional. “The dragons who have shadow abilities can only use them when they change shape. There’s never been a dragon who can stay between forms. That would be like you turning into a metal bird.”

Kristen raised her middle finger at Erin. “How’s that for turning into a bird?”

Heartsbane didn’t understand the significance of the phrase but she sent another wave of calm over her. “Whoever he is, he’s gone now. Let’s get you out of here and back into the sunshine. You’re probably going stir crazy down here.”

“No, no, I’m telling you that—oh, my God. Heartsbane, he’s behind you!”

She turned but could see nothing, merely shadow and dark and— Heartsbane gasped as something raked her across her belly.

The shock of the attack brought her senses to perfect clarity and she saw a pool of darkness that was somehow darker than the rest of the cave. She tried to swipe at it but her hands found nothing.

That didn’t stop the shadow from wrapping a bony dragon tail around her neck and hurling her into a lake.

Heartsbane plunged into the water and fought to reach the surface as she sent out a message using her aura. Danger! This dragon is gonna fuck you guys up!

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Amy was the only one who laughed at Lumos’s butchering of the name of one of the most important Wookies in history. Everyone else was too busy turning their guns to aim at the suddenly liberated dragon.

Idiots, she thought and pushed all their guns—all twenty that she counted—harder than their operator had intended. She smirked when the armed men all smacked their guns against a wall like they were kids playing laser tag.

“You fools!” Ramos shouted. “Get the girl, not the dragon.”

Some leaders didn’t follow their own orders, but he did not seem to be one of this variety. He lashed out at the mage with a blast of energy. It was sharpened into a long point as if he intended to skewer her like a fish, but she brought up her magical abilities and stopped the point from stabbing her. Still, he was far stronger than she had expected. With the point of his attack blunted, he still shoved her back until her shoulders thunked into the bars of the cage behind her.

She grunted, impressed but also resolute in her desire to show this idiot exactly who he was messing with. Without hesitation, she raised her hands and launched a blast of her own.

Ramos was expecting it and made a shield to block her attack, but she wasn’t an idiot. She had no intention to spear the idiot, not this early in the fight. All she wanted was to knock him back so he would collide with a wall and look like a buffoon.

He careened away and into a man carrying a crate of crickets who seemed blissfully unaware that all hell was breaking loose. The box shattered and the creatures scuttled everywhere.

The base commander struggled to pull something out of his robe while he yelled at his peons. “Kill them! Kill them dead!”

“Fat chance,” Lumos said, floored the guard at the dragon cage with a roundhouse kick, and launched Colt at least twenty feet with a dragon-powered uppercut.

“You two are show-offs, you know that, right?” Drew took careful aim and squeezed rounds off at the men who still hadn’t recovered from having their weapons almost yanked from their hands.

“You didn’t hit anyone,” Amy said.

“It’s called covering fire! Use it!” he shouted as the enemy returned a volley of their own.

“Pah, these humans can’t hurt me!” Lumos boomed, which immediately drew a fusillade in response. Drew flung himself across the space and tackled the dragon to thrust him beneath one of the rings.

“They have dragon bullets, you goon!” he snapped.

“I know that now,” Lumos said and pointed to his forearm which had a tiny gash across it. Thankfully, he’d only been grazed.

“Come on out, you cowards!” McMurtry shouted from the stairwell to which he’d retreated.

“You first, asshole,” Amy retorted, which earned her a barrage of gunfire even though none of the bullets even came close to hitting them.

“I think the only way out is the way we came in,” Drew said, poked his head out, and fired three shots through the hollow center of the missile silo. Three bodies tumbled to the ground and he looked disappointed in his enemies. “That was only supposed to be covering fire, you idiots,” he said to their fallen bodies.

“Who are the idiots, now, huh? You may have forced Ramos into a retreat, but you forgot about meeeeeee!” Vince yelled as Amy simply lifted him by the back of his shirt and rocketed him up through the central empty space of the missile silo. She heard a clang from somewhere high above her and knew he had made impact with something even harder than his head.

“I guess I could try to fly up there?” Lumos said and peeked up. Their adversaries responded with a hail of bullets and magical blasts of energy. “Or not. It might be better to keep my human form for a while. Dragons make a very easy target for cells of magical terrorists intent on killing dragons.”

“Go figure,” Drew said as he relieved dead guard of his assault rifle.

“What about her?” Amy said and gestured to the dragon in the cage behind them. “I don’t want to leave her here. I know this was supposed to be reconnaissance, but if we leave her now, they’ll take her and go even deeper underground.”

“I see what you did there,” he said.

“I’m not joking,” she replied.

“The way I see it, we have two options.” Lumos scanned the stairway with a small frown. “Either we rescue the dragon now and try to get the hell out of here with her, or we eliminate every single mage here.”

“That’s impossible,” Drew said.

“I agree.” Amy nodded. “She’s not mentally stable. I don’t think we can try to get her out of that cage, move her through a barrage of gunfire, and reach the surface. For all we know, she’s never even been to the surface.”

“That’s not what I was saying was impossible!” he protested.

“Then we—what do you humans say?—bring the pain?” the dragon asked with a grin.

“I planned to go with fuck shit up, but a little pain might be in order, sure,” the girl said. She turned to Drew. “You’ll have a ton of cleaning up to do, cleaner.”

“Better me than them,” he replied a little grumpily, probably because she and Lumos were ignoring his battle experience.

“All right then. It’s settled! We trash this place.” The mage grinned.

“Now would be the time,” he said. “They’ve assumed some kind of formation.”

Indeed, even Amy with her woeful lack of combat experience could tell there was much less gunfire than there had been before.

“They probably think we’ll try to escape through the elevator, which means they’ll set up a barricade,” he explained.

She smiled. “Well, let’s go convince them we’re not going anywhere.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Kristen’s first reaction to seeing Heartsbane appear and be summarily hurled into the lake was that she was having a hallucination. She’d been down there long enough and with the stress of being attacked, she’d finally lost it.

As she considered this as if from a distance, Emerald rushed toward the water and slapped her on the arm as he yelled, “Let’s do this, Steel!” He raced after Heartsbane and she decided that if this was a hallucination, she would simply go with it.

“Are you all right?” Timeflash asked.

She nodded and pushed the idea of shock-induced delirium from her mind. There were too many pieces that were too compelling and told her this was real. It had to be.

“I’m better now. Do you guys have a plan to get out?”

“Do you want to run before we defeat this asshole?” She smiled.

Just then, Emerald was plucked from the rock and tossed into the lake without warning. Kristen couldn’t see what had picked him up and only knew that one minute, his feet were on the shore and the next, his voice echoed as he tumbled into the water. “Too late to run now!” he yelled before he splashed into the water.

The blob of shadow surged toward Kristen and Timeflash. The two women fought back to back and used fists and feet to defend against their amorphous foe. The Steel Dragon took deep breaths as she fell into the rhythm of combat. Truly, this was more like sparring as she couldn’t land a punch. Every time a claw or tooth lashed at her, she tried to strike at it but she was too slow. The shadow dragon simply puffed into nothingness and her blows fell through empty air.

Timeflash fared no better. She wasn’t much of a fighter given that her abilities lay elsewhere, and it showed. Her punches were slow and her kicks underpowered. While she still had enough strength to kick the ribcage out of a human, against this foe, she wasn’t the partner Kristen needed.

The dragon had tossed those in the lake.

Fortunately, they both seemed more adept than she was at using their bodies underwater. Emerald burst from the surface in dragon form with Heartsbane on his back.

She vaulted off and spun in midair to accelerate her elbow to bone-crushing speed. Her perfect trajectory took her through the cloud of darkness but she hit nothing but the ground itself.

“Dammit!” she cursed, not because the blow that had cracked the earth had hurt her but because she didn’t like to miss. She didn’t dally, though. Instead, she lashed out at the cloud all around her. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to land a single blow.

Now that Kristen could see someone else fighting this beast of darkness, she began to understand his powers a little better. The dragon could keep as much of his body in shadow form as he wanted, which meant he could dodge any blow he anticipated. He could turn a claw or fang solid for long enough to hurt one of them, but as soon as they retaliated, he simply reverted to his inky darkness.

The realization gave her an idea. All she had to do was surprise it.

Emerald seemed to have the same thought. While Heartsbane battled the foe from the inside, the green dragon attacked. He leapt from his place beside the water, leading with both clawed forelimbs as well as a mouth filled with deadly dragon teeth.

The shadow dragon somehow saw him coming and vanished as the huge dragon barreled toward him, which forced Heartsbane to dodge at the last second lest she bear the brunt of the attack.

The three human-shaped dragons formed up around Emerald. Together, they scanned the darkness in search of their opponent but saw nothing.

“Do you think that scared him off?” he asked.

“Not even kind of,” Kristen replied.

“I don’t know. Whoever he was, he seemed like a chicken-shit coward to me,” Heartsbane yelled and the words echoed through the cavern. “I learned that from your human friends—” Heartsbane’s explanation was cut off when the shadow dragon returned.

“You cannot defeat me,” he roared as a tail made of nothing coalesced into a whip of spines and bones that pounded into her. Both Timeflash and Kristen tried to grasp the tail but it was already gone.

Instead, each of them felt a claw thump into their back.

Emerald moved to defend them but in the next moment, the foe was gone, vanished to wherever he was hiding.

“You realize you cannot win, correct?” the disembodied voice gloated. Rather than speaking loudly enough to cause an echo, he delivered the words in a whisper as if he were right beside them.

Which he was, of course. A claw grasped Kristen’s ankle and lifted her.

She thumped it with a steel fist but not before it had gained enough momentum to hurl her aside.

Helpless and horrified, she watched as the cloud of darkness seemed to bubble up from the rock itself and wreak havoc on her team.

He thrust Heartsbane and Timeflash away as if they were nothing but toys. Emerald tried to retaliate, but he unleashed plumes of jet-black smoke around his neck that solidified into his tail.

The green dragon began to choke.

“We can’t let him separate us,” Kristen shouted as she raced toward the fray.

Before she could get within ten feet of her teammate, a claw materialized and swiped her legs out from under her.

Timeflash fared no better and met a set of snapping jaws that made a gory mess of her arm. It began to heal immediately, but she would be at a disadvantage in this fight.

Emerald, gagging, transformed into his human form and slipped out of the shadow dragon’s grip. His attacker roared in frustration before the cloud streaked to the ceiling and sank into nooks and crannies, no doubt preparing for another strike.

“That was brilliant!” Heartsbane said. She’d only reached Emerald when the dragon had taken a quick retreat. “Where did you learn to use your human form like that?”

“I picked it up from a coworker,” Emerald said and nodded at Kristen.

“Soon to be former coworker,” she quipped.

“Ah! The gallows humor,” Heartsbane said. “Because he’s going to kill you!”

“Hardly. More like I’ll fire all of you if you let that dragon touch me again.”

“Then fire them,” the shadow dragon growled before he plunged from the ceiling and attacked the four of them at once.

Kristen fought with every ounce of strength she still had left after her ordeal. She tried to batter her opponent with fists made of steel and kicks that could crumple semi-trucks. Every time, she found nothing.

Worse, the dragon didn’t seem to be contained by the exact shape of his dragon body at all. He could use all four of his claws more or less interchangeably and attack two members of the team in strikes that would have been impossible if he had a skeleton to worry about.

It took all they had simply to block its shadowy blows and stay together.

“You see how this will end, don’t you?” the shadow dragon demanded, his mass nothing more than a cloud of darkness boiling furiously around the four of them as he struck again and again and again.

“You’ll take us out for burgers?” Kristen asked.

She was answered with a claw raked across the face.

“You will all die and all this talk of peace and love between the species will die with you.”

“Are you sure you don’t simply want some love?” Heartsbane asked. “Turn solid for a second and you might feel better.”

The dragon laughed and the sound seemed to come from all around them while the blows from his claws increased in speed. “I have not amassed this much power by falling for tricks as pedestrian as that.”

“The way I see it,” Emerald said as a tail swung into his gut and forced him to double over. “You haven’t amassed anything. All you’ve done is hide in the dark.”

“There is power in the dark!” the dragon replied. He adjusted his blows and forced them to move back to defend themselves or risk being truly savaged by his force that none of them had yet discovered how to stand against.

“For centuries, I have bided my time in the shadows, watching, learning, appraising, and acting when I must rather than when I wanted. And you think that you—a dragon raised by a human bitch—can unravel everything I’ve done in a year?”

“Honestly, at this point, I was only hoping for a sandwich,” Kristen replied. Her reply earned her another hard strike, this one with enough force to knock her on her ass, which immediately got soaked as the shadow dragon had pushed them all to the water’s edge.

“Such impetuousness from such a little runt. How dare you speak to me like that!”

“We don’t even know who you are,” Timeflash said. “Why the hell would we respect you if you’re merely a mage doing this?”

Timeflash—of all dragons—knew what mages did for the world and respected them for their work. She had a team that helped her augment her power, so what she’d said had been nothing but a cheap jab intended to piss the dragon off.

It worked. “You think a mage is capable of the forethought and planning that I have worked at for the centuries? Do you think a mage could singlehandedly take on four dragons at once? No, it is not a mage you face, but a dragon. You brainless slugs will never earn the right to use the name my allies use to speak to me, but I will tell you my plans. Are you listening? When this battle is over, I will harvest the skulls of your human peons and wear them as masks. When I tire of their bone structure, I will toss them aside like the trash all humans are.”

Kristen swallowed. Finally, she had a clue—an extremely weird, insanely creepy clue about this dragon who had toyed with her since before she’d even arrived at Mammoth Cave.

Now she could really piss him off. “Funny, I had planned to make a coat of your scales.”

The dragon roared and hoisted her into the air and she pounded on the arm that was attached to the claw wrapped around her waist. She didn’t have time to see if her blows caused any damage before her assailant hurled her into the lake.

She splashed into the cold water and pumped her arms and legs in an effort to swim to the surface. Before she could make it and suck in a precious breath of air, another splash was followed by two more and all three of her allies were beside her, swimming madly to the surface.

Kristen broke through first and sucked in a breath before she looked around to make sure everyone had made it.

They had, none of them being paranoid about water the way a person who could sink like steel was. Three dragon heads popped above the surface and the four of them all looked at each other.

Heartsbane grinned. “So now what? We play water polo or something? Did that dumbass not realize that there’s much more room in the water for us to take our true forms?”

Emerald chuckled, as did Timeflash.

No, this is when he tries to drown us. Kristen wanted to say the words but something had already caught her by the ankle. “Take a breath!” she managed to blurt before she was once again pulled beneath the water.

She wanted to scream when she saw the other three—all still in their dragon bodies—all yanked beneath the surface as well. Thankfully, she resisted the urge as she knew from experience that in this place, every breath of air counted and that if she screamed, no one else would come.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Amy broke from cover and raced toward the spiral staircase that wound upward through the abandoned nuclear missile silo. Drew thought she was crazy, even though she kept her shield up as she ran. The magic barrier robbed bullets of their momentum and turned them into nothing but lumps of either lead or the harvested and processed pieces of dragon they were made of. He knew they had practiced this maneuver for some time and that she could keep the bullets at bay without much difficulty.

The blasts from the other mages appeared to be a more difficult challenge.

Bolts of lightning and fire streaked at the girl and battered through the shield she’d made for bullets. The attack forced her to dodge aside.

“I think we should stick together!” she yelled at her teammates, who both rushed forward to shelter with her under the dome of magic protection she now used to slow the bullets and the mage blasts.

“Are you all right?” Drew asked as he moved past her and fired at a mage at the top of the stairs who tumbled to finally sprawl motionless beside them.

“I can hold them for a while, but the mage blasts will drain me faster than only the bullets.”

“It sounds like we should bring the fight to them, then,” Lumos said and peered up the staircase with a grin.

“Careful, dragon,” Drew reminded him. “You’re not wearing bulletproof armor currently and these guys are armed with what can kill you.”

“It looks like I need an escort then.” The dragon smiled at him.

After a hasty scan of the enemy placements, he nodded. “Let’s make for the next level.”

He started up the steps with his assault rifle ready to provide cover and his teammates followed hard on his heels. Amy maintained her shield. It reacted as a kaleidoscope of colors above them when the bullets sparked and she somehow absorbed the energy from the mage blasts.

That was the impression, at least, when he glanced out of the corner of his eye. Much as he wished he could simply step back and rely on her to get them out of this, his experience told him that wasn’t the case. Both resigned and determined, he pushed on with the task to clear the way for them to reach their chosen destination.

They hunkered close together on the landing and Lumos went to work.

Now that they were on the ring of plates around the center of the missile silo, the dragon could slip into the hallways and rooms carved into the earth that radiated out from the central chamber.

This ability wasn’t a good turn of events for the mages and men who tried to kill the three of them.

Drew had seen enough dragon battles to know what to look for but still, he knew that if he so much as blinked, he’d miss much of the action.

Lumos moved through the men ranged against them like a hurricane sweeping through a beach town. He was incredibly fast and almost invisible, yet the devastation he wreaked was frightening.

A man fell and tried to breathe as he clutched his neck where the dragon had chopped him.

Another was hurled aside by a spinning kick that swept his legs out from under him.

A third defender’s weapon was snatched from his hands to deliver a powerful blow to his face.

The fourth was simply tossed into the central chamber with enough force to careen across and power into the fifth who had been focused on Amy rather than on his airborne teammate.

“Shoot the dragon, you idiots! The dragon!” McMurtry bellowed. He stood on the opposite side of the ring they were on with his assault rifle in hand. The man didn’t seem to be a mage at all, which made him a perfect target for Drew.

“I’ll deal with McMurtry. Are you all right?” he asked the girl.

“It’s taking a ton of energy to stop these attacks, but if you guys can eliminate some of our enemies, I’ll be fine.”

“Roger,” he said and raced into action.

He ran through the devastation that Lumos had caused, his gaze fixed on a level above and the men McMurtry ordered about from the alcove where he sheltered. The way the cop stilled was a clear indication that he’d locked onto Lumos and was about to pull the trigger when Drew flung himself in front of the barrel. The bullet struck his chest like a train, thrust the wind from his lungs, and forced him into a tangled pile on the floor.

“Got one!” his adversary shouted and sounded like a kid at a carnival instead of one of a town’s chief law enforcement officers.

Drew’s chest burned from the injury but he ignored it and pushed to his feet.

“You’re supposed to be dead!” McMurtry said as he stood in front of him.

“Y’all small-town cops might not have heard of these things called bulletproof vests,” he said and launched himself at the man despite his heart hammering in his ears. His lungs still felt tight from a lack of air and he dragged a breath reflexively as he closed the distance between them.

McMurtry snarled his fury as he began to pummel him.

Surprisingly, the older officer was able to hold his own against him, but only for about thirty seconds. He blocked the piston-like punches with his assault rifle and was able to dodge his knees, but when Drew managed to hammer the other man’s fingers with a punch, the cop released his weapon reflexively from the pain.

Seizing the moment, he proceeded to deliver another unbridled attack.

He kicked the gun out of his hands and swung a fist into McMurtry’s skull. The man sagged and fell.

“Goddamn, who the hell taught you Yankees to move like that?” he moaned.

“Your mom,” he said, caught him by the collar, and lifted him bodily above his head. McMurtry struggled, but he was fortunately not strong enough. Drew took the smaller man and dangled him over the edge.

“You wouldn’t!” his captive protested. “You’re not supposed to kill—you’re a cop!”

“So are you, you piece of shit,” he retorted and released the man over the edge.

McMurtry screamed for far longer than he fell, but that was because he only dropped about two feet before he came to a stop, held in place by a piece of metal Drew had hooked the crooked cop’s shirt on.

“Oh, God…please no. Oh, god,” the man whimpered, his eyes still shut, and didn’t realize what had happened and that he wasn’t falling.

His closed eyes also meant he would never know who killed him.

“Take out that cop!” Ramos ordered from higher up the missile structure than Drew could see.

The volley of gunfire was immediate and bullets rocketed toward him as he scrambled to find cover. Fortunately, Lumos had already cleared the entire level, so no hostiles hid in the shadows. He made it to cover without getting hit but knew Amy had something to do with that, as a few bullets fell like they were nothing more than discarded coins.

Unfortunately for McMurtry, no one had provided him the same level of shielding from his own supposed allies. The people who had once obeyed him now cared only for Ramos’ orders and fired indiscriminately at their former lieutenant. In an instant, the man was riddled with bullet holes.

Drew didn’t want to imagine what the bottom of the silo would look like by the end of it. Already, bodies had fallen there, and McMurtry would now drip blood in a macabre shower of gore.

He focused his attention on the level where he stood. It looked like there were four floors in total, and they’d cleared the first two without sustaining injuries, which wasn’t bad.

Unfortunately, most of the force looked like they were at the top.

“Maybe we should make a break for it,” Drew said. “I bet we can reach the elevator and get out of here.”

“No way!” Lumos protested. “We haven’t eliminated the leader of this group yet.”

“I’m with Lumos,” Amy said. “We can do this. Let’s not stop now.”

He nodded. They had voiced his preference but he’d needed to make sure everyone was on board. “Does anyone have a plan for the next level?” he asked across the space in the middle of the compound.

“Oh, this is fun.” Lumos peered at the next level and didn’t sound at all like he was in the middle of a firefight. “From my angle, I see big yellow barrels with a flame symbol on them and the number four. Do you have any idea what that means, humans?”

“Not a clue,” the mage responded.

Drew smiled. “Those barrels are flammable. I don’t remember if number four or five is the highest, but I know they definitely mark anything that burns.”

“Oh, this does sound fun,” she agreed.

“All right,” he said, checked his ammunition, and found it empty. He took an extra magazine from one of the men Lumos had knocked out. “I’ll lead the way up the stairs, target those tanks, and land a few shots. They should go kaboom. You two follow once I have the area clear.”

He darted forward and drew another spray of bullets that Amy blocked with a dome of magical power. In moments, he reached the steps and raced up them, taking them two at a time until he gained the landing and darted around a corner into cover.

As he’d been trained to do, he waited for the obligatory pot shots before he snapped his head out, sighted the barrels of explosive material, and fired.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t noticed that Lumos had followed him to this level.

The bullet struck one of the barrels, punched through the outer casing, and burrowed inside. The explosion was immediate and released a shockwave that ripped through the other barrels beside it. Those detonations joined the first until it seemed like the entire earth would collapse on their heads.

The dragon didn’t even flinch. He stood directly between Drew and the barrels while shrapnel seared into him and flames surged to engulf him. The ancient dragon stood strong and laughed as the deadly mixture ripped at his skin to cut him, burn him, and tear his clothes away until he only wore scraps and tatters.

It reminded Drew of when Kristen had first learned that she was something more than human. She had placed herself between a partner and a rocket and the weapon had lost.

Lumos seemed to be as strong. Before the blast was finished, he was already healing. “You gotta mix the dragon pieces with the gunpowder if you want to hurt me, you sons of bitches!” he shouted, apparently enjoying this.

Drew stood cautiously, tried to shake the ringing from his ears, and looked around the third level of the base.

It was a wreck, an example of what complete and utter devastation truly meant.

He approached Lumos and they looked at all the men who’d been caught in the carnage. The poor guys hadn’t even had a chance to try to kill him. Well, technically they had, as they’d fired at him for a while now, but after they’d been wiped out so easily and completely, he couldn’t help but pity their incompetence.

“I guess that’s it, then, huh?” he said.

“Wrong.”

Ramos floated from the top floor of the compound. He glowed, his skin like hot coals. His robes billowed around him and resembled smoke issuing from a smoldering fire. Each hand was wreathed in flames that twisted and curled like serpents. “You fucked with the wrong mage.” He sneered.

In response, Amy floated up. While the energy that poured from the man seemed malevolent like red flames burning a house, the air around Amy held a cool blue sheen. Her hair blew gently in a breeze Drew knew she was creating. Her fingers were covered in energy as well. It was light-blue though, the color of a robin’s eggs. Rather than writhing like snakes, it seemed to breathe like a snoozing animal.

“You tricked my men and you will pay for their loss!” Ramos screamed at her.

Before he could martial his energy, she delivered a massive blast into his chest.

It shredded whatever magical armor he had and flung him into a steel bulwark. He spun as he fell unhindered to the floor four stories below. He landed with a dull thud that made Drew cringe.

The girl floated closer and landed beside him. “Well, that was anticlimactic.”

He chuckled. While he’d expected more of a grand showdown, Amy truly was in a class all her own. “I must say that was damn wicked.”

“Thanks!” She beamed. “But did you see Lumos survive that blast? It was badass!”

“Why, thank you.” The dragon tittered at the compliment. “Although in all honesty, that wasn’t the wisest use of my resources. I was able to heal but barely. I’d love to stop and get more brisket before we head home.”

“Are you feeling all right, Drew?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.” He tried not to sound annoyed. “I was the one who shot the tank if you don’t remember. That means I killed more than both of you put together.”

Amy indulged him with a smile before she said, “Yeah, but you’re our cleaner, Drew. That means you have a ton of work to do.”

He looked down four stories, past the moaning forms and unconscious bodies of many of the people in the cell, to some of the dead, including the leaders, at the bottom. She was joking, of course, but he also knew they weren’t done there yet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Kristen had believed there could be nothing worse than drowning alone and in the dark, but she found now that simply wasn’t true. It was far worse to watch your friends drown.

Emerald burst above the surface and joined her briefly before he was yanked underwater again by the shadow dragon.

“Emerald!” she shrieked which was, of course, exactly what their opponent wanted. As soon as she emptied her lungs while she screamed for her friend, the shadow dragon attacked, dragged her down, and forced her to swallow a mouthful of water.

She changed to her dragon form—burning the last of her energy—as she tried to swim to the surface once more. A part of her had begun to wonder why she was still alive. Her enemy could have killed her any number of times already. He could have killed all of them. Why drag this out?

Heartsbane thrust through the surface of the water moments before her and sucked in a ragged breath. Kristen realized that maybe their enemy was finally finishing the job. Her teammate looked rough, worse than she had ever seen her. Before she could fully catch her breath, she was hauled under once more. This time, she blew fire at the ceiling in frustration.

Kristen thought maybe the tables would turn when the fire passed through a cloud of inky darkness, but it seemed the shadow dragon couldn’t be hurt at all in his insubstantial form. She hadn’t quite worked out whether he also managed to be in the water and on the ceiling at the same time or simply moved with incredible speed between the two.

Emerald and Timeflash bobbed to the surface in the wake of the blast. Both stayed up long enough to catch their breaths.

“What is this about?” Timeflash asked and craned her long dragon neck to look around in the low light.

“It was Heartsbane’s fire,” Emerald said.

“No, it wasn’t,” Kristen explained sadly. “It didn’t hurt him at all.”

“No, no, not the fire itself but the ligh—” He didn’t manage to finish his thought because he was immediately submerged again.

“The light?” Timeflash asked before she was pulled under as well.

That was it, Kristen realized. When she had heated the stalagmite, she’d been fine, and when she’d blasted fireballs, she hadn’t been attacked. The shadow dragon couldn’t attack if he was in the light.

When Heartsbane surfaced, her boss was ready with battle orders. “Heartsbane, fireball—go!”

The dragon obeyed her without hesitation. She launched a fireball at the ceiling and again, the inky form retreated from the light. This time, he returned as soon as the light was gone to bite and slash at the two teammates before he dragged them down into a lake that was now red with their blood.

They couldn’t beat him, her reason told her. He was simply too powerful and didn’t need a dragon-sized shadow to hide his form. Any size seemed to work for his powers—which explained how he’d been able to follow her. Worse, he seemed to be able to send parts of him to attack in the spaces between blasts of fire. No matter what they did, they couldn’t win this. They would be drowned, one by one, and she knew she would be last. The shadow dragon would kill her friends to make her suffer all the more.

She surged to the surface, sucked air, and waited to be struck yet again. It took a few moments for her to register that something had staved off the inevitable attack.

Emerald breathed fire at the ceiling again and again. When he stopped, the light remained.

“I thought we needed a lamp,” he said and gestured at the stalactite above him that now glowed with heat.

“That’s brilliant,” she shouted. “Light this place up.”

Timeflash surfaced, then Heartsbane. Kristen told them both to do as Emerald had and soon, the ceiling of the cave above the four dragons glowed with a rosy brightness.

The inky form of the dragon didn’t enter the light. He pushed against the borders and each time he came too close, part of him would become solid to reveal his dragon shape.

“There’s still darkness between us and the exit,” Kristen said while she tried to marshal the strength she needed to make fire of her own and failed.

Their enemy saw this too and his dark, cloudy form swirled between them and the tunnel the dragons had entered through.

“It’s time to shine a little light on the problem, then,” Emerald responded and launched a streak of fire at a stalagmite near their exit. It began to glow and as it did so, the cloud of inky shadow retreated.

“Come on, people!” the green dragon shouted. Timeflash and Heartsbane swam forward, keeping Kristen between them. As they moved, they blasted more areas of the cave with fire until it soon seemed like every piece of stone or crystal she could see now sparkled with light.

None of this went unnoticed by the shadow dragon. He screamed in fury and hurtled forward in spears of dark energy that nevertheless coalesced into something more solid whenever he entered direct light. A spear became a claw and a cloud became a snout. Every time this happened, he retreated.

“What? Are you afraid of how you look in the light?” Kristen asked, knowing full well that what the dragon was truly afraid of was his identity being revealed.

“You will not get away, Steel Mongrel!” he roared, but she didn’t feel the blow she knew he wanted to land on her. Now that they were bathed in light, the dragon couldn’t use his abilities.

“Light up everything but our tunnel out of here. If this asshole wants to run, let him run into our friends,” she proclaimed and the dragons needed no further urging to deliver fireballs that were dense with hot energy to every corner of the cave.

The enemy reacted like an animal. He shrieked and spun in circles like an angry flock of birds. His motion accelerated to the point where he was almost a blur until Kristen felt sure he would attack in his frenzy, using some other power.

Her instincts, fortunately, hadn’t failed her. Like a cannonball fired from a ship moored in hell, the shadow dragon launched toward her, but she was ready. She lashed out with her steel tail and struck the dragon across the face with enough force to deflect the energy into a dark corner of the cave.

He mewled piteously, obviously in pain, but it faded into the sound of wind rushing over stone before the cave fell silent.

Nothing moved except the billowing lungs of her dragon friends who used their breath to protect her.

What had been a nightmare was now a dream. The crystals glittered like chandeliers, the stalagmites and stalactites glowed with rosy energy. Best of all, she wasn’t alone. She was surrounded by people who cared about her—people who were willing to risk life and limb for their friend. She could joke and cry with them and simply be with them, even if they weren’t people in the human definition of the word.

“Thanks for saving me, but one of you guys has really bad breath.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

It always felt good to come home, even if home was currently an old warehouse transformed into a base of operations.

Although Timeflash had been away for a day, it still looked great. The biggest difference was that it bustled with activity. People moved about, carried equipment, and set up more of the endless workstations it seemed they’d need. A few continued to work on landscaping while others—regular humans judging by the way they carried themselves—trained in hand-to-hand combat.

Kristen limped through the gate they’d installed in their secure perimeter and headed toward the main building. Despite the fact that she didn’t know many of the faces, they obviously knew her. Most of them stopped and saluted, and those who didn’t were chastised for missing their boss’s entrance by their more observant coworkers.

Two dragons flew overhead as well, practicing dodges of rifle fire from humans who were being trained on how to shoot dragons from below. It was a tough world when your enemies could be anyone. Dragons had to train to fight humans and humans had to train to fight dragons, and everyone had to be ready to fight mages. Yet all she wanted was for them to work together.

It seemed Jim and Stonequest had been busy with recruitment. The humans’ obvious deference to Kristen made it clear these were Jim’s people, and the auras of the dragons overhead held no hostility to her.

What a relief it was to feel dragons rather than guess where they were. She shook her head to clear the memory of facing the shadow dragon. It was a relief to bask in the warm sunshine, hopefully something he could never take away from her again.

They entered the base, where Stonequest, Jim, and Brian waited for them with a stack of pizzas higher than she had ever seen. Despite her bruises, she couldn’t help but smile.

“You didn’t get anything for anyone else?” she said by way of greeting and her brother rolled his eyes at her.

“She almost dies and is still bruised despite having dragon healing powers and all she cares about is pizza. That’s my sister.”

Everyone chuckled while he embraced her and hugged her tightly with muscles that had begun to emerge from beneath his once girthy body.

“I’m all right,” she whispered to him but he held her for a second longer anyway.

“Hey, you’re hogging the boss!” Jim joked. The young tech pulled away and everyone else teased him until he stepped aside and served a slice of pizza next to a massive salad on his plate.

“So…” Larry said once everyone had settled and he’d stacked his plate with more food than Kristen had ever seen him eat. “What the hell happened down there?”

Kristen didn’t tell them right away. Instead, she introduced herself to the two new dragons and greeted a third she already knew—Amythist, whose garden she had destroyed while battling Constance, wanted to repay the favor of her life.

The other two dragons were much younger than her and both wanted to join the team because they agreed that the Dragon Council was mismanaging things in favor of those with vast powers. At the same time, they also wanted to make sure that the new world order the planet seemed to be marching toward still had dragons at the negotiating table. Neither had powers beyond the basics and both were concerned that this might make them a liability when fighting at the Steel Dragon’s side. Kristen, having been through an ordeal where her steel skin had almost drowned her many times, assured them that their help would still be appreciated.

Finally, with everyone assembled, introduced, and offered food, she told them about what had happened beneath the earth.

It was odd to have to recount not only the dragon battle but the entire ordeal to her team. For so long, she’d worked closely with them. This was the first time in a while that she’d truly been afraid, and a big part of that had been because she’d been separated from the people who supported her. They had been right to bring more people on. Their only mistake had been to wait as long as they had. The other part of her fear was the bizarre powers of the dragon she’d fought.

Despite her personal discomfort, she told them of his powers, answered their questions as best she could, and tried to assuage their fear while also making it crystal clear that this was an extremely dangerous enemy—stronger than any of them had fought.

No one knew what to make of the dragon except Amythist.

Kristen also greeted the soldiers Jim had brought in and confirmed what he had promised. Yes, she would pay well.

Although she wasn’t too worried about the money—it was hard to stress about that kind of thing when you had a private jet and a staff to fly it—Amythist was quick to offer her funds. Apparently, Windlock was considered working class by most dragons, and his holdings and fortune thus paled in comparison to hers. The old dragon pointed out that her funds might carry them into battle but she would most definitely not join them. Because of her generosity, Kristen couldn’t help but listen respectfully to the wizened old crone.

“Tell me about his threats again,” Amythist said when the large meeting finally finished and people broke into their working teams.

“That he would take the skulls of my human friends and use them as masks. Does that mean something? I thought it was only fear-tactics,” she said.

“I can’t say for certain, but I have heard rumors about such…fetishes. Tell me, did you get a look at either of his forms?”

She shook her head. “He knew how to use the shadows for more than only attacks. I never saw more than a tiny piece of him at any moment.”

“Still, those details might prove helpful,” the old dragon murmured.

In response, she reached into her memories. She’d found it so difficult to make anything out. It had been almost pitch-black in the cave and the inky form had stuck to the deepest of shadows as much as it could. What could she say? “He was vicious with his claws. Flexible, like he could use combinations of his claws and teeth that I’ve never encountered.”

“Ugh, his bony tail, too.” Heartsbane wrinkled her nose. “Instead of only having to worry about the bladed tip of this asshole’s tail, we had to watch out for every piece. It was like a razor-tipped spine.” She shuddered.

“Anything else?” Amythist persisted.

“He could mask his aura perfectly,” Kristen said.

“You said the same thing, didn’t you, Heartsbane?” Timeflash interjected.

Heartsbane confirmed that while the old dragon continued to nod with a thoughtful expression.

Kristen tried to think of more details but came up with nothing concrete. “He was toying with me, whoever he was. He seemed to think I was interrupting his plans.”

Amythist chuckled and clucked like an old hen. “My dear, you interrupted the plans of every dragon on the planet when you burst into the scene as a police officer. That, at least, doesn’t winnow the field. Still…I shall have to look into this. Those powers are certainly unusual and this individual sounds like he has gone to great care to conceal them for a very long time. I fear it will be difficult to shed light on this situation.”

“If we’re done using puns, I’d like to introduce my platoon—the Dragonbacks because we got your backs,” the Wonderkid said with a wide grin.

“This young man is so delicate he wouldn’t bruise a peach,” the old dragon responded. He smiled at her and even winked while she undressed him with her eyes, apparently unconcerned that he was thousands of years younger than her.

Jim saluted. “We’re glad to work with you, ma’am. These men and women are all ex-military and experienced warriors who have seen the true cost of war. None of them want to see the world embroiled in something like that.”

“Yeah, and the paycheck ain’t too shabby!” one of the soldiers interjected and drew a few chuckles from those standing in formation beside him.

“I’m happy to pay, my dears,” Amythist said. “I love the look of men in uniform and dragons, of course, would never be caught dead wearing anything that wasn’t couture. I’m invested in people sticking around.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the Wonderkid said and dismissed his soldiers to their training exercises.

Kristen poured a cup of coffee and watched the base work. It was amazing that it wouldn’t exist if not for her. Now, they were all there and operated more effectively and faster than she ever could have herself.

She was about to settle on a couch when the team she’d sent to Texas returned.

“Amy!” she said, managing to stay on her feet despite wanting to sit more than anything.

“What? No special greeting for the two of us?” Drew joked although she was quick to notice there was no laughter in his eyes.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“No, I’m afraid not.” Lumos stepped forward, leading a fourth person she had never seen before. In seconds, she realized it was a dragon.

“This is… Well, she doesn’t have a name—at least not one she knows.” Amy’s voice sounded hard and brittle.

“She’s the lab-grown dragon from Texas?” Kristen asked. “But that’s great. I thought you three were only going to gather intelligence.”

“Once we found out what they were doing to this poor young lady, we couldn’t even consider leaving her there any longer,” Lumos said.

“It was worse than—”

“Stella?” the old dragon asked. “Oh yes, far worse. This one can’t speak and is terrified of almost everyone except Amy and me.”

“I…I don’t think anyone has ever been kind to her—ever,” the mage said, her voice hollow. “I was able to help her transform with magic. Once the spells keeping her in her dragon form were gone it wasn’t that hard. I think that helped. I’m not sure when last she was able to be a human. Maybe never.” While she spoke, her voice had grown tighter until it finally broke and she looked at her boss with rage in her eyes.

“She’ll be all right,” Kristen said.

“Will she?” Amy asked with true fury. “Because I don’t know if I could be after the way they treated her. I’ve never seen cruelty like this, Kristen—never. What those two dragons did at my parents’ house was callous, but it wasn’t like this. She lived in filth and ate gruel made of insects. I…I want these bastards destroyed now!”

“We’ll get them soon,” Drew said. From his tone, Kristen had a hunch he’d had to talk Amy down a few times already. “We found good information in that base—maps, logs, and hard drives. Let Zed have a look at it and we’ll decide on the next move.”

“What about the Texas cell? How dangerous are they?” she asked.

For the first time since she’d seen them, the three shared a small grin.

“How dangerous were they? Not so tough, especially not when faced with little miss mage here. How are they now? Gone.” Lumos smiled a smile that would have fit fine on his dragon body’s face.

“Kristen, when I signed up to join you, you told me we would help people. That our mission would be to make the world a better place by making different sides see what we had in common.” Amy took a deep breath. “I don’t see how I can ever work with people who would do this kind of thing to an animal, let alone a thinking, feeling being like a dragon or a human. I want to stop them. More than anything.”

She clenched her jaw. “I think in the days to come, we’ll all come up against forces and foes we never expected. What I faced in that cave was terrifying, but it was cruel as well. So cruel that I can’t imagine ever working with it so no, if it comes down to it, I won’t stand in your way. As long as you continue to help me—to help all of us to right the wrongs in the world, regardless of who committed the crimes or who they were committed against— I’ll have your back.”

“How long of an R&R do we expect this time?” Butters asked.

Kristen shook her head and clenched her jaw. “I’m sorry, but I hope none of you were planning any vacations. The time to act is now. You eliminated a cell, plus the disruption to the one in Florence less than a month ago, which means we’re on a streak. Every other technomage terrorist cell in the world is about to try to change hideouts, dig in deeper, or attack outright. We have no time to wait and need to focus on an immediate assault to topple this organization before the cells can try to strike again. It’s time for us to take the war to the enemy in a big way.”

Everyone agreed. Working together was the way forward. This would be the body that would bring about a change in the world, and she would be the steel blade that would lead them all to victory.

THE STORY CONTINUES

The story continues with book twelve: Warrior’s Blood, available at Amazon and through Kindle Unlimited.

Grab your copy today!

BOOKS BY KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN

Realms of Power and Fury

Discovering Power (Book 1)

Finding Honor (Book 2)

Tomb of Malevolent Evil

Roll for Initiative (Book 1)

Cast of the Die (Book 2)

Steel Dragon

(with Michael Anderle)

Genesis Draconis (Book 1)

Scales of Justice (Book 2)

Dragon Rising (Book 3)

Dragon Swat (Book 4)

Terror Obscura (Book 5)

Never Cage a Dragon (Book 6)

Dragon's Party (Book 7)

Dragon Rescue (Book 8)

Destruction Imminent (Book 9)

Ties That Bind (Book 10)

The Masked One (Book 11)

Warrior’s Blood (coming soon)

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)

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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