TIES THAT BIND

STEEL DRAGON™ BOOK TEN

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN

MICHAEL ANDERLE

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

Copyright © 2020 LMBPN Publishing

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Version 1.00, March 2022

Previously Published as part of the megabook Steel Dragon 4

eBook ISBN: 979-8-88541-311-4

Print ISBN: 979-8-88541-312-1

THE TIES THAT BIND 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

Even though Kristen hadn’t visited her parents in a while, it still felt like coming home.

The smell of her mom’s lasagna from the front porch and the color of the maple tree in the front yard in early fall brought a wash of nostalgia. Her brother’s face smirked at her through the windows, vanished, and reappeared as if to make her think he was a ghost like he had done when they were kids.

“Okay, so remember, let me do the talking. My parents have lived in this house for forty years,” Kristen told Stonequest as they approached the front door. “They won’t take this easily.”

He smiled indulgently at her. “Well, I’ll be…I’ve seen you face multiple dragons, mages armed with machine guns, and even the Dragon Council itself, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared. Are your parents so bad as to frighten the Steel Dragon herself?”

“Just…don’t step on my mom’s flowers, okay?”

“Noted.”

“And wipe that stupid grin off your face.”

Stonequest obliged and replaced his smile—that had steadily become goofier and goofier—with the face he used to interrogate hostile witnesses. “Better?” He grunted for effect.

“No! It’s better if you merely smile normally—no, not like that! You know what? Do whatever you want with your face as long as you keep your mouth shut.”

“Am I allowed to eat, Investigator?” he asked.

“I’ll let you know if you earn the privilege,” she retorted, not at all amused with him at the moment.

She rang the doorbell twice and opened the door before anyone could answer.

“Hey, Kristen!” Brian said from the living room.

Kristen was surprised to see that he wasn’t burrowed into the couch. Instead of a fine dusting of cheese crumbs from a flavored chip product, her brother was coated in sweat. His face was red not from getting himself worked up defeating an opponent online but from doing…squat push-ups?

“Brian…are you all right?” she asked, beyond confused. Her brother normally complained about putting away the groceries but was now working out in the living room?

“I’m fine,” he replied breathlessly.

“Good form, kid,” Stonequest said and Brian beamed.

“I’ll go hit the showers,” he said a little too nonchalantly.

“Sounds good, Brian,” their mom said and, unable to help herself, she added, “Seeing as how we have so many in our locker room, I hope you’re able to find a stall.”

“Ah, a pleasure to see you again Mrs. Hall,” Stonequest said and bowed cordially before the woman like she was a member of the Dragon Council. “It is always a pleasure to be reminded where Kristen gets all her snark.”

Marty smiled and extended her hand for him to take it and kiss it as he’d done before, but when he took it, she pinched his fingers and rapped his knuckles with her other hand. “I’ve told you before to call me Marty. Mrs. Hall was my mother-in-law.”

“Yes, ma’am—I mean, yes, Marty,” he said and looked embarrassed for either being admonished or for a woman at the high end of middle age being able to move quickly enough to slap his hand.

Before Kristen could think of something snarky to say to him that wouldn’t earn a tongue lashing for implying her mom was slow, Frank Hall appeared.

“Krissy, sweetie!” he exclaimed, a big grin on his round, red face.

“Dad!” She went to hug him, but he put his hands on her shoulders instead and studied her intently.

“Where is it?” he demanded.

“Where’s what?”

“Oh, come on, Krissy! I’ve heard the rumors but I have to know if it’s true. You know I’ve only ever seen one three times? Thirty years in the force and I barely ever meet a dragon. Now, my daughter is one of their highest-ranking officers.”

“Right, sorry.” She pulled her jacket back to show him her badge.

His eyes brimmed with tears when he saw the seven-pointed star with the stylized, slitted eye of a dragon in the middle. “Oh, Kristen,” Frank said, choked up. “I…it’s beautiful… It’s truly beautiful. I know you don’t need to hear it from the old man who changed your diapers and learned how to take care of your curly red hair but I’m so proud of you, sweetie.”

He wrapped her in a hug and she let the world fall away so she could be held by her daddy. That he was her adopted dad and had taken the place of the dragon who had sired her meant the world to her. Frank Hall was her father. He was the reason she had become a police officer and the reason she thought one girl with curly red hair could make the world a better place. It felt better to be hugged by him and told he was proud of her than it had felt when Windlock had given her the badge.

Windlock.

Kristen still didn’t know how to think about the old investigator without being overcome with emotion. He was dead and she couldn’t help but think that if she’d only been a little quicker, a little more clever, or slightly more persuasive with Constance, he’d still be there.

“Kristen,” Stonequest said simply when she pulled away from her dad. She nodded. It had only been a week since Windlock had died, but that was still more than enough time for Stonequest to be able to tell when her aura was focused on him. At first, it had been annoying but right now, she appreciated the reminder to not let herself sink into despair at the loss of a friend and mentor.

“You should be crying!” Marty snapped and ripped Kristen’s thoughts away from two men she’d worked so hard to make proud.

“Mom?”

“Do you have any idea how much stress you’ve put us through? We follow the news, you know. We heard about your fight in Canada and some mess on a farm near here and now, the tabloids say you prevented a war from happening. Tell me they made that one up, young lady.”

“No, ma’am,” her companion said. “Your daughter is a hero.”

“And I suppose you think that’s a good thing?” The woman jabbed him in the chest with such force he looked as he’d been struck by a dragon bullet.

“Ma’am?”

“I spent my whole life worrying about Frank and she became a cop, but at least she had steel skin. Then, you dragons come along and whisk her off to the only job that could endanger her.”

Stonequest was stunned into silence, but Kristen had far more experience with her mom.

“That’s not the case anymore, mom,” she said.

“Oh, here we go,” Marty countered with a snort.

“Can we at least sit and eat before we get into all this?” Brian said. “Working out makes me even hungrier than videogames used to.”

“I think that’s a great plan, son. Marty?” Frank took his wife’s arm, planted a massive wet kiss on her cheek, and escorted her into the kitchen.

Dinner was pleasant enough for about ten minutes. The lasagna was great, the garlic bread almost offensively garlicky—exactly as Kristen liked it—and the salad delicious.

Her parents carried the conversation as they ate, during which her dad asked her about work and her mom told them about her garden rather than asking more about her daughter’s dangerous adventures. Brian made a few wisecracks, exactly like he always did, but there was something about him that was…different.

He was more quiet than usual and didn’t snipe at her, which made her want to check his pulse and make sure he hadn’t been replaced by a robot.

Stranger still, when he reached for seconds, it was only for more salad.

“So…” Frank said, having had his fill of updates. “What’s next for the Steel Dragon?”

“Actually, that’s why I’m here,” Kristen said, straightened, and looked at each of her family members in turn. “We stopped the technomages from starting a war, but that doesn’t mean our fight is over.”

“Well, uh-duh,” Brian rolled his eyes. “You only took out one cell.”

“Exactly.” She nodded despite the snark before she stared at her brother more closely. “How did you know that?”

“It’s kind of obvious, right?” He shrugged. “They’re terrorists and rely on small, dispersed, disconnected cells so they can appear to be a larger force than they really are. It doesn’t make sense that she’d try to take on the whole world of dragons with only eight mages. I could do that kind of shit in World of Warcraft, but this isn’t a videogame.”

“That’s…surprisingly perceptive of you,” Stonequest said. “Although I have never heard of this Warcraft World. Is it on this continent?”

Brian laughed and seemed almost giddy under the dragon’s praise. No one else shared his humor.

Kristen’s father looked grim but resigned like a cop ordered to go into a hostile situation. Her mom looked downright ornery.

“What do you mean the fight’s not over?” Marty asked after an awkward moment of silence. “How many times do you have to save the world?”

“As many times as it takes, Mom,” she said and immediately wished she hadn’t said a damn thing.

“Kristen has been tasked with a mission directly from the Full Dragon Council. It’s an honor,” Stonequest said before he added in a slightly more dour tone, “and a duty.”

“What does that mean, Krissy?” Frank asked. “Will you be out of town for a while?”

“Yeah…but that’s not quite why I’m here. We’re building a fighting force to target the cells in their lairs, eliminate them, destroy the dragon bullets, and free my captive biological siblings.”

“Your siblings?” Marty looked aghast.

“That’s where they’ve obtained the materials for dragon bullets? They’ve taken dragon prisoners?” Brian nodded as if he had put the pieces together.

“Very perceptive,” Stonequest all but purred again.

Kristen wanted to agree but was again confused with her brother’s level of knowledge. They hadn’t been able to keep it a secret that the lethal dragon bullets were made of dragon pieces. By this point, too many remnants had been found, primarily in the battlefield where she had engaged the mages in Canada and saved Amy, but the media had promoted the story that the mages had taken these bullets from the dragons they killed. For Brian to see through that was unexpected. But it was something to ask about later, not right now. Their lives were too important.

“These are lethal enemies. We’re not talking robbers or crooks or whatever else, we’re talking people who will not hesitate to use my family against me.”

“They wouldn’t be the first,” Brian said and anger crept into his voice.

“I know, and I’m sorry. Both for the home invaders and for…for when you were abducted, Brian.”

“It’s fine,” he said, his voice almost a shout. “I had to grow up sometime.”

In any other context, she might have been proud of her brother, but the venom with which he said it made her fear she’d lost the carefree brother she’d fought so hard to protect.

“I can’t let that happen again and if you stay here, it will happen,” she finished.

“We don’t think it’s a question of if but of when,” Stonequest added somberly.

Her parents shared a look.

“We’re not leaving,” Marty said. “Not after everything we’ve done to this house. This is our home, and I won’t give my garden up for a group of terrorists.”

“Dad, please, listen to reason,” Kristen begged.

“Your mother’s right, Krissy. This is our home and we’ve made a life here. We even have decent neighbors. We won’t run away—not now and not ever.”

“Dad, it’s not safe.”

“Kristen, I had a job that was not safe for thirty years. Do you think I forgot how to handle a gun when I retired?”

“Dad, these are mages!”

“Do you think I give a shit who these fuckers are?” Her dad’s voice rose and his face reddened alarmingly. “I’ve lived in this house for forty-one years. Forty. One. Years! Do you think I’ll let a robe-wearing terrorist come in here and take me quietly?” Frank thumped his fist on the table and all the dishes clinked. Still, he didn’t stop. “They’re only people, Krissy. They invade my property in America? I’ll show them my favorite amendment.”

“Frank! Frank, calm down.”

“Damn it, Marty, I will not calm down,” he said and stood abruptly. “These terrorist mage fuckers think they can remake the whole goddamn world and I won’t have any part of it.”

“Dad! Have some water,” Brian said. He’d stood as well and now put a glass of water in front of his father, his expression imploring.

Frank looked at the water, seemed to notice how heavily he was breathing, and sat slowly.

“The water, Frank.” Marty raised her eyebrows to emphasize her point.

“Right, sorry. Water.” He reached for the cup but stopped to take a little vial out of his shirt pocket. “Brian, tell Kristen about your new workout regimen,” he said as if that would distract her from what she’d seen.

“Dad, what are those?”

“What, these? These are nothing. Only a little nitroglycerin—good for the heart and all that. Didn’t I tell you? It’s not a big deal, honestly. A precaution like a vitamin.”

“Dad, your water,” Brian said.

Frank nodded and popped a pill under his tongue before he took a sip of water.

“How long has this been going on?” Kristen asked and tried not to make it sound like a demand.

Her father shrugged but Brian answered. “He’s been on those since we were held at gunpoint in the house.”

“Not right after.”

“Frank, the doctor told you not to argue,” Marty said and he nodded, took deep breaths, and let the red leech from his face.

“He began to have chest pain soon after, went to the doctor, and now, he's on a collection of pills,” her brother said and looked at Kristen like it was her fault. Oddly, he also looked guilty for looking at her that way.

“Is this true?” she asked her parents.

Their silence told her everything she needed to know.

“This only proves my point even more. I want you guys safe, not having health issues from the stress because of me.”

The idea of the stress of being her family making her dad physically ill struck her like a baseball to the chest. She felt guilt, terror, resentment, and rage all at once in a massive tangled knot in her gut. “I want you guys safe. Living in fear is not safe.”

“And you think staying in a hotel and moving every few weeks is safe?” Marty demanded. She sounded much like Kristen when she demanded things, thus proving that many traits were taught, not inherited. “We tried that, Kristen. It was hell.”

“It sounds like hell,” Stonequest interjected.

All four pairs of Hall eyes settled on the dragon and he withered as if he were surrounded by a team of dragons and mages rather than humans and his dragon partner.

“I’m only saying I don’t know why you would do that again.” He raised his hands in surrender.

“Because your boss is demanding it of us!” Marty yelled.

“Mom, calm down. If you have to start taking pills too, I’ll lose it,” Brian said.

“Oh please, if your father had eaten half the salads I’ve put on this table for all these years, he wouldn’t have any of these problems.”

“Damn it, Marty, we are not going to talk about the food right now. You bake a good chicken and fry a good pork chop. How is it my fault I like your cooking?” Frank shouted and grew as red as a beet again. This time, he caught himself, though, sat again, and breathed deeply.

“I’m only saying it would make more sense for you all to leave the country. A hotel in Detroit is hardly a great way to keep you safe,” Stonequest said placatingly.

“And where would we go?” Marty demanded, her words like knives.

“Well, why not go to Kristen’s villa in the South of France?”

Again, all four Halls turned to him with some form of confusion in their expressions.

“Her villa? It’s rather nice—at least it was the last time I visited.” He shrugged.

“Stonequest…I don’t have a villa. I’ve never even been to France,” Kristen said.

“Oh? Pardon me, I assumed Windlock had taken you there. It’s quite lovely.”

“Kristen,” Marty all but purred. “However did you fail to mention that you own a villa in the south of France? You know your father and I honeymooned in Europe. We never made it back.”

“Well, why not go now?” Stonequest asked and beamed. Kristen could feel his aura working too but she didn’t fault him for it. “It might make a wonderful place to ‘vacation’ for a while...only until all this is cleared up, anyway.”

Her parents shared another look, their faces thoughtful rather than angry and obstinate.

“What do you say, Marty?”

“I’ve always wanted to visit the southern coast of France,” she replied and batted her lashes. “Why didn’t you tell us you had a house there, Krissy?”

“I didn’t know.” She smiled weakly. The depth and scope of the wealth she’d inherited from Windlock was staggering to her. She had seen an estate outside Detroit and a vast trove of old treasures and assumed—like any sane human being—that had been the extent of his wealth.

“Oh, it’s quite lovely,” Stonequest said again. “And I know a few dragons in the area as well. I can arrange a security detail that won’t even look out of place. What does everyone say?”

Marty and Frank beamed and relief washed over her.

At least until Brian stood and thumped his dishes into the sink. “I’m not running away.” He looked as angry as Kristen had ever seen him and almost like he was ready to take a dragon on with his bare hands.

She wondered what he had in mind.

CHAPTER TWO

The rest of dinner passed amicably enough, if only because Stonequest continued to divulge more details of Windlock’s—now Kristen’s—villa in France. Marty seemed happy enough about it, although when she glanced at her, she could still see bitterness in her mother’s eyes. She felt bad about making them go but at least they’d agreed to it.

That left her wondering what exactly Brian was thinking. He’d declined dessert, which made her think he must have cancer or was a robot or something, but her parents didn’t react negatively. Frank even congratulated the boy on staying strong while he served himself a second portion of chocolate and peanut butter brownies with ice cream.

Kristen took her bowl and gestured for Brian to follow her into the back yard while Stonequest continued to woo her parents.

“Are you excited for France, Brian?” she asked and tried to sound as friendly as she could despite his earlier outburst. “You’ve lost weight. Keep it up and I’m sure some French girls will be quite interested.”

“I’ve lost, like, twelve pounds. Nothing to be proud of…not yet.” He paused, then looked her in the eye and squared his jaw. “I don’t want to go to France with Mom and Dad.”

Kristen nodded. He’d made that much clear. “Why not? I know I haven’t been to this villa but Stonequest makes it sound great. Plus, if you stay here…” She swallowed and cleared her throat. “I can’t let anything happen to you again. Can you please go so I’ll know you’re safe?”

Brian responded with a question of his own. “Will you be safe if I leave?”

She didn’t mean to but she recoiled reflexively at the absurdity of the question. “Of course I won’t be safe, Brian. No one will be safe until we root out all these technomage cells and make sure none of them do something that finally pisses the dragons off enough to start burning cities.”

“So, you’re saying I should simply sit on the sidelines, waiting for the world to burn, while my little sister does all the hard work and takes all the risks? What if the dragons decide to burn Detroit?”

“That’s why I don’t want you to stay here.” Her frustration mounted but she tried to keep her tone level.

“So I should leave, while all our neighbors stay behind and risk being incinerated if all this blows up?”

“I know you’re not asking me to send the neighborhood to France,” Kristen replied and took a deep breath to help her stay calm, something she knew annoyed her brother. “But what are you proposing?”

“I want to help you. Not only you, but your army, or force, or whatever your guys are.”

“Brian—I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Please, hear me out,” he replied and sounded eager for the first time since they’d come outside. “After what happened with Obscura—”

“I am still so sorry about that,” she interjected.

“Would you please shut up and cool it with your aura for five minutes?” Brian snapped in response.

“Sure, right.”

“Being abducted and almost killed by a dragon in a fucking LARP version of Pac-Man kind of put things in perspective for me,” Brian said. “I used to think all this”—he gestured to the backyard, the trees, and the neighbor’s boat—“didn’t matter. I thought life was only about experiencing things, and I could experience almost anything in a videogame. Hell, I thought I could experience things better than real life in a videogame. I used to want to be a master of the digital world. That’s where the most competitive people are these days, or at least that’s what I thought until Obscura showed up.”

Kristen tried to smile but she couldn’t stop the tears from flowing down her cheeks. It was like watching her brother age ten years in a single conversation.

“None of it feels real anymore, I guess because none of it is,” he continued. “I want more than I used to. I want to be a part of something that matters, and I can’t think of anything more important than helping my sister stop a war and maybe end human and dragon segregation. I know I’m only a regular human but you have other regular humans on your new team too, right?”

“Yeah.” She sniffed. “But they’re cops. They’ve all trained for years. You’ve never even been to the shooting range with Dad. I hate to say it, but you’d be a liability. If you were killed, I’d never forgive myself. I can’t let you throw your life away for nothing, and if you got in a firefight with these mages…that’s all you’d be doing.” She tried to wipe her eyes.

“Damn it, Kristen, why are you crying?”

“I’m sorry.” She swiped furiously at her cheeks and grimaced. “I had really grown to appreciate you being a gamer.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I knew you’d be safe as long as you had a high-speed connection. I thought Mom and Dad would fight me on getting them to leave but that you’d go for it as long as I could get you somewhere with an ethernet jack.”

Brian laughed grimly at that as his eyes welled with tears. “You can’t protect me forever, you know. Plus, I’m your older brother. I’m supposed to protect you.”

“I’m a dragon, Brian!”

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I bet the Internet in the south of France sucks.”

“It might be good,” she said, simply for the sake of arguing with her brother.

“It doesn’t matter, Kristen. I don’t care about that anymore. I want to help. And you’re right, by the way. I’m not ready for fieldwork. Shit, compared to the rest of you guys, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready for fieldwork.” He laughed as he grasped his big round belly and jiggled it.

Kristen eyed it surreptitiously. He had lost weight and given the fact that she’d seen him both working out and eating healthier, it seemed like he’d lose much more. But he was right. He was in no shape for fieldwork. “What exactly were you thinking if it wasn’t being shot at by a group of mages?”

Brian chuckled. “Something more on the intel side. I could help gather some of the information you’ll need if you plan to strike the Texas cell first, although I’m sure you’ve considered the one in South America too.”

She nodded. “We’ll raid Texas first, I think, then Colombia because we think that might be the only cell in South America…” The words trailed off and she looked at him. She was so used to talking about operations with her people that she didn’t notice that he had casually dropped a fair amount of confidential intelligence into the conversation. “Brian, how the fuck did you know about the mage cells in Texas and Colombia?”

“Internet,” he retorted smartly with a dorky smile.

“That doesn’t even begin to explain it,” Kristen replied, concerned that her intelligence might be compromised. Had Brian found a back door into their computers or something? If he had, maybe others had. “Did you…did you hack us?”

He smiled. “Yeah, I’m sure hacking someone’s new boss is a great way to get a job.”

While she liked that he called her a boss and not his sister, she frowned at him saying he’d hacked her.

“No! I didn’t hack you guys. I tried, though, and I probably could have but their whole server’s not even connected to the Internet at large.”

“That explains why the Wi-Fi at work sucks,” Kristen mumbled quietly before she snapped her attention to her brother. “Seriously. How did you do it? If you want to work for me, I need to know your methods.”

“Well, you’ve never really been that discreet. I read about what happened at Fort Drum—granted, it was in some of the darker corners of the Internet—and that farm with the super-obvious name? Deephealth Ranch was all over the news when they began to excavate to dig a dragon out, of all things. With those two as data points, I started looking for correlations.

“It seemed like checking industrial farms with a strong focus on meat was a good place to start. I ran searches on the shipping records of dozens of farms—like, seriously, a ton. I especially looked for shipments that went to military bases. There's a ranch in Texas, you see, that's sent shipments to Fort Hood. That by itself isn't crazy weird—soldiers gotta eat, and soldiers like bacon—but the ranch never sent anything until a couple of weeks ago and now, they're sending regular shipments—”

Kristen laughed. “Wow, Brian, I gotta say, I’m impressed. How did you know about Colombia?”

Brian’s smile broadened. “I didn’t. You told me.”

“But you mentioned the South American base.”

“I assumed they’d have cells on most continents and that South America would be the easiest for them to supply and for you to strike. I had thought Brazil, though.”

Another laugh bubbled. It was a good thing he wanted to work for her and not a newspaper. “I’m impressed you found all that on the Internet.”

“I’ve become good at ferreting out leads like that. It turns out being a gamer wasn’t a total waste of time. Many of us found out how to find hidden content or download weird links from odd corners of the Internet. I agree with you that I’m not a good candidate for field ops, but do you have someone to manage the back end of things? I kind of envisioned myself being someone like ‘Overwatch’ from that show Arrow. I can help you find targets and during actual operations, I can provide up-to-the-minute intel. Also, I can help you with GPS tracking, cameras, and maybe hack a cellphone here and there or a CCTV system.”

“You mean you want to be like Felicity?” Kristen grinned. The amount of time he had talked shit about that show must have numbered in the hundreds. Certainly, more times than there were episodes.

“Okay, I used her codename because I thought it was cooler, plus Overwatch is a videogame I totally kick ass at so…” He shrugged.

“Yeah. We won’t call you Overwatch, that’s for sure. But…well, I’m impressed. I think this could work. You could be like our Alexa or Siri.”

“No, that is not what I had in mind.” He held his hands up, but she could already see it had gotten under his skin.

“Yeah, we could use you. How about Jarvis?”

“No way!”

“Cortana?”

“That reference is, like, twenty years old.”

“Zed?”

“You mean from Power Rangers? Isn’t he bad?” Brian asked although he didn’t sound like he hated it.

“Yeah…but didn’t he stay out of the battles and send monsters in to fight? That’s what you’ll do.”

“Zed…yeah, Agent Zed. It sounds good.”

“It damn well better, Zed,” Kristen snapped in her bossiest voice. “You work for me now.”

He smiled at the harsh tone. “That’s more like it.”

“So…what do Mom and Dad think?” Kristen asked.

“Dad said, and I quote, ‘about time,’ and Mom…”

“Let me guess, she hates it?”

“Prize for the dragon,” Brian agreed. “But she’s been okay with it since I’ve been eating better and working out, plus…she never thought you’d agree.”

“You mean she still thinks you’ll go to France with them? Even after you yelled at the table?”

“Yes, boss, she does, and I’d appreciate it if you could do something about that for me.”

She rolled her eyes but she agreed. It was like Stonequest had said. She’d faced dragons so she could face her mom.

The reminder didn’t make her any less nervous, though.

CHAPTER THREE

Neal Havington had taken every precaution. Even though the exact details of what had happened to the mage cell in Detroit were unknown, their organization understood the general import of what had transpired.

Constance had been poised to destroy not only the North American Dragon Council but the Dragon Councils of the entire world.

She’d failed.

He knew this because the insufferable Shimmerclaw of the European Council had returned to the continent and not called for anything but forgiveness.

At least, that’s what she said.

Havington wasn’t naïve enough to think that just because a dragon said something, they meant it. He and his mages had spent the last week moving their entire base of operations. Constance wasn’t supposed to know anything more about them than that they had been based in Pisa, Italy, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t. She was smart—is smart, he told himself because until he saw her body, he had to tell himself she was alive—but she was also wily. Her intention had been to lead the entire organization—scattered as they were—which meant she might have known exactly where his team had been.

Now that they had moved into a more secure location, he wanted to honor Constance’s work by killing some goddamn dragons.

It was possible she had killed a few. Shimmerclaw hadn’t made a statement about casualties. But it hadn’t been enough to put a spark to the powder keg of human and dragon relations.

The cell leader couldn’t wait for the dragons to decide to take action. He needed to light another spark. His plan was to inspire the European Council with a couple of surprises of his own.

His expression set and determined, Havington connected to the headset of the first mage.

The opera was perfect, absolutely perfect. There was no better way to celebrate than with street food.

Some dragons balked at Dentedoro’s taste in food, but he found dragons to be fairly pretentious, by and large. To him, nothing was better than arancini with a little espresso to follow an opera.

He left the theater with the other attendees, regular people dressed in tuxedos and elegant ballgowns. They wore gold Rolexes like he did, had handmade shoes like his, and a chauffeur drove their mint-condition Lamborghini Miura exactly like his did. Well…maybe not that last one, the dragon mused. Even if one’s human acquaintances were the Italian nobility, it still served him well to set himself apart. Thus, the sports car and the street food.

While most of the concert-goers made their way to fulfill their reservations or returned to their mansions to have their chefs prepare food for them, Dentedoro moved toward a string of booths above an entrance to the train station. He had his eye on the third cart from the left and the pyramid of arancini stacked inside the man’s humble establishment.

Each ball of rice was filled with cheese, rolled in breadcrumbs, and baked…fried? He didn’t know the first thing about food prep but he did know this man made the most delicious arancini in all of Italy.

“They’re good, huh?” a man said to him in Italian from under a hood. He had a rice ball in one hand and his other hand in his pocket.

“The very best,” Dentedoro replied. “I come here after every opera. This man is worth far more than he makes here. I have known kings with less skilled chefs.”

“Why don’t you hire him, then?” the man asked. There was something odd about him, something he seemed to sense was wrong, but he couldn’t quite say what.

“Humans do their best work when under a little stress,” he said with a shrug and a flash of his golden teeth. He’d had a mage gild his human teeth decades before. His dragon form always had them, but he had wanted the same effect when in this weaker body. “If I hired this man, he would become fat and lazy like a pig—good for nothing but slaughter.”

The man nodded and adjusted his robe.

That was it! Dentedoro smiled at the realization. The man was dressed in a robe as if they were living centuries in the past. He hadn’t noticed because he’d seen so many fashions come and go, but the robe had never really been a fashion. To see a man wearing it now could only mean—

“You’re a mage.”

“And you’re a pig—good for nothing but slaughter,” the stranger replied. He yanked his hand from his pocket, fired three shots from a gun into the dragon’s chest, and spat on him when he crumpled to the paving.

The last thing Dentedoro saw before he died was the man remove his robe, throw it in a trash can, and give the man who made Italy’s best arancini a fat stack of Euros.

Aya didn’t love her job but she needed it. Her master wasn’t cruel but she also wasn’t patient. Fraunfeuer expected her to clean the entire castle while she slept, and if she so much as dropped a dish or knocked a broom over and woke the dragon, she would dock her pay by half. She had threatened to do far worse to her if she woke her more than once. As a result, she had learned to be very careful when she worked.

If she didn’t make any mistakes, the money was good. When she messed up, at least she still had a job. Anything was better than the years she’d spent running from her home in war-torn Libya. Still, it was hard to feed her children when a simple mistake could cost her so much.

So when a man came and offered to pay her what she made in six months if she would merely leave a back door open to the Fraunfeuer’s home, Aya hadn’t asked many questions and said yes. After all, she’d never even seen two thousand Euros. This man had offered to give her half before she even did anything for him.

She was scrubbing the dishes when he came in through the backdoor. If she hadn’t been expecting him, she might not have even noticed, but as things turned out, she did. She trailed him up the stairs and caught up to him before he entered the dragon’s room.

“You will not do anything to make her angry?” she asked in her best English. Despite being in Germany, this man had always spoken to her in English and she was happy to have spent so much time watching TV and picking up the limited English she knew.

“She won’t be angry at you ever again,” the man said and stepped into the room.

When he drew a gun, Aya gasped and woke the dragon sleeping in her human body. That had been one of the only questions the man had asked Aya before he paid her—how the dragon slept.

“Aya, you little, Libyan whore!” Fraunfeuer shouted at her before the stranger shot her in the chest.

“Be sure to lock up here when you leave,” he said and gave her another two thousand Euros—much more than he’d originally said—and left.

Although she knew she should take the money for her children, she let it fall and fled the castle.

It didn’t matter that she left it behind though. As soon as she left, running as fast as she could to the bus stop, the man who’d paid her shot her in the back.

“You should have locked the door like I said.”

Sir Silverscales hated the French but he loved France and Paris especially. He found it quite annoying that the humans had named it the city of lights even though they filled all their cursed cities with lights, but there was something je ne sais quoi about Paris. Something enchanting.

Despite the need to return to his estate in Wales, Sir Silverscales decided to make another loop around the city of lights, if only to tell Lady Coalclaw about how it had changed.

Perhaps he might have lived if he had flown directly across the channel to Wales.

As it was, as soon as he banked, he was shot in the heart by a high-powered rifle.

He plummeted to the city below, dead before he splashed into the River Seine.

“And you’re sure Lady Coalclaw wants all this?” Dervin asked. He didn’t know her personally, of course. Few did and besides, he was merely a sound guy from one of the more modern pubs in town. What would he have to do with a dragon who’d lived there for centuries?

“I assure you, she will not complain,” the woman who paid the bills said.

He nodded and returned to work. While he didn’t understand why anyone would want to have a concert on the hills when they had a mansion with a ballroom that was built for perfect acoustics, who was he to say anything?

When he finished, he showed the woman how to work the soundboard and turn the generator on for the speakers before he left.

Not long after, he reached the edge of the estate and stood on a high hill so he could see the gorgeous mansion in the center of it all when the woman played some kind of a test sound.

To Dervin, it sounded horrible—like trumpet mixed with the scream of a fish eagle, but Lady Coalclaw seemed to like it as she came out of her mansion all smiles and warmth.

That was when the woman who’d paid him shot her in the face.

For obvious reasons, he didn’t stick around to see if she was okay. He wasn’t a medic but he knew most people needed a head to live, so he wasn’t particularly optimistic about her prognosis. More than a little panicked, he floored the gas pedal of his old truck in haste, which caused it to backfire.

The noise was louder than the literal gunshot to his terrified mind. He willed the truck to go faster, to get back to a town or a petrol station—anything—but he wasn’t fast enough.

The woman caught up to him like some kind of pagan goddess carried by the winds themselves.

“You’re a mage, you is,” Dervin accused her before she shot him in his face, exactly like she had Lady Coalclaw.

Vertaile didn’t need his band but they did make it more fun.

His voice was perfect, even when it wasn’t. When he hit a wrong note, he simply flexed his dragon aura and made the crowd think he’d meant to. He wasn’t French. While he was older than Napoleon and didn’t consider himself French, he liked the French style. It was stripped down, elegant, and perfect in its simplicity.

His band emulated this.

He sang, a man named Dominic played a snare drum, a kick bass, and a high hat, and a woman named Adrienne played the bass. He didn’t need the humans to draw the crowds he did but he liked the moody ambiance they provided. Plus, they were both great in bed, especially for humans.

Though Vert didn’t need Dominic or Adrienne, he enjoyed it when the three of them made music together. It was heady, romantic stuff, not at all like the garbage the American dragons constantly pumped out. He was adored all over Europe and also here in Florence, Italy—a city never known for its music. Well, not for hundreds of years, anyway. Wherever he went, he always drew a large crowd.

They were into their third song and the audience had finally fallen into the melodic grooves Dominic and Adrienne so excelled at when it happened.

Gunshots rang out, exactly like in America.

Vert flung himself down with a burst of dragon speed, but it wasn’t fast enough. His shoulder burned with pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.

He looked at his band members, who had both been shot—Adrienne in her beautiful breasts and Dominic in his face below his pierced eyebrow that Vert had tried to talk him out of. The man was dead already, but she still moved.

The dragon crawled to her, his shoulder burning with pain. He tried to stem the blood but there was nothing he could do. Her body was slick with blood and her last breaths came in ragged gasps. She even coughed flecks of blood in his face.

“Save yourself, my love.” She wheezed and fell back, her eyes open but hollow and motionless.

The crowd screamed and he wanted to join them in their grief but he couldn’t. He’d paid attention to the news and knew from the searing pain in his shoulder and the way his wound wasn’t healing that he’d been shot by a dragon bullet. He also knew it had not hit him by accident.

He’d made sure there was a back exit from the venue before they’d begun, and he crawled there now, using every ounce of speed he still had available to him despite the pain that seemed to be growing worse.

Finally, he escaped into the night and vanished into the streets of Florence before the gunman could catch him. It was the longest and most painful night Vert had ever lived.

Havington had poured himself a glass of red wine in anticipation of their victory. He’d told his last mage to wait for the third song to execute the green dragon singer, but he’d missed.

“Sorry, sir. I can’t find him, sir,” the mage said into his earpiece. He could have followed the target across the stage but had been given express orders not to. That kind of behavior might make people remember the assassin. It was better to run from violence, not toward it.

Obediently, the man had gone out onto the street and found that Vertaile had vanished.

“What should I do?” he asked, desperation in his voice.

“Make a few rounds to be sure you haven’t been tailed, then come back to base.”

He agreed and sounded relieved.

Although he’d failed, he’d still injured his target. With luck, he’d wounded him in an organ and given him a long painful death rather than a quick one. Either way, five dragons attacked in one night was good enough for Havington.

Let Shimmerclaw call for forgiveness and peace now, he thought as he sipped his wine. It tasted like victory.

CHAPTER FOUR

Stonequest and Kristen flew to her new base with Brian riding on her back and cheering like a little kid every time she so much as took a turn.

“That’s it, huh? The Steel Trap?” he shouted.

“We don’t have a name yet,” she responded patiently.

“We do now,” Stonequest replied, banked sharply, and began a spiraled descent to land outside the old industrial complex.

She had been shocked to inherit Windlock’s vast fortune, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t spend it. As convenient as the dragon’s old office in the Detroit SWAT building was—although it was a tiny, cramped space overflowing with paperwork and wasn’t nice at all—she needed something more. Detroit’s Dragon SWAT team had a job to do, namely keeping the peace between dragons and preventing them from causing damage to humans or at least holding them accountable when they did. Her mission was different than that and she didn’t want to be held back or slowed down by a bureaucracy that was already well-established, so she’d bought her own base.

The cluster of buildings had been erected on a paved parking area the size of a city block. It used to be a manufacturing center for car parts, electrical systems, lights, radios, and similar products. All the machinery had either been sold or stolen long before, so when she bought it, there hadn’t been much to clean out except trash from some long-gone squatters.

Kristen had purchased it because the entire property was secured by an eight-foot fence and the buildings themselves all had fairly modern locking doors and no windows on the ground level. Apparently, the previous owners thought their failing business was due to corporate espionage and had hardened the perimeter of the complex as much as they could. It was as secure a location as she could find and could be used sooner than any of the other premises they’d scouted, even though it was a less than beautiful space in which to work.

It gave her peace of mind to know her people could work, train, and rest with some protection against attack. Yes, she knew the technomages could jump fences, disable cameras, and break locked doors, but at least the security measures would give her and her team time to react to attacks.

They landed and when Brian climbed from her back, his jaw almost met the ground before his feet did. “You bought all this?” He gestured at the buildings, the new cameras, and the motion sensors.

“Yeah, the previous owner cut us a good deal when I offered cash.”

“I can’t even imagine how rich you are,” he muttered.

Before she could give her brother a tour, Emerald marched out of the main building toward them, his jaw locked in a grim expression.

Kristen transformed into her human form and moved to intercept him. Stonequest and Brian fell into step behind her.

“Is everything all right, Emerald? If you don’t have our computers set up yet, I think I found the man for the job,” she told him. When she’d left, he had been complaining that it didn’t matter how state-of-the-art their tech was if they didn’t have someone to operate it.

“Shit’s going down in Europe. A heap of shit,” he replied as he glanced at Brian and gave him a curt nod.

“Explain,” Stonequest instructed reflexively and stepped over Kristen’s authority as an investigator.

“That’s the boss’s line,” Brian said to him.

Emerald answered the question as if she had asked it. “Five dragons were attacked, all of them in Europe but spread out. Four are dead. The survivor is under the protection of the Southern Europe Dragon SWAT.”

“What else do we know?” Kristen demanded.

“Let’s get you inside and secure, ma’am, and I’ll brief you on everything we have.” His green eyes scanned the perimeter as if the European strike meant that more mages might be waiting outside their gates.

“Lead the way,” she agreed and strode to the main building. She looked up to where two of her team sat on the roof of the main building, Butters with his sniper rifle and Beanpole with a pair of binoculars. The sight didn’t reassure the Steel Dragon as much as she would have liked it to.

They walked inside, and she finally let herself breathe a sigh of relief when the heavy steel door locked behind them with a click.

“This is fucking awesome!” Brian murmured, his mouth open.

She looked at him in bemusement.

The base was still very crude with concrete floors and brick walls built up about twenty feet before they gave way to old panes of glass that were mostly undamaged. A catwalk remained fairly intact and offices had been erected at the far side of the building. It was like any number of abandoned factories in Detroit, notable only for the lack of machinery inside and the recently swept floor. The first floor had an extremely tall ceiling—as tall as three stories in a regular home—which had been a necessity as they had to fit dragons inside. Above that—where the fourth floor of a normal building would be—was an entire level of office space. They hadn’t moved anything there yet, though. The carpets had been moldy and had to be removed.

All Kristen had done thus far was set up a camera system, buy desks and computers, and purchase cots and mattresses to put on the second floor so her dragons and humans would have a place to sleep. They hadn’t even set those up in the designated area yet. All of it was spread on the wide concrete slab that was the base of their main base. The other two buildings in the complex were much the same as the first, although slightly smaller.

“Oh, my God. I’ve only ever seen computers like that while looking at computers on my computer,” her brother gushed. He veered away from Kristen, Stonequest, and Emerald and headed toward a row of tables loaded with monitors and computers and connected to a distant wall by a thick group of cables duct-taped to the floor here and there so people wouldn’t trip over them.

One of the screens was currently in operation and showed a map of what looked like a city to Kristen. Judging by the colors, the narrow streets, and the shit Emerald had alluded to, she assumed it was somewhere in Europe rather than the States. The other monitors were all dark. Keith was behind them and cursed as he tried to hook and unhook cables.

“What do you have for us, Keith?” she asked.

“A fair amount, actually, but these damn monitors aren’t working…” His reply trailed into inaudible grumbling.

“Do you mind?” Brian grinned at Kristen and wiggled his eyebrows.

“It’s about time you started pulling your weight,” she quipped.

“Was that a fat joke?” he retorted but he didn’t sound upset about it as he immediately began to undo everything Keith had done. In a few moments, all six monitors were working.

One of them showed the map of a city in Europe. The other five each showed a photo and profile of a dragon. Four of them had red X’s across them. Only the fifth didn’t.

“All right, it looks good,” Kristen said to Brian. If he hoped for more praise than that, he wouldn’t get it. “Report,” she said to Emerald and Keith.

“Four dragons were shot and killed in the last twelve hours,” the Rookie began. “One on the streets of Rome, one in Germany while asleep in her home, one shot out of the sky while flying over Paris, and one at her home in Wales.”

“The one over Paris—Silverscales—and the one in Wales—Coalclaw—were lovers,” Emerald said. “Other than that, there weren’t any connections between them except that they all lived in Europe.”

“Any witnesses?” Stonequest asked.

“None that are useful,” Emerald said, perhaps a little too gruffly for Kristen’s taste.

“A maid in Germany was found dead at the scene, and a sound guy at the estate in Wales was also deceased,” Keith replied and also looked at the green dragon like he’d been a little callous. “We think they must have been used to help with the assassination.”

“Are there any witnesses in Italy or Paris?”

The man shrugged and answered before Emerald could. “Dozens in Paris. It’s not every day someone sees a dragon fall dead into the River Seine, but no one has come forward about the gunmen. I’d say that’s a wild goose chase. There was a food vendor in Rome who said the gunmen came out of nowhere, shot the dragon, and ran off, but he won’t say anything else. I’ve seen videos of the guy being questioned and I’d say he doesn’t look like he’ll give us anything more.”

Kristen nodded. All that was bad news. “What about the survivor?”

Emerald answered. “His name is Vertaile but he goes by Vert and is the singer in a band. From what we found, he’s not the most savory of characters and is well-documented for using his aura on crowds.”

“That’s not illegal,” Stonequest interjected.

“Eh.” Emerald shrugged. “If the King of rock and roll didn’t have to do it, I don’t see why dragons need to.”

“He’s all right?” she asked.

“We’re fairly certain he was hit by dragon bullets. The Southern EU SWAT said he’s not healing and is in considerable pain. They’re trying to get the bullet out now and are supposed to let us know.”

“I think we can assume they were all shot with dragon bullets,” Stonequest said.

Kristen thought it was good her old boss could be the first to say that. He’d spent so long denying the danger of the bullets and they needed him to be willing to face them head-on.

“I guess Texas will have to wait, then,” Brian said.

“You told him about Texas?” Emerald asked.

“He worked it out himself,” Stonequest said and sounded impressed.

“This is the only activity we’ve seen anywhere since Constance was taken out of the equation,” she said. “It looks like they’re trying to heat things up over there, and it’s up to us to stop them.”

“It could be a trap or misdirection to try to get us out of here,” Stonequest suggested.

“It could be, but they attempted to assassinate five targets. That’s something we have to take seriously,” she said.

He nodded and deferred to her judgment. Kristen wasn’t sure she would ever get used to that.

“All right, I want the whole damn team ready to move in half an hour. Brian, my techie brother, it looks like you need to book us tickets. This will be a long flight, but I guess I can at least afford first-class.”

Stonequest cleared his throat a little exaggeratedly and hid a smile behind his hand.

“What is it now?”

“Brian doesn’t need to book those tickets. Windlock had a plane.”

“So what? Windlock owned a—oh. Right.” It was still beyond belief that everything the investigator had owned now belonged to her. He hadn’t even left anything for Larry, the mage who’d served him for over a decade. Not that he minded—apparently, he’d been paid quite handsomely over the years.

“What kind of plane are we talking about?” Keith grinned.

“It’s a decent-sized private jet. I’m sure it can easily make the trip faster than a regular airliner.”

“I can’t believe you own a plane. Do you own the People Mover too? What about Tiger Stadium?” Brian’s grin was unrestrained. “I hope you at least put Mom and Dad in first-class on their flight.”

“Good idea, Brian. See to that,” Kristen said. “I want them on a plane when we leave. I don’t want us gone with them still here.”

He grumbled but turned to his bank of computers and let his fingers fly while she gave orders to gather the team and prepare everyone for an extended stay in Europe. By the time she’d tasked her team with their various responsibilities, Brian turned to her.

“All right. Anything else, Lady Steel? Do you want to take over the US economy with your gold or maybe buy furniture for this base?” Kristen wanted to wipe the grin off his face but it was good to see so she let it ride.

“Actually…yes. You’ve given me all this crap about being rich.”

“Because you are rich.”

“Right, but how rich am I?”

“Ah…a question for the ages,” he replied pontifically.

“No, that’s what I’m asking you. Find out everything I inherited from Windlock, and write a report up for me. I know he has a place outside Detroit, the villa in France, and now a plane. I’m sure you can find out the rest.”

“I should have kept my fat mouth shut,” he mumbled.

“No, Brian, you should know I always value the input from my team, especially when it comes to new ways they can help,” she said sweetly.

He glared at her but focused on the computers without protest.

“Stonequest, tell me about this jet,” Kristen said after she’d gathered a few changes of clothes and toiletries. She’d already moved out of her apartment and made this base home, and it now proved to be a wise decision. There was a shower in one of the upstairs rooms and she would simply eat out until they installed a kitchen.

“He called it Windchaser,” the dragon replied and barely managed to not roll his eyes. “It’s here in Detroit since Windlock had been stationed here. He had a pilot and staff who will probably work for you since you’ve been writing their checks for a week.”

“Their checks?” she asked, wondering how many other people she currently employed. “You know what, never mind. Get everyone ready. I need to check on who is staying behind.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kristen went to Timeflash who was currently in one of the other buildings. “Are you all right staying behind, Erin?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, it only makes sense,” Erin Timeflash replied. “My abilities let me sense these structures so I’m the only one who can make sure there’s no sabotage or anything going on.”

“And there hasn’t been so far?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not really. I found a few guys slacking on day two and I fired them. That made everyone else very careful about their attention to detail. But other than that, we’ve been fine. I haven’t felt any malicious auras, so I think Constance’s cell really is done for.”

“Well, that’s some good news, I guess.”

“It is,” Erin reassured her. “So go. When you come back, it’ll feel like you have a brand-new base. I trust the security team we hired and the contractors working on it are afraid of me, so we’re good.”

“Thanks, Erin,” Kristen said, but she couldn’t go quite yet.

Instead, she went into the third building of the complex.

Inside were two dragons—Lumos and Kristen’s sister, the dragon Constance had trapped and used for parts for her entire life. The Council had recommended killing the dragon—putting her out of her pathetic existence had been the official language. Kristen, of course, hadn’t allowed that.

“Hey, Lumos. How’s she doing?”

“Better,” he said. He was in his dragon form as it seemed to be the best way to show the other dragon that he wasn’t a threat. “She’s progressing remarkably quickly, but…well… There will be permanent damage, of course. She was held there for a long time.”

Kristen peered around him to see her sister.

Despite the fact that she looked much better, it was still a little difficult to look at her. The terrible wounds were healing. Her claws were growing back, her teeth coming in, and her scales filling out. Her wings still looked mangled, but the webbing between the bones was at least solid now, although it still didn’t look like it would be able to hold her weight.

“Hi, Stella, how are you?” she asked. They had named her Stella because she’d frozen in place when she’d first seen the stars after emerging from her underground prison.

“Good! I good!” the dragon said. Despite her being the same age as Kristen, she was intellectually stunted after being in a tank her entire life. Still, she’d shown amazing improvement. It was incredible what a little love and care could do for a living creature.

She smiled. “That’s good, Stella. I’ll be gone for a while, but Grandpa Lumos will take care of you while I’m gone, okay?”

“You going to help more like Stella?”

“That’s right, I am. More dragons are in trouble from the same people who hurt you. We’re going to stop them.”

Stella nodded and her jubilant smile twitched to something else. “Stop them,” she growled.

“We will, Stella, I promise. We won’t let anyone else hurt dragons like they hurt you.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Thanks for letting me come with you guys,” Brian told Kristen once the pilot of the Windchaser said everyone could remove their seatbelts.

“You said you would throw a temper tantrum the likes of which the world had never seen if I made you stay behind,” she replied drolly.

He shrugged. “I’m glad you didn’t call my bluff.”

“I still don’t understand why you needed to come with us. You could have done all your fancy techie stuff over the phone.”

Her brother recoiled visibly. “What if you get a data drive that needs decoding? Or what if there’s a system not connected to the larger Internet that needs to be broken into? By the end of this, you’ll be happy I came.”

“I’ll be much happier when you tell me the extent of my assets. Are you sure that laptop will be enough to get the job done?”

“It’s slaved to the big computers in Detroit and linked by satellite, so it has more than enough power—not that I’ll need it to do a little accounting. If there’s a delay issue, maybe I can link with whatever system they have in Paris.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, actually,” Drew said.

Kristen excused herself to her brother and walked up the length of the Windchaser from the back of the plane. It was a very nice jet, she decided. Apparently, Windlock had a penchant for white as the floor was all white carpet, the plush leather chairs and sofa were white leather, and the walls were all painted white. She would have felt like she was in a commercial if not for the undeniably utilitarian appearance of her crew.

She smiled at the thought—her crew. Until recently, the two teams on this plane had been separate but now, they all worked together, human, dragon, and mage united to stop a common threat. It was the start of her vision for a better world.

It was too bad that it happened with people who habitually wore bulletproof vests, tactical combat gear, and pistols at their hips. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing most people liked to see on TV, but a common understanding of what it took to defend a way of life was often where peace started.

“What’s going on, Drew?”

“Well, I’ve thought about your decision to go to Paris.”

“What about it?”

“The call is yours, of course, but I don’t think that’s where we’ll find them.”

“It makes sense,” she replied. “Paris is centrally located and a dragon was shot out of the sky there. Plus, Vertaile is from there. It’s the only place with two targets.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“Where would you have us start our search?”

“Honestly? I’d start with the survivor in Florence,” Drew responded.

“Tell me why,” she replied.

“I don’t know why they would have targeted the dragon there unless they were stationed either in Florence or somewhere nearby. If they were from Paris, why not attack him in his home? They took a big risk when they exposed themselves to everyone at the concert, definitely the biggest risk of all their targets as far as witnesses are concerned. I don’t think they would do that unless him being in Florence was convenient for them and they knew the city well enough to know they could escape.”

Kristen nodded. It made sense to her. They’d have to call the European SWAT team and redirect them to meet them at the airport in Florence, but if Drew’s hunch was right, that would be well worth any potential friction it caused. “All right. We’ll go to Florence.”

“Do you want me to tell the pilot?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I haven’t adjusted to having my own plane yet. I think I’ll enjoy telling the pilot where we’re going.”

“No problem.” He nodded and settled into a white leather chair next to Stonequest. The two leaders of their respective teams immediately began to talk shop. She smiled at their exchange of ideas and information.

The same tableau played out through the entire plane. After thwarting Constance and saving the Dragon Council, both teams were much more comfortable with each other and everyone seemed to try to pick up tips from their counterparts.

As she walked up through the body of the plane, she relished the exchange of information. Emerald was seated with Jim, Beanpole, and Butters. He was explaining to them everything he knew about mages—what they could do, what they couldn’t, and what kind of powers they might encounter. The three men listened attentively and occasionally asked questions about detection abilities. The sniper obviously attempted to learn how to sneak up and take a shot at someone who could control magic as easily as a regular human could use a computer.

Heartsbane sat with Hernandez and Keith. The demolitions expert told the dragon all about different types of explosives, how to recognize them, and which ones might be most effective against dragons. Despite the fact that the dragon’s wounds inflicted by a bomb filled with dragon shrapnel had already healed, she listened in rapt attention. Keith occasionally interjected something, but he mostly tried and failed to make the two volatile women laugh. He must have a thing for dangerous women, she thought and fought a grin.

A shout of surprise from the back of the plane was followed by laughter. Kristen turned to where Jim had drawn a gun on Emerald and the dragon had expanded his chest instead of dodging. Beanpole and Butters tried to tell him how to protect himself from a weapon that had only ever been a nuisance for the dragon’s entire life between bouts of laughter.

In the front of the plane, closest to the cockpit, were the two mages. Sometimes, she wished Amy and Larry would spend more time with the other members of her team, but she understood that both had much to gain from spending time with each other.

“What are you two up to now?” she asked them.

“Larry’s teaching me techniques for control.” The girl levitated a pen and signed her name on a piece of paper—or tried to. It looked like a child’s first attempts at scratching letters. Although it was legible—barely, but her effort deserved a generous response—it was nothing compared to the elegant flowing script that Larry was able to produce on his piece of paper.

Amy tried again with worse results than before and she cursed, frustrated, as the pen hurtled away and stabbed into a leather chair.

“You can’t lose control like that,” Larry chided her, although he was smiling. “You have to be the master of your powers. I know it can be difficult with all the raw power you have, but if you can learn finesse, you could be one of the greatest mages of all time.”

She nodded, took a deep breath, and drew the pen back to her using only her telekinetic abilities.

He nodded in approval, looked at the chair she’d damaged, and wiggled his fingers, and the leather appeared to repair itself.

“It’s fucking crazy you can do that.” The girl shook her head in disbelief.

“I learned that from Timeflash.” He grinned. “I’ll show you how—once you can write a paragraph.”

“It’s so hard with all this power,” she said. “Like trying to put a fire hose through a squirt gun.”

“You can do it, though,” Kristen assured her. “I’d much rather have you at full power than hindered, even though I know it’s not the norm.” She slid her hand into her pocket and withdrew a silver bracelet.

Amy gasped when she saw it. “No, Kristen, I don’t need that, honestly. The feeling of being limited…it's terrible.”

Larry eyed the bracelet and smiled. “I think you should try it on.”

She looked from him to Kristen, crestfallen, but she allowed the Steel Dragon to shackle her again. “I guess if you think I need to limit my—wait a minute.” She looked at the bracelet for a moment and narrowed her eyes in confusion. “I…I can feel an aura coming off this like the other one you first had me wear but…well, it must be broken. I don’t feel like my power is limited at all.”

“That’s because I had Larry work this bracelet up especially for you.” Kristen grinned.

“I put spells on it to make it seem like it’s limiting your power without actually doing so,” he said and sounded both proud and smug. “As long as you’re wearing that, dragons shouldn’t bug you.”

“It’s not spelled to me either,” Kristen said. “So if you want to take it off to have a shower or whatever, you can.”

“Oh, my God, you guys! This is so cool.” Amy hopped up and hugged her.

“You’re more than welcome,” she said. “Although you should thank Larry. He did all the work.”

“Thanks, Larry.” The girl planted a kiss on his cheek.

“Ah, don’t mention it. I only did what the boss-lady asked,” Larry replied and blushed fiercely at the kiss from the younger woman.

“I have something for you too,” Kristen said and retrieved a second bracelet from her pocket.

“Is that right?” His gaze settled on the bracelet and he paled.

“I had Atramento copy your work. At first, he didn’t want to, but when he saw all the spells you worked into Amy’s, he took it as a personal challenge. It works the same way as hers does. You’ll still have full power without drawing attention.”

“Yeah…thanks,” he said, although his voice sounded hollow. His hand covered his wrist so she couldn’t put the bracelet on him.

“Larry… I’m sorry, is something wrong?” she asked. “I wanted to show you the same trust I show Amy and the same trust that Windlock showed you. I know you’ll only use your power to pursue justice and now that he’s gone and you’re with…well, you’re stuck with me, I thought you’d be happy.”

“No, no it’s fine. It’s nice of you, actually, but it’s…” He raised his hand to reveal that he still wore the bracelet Windlock had given him, despite the fact that it had been crushed and mangled from when the investigator had destroyed it. “It’s kind of all I have left of the old windbag, you know?”

“I miss him too,” Kristen said, although she could see from the pain in the mage’s eyes that she didn’t miss him half as much as he did. And why should she? She’d known him for barely months and he had known him for years. “I know he didn’t leave you anything in his will but if there’s anything you wanted—”

“No, no, no,” Larry said and cleared his throat and wiped his eyes before the tears could stream down his cheeks. “He already gave me more money than I would ever have had as a regular human working at a convenience store, and you’re using his wealth better than I ever would have. It’s only…he was always there, you know? Okay, I took a vacation now and then, but other than that, we were always together. It was the job and it was our lives. Mostly, it’s all these little things like this plane. Do you have any idea how many times he had this cleaned? White is the dumbest color for a vehicle, let alone one that experiences turbulence. No matter how times I told him that, he never changed it.” He smiled at the memory but winced when he once again remembered that Windlock was dead.

“I know I can’t replace him—”

He shook his head sharply to cut her off. “You’re wrong about that, Kristen. You have to replace him. Being an investigator’s mage is all I have. It’s all I know. If I can’t be yours…” He shook his head and looked lost.

It was her turn to wince. While she liked Larry and wanted him to work with her, the idea of him being “hers” made her uncomfortable. She tried to say as much but he wouldn’t have it.

“No matter what happens,” he said and his voice hardened, “I’m sticking with you, Steel Dragon. Either we help both sides see a path forward or we die trying. That’s what Windlock would have done. Hell—” Fresh tears welled in his eyes. “That’s what the old windbag did.”

“Everything I do is to honor him,” Kristen said.

Larry laughed bitterly at that. “Don’t you lie to me, Kristen Hall,” he said and wiped his tears. “Windlock was part of your crusade. You weren’t a part of his. He was a good dragon but you’re a great one. Now, enough of all this blubbering. Put that bracelet on already so if the plane crashes and you die, at least I’ll have something to remember you by.” He removed the other bracelet as he said it, looked at it for a moment, then disassembled it without looking at either of the two women.

“Why did you do that?” Amy asked but he already had an answer. He used his powers to reform the links of the chain and stretched them into smaller and finer pieces of metal until he’d extended the crushed bracelet into a necklace. He put it on with magic as he extended his wrist for the new one.

“How did you do that?” the younger mage asked.

“I have full power now as well,” he said as Kristen attached the decoy bracelet to his wrist. “I may not be quite as strong as you but I have a feeling we’ll need everything I have in Paris.”

“Florence,” Kristen said and recalled that she had a pilot to boss around.

CHAPTER SIX

They arrived at the airport in Florence and the aircraft taxied to a standstill near a small fleet of black SUVs. Kristen could feel draconic auras emanating from inside the vehicles.

“I guess they’re not taking any chances with shooters armed with dragon bullets on the loose,” Jim remarked as they walked down the steps from their plane onto the tarmac. “That’s bulletproof armor and glass.”

“Good,” Kristen replied. “It’s about time someone took these technomages seriously.”

“I don’t know,” Keith said dubiously as they walked toward the SUVs. “If the dragons are turning to bulletproof tech, the technomages will find a way to pierce it or use more bombs or something. The dragons will adapt to the new weapons, so the mages will develop more powerful ones and on and on and on.”

She could see the implications of this better than anyone. There was nothing to be done about it, though, other than what they were doing—stopping the technomages from using dragon bodies like they were resources to be mined.

“My name is Artigliorosso,” a dragon dressed in an Italian black suit said to Kristen as he extended his hand. “I am the leader of this division of the European Dragon SWAT. You may call me Rosso.” He spoke in an Italian accent and was essentially the epitome of a handsome Italian man—tall, dark, and with a wicked smile. “This is my partner La Flamme.”

“Bonjour,” La Flamme said. He also wore a dark suit, although his puckered expression made him much less handsome in Kristen’s eyes.

“We barely made it here in time,” Rosso said. “I assure you, there was no threat of being shot out of the air in Paris. The drive will now take us considerable time and is not any safer.”

“We want to begin our investigation here in Florence,” she said.

He bristled at either the way she said the name of the Italian city in English or for having the audacity to change their plans. “I assure you, the base of operations in Paris is better suited for this kind of…delegation.”

“Rosso—I’m sorry, Officer Rosso,” she said and not so subtly pointed out that as an investigator, she far outranked him. “But my team thinks the cell is here in Florence, so this is where we’ll begin our work. I trust that won’t be a problem?”

The two dragons argued with each other in a blend of French and Italian before Rosso finally deferred to La Flamme. “Very well. If you would come this way.”

Kristen smiled and gestured for Stonequest to ride with her and the two European SWAT officers.

“I wish I knew what they were saying,” she mumbled to him. She had taken Spanish in high school but had been terrible at it and had been far more into sports.

“Rosso is pissed we’re here at all. He thinks they had everything under control and we won’t help and will simply get in the way,” he said quietly to her as they neared the cars. “La Flamme thinks they can solve all these murders as well but apparently, he also thought the technomages were here in Florence. I think that’s why they agreed to stay here—because of La Flamme.”

“You understood all that even though they’re speaking in French and Italian?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been around a while, Kristen. You might want to start thinking about learning a few languages too.”

They slid into the back of the car and blessedly, the two dragons reverted to English in the small space.

“We…I believe…they so close,” La Flamme managed in English. He didn’t seem to be as good at the language as Rosso.

“What La Flamme is trying to say is that we had it under control. This is the kind of thing Dragon SWAT is for,” Rosso said and didn’t sound pleased to have to drive them around.

“I assure you, this is not what Dragon SWAT normally does,” Kristen replied. “This is not the work of a disgruntled dragon or a centuries-forgotten grudge. There are mages behind this.”

La Flamme grew quite agitated at this and began to speak in French while he gestured dramatically. Apparently, he understood English fine.

Stonequest looked at her to see if she wanted him to translate but she shook her head. It was better to let Rosso do it.

“La Flamme remembers the last Mage War. He says he barely survived,” the man translated. “He says we want to stop these mages more than you—after all, these were our dragons—but because of Shimmerclaw’s insistence…” He trailed off and muttered in Italian.

Her companion leaned closer to her. “Rosso’s pissed that Shimmerclaw told them to give us their full hospitality and to help us in every way possible. Neither of them is happy about it, but I wouldn’t be either. I guess she didn’t threaten them but it was implied.”

Kristen nodded. It was too bad that these dragons weren’t one hundred percent on board with her and her team being there, but there was good news too. It was certainly a good thing that Shimmerclaw entrusted an entire organization to Kristen. The dragon obviously wanted her to succeed. She’d count that as a good sign.

After another few miles—kilometers as they were called in Europe—of winding streets, they emerged from the maze of roadways that comprised Florence with what she would only be able to think of as a castle ahead of them.

“Welcome to Castillo Montalbano,” Rosso said and gestured to the huge stone walls that served as a bulwark against the rest of the city.

She turned as mage servants opened the doors of a few of the SUVs behind them but strangely, not all.

“Why don’t they open all the doors?” she asked.

“Oh,” Rosso responded, seemingly surprised at the question. “The humans will stay at a local hotel. It’s more than adequate and only a few minutes’ walk down the road from here. Oh, I’m sorry. You must have thought the mages wouldn’t be welcome but as you can see, we allow their kind in Montalbano.”

“Yeah, that’ll be a problem,” Kristen said. She took her cellphone out and opened an app to find a local hotel.

The Italian didn’t seem to understand what she was doing until she put the phone to her ear and made a request for rooms for her entire team—dragon and human.

“Forgive me if I was not clear, Lady Hall,” he said and bowed slightly. “One of our agents called ahead. Despite the last-minute change of plans, we have accommodations inside that I trust you will find to be quite pleasant. The mages will be well-tended as well, and the hotel for the…other humans is a nicer one, by their standards.”

“This will not happen,” she replied firmly. “We won’t start this whole endeavor by splitting my team up. I won’t disrespect these men and women by putting them in second-class accommodations.”

“I know the monkeys stink but sending them away is very stupid,” Heartsbane said to Rosso as she stepped alongside.

“Stupid?” Rosso balked.

La Flamme laughed.

But Heartsbane wasn’t done yet. “Splitting us up means having to secure two locations instead of one. Plus, it's inefficient. These humans may be weak little things but by the end of this, you’ll owe them your lives.”

“Well, I only hope they understand what a fortune that would be for them,” Rosso muttered and hollered at a mage to approach.

He yelled at the woman for a moment in tones that needed no translation, slicked his hair back, and gestured for Kristen to enter. “It will take us a few minutes but we will prepare rooms for your entire team.”

“Excellent!” She beamed as if they’d been in agreement the entire time. “And the rooms are all located in the same part of this castle, I assume?”

He ground his teeth, hollered something at the retreating mage, and turned to her with a smile. “Of course.”

“Good.” She nodded and put her phone away. “Let’s begin, shall we?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Neal Havington was from the United Kingdom and would thus always think that British ales were the best way to celebrate. French wine had never sat quite right with him, despite the years he and his team had spent in the city of lights. But there was something about Italian red that seemed perfect for the celebration of an enemy who no longer posed a threat.

He opened a second bottle and refilled the glasses of the five mages who’d carried out his carefully laid plans. Everyone was giddy with excitement over a job well done—after all, it had been years in the making. Everyone, except Ron.

“It’s all right,” Sarah assured him. “You hit him, didn’t you? And you had the hardest target.”

That was exactly like Sarah. Assassinating Coalclaw had easily been the hardest thing to do—what with needing to coordinate the sound equipment and get a recording of her mate’s bugling call. Her comforting him was her way of bragging and Ron knew it.

He looked at his leader before he lowered his gaze to the floor and sipped his wine halfheartedly.

“She’s right, Ron. You did well,” Havington said, which was enough to at least encourage the mage to raise his head a little higher.

“Do you really think so, Boss?”

“I do, Ron, I do, and let me tell you why. For starters, we killed four out of five. I had hoped for three out of five, so that’s great.”

“But it could’ve been all five if not for me!” the mage protested.

“It could have, yes, but you also shot the bloke, right?”

Ron nodded.

“You had the hardest target and you still managed to hit him and make him bleed. I count that as a success.”

“You’re just saying that,” he said, although he sounded like he wanted to believe it.

“Think about it, Ron. He was the only one of the five we chose who was a real celebrity in human culture. If you can believe the tabloids, that disgusting reptile even fornicated with humans—no doubt after casting his aura on them to make them unable to protest his disgusting advances. He was an abomination and a disgrace. Humans shouldn’t treat those lizards as celebrities, and now they know not to. As soon as the other dragons let him resurface, he’ll whine to the newspapers about how badly you hurt him. No human will want to get close to him or any other dragon. I’d say it’s better than him dying, honestly.”

“Do you really think so?”

Truthfully, Havington didn’t. He would like all five dragons to be dead because it would have demonstrated the perfect orchestration and coordination of his team, but he wouldn’t say that to Ron. It was far more important for his team to be confident, given the undeniable power of their prey. “You did well, Ron, honestly, now drink some wine and get proper drunk so we can wake up and lay our next plans in the morning.”

“Right, sir. You got it, sir,” Ron said, finally mollified.

The leader’s phone rang and he straightened. “Pardon me,” he said and stepped away from his team and into a different part of the crypt where they’d made their base. It was a large cavernous room where they’d planned to move the captive dragon they’d used to harvest materials from in Paris, but after what had happened in the States, Havington hadn’t had the resources to move it.

Instead, he'd shot it in the brain with a bullet made from its own body.

The empty room was a reminder that the cursed Steel Dragon was already affecting his operations, despite her being on another continent.

He pushed all that from his mind and answered his phone. “Mr. Havington, I wished to call and congratulate you,” said a smooth voice on the other end of the line.

“Who the fuck is this, then?” he demanded. “I’ve had this damn number for a week since I burned my last phone. How the fuck did you get this number and how do you know that name?”

Without fail, he switched phones weekly, and the only people who had his number were those in his cell and a few of the leaders of other cells. He didn’t recognize the voice, which meant one of the other cell leaders must have given the number to a cell he didn’t know. It was a damn breach of security measures if there ever was one.

“An ally, Havington—an ally who wishes to offer congratulations and my help.”

The cell leader warred with himself for a moment and tried to decide if he wanted to hang up or keep talking. He didn’t like that someone had given his number to the leader of another cell, but he was quite proud of his work and also concerned. Why would they need help after such a victory?

“Yeah, well, those lizards had it coming.”

“Indeed. Cowards, every one of them, and I congratulate you on your efficiency.”

“Yeah, well, thanks,” he said, proud of himself despite not knowing exactly who this guy was.

“However, I want you to know that the Dragon Council has conspired against you.”

“Shimmerclaw,” Havington said.

“Indeed,” the man replied. “The Steel Dragon has arrived in Florence with her team to help her. I have reason to believe Shimmerclaw herself has put her on your tail to hunt you and put an end to your group.”

“There’s no way she could already be here,” he protested.

“I assure you, she is. Her resources are substantial but she is not all-knowing. She must have suspicions you are there, but she cannot yet know that you know.”

“What are you thinking?” he asked, although plans had already begun to form in his mind.

“You know the terrain better than her, I hope? Perhaps you could turn the tables on the Steel Dragon and eliminate her instead. It would be a boon to the rest of us, especially after what she did to Constance.”

“Yeah, pity that,” Havington said. Constance had told him they had plans to assassinate the entire Council. Since then, although he hadn’t heard any official reports, it wasn’t exactly a stretch of the imagination to deduce who must have stopped her. The same steel bitch who had stopped her every damn action.

“Well?”

“We’ll see what we can do. Where did you say you were stationed?” he asked, but the line was already dead.

“Who was that, boss?” Sarah asked.

“Someone with eyes in places I don’t like,” he said. That had to have been someone from another cell making the call, right? But how had another cell known something about Florence before he had? It was very troubling but a problem for a later date. “I’m turning in. You all enjoy that bottle, then go to bed. It looks like our next step starts tomorrow whether we’re ready or not.”

“Yes, sir,” Sarah said and left Havington to his thoughts.

He wondered what cell had known about Constance—another one based in the States, perhaps—but once again, pushed it from his mind. The fact was, if the Steel Dragon really was there, this was a golden opportunity to remove a major problem for their cause. If he and his mages could eliminate the meddling Kristen Hall and her friends, the Dragon Council would have no choice but to declare war on humanity. At that point, he and the cells could openly retaliate and finally end the reign of dragons over humans and mages.

Havington knew Constance and knew she was driven by a desire to make humans and dragons equal. It was an admirable goal and certainly a good one for the media, but he had always considered the wider implications of having no dragons. With them gone, mages would be the most powerful group of beings on the planet. This applied especially if humans went all out for the war and really enraged the dragons. The damage to the infrastructure and social order of the world would be irreparable. In that future, he couldn’t help but see himself as a future power player.

Lord Boneclaw put the phone down and picked up his most recently harvested mask. Like all the others, it was made of an actual human skull taken from one of the wretched creatures while their blood still pumped. He put it on, relished the smell of dead human, and embraced the persona he’d used for his own brand of diplomacy for so long—the Masked One.

He had never expected the Steel Dragon to outlive Shadowstorm or his mother Obscura, but there she was. After the unexpected firsthand view of what she was capable of, he had to admit that she was impressive in a flashy kind of way.

When he recalled that, he looked forward to ending her existence even more, but she was in no hurry and neither was he.

Dragons, after all, weren’t afflicted by limited lifetimes. He had a position of comfort on the North American Dragon Council, he had wealth and riches beyond any human, and most of all, he had patience.

Part of his confidence came from the fact that he understood how the mages and, indeed, even Kristen Hall felt about the establishment of power. He had been deemed a bony runt thousands of years before and not been given much of a chance to live. With such an inauspicious beginning, he’d had to murder his creche mates and seize what was his. He’d taken much—as much as he could given the frustrating limits dragon society placed on him.

Now, he stood on the edge of a bonfire that was slowly being loaded with more fuel. The Masked One knew it would burn. Constance had failed to ignite it but she hadn’t failed to add more fuel. Havington had contributed as well, but that obnoxious Shimmerclaw had doused it like she was always prone to do.

He wanted to see if Havington would have the cunning to kill Kristen Hall and her band of mongrels but if he didn’t, there would be another opportunity. Every time she struggled, she pulled the webs he was weaving around her tighter and tighter. Eventually, she would be so tangled she wouldn’t be able to move. The only question in his mind was whether the world would erupt in a war before or after she was removed.

It didn’t matter, not to someone with the patience of the Masked One, but it was interesting. If all else failed, he could slaughter the whelp like he had so many others but in the meantime, watching this unfold would be more entertaining than his operas.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kristen began her next morning by talking to Vertaile, the dragon survivor. They met in a dining hall inside the castle where she and her team were staying and spoke over a breakfast of poached eggs, wonderful rustic rolls, and espresso that was so strong even a dragon could feel it.

“How are you holding up, Sir Vertaile?” she asked like she had done with so many human victims of crimes.

“Holding up?” he responded in English heavily tinged with a French accent. “I was attacked at a show for doing nothing more than playing music and two of my friends—humans, I should tell you—are dead, and you ask how I’m holding up?”

“Sir Vertaile—”

“Vert is fine,” he stated with a dismissive wave of his hand. Before she could go on, he gestured rudely for a mage to bring them more food. He’d already finished his meal and she noticed him eyeing hers and almost wanted him to attempt to snatch it. She was reasonably sure that not only could she stab his hand with her fork, but she wouldn’t regret doing it.

Kristen cleared her throat to continue but again, Vert cut her off.

“You ask how I am holding up after being shot by one of these horrible American weapons? Not well. If they were only a few centimeters over, I’d be dead. As it is, I cannot fly and I can hardly use my arm.”

Kristen nodded because she didn’t think it was an act, not if his aura could be believed. “Did you get a look at the shooter?”

“Non,” he responded. “The shot came from inside the venue, though, so it had to be someone there.”

“Do you have any idea of who might want to hurt you?”

“One of these damn terrorists, perhaps? Other than that, I have no idea. I am loved by my fans. Adored! Who would want to hurt me?”

“Rumor is you use your aura to make crowds love your shows. If that’s true, it could be the kind of thing that angered whoever did this. Many humans and mages don’t like the power we dragons have.”

Vert snorted contemptuously. “Next you will say women do not like it if I make them orgasm.”

She reminded herself this guy was a wounded victim and that it was generally frowned upon to beat the shit out of them, even if they were arrogant dragons.

“Do you know if the event was recorded?” Kristen asked, ready to move on from witness testimony to hard evidence.

“Sure, of course,” he said with another dismissive wave of his hands. “I am well-loved by fans, even when they are not in the presence of my aura. All my gigs are recorded.”

“One camera or multiple?” she pressed.

“Multiple, of course. This is not a pedestrian recording but a video that hundreds of thousands of my fans will watch after I have released it.”

“So you handle the footage yourself, then? Do you mind if we look at it?”

Vert shook his head as if she had asked him to clean a latrine. “I am the show. I do not handle the details. I have a human who handles all the tedious little details.”

Kristen was quite done with him at this point so was incredibly thankful when she asked for the contact information of said human and he was able to produce the number from his cellphone.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, stood quickly, and dialed the number. It turned out she was not quite done with Vert, though. Despite the human on the other end of the line admitting that yes, he was still in town and yes, he had the footage of the night, he would not give it to her.

“I can’t release it without Vert’s say-so. How do I know you are who you say you are and not some tabloid?”

“What the hell would a tabloid do with concert footage?” she asked but bit her tongue. It didn’t matter, nor did it matter that when she went to get the footage from the man, she could show him her badge and thus prove her identity. He had obviously spent too much time around Vert and thus thought his mix of dragon and celebrity trumped anything else, including the law.

She sat across from the victim again, put the phone on the table, and turned the speaker on.

“The manager won’t release the tapes without your permission,” she said and glared at the dragon as he chewed his roll and a third portion of eggs.

Finally, he swallowed and asked, “So?”

Kristen tried to wither him with a glare and eventually, it worked and he understood.

“Why must you be so dense, Williams? Give the woman what she asks for,” he snapped into the phone once he’d identified the problem.

“Right, boss. Sorry, sir, I’ll have it all ready soon. Send her over.”

“There you go,” Vert said as if he’d actually helped instead of mostly been a speed bump for her doing her job.

Her breakfast ruined, she left the dining hall and called Amy. She wanted to get the tapes as soon as possible but heading off without backup seemed like a terrible plan.

“Amy,” she said once her mage had answered. “Get Larry, Drew, and Jim and meet me at the front. We have a lead.”

“We’ll be down in a minute,” the girl said.

As Kristen waited at the entrance for her team, she pondered the luck of the whole show being recorded. Vert and his manager were both rather rude and annoying but hopefully, this would prove to be solid evidence. At the very least, it would give her team something they could chase down and help familiarize them with the narrow streets of Florence.

She dialed her brother and told him to start hunting through the web for anything that might lead them to the cell. He said he was on it although, from his voice, it sounded like he was mostly combatting jetlag.

Finally, she called Stonequest and made sure he and his team were ready. If something else happened, she wanted them on it as quickly as possible.

Amy emerged onto the street with the others behind her. “Ah, man, we’re driving?” She sounded bummed. “I hoped to see this place from the air!”

“It sounds nice but we can’t risk being seen,” Kristen replied. She hoped they still had the element of surprise but couldn’t help feeling like eyes watched them from behind every brick in this Renaissance city.

CHAPTER NINE

Kristen was able to enjoy the first part of the drive. Florence was beautiful with its four and five-story buildings built over the centuries and capped with red tile roofs. Some part of her fantasized about perhaps seeing the Duomo when this was all over or getting away to another part of Tuscany, but that all evaporated when Drew announced that they were being followed.

“Damn it!” Larry said and jerked the wheel to turn the car down a narrow alley as he peered at the sky.

“By a car, not a dragon,” the other man said. “Although I’m not sure yet.”

“Oh, right, sorry about that,” the mage said sheepishly. “With Windlock, we were mostly after dragons, not people in cars.”

“It might be a false alarm,” Drew said.

Jim shook his head. He was squashed in the back seat with Kristen and Amy. In all honesty, he was too big to fit in the back seat of anything and Larry was the only one of them with experience driving in Europe, so Kristen took the rear as well. “He’s been back there a while. A black car?” Jim asked.

“Where is it?” Kristen asked.

“Behind us, I think,” Larry answered and tried to crane his neck to peer behind them. Slightly panicked looks from everyone else in the car convinced him to rather watch the road.

“There it is,” the Wonderkid said when the car turned down the alley they were already halfway down.

“What do you want us to do?” Amy asked. “I’m fairly sure I could flip it into the river if you’d like.” She sounded eager.

“No, no. Larry, keep driving. Everyone, keep your eyes on the buildings on either side of us so we look like tourists.”

Their heads snapped toward the windows, which had to be about the most suspicious way they could have all carried the order out.

Ah, well, there was nothing to be done about it now.

“Larry, turn right up here,” Kristen instructed.

“It’s one-way.”

“Duh!” Jim and Drew said in unison.

“Oh, right, to test them!” the mage said and turned blithely into traffic.

Fortunately, it was early in the day in Florence and most of the traffic was tourists getting gelato or people hurrying to get a place in line at the big tourist sites. They drove down the alley without hindrance. She had begun to tell herself it was simply them overreacting when the black car also turned down the one-way street.

“Now can I flip them into the river?” Amy asked.

“No. Same plan. Larry, keep driving. Look for another wrong way to go down.”

He complied and soon found one, this time on a street that bordered the river. The black car paused at the T before it turned in the other direction and went with the flow of traffic.

Everyone exhaled a sigh of relief.

“Larry, drive across that bridge there. That should put some distance between us.”

Everyone else started throwing theories around.

“Secret police?” Drew asked.

“More like those European SWAT dragons,” Jim countered. “They don’t trust us at all. I bet they’re trying to keep an eye on us.”

“Did you sense anything from them?” Larry asked Amy.

“No…not really,” Amy said. “But they were fairly far away.”

He nodded. “They could have masked their magic too. It’s not hard to do and a group of mage terrorists would no doubt practice the skill.” He said it casually, but the words put tension in the air that lingered for a while after the unidentified vehicle had turned away.

Kristen didn’t like it, but she had to consider the possibility that their cover was blown. But how could it be? It seemed like the only possibility was either Windlock’s pilot—something she seriously doubted—or someone within the European force, an equally unpleasant prospect. Either way, it was better to let the rest of her team know. She took her cell out and called Stonequest.

“Kristen?” He answered briskly and using her name was his way to tell her he was in private. If he answered with “Investigator,” she’d know there were people who were not part of their team nearby.

“I want you and the others ready and on your toes. It looks like we might have to go airborne sooner than I expected. Keep Butters on the roof.”

It was always good to have a sniper keeping watch, she thought.

“Has something happened?” he asked. “We can send backup now if you need it.”

“No, nothing yet, merely a feeling. I’ll call you if anything happens.”

Stonequest chuckled. “With you, I know better than to wait for a call. If anything happens, I’ll follow the sirens and look for smoke.”

“Yeah, well, make sure you’re on the roof then,” she replied. It might have sounded gruff, but he knew her so well that he only acknowledged the order and went to gather the team.

“We’re getting close,” Amy said as she checked the map app on her phone.

“Any sign of the black car?” Kristen asked.

“Nope, nothing,” Jim and Drew said together. They had a broad view this close to the river and couldn’t see the car anywhere. As the team drove into the winding streets of Florence again, one of the ubiquitous scooters pulled out behind them.

Havington had thought it a close thing when the Steel Dragon noticed their tail. He’d had no choice but to stop following them or at least to make it appear that way. The foolish girl didn’t seem to have any idea that a mage had been on a boat in the river Arno and had sent a message to another mage on a scooter.

They might have identified that tail too, but they reached their destination quickly, exited their vehicle, and went inside the digital studio. His mage continued to drive past as the Steel Dragon and her team walked in, completely oblivious to how compromised their position had become.

CHAPTER TEN

“Watch the car, all right, Larry?” Kristen said and narrowly dodged a speeding scooter.

Drew, Jim, and Amy scrambled out of the vehicle and started toward the door. Before she could go inside, though, a woman wrapped in robes stepped up to her and held a burning candle.

“Bless this, will you, ma’am?” the woman said in English and pushed the candle toward her.

“Uh, no, no thank you,” she said, thinking this was the first part of the woman’s way to ask for money. She tried to step around her.

The stranger caught her wrist with surprising strength. “Please, miss. You are a dragon, are you not? A special dragon. Please, bless this candle…please?”

She honestly had no idea what to do and glanced at her teammates. While she had never heard of such a thing, neither had any of the people with her judging by their expressions. Jim, Drew, and Amy had even less experience with the dragon world than she did.

“I’m sorry, but I’m really in a hurry,” Kristen protested.

“Please, miss. It is for my mission to be successful—my mission to make the world a better place.”

Kristen sighed as a man pushed past and hurried up the stairs into the building. “What can I do?”

Fortunately, it wasn’t hard. She merely mumbled a prayer in Italian—repeating the words after the woman—and as if to confirm her earlier suspicions, the stranger asked for a couple of euros. She shook her head, annoyed she’d been duped into wasting time and money on the beggar, but she gave her a couple of euros all the same and sent her on her way.

They entered the building and the man who’d done so a few minutes earlier pushed past them. He practically bounced off Drew’s chest as he went down the stairs.

“Italians are fucking rude,” Drew said. Before she could point out that most of the Italians they had met had been fairly polite—or at least no ruder than a Detroiter—they were on the second floor. They stopped outside the door of the office Vert had directed them to.

She pushed it open and the manager—a man by the name of Williams who was obviously British—stood nervously in the tiny lobby.

“Here ya are, then,” he said and held the hard drive up.

It didn’t take a dragon investigator to see that something was up. The man’s eyes were wide with real anxiety and his forehead was slick with sweat. His gaze darted constantly from Kristen to the door and to the hard drive in his hand and his aura was panicked. It was so strong, she could sense it like a rancid aroma.

“Are you all right there, buddy?” Drew asked. From his posture, Kristen could tell that he also suspected something was wrong with the guy.

“I’m fine, ya,” Williams replied. Then, perhaps realizing that he was drenched in sweat and acting like the world was going to end added, “I have a big project due later and have to start work on it right away. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll head out.” He stepped toward the door and tried to shove the hard drive in Kristen’s hands at the same time.

“I thought you had important work to do. Isn’t this your office?” Jim asked.

“Right. Sorry,” the man responded, dabbed his brow with a handkerchief, and scurried away from them and deeper into the office space.

“This has all the angles?” Kristen asked as she held the hard drive up and used her aura to send a flush of fear through him. She wanted him to be afraid of the back of his office the same way he was afraid of her. It worked as it wasn’t difficult to change the target of someone’s fear. If the truth be told, it was much more challenging to make a fearful person calm.

“It has all the footage on it, ready for viewing. It's a lot of video,” Williams said as if that was some kind of warning. “But it's all there. Tons of different angles. It’ll probably take you all day to get through it, so I’d get a move on. Plus, like I said, I’m very busy,” he added belatedly, perhaps realizing he’d ordered a dragon around.

Drew stepped forward and took the drive from Kristen. He turned it one way and then the other before he tapped the side of it. Despite the fact that the device looked new, he noticed scratches along one of the seams that kept it closed.

They didn’t need a tech expert to know it had been tampered with, which made not an iota of sense. She didn’t know computers, but her brother had almost ripped her head off when she’d once opened one of his solid-state drives.

Now, at least, she understood the source of the man’s fear. It had very clearly been tampered with, probably by the same mages they were trying to stop. This meant, among other things, that they had been right about coming to Florence and that the technomages knew they were there.

It also meant that the hard drive was a liability. It had to have either a tracker, a bomb, or some kind of spell on it. There was no way to know without opening it, and she didn’t want to do that without Hernandez on hand to check for explosives, Keith or Brian to check for a bug, and Larry to check for spells. But taking it to them seemed like exactly the intention of whoever had tampered with it.

“Would you mind if we took a quick look at the footage right here?” she asked and stepped in front of her team. If it was a bomb, at the very least she could turn her steel skin on and protect them.

“I really can’t. Very busy. Quite busy.” Williams began to sweat even more profusely now.

“The sooner you do it, the sooner we’re gone,” she said and nudged him with her aura to make him fear her. Maybe if she could make him scared of her, he’d acquiesce and send them on their way. She didn’t push too hard, though. This man didn’t seem to be guilty of anything other than being terrified, and she didn’t want to harm his mind the way she had General Andrews’.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when he accepted the drive, took two steps toward his computer, and stopped. “I can’t.” His voice was barely a whisper. “They’ll know.”

“Who will know?” Kristen asked and tried to make her aura show him that telling them would make him feel safer. It didn’t quite work because she didn’t have the kind of control of her aura she needed to make someone feel such a complex emotion.

Instead, he trembled visibly where he stood, frozen between wanting to get rid of her and the drive and his fear of whoever instigated this. “Them. You know—them,” Williams finally managed to say, his tone low and rough.

“Tell us who, and we’ll be on our way.”

“I don’t know their names!” His voice rose from a shrill whisper to a shriek. “But I know they’re watching.”

It could only be the mages then. Who else could it be? But if they had been there, it meant they knew about her presence in the city and what she was investigating. Were they scared of what the footage was or was this merely an attempt to harm her and her team? Logically, such an attempt would have been more easily accomplished with a roadside bomb or something like that. Why let them come all the way up there unless the footage itself was dangerous?

It might have been a bad decision, but she took the hard drive.

Williams’s relief was palpable.

“Thank you, ma’am. Truly.”

They stepped into the stairway that led to the office and she closed her hand around the device.

“It has to be a bomb,” Drew said.

"Probably. Or something worse," Kristen muttered in response. “Amy. Can you make a shield to protect those offices? I don’t want anyone to get hurt if this thing goes off.”

“You got it, boss.”

“Can you tell if it's magical at all?”

“No, I can’t. I don’t know much about detecting yet, but Larry could, I’m sure.”

“We can’t risk going out there. Detonating it when we get into the car would make the most sense.”

“So you want to sit here?” Drew asked.

“No.” She shook her head. “They must be nearby. If we take too long, I’ll bet they activate whatever it is.” Thinking quickly, she came up with as much of a plan as she could. “Drew and Jim, get to the car and call Stonequest. Tell him to bring Brian and Hernandez. I want this data and I don’t want to be blown up to get it. Go down now. I want our enemies to see someone come out of the building.”

“You know they might blow this—” he protested but she cut him short.

“I know. Just go. Amy, keep a shield on the door to that office. Can you do that while you go down the stairs?”

“Yes, but I won’t leave you to be blown to pieces.”

“I’ll be fine, just go.”

The girl started down the stairs behind everyone else. While she descended, Kristen looked for somewhere to stash the hard drive.

She finally settled on a location behind a large, potted ficus tree. If they were wrong about it being a bomb, no one was likely to notice the device there. But if they were right, she realized it wouldn’t matter.

Kristen was about to head down the stairs when she realized that she couldn’t simply leave it here. This building had businesses and apartments in it. If she left and the mages had indeed planted an explosive, people would die. She couldn’t allow that.

But she couldn’t be caught by the blast either. She’d learned the hard way that the technomages used pieces of dragon in some of their bombs. An incendiary device laden with dragon-scale shrapnel could kill her.

“Kristen, the guys are in the car. What are you doing?” Amy whispered from the stairwell.

“I’m making sure this doesn’t hurt anyone. Can you keep it contained?”

The girl ground her teeth. “I can try,”

“Okay, keep trying.” She removed her bulletproof vest and transformed to steel. If the device had dragon shards in it, her steel skin wouldn’t protect her, but the bulletproof vest and Amy’s shield might do the job.

Cautiously, she approached the hard drive still tucked behind the ficus and scooped it up to wrap it in the vest. Hopefully, that would contain any shrapnel. Now, if Amy could make sure the blast didn’t blow up the offices, they could get whatever footage they needed after it exploded.

There were times when Kristen hated being right. As a girl, she had loved it when she’d outsmarted her older brother or demonstrated a tidbit of knowledge to her mom that she hadn’t known. Now, though, she would have been more than okay about being wrong about the hard drive being a bomb.

Unfortunately for her, she was proven correct as the device detonated in her hand. Fortunately, she had also been correct that the vest would contain any shrapnel. Not only that, but Amy had been able to strengthen her shield on the side of the bomb closer to the offices.

Less fortunate was that the force of the explosion was still strong enough to hurl the Steel Dragon through a wall and out into the street below.

She pounded onto the cobblestones and her steel skin did more to damage the street than the landing had done to her. The target had been the information, then, and perhaps some of her human allies. She didn’t think the hard drive had been loaded with dragon shrapnel because she found that the bulletproof vest had indeed been shredded by the explosive. Despite this, she felt none of the tell-tale pain that would accompany shards of dragon embedded in her body.

Kristen stood and noticed that she had barely managed to avoid impacting the roof of the armored car. Her friends were inside, still safe and unhurt as the vehicle had shielded them from any falling glass or brick from the explosion.

Now, all they had to do was go back into the office and demand the manager’s computer to get the actual footage. She signaled for her team to get out of the car and they complied with stupid grins on their faces.

“That was crazy,” Jim said and looked proud.

“And stupid,” Larry protested. “You should’ve made Amy send it skyward. It would’ve blown up high enough not to hurt anyone.”

“Yeah, but this way, the mages might think they got us—unless they’re watching right now.”

Of course, their enemies were watching. Kristen knew this because as soon as all her friends had stepped out of the easily defensible bulletproof car, it was dragged away from them as if some invisible claw had taken hold of it.

In the next moment, gunfire erupted.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“What’s the plan, boss?” Drew asked once he’d taken cover under the stone arch that framed the doorway to an apartment building.

Kristen had to wait for the gunshots to subside before she could answer.

“Let me try something,” she shouted in response and sprinted to the door of the building she had been blown out of. As soon as she headed toward it, a barrage of gunshots let loose on the street and forced her to dive behind cover. It was exactly as she’d suspected then. “These assholes really don’t want us to get that footage.”

“Let me guess—your plan is to go get it?” Jim called. He’d managed to remain hunkered behind the car when the mages moved it and used its bulletproof armor to protect himself behind an open door.

“Larry, Amy, how are we doing?” Kristen yelled at the two mages.

“I’m fine,” she replied from the stairwell.

“Me less so,” Larry replied from the front seat of the car. How he’d managed to dive inside it was a mystery on top of a miracle, but at least he hadn’t been shot.

“Amy, can you get a shield over Larry so he can join us here?” Kristen asked. He could probably have done it himself, but he sounded a little shaken and she didn’t want him to be distracted.

“Yes, ma’am!” Amy hurried down the steps and extended her hands once she was beside her, and a sphere of shimmering blue energy surrounded the other mage. He knew exactly what that meant and didn’t waste any time. His head low, he flung himself out of the vehicle and raced toward them as the mages opened fire on him.

Kristen was able to count four of them—two on the ground and two on rooftops. “I have four hostiles.”

“We see them,” Drew responded from his alcove.

“I have a shot,” Jim said and squeezed off a few rounds from his pistol. No one carried anything more than a handgun as they hadn’t expected anyone to know they were there yet and walking around with two-handed weapons seemed a little extreme. Now, that felt like the epitome of naivete.

His shots prevented the two mages on the ground from approaching, but that was the limit of their effectiveness.

“Keep them occupied,” she shouted as she pulled her phone out and dialed Stonequest.

Brian picked the phone up. “Hey, Krissy, Stone’s driving—are those gunshots?” He went from sounding amused to terrified in the span of a single heartbeat.

“Yes.”

“I think Kristen wants us to go to the headquarters!” Brian shouted to Stonequest.

“No! Tell Stonequest we’re under fire and that when he gets here to go in the back with you and get the manager’s computer. Take the whole damn thing if that’s faster than simply getting the data.”

“You want me to go in there?” he demanded, his voice an octave higher than usual. She could hear the echo of gunshots from his side of the connection, which meant they were close.

“I didn’t want you to be here but you are, so now, I need you to go in. Stonequest doesn’t know anything about computers. He might snag a microwave and think he has the data.”

“I heard that!” the dragon said. “But she’s not wrong.” When car doors slammed, she knew they were at the back of the building.

“Make sure you get Brian back safely,” Kristen shouted warningly.

“Kristen says to keep me safe or she’ll rip you a new asshole.”

“Protect yourself. I got the kid,” Stonequest yelled so she could hear before the line went dead. He could no doubt hear the shots being fired and knew the conversation was over. It was time for her to escalate the distraction.

Now that she knew the mission was still on, she needed to direct all her focus to the task at hand. She poked her head out and used her dragon speed and senses to get a look at the four hostiles before they opened fire on her. About a third of a second passed before a volley of bullets was directed at her head. The attack answered one question anyway. Their primary target was the Steel Dragon, although that was hardly surprising.

Despite the fact that the mages had released their fusillade so quickly, she’d had enough time to see the four shooters. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to see their faces as they all wore masks.

They had fired at her with pistols rather than rifles. It was a tiny comfort to not be outgunned, but given that they were all still alive, it wasn’t a particularly surprising truth.

The two groups exchanged fire for perhaps thirty seconds before Kristen gestured for Drew and Larry to cover Jim so he could find a better position. They all opened fire—the two of them with bullets and the mage with glowing blasts of magic—while the Wonderkid scurried from the alcove he’d taken cover in to another one.

Kristen and Drew tucked into their shelter again, while the mages concentrated their attack on Larry. Apparently, they hadn’t anticipated fighting a mage and he had drawn their ire at the fact that they had to face one. That anger proved to be a mistake, however. While they focused on their quarry, Jim made a lucky shot that eliminated one of the two on the ground whose ski mask had a skull on the face.

“Good shooting,” she called as the wounded mage dragged himself to cover. He wasn’t dead but appeared to be out of the fight.

She took a moment to assess their surroundings. While she had only hoped to hold the technomages in a standoff, now that they’d disabled one, she sensed victory. “Let’s push this and make Brian and Stonequest feel like they missed out by getting the computer,” she ordered.

It seemed they weren’t the only ones interested in escalating the stakes of the conflict, though. From the end of the street, a cab careened toward them at breakneck speed.

“Amy! Now would be the time to flip something into the river,” she shouted.

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” the girl said, her hands outstretched and teeth gritted. “It’s like I can’t get a hold of it!”

“Then get us out of here!” Kristen shouted and her companion obeyed without protest.

The young mage enveloped Kristen, Larry, and herself in an orb of energy and lifted them out of the entrance to the building as the taxi powered into it.

A small explosion followed when some of the gasoline inside the car reacted, but the force of the vehicle was still enough to crumble the face of the building.

Shots pursued them as Amy carried them across the street to land behind a delivery truck. It was from this new vantage point that Kristen saw who had sent the vehicle toward them.

That the masked figure was a mage was obvious. He floated above a bed of flame and wore a ski mask that completely covered his face with the image of a crown. When he landed in the middle of the street, the other mage at street level—this one with a bunny mask—came to stand beside him. Another mage who must have just arrived joined them.

The newcomer wore a long black coat like the rest of them and a ski mask with the image of a flower on the face. She was obviously a woman as she wore a black skirt under the coat.

“Traitors!” the man yelled before he scowled at his fire and extinguished it. Curls of smoke rose around him.

“It’s great to have you admit to it,” Jim retorted and the mage on the roof across the street opened fire at him as if to tell him to shut up.

“The Steel Dragon can’t help but betray mankind. It’s in her nature. But you mages should know better. Join us and help usher in a new era where mages rule instead of dragons.”

In response, Larry threw a ball of energy at the man with the crown mask.

Rather than using a shield to block it, he batted it away with the back of his hand. It veered away and into a building with a bright explosion.

“The bastard’s strong,” Larry muttered. “I tried to make that blow up as soon as it touched him, but he was able to contain it.”

“Do you think he’s something like their Constance?” Kristen asked.

He shrugged. “It’s too soon to tell and he seems to like fire while she liked wind, but he has to be their strongest one.”

“I guess you’ve made your pathetic little decision,” the mage said and released a great blast of flame from his hands.

Amy stepped out from cover and threw a wall up in front of them. The flames bulldozed into it and she had to take a step back, but her shield held. It helped that she had come into her magic by withstanding the fire breath of a dragon. Her powers were literally born in fire.

The blaze pushed against her wall and seemed to try to almost burrow inside the barrier, but the young mage remained strong. Kristen couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if she and Larry still wore their old bracelets. Bad things, most likely.

Apparently, their adversaries took her shield as a challenge as they opened fire as one. The two on the roof were each armed with a gun but the three on the road hurled blasts of magical energy.

“We need to move,” Kristen said and her old combat skills clicked in. Remaining in one place in a gunfight was a great way to get shot.

Drew and Jim seemed to understand her and the mages’ predicament and opened fire as well. Their volley prompted the one with the bunny mask to block their bullets with a magical shield.

Amy used the opportunity to levitate onto a roof, where she proceeded to lift stones from the wreckage the taxi had caused and hurl them at her enemies.

Larry focused on much flashier magic, but Kristen realized that it wasn’t nearly as strong as either Amy’s or the enemy leader’s. It was bright, flashy, and distracting, but it didn’t seem to pack much of a punch. She didn’t know if that was simply the extent of his powers or if he had been handicapped for so long that he didn’t know what else to do.

It didn’t matter in their current situation, however. The two mages could block the bolts of energy easily enough. While they focused on that, she needed to protect her humans.

She raced forward with a burst of dragon speed and slid to a stop in the same alcove as Drew. She’d almost been struck multiple times and hadn’t been able to fire a shot off. The logical assumption was that these were dragon bullets, so she had to play it safe.

“I feel useless out here,” she told Drew in growing frustration. “If I took my dragon form, I could eliminate them all.”

“You’d be a massive target. It’s not worth the risk,” he responded.

“But—”

“I spent hours of damned time training you how to be an expert as a human, even without your powers. If you start bitching about not being able to turn into a dragon, I’ll tell Hernandez.”

“Right, sorry,” she replied hastily. “Do you have a plan?”

He darted out and took a few shots at the enemy leader, who hovered in a position where he could target Amy. She was able to deflect the balls of fire he launched at her either with stones or walls of force. The stones that were struck by fire, she hurled back at the mage.

“She has him covered. We need to get Jim to the high ground. Let’s make a dash to the car and give him the time to get to a rooftop. We need to stop those two shooters up there.”

It was crazy, but Kristen loved it.

They darted from cover as Larry delivered streaks of energy past them and Amy distracted the mage leader. They reached the vehicle and opened a door to use as cover but immediately, found the space to be woefully inadequate. The airborne leader merely had to land behind them to be able to take them out.

Fortunately, he didn’t have time to do so as Jim had reached the roof. A string of gunshots rang out and a mage cried in pain as he tumbled from the roof and through the branches of a tree to fall heavily onto the street. He tried to push up but collapsed, although it wasn’t clear if he was dead or badly wounded.

The mage with the bunny mask released a stream of sparks into the air that must have been some kind of code. As soon as she did so, the behavior of her team changed.

The second shooter who had been on the roof across the street jumped and slowed his fall with magic seconds before he made impact. His mask carried the face of a ram and together, he and his teammate with the floral mask lifted the mage who had been injured earlier and carried him away from the battlefield.

The bunny-masked individual ran to the mage who had fallen off the rooftop—who wore a ski mask with the screen-printed face of a gorilla—lifted him in her arms, and followed the other two.

That left only the leader. He continued to battle Amy but wasn’t throwing as many fireballs at her. In fact, he only used one hand as his other held a ball of flame that glowed brighter and brighter with each second until soon, it looked like a miniature sun.

“Heads up!” the girl shouted as he lobbed the sphere. It didn’t seek out a target as Kristen had expected. Instead, it careened above the rooftops and exploded in a blinding flash.

The Steel Dragon raised her hands faster than anyone else—it helped having dragon reflexes—so she wasn’t blinded like the rest of her team was.

She prepared herself to fight the four uninjured mages alone, not a good prospect, but as it turned out, she didn’t need to. They raced down an alley and vanished into the streets of Florence.

“Should we give chase?” Amy asked and sounded eager.

“Jim?” Drew called out.

“I’m hit,” he responded. “Not bad, but…shit, I need a doctor.”

They heard him sit heavily on top of the building he was on. Drew raced away to help him.

“No, no chase,” she said to the young mage. “With any luck, the computer they tried to protect has information about one of them we can use.”

“Okay,” Amy said and joined the team.

Kristen took her phone out and called Stonequest. “We’re coming up. I think the fight is over for now.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kristen thought through the implications of what had happened as she worked to clear the rubble in the stairway to the manager’s office. Between the explosion and the taxi, the building was a mess. Amy had said she could do it, but she had refused. She thought better when she was moving and besides, without Amy, Drew and Jim would likely have been cooked.

Hell, she might have been cooked too. Despite being a dragon, she didn’t know much about mage fire. It didn’t seem too far of a stretch to imagine that a mage with a grudge against dragons would develop the skill to the point where it would be able to hurt their sworn foes.

First, the good news, she thought as she moved brick and stone aside. She thought they were probably only facing a force of six, and two were injured. If the group was larger, they wouldn’t have been so concerned when two of them were wounded. Plus, six fit with the murders. Constance had always acted alone, and Kristen thought it reasonable to assume that mages from the cells were trained that way. It meant five assassins plus one in charge, obviously the mage with the crown mask and the fire powers. Injuring two of six was good, she told herself, but she didn’t feel it.

The bad news needed to be examined as well. The mages were well-connected and well-organized. Somehow, they had known she and her team were here. They’d tailed her through the city—she now had no doubt that the car had belonged to them—and been able to maintain their surveillance even after they thought they’d ditched them. That meant they were an organized, efficient team. It also meant—little though she wanted to think about it—that they might have someone working for them on the inside of dragon society.

She had seen it before. In fact, Constance had been working with a dragon when Kristen had first battled her. Maybe another dragon played a similar role here. It would certainly explain how someone knew about them. But who? Rosso? He’d been gruff with them but she shook her head. She was jumping at shadows but how else could they have known they were there?

They’d entered immediately once they’d parked. Except…no, that wasn’t entirely accurate.

“Has anyone seen the old woman who asked me to bless her candle?”

Everyone shook their heads.

That gave her pause. Maybe they’d somehow put her there as a distraction? If so, it meant the mages were incredibly well-organized. Still, it seemed like more jumping at shadows. She would have to ask Stonequest what he thought.

When she’d finally cleared the stairway, she proceeded to the second floor. The landing was a wreck—after all, a bomb had detonated there—but the wall with the door to the office was undamaged. Amy had protected it well.

Too bad Kristen simply kicked it in.

The door splintered in the middle and ripped the hinges off the wall as it catapulted inward. It might have knocked the manager over if Stonequest hadn’t been in the way. He thrust it aside as if it were nothing but a fly buzzing near his head.

Brian, meanwhile, dove for cover behind the desk.

“Ah, Lady Hall.” The dragon smiled malevolently at the manager. “I see you’re finished downstairs.”

“Indeed,” she responded, caught the man by the lapels, and lifted him off his feet. In all honesty, she hadn’t meant to lift him, but now that he was in the air…well, it wouldn’t hurt to let him dangle a while to show him she was serious. It wasn’t like he was choking or anything. “Who came in here before we did?”

“I d-d-d-don’t know I s-s-s-swear!” Williams stammered.

“Tell her,” Stonequest said and flexed his aura over the man. She might have balked at how quickly and almost casually he had done this—she still hated using those powers on a human mind, while he had no such compunctions—but the results were immediate. The dragon immediately relented and left the man scared but not broken.

“It was some asshole! That’s all I know. A mage, definitely a mage. He said he’d set me on fire if I didn’t do as he asked.”

“What was that?”

“He said when you got here that I should hand over the hard drive I gave you.”

Kristen nodded, although it wasn’t terribly compelling evidence. It was obvious that if she went to the sound engineer’s building after no doubt talking to the dragon performer, she’d want footage. All that proved was that the mages were smart.

“What else did they make you do?” she asked.

“He watched while I deleted all the footage from my computer. Speaking of which, Vert will be pissed.” There was despair in William’s voice at the mention of the green dragon performer’s displeasure.

“I think that’s all he has,” Stonequest said to her. She believed him. He was a better judge of auras than she was and had been interrogating witnesses—human, dragon, and mage—for a long time.

“I keep looking for a clue from them, but I feel like we always come up with nothing,” she muttered.

“It doesn’t seem like much of a trail to follow to me,” he said. “And I bet if you had pursued them, you would have walked right into a trap.”

“I can’t help but feel like these guys are good. As good as Constance and much better at remaining hidden.”

“Eh. Not that good,” Brian said and sounded smug.

“What do you have, Zed?” she asked her brother.

He blushed at the use of the codename but hearing it did cause him to straighten his posture and pull his gut in.

“I got into this guy’s computer. His password was Vertpaysthebill$? Really?” He looked at Williams in mock-disbelief. “You realize you said that to me and Stonequest, right?”

“I read an online article not to use pet names,” the man muttered and sounded completely dejected.

“He deleted all the videos”—Brian gestured to Williams—“but he never reformatted the drive.”

“English, please,” Kristen replied. “Can you get them back or not?”

“Are you kidding? This is a piece of cake.” He worked for a minute, retrieved his personal hard drive, and plugged it into the computer. “They’re downloading as we speak. I need about…six minutes. Five and a half.”

“Is there much there?” she asked.

“Oh yeah.” He nodded.

She flashed him her most sisterly smile. “I am so glad we have such a great computer expert.”

He had known her long enough for her words and tone to spark immediate suspicion. “Why are you complimenting me right now?”

“Because you’ll be in charge of searching through all that video data for any sign of these assassins.”

Brian groaned like she had managed to sneak her Brussel sprouts onto his plate without their parents noticing. “That’s like…” He looked at his screen and clicked a few times, and his face fell. “That’s like hundreds of hours of footage.”

“And what’s great is that I’m sure you understand that you don’t have hundreds of hours to look at all of it. As soon as you have the data, we’ll get you to Castillo Montalbano and you can get to work.” She turned to the rest of her team. “Right now, this footage is our only lead. They all wore those weird masks, so unless anyone disagrees, I don’t see much point in looking through any CCTV footage.”

No one objected, another instance in which she wished she wasn’t right.

After a few minutes, Brian had his data and it was time to return to base.

“Come on, kid, you can ride on my back while I fly to base,” Stonequest said to him and moved toward the stairs to the roof.

“Hold up, Stonequest,” Kristen said. “You came here in a car and you need to go back by car.”

“What? Why?” The dragon sounded frustrated. He didn’t often sound frustrated and that he did now sent a chill down her spine. “They know we’re here now, obviously, because of this attack. What’s the point in keeping a low profile?”

She clenched her jaw at this. It was another instance of the old dragon stereotypes toward humans coming out, and she reminded herself that change took time. He was so much better, but this wasn’t the moment to entertain dangerous assumptions. “Because one of these mages presumably shot a dragon out of the air over Paris with a sniper rifle. If so, we have to assume they have an arsenal as extensive and dangerous as Constance’s. Your dragon form is an easy target for them.”

“Goddammit.” He ground his teeth.

“Is that a problem?” Kristen asked.

“You’re goddamn right it’s a problem,” Stonequest grumbled. “But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. I guess if I get in a fight, I shouldn’t transform into a dragon either.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” she agreed. “I understand that you’re more accustomed to your dragon form—I know all of Dragon SWAT is—but it will put you in grave danger. Remember that these mages have trained for years to face dragons. At the very least, we can assume our breath attacks won’t do anything to them. On top of that, they’re armed with dragon bullets, which—”

“I know all too well what it feels like to be hit by one of those damn things,” he said and rubbed his shoulder.

“Will you be all right?”

He hesitated but nodded. “I guess I have to be. I’ve never been in a situation like this before—where my dragon form is weaker than my human one. It…it doesn’t seem right.”

“There’s nothing right with these mages harvesting dragon bodies to use as bullets. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful.”

“Sure. Brian, do you want a ride?”

“Actually, I think we’ll all take one,” Kristen said. “Our car was badly damaged in the fight.”

Stonequest nodded and no one complained until they all had to cram into one vehicle.

She hadn’t been in a car this full of people since high school. Back then, she had found it hilarious and exhilarating—the press of bodies, the driver laughing, and everyone jostling and giggling as they drove home from school.

Now, it had none of that charm. As they drove, she couldn’t help but feel that if they were attacked, no one would be able to reach their weapons in time. They would be roasted alive in this glorified can of sardines while their foe continued to outmaneuver them.

It was not a pleasant trip.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The journey was uncomfortable, but they arrived at Castillo Montalbano without another attack, which was a huge relief. Kristen would have suffered any amount of discomfort if it meant keeping her team safe. Sometimes, she found it cosmically ironic that the people she wanted to protect the most were people who made their living risking their lives for others. Until recently, she had at least been able to tell herself that her family could avoid danger, but with Brian now working for her, that was no longer true.

She only hoped her parents were enjoying their so-called vacation.

They scrambled out of the car and passed two dragon guards and two mages as they entered the building. It was a small comfort that at least this division of SWAT took their security seriously. They seemed to police their perimeter better than Detroit Dragon SWAT ever did.

“It’ll take me a while to process all this on my laptop,” Brian said to Kristen apologetically.

“I thought you said that you’d slaved it to the other computers back home?”

“I did, but that connection has to go through a satellite relay now, which causes a delay and will severely limit my processing power.”

“Are you saying you need a local computer set up here?” Stonequest asked.

“Ideally, yes.”

“Come with me. They have a great one here. At least I think they do. Computers aren’t my thing.” He gestured for the young man to follow and the two of them walked past the guards and deeper into the complex as if they belonged here. Too bad the European Dragon SWAT didn’t treat the rest of her team as well.

Rosso and La Flamme strode toward them before they could leave the entryway and disperse through the building.

“What is the meaning of this?” the former demanded. He looked quite angry. La Flamme, on the other hand, didn’t look angry, only profoundly uncomfortable. His gaze flicked continuously from Larry to Amy.

Kristen had a suspicion this wasn’t about the mages who had attacked them. “I’m sorry about the collateral damage. We didn’t think the mages knew we were here yet. I would have briefed my team on less damaging tactics if we had known. It won’t happen again if we can help it.”

As she had expected, that wasn’t the focus of his fury. “And what tactics could you teach to these two?” He gestured at the two mages. “There were rumors that you have uncuffed mages on your team, but I never believed it.”

“Yeah. Well, don’t,” Amy muttered and stuck her hand out with what appeared to be a magic-dampening bracelet on it.

La Flamme took her hand and examined the cuff. If it was a little rough for Amy’s taste, she didn’t say anything, which both made Kristen proud for her controlling her anger and pissed that the man was touching her mage.

“What exactly is the problem here?” she asked. It wasn’t advisable for La Flamme to examine the counterfeit bracelets any longer than necessary.

“The problem is that these mages exhibited considerable power out there,” Rosso said.

“And how exactly do you know this?” she demanded.

“Because we have back doors into almost every camera in this city. We saw the entire fight on camera. There is no sense denying it. You had power as strong or stronger than the leader of the enemy mages. What have you done to circumvent your bracelets?”

“We didn’t do anything,” Amy said quite petulantly.

Kristen appreciated the technically true argument but knew it wouldn’t hold for long.

“Then who did? The mages we are trying to stop? A cuffed mage should not have that kind of power, period.” Rosso’s voice rose in pitch and filled with fury.

“If they hadn’t been there to help us, we’d be dead,” Drew said. “It was the mages who kept us alive.”

“How do you know it was not the mages who told the enemy where you were?” La Flamme asked in heavily accented English.

“La Flamme is right,” the Italian said quickly. “It seems we have a leak. How else could a mage get through their bracelets if they were not allied with the enemy?”

“I’m sure there’s another explanation for this,” Kristen said, a weak justification even to her. She had only now obtained the cuffs for her mages after a fairly long wait. While she had hoped the deception would last for some time—ideally until the technomages had been stopped—that seemed less and less likely.

“Another explanation for how these two circumvented dragon law?” Rosso asked and his smug expression confirmed her suspicion that he must have looked the English word up before talking to them. “Even if they are not in league with the enemy, this means they might as well be. It was unfettered mages who started the first age rebellion—and the second. It’s unfettered mages who are attacking dragons across the world right now. Even if they found out a way around the bracelets on their own, it only shows contempt for dragon law. Sooner or later, they will turn against their master.”

“No. I assure you, they won’t.” She knew this was not the time to try to argue that she didn’t want to be their master at all and that she respected them as cool-headed individuals who were as committed to justice as she was. Those opinions might not go over too well with Rosso’s current line of reasoning. “I trust them both. Amy has shown no reason to not trust her, and Larry worked with Investigator Windlock for years. They’re on our side.”

“You can’t know that!” he protested.

“You saw their power,” Kristen said. “What they could do. If they wanted to kill me, they could have done so already a hundred times over. If they were against us, why would Amy have worked so hard to stop the one with the crown?”

“Crown?” Rosso asked skeptically.

“Their leader had a mask of a crown. It doesn’t matter. The point is, they could have hurt me many times before and they haven’t. I trust them completely and you can too.”

The man shook his head. “It is impossible to understand the workings of a spy. Sometimes, they must fight against their loyalties—even kill—to prove themselves to their target. How else could the mages have known you were here?”

That was too much for Kristen. “If you think there’s a spy, I suggest you start looking inside this castle, not on my goddamn team. There’s no way any of my people are working against me. I would know.”

“You couldn’t possibly—”

“And you can?” she demanded.

“No one on our team circumvented the rules on controlling mages during a conflict with unfettered mages,” Rosso said, his words like daggers.

Frustrated, she clenched her teeth. She’d tried to keep her little secret but could see now that she had been wrong to attempt to deceive anyone. Which suited her fine. The more she came to understand dragon culture and societal norms, the fewer shits she gave about respecting all their nonsense. There was so much good in them to be respected and sometimes, even admired, but they could infuriate her beyond belief with their obstinacy. Not, she reminded herself, unlike some humans she knew.

“Do you want to know how they circumvented the damn bracelets? Fine.” She snapped both Amy and Larry’s bracelets with deft movements.

Rosso and La Flamme gasped but weren’t so shocked as to drop them when she tossed them to them. “But…but they are fakes!” Rosso said.

“I know they are. I was the one who commissioned them to be crafted,” she explained.

“Illegal!” the Frenchman objected.

“If I hadn’t, half my team would have died out there on the street today. If we handicap our mages, it means losing a huge chunk of their effectiveness, don’t you see? We have to trust our people. That’s why I gave them the bracelets—to give you time to trust them.”

La Flamme began to yell at her in French and she decided she was quite all right with Stonequest not being there and the words going untranslated.

“You can keep them, how about that?” Kristen snapped at the two dragons. “I won’t make them wear fake cuffs. I can see it scrambled your reason—both of you—which I should have realized it would. It was a stupid idea to try to protect you from confronting your own misguided beliefs. Does that satisfy you?”

“Absolutely not!” Rosso shouted and stepped toward the mages, but she had heard quite enough.

“Then what should we do about it?” she demanded and stepped in front of him before he could get any closer to Amy.

“I… That is, she—”

“Is my mage, at least by your stupid rules, correct?”

“That is true, yes.”

“Then come to me if you have a problem with the way I operate. But if you want us to stop these assholes from killing dragons on your continent, stay the fuck out of my way.”

The two dragons bristled at that and looked like they both intended to respond vociferously. Heartsbane and Emerald came down the stairs before they could, however.

“Is everything all right boss?” Heartsbane asked. “From the auras, it seems like a few dragons here have their panties all knotted up.”

Emerald nodded.

Rosso and La Flamme looked from Kristen’s dragons to her mages, and finally, to Jim and Drew who—despite only being regular humans—looked like they were more than ready to start a fistfight with them. The two European dragons didn’t look happy about it, but they did look intimidated enough to stop pestering them for now.

While she recognized their acquiescence, as reluctant as it was, she didn’t want them to think she was some kind of upstart from another country there to lord it over them. She had orders from their boss and was more than willing to let them know it.

“If you have a problem with the way I do things, why not let Shimmerclaw know how things stand? I’m sure she’d love a report. Make sure you include all your complaints—and if you don’t mind explaining how the hell these mages already knew we were here, that would be great too.”

Invoking Shimmerclaw felt like calling the teacher in a playground scrap, but it worked. Rosso and La Flamme capitulated, although neither looked particularly happy.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Despite the two European dragons ostensibly standing down, Kristen had no intention to let them try to cuff her mages as soon as their argument was over. She escorted Larry and Amy to their level and told herself that spending a few minutes with them would help her nerves. But, if anything, the result was the opposite because although she had asked for everyone to be situated close together within the complex, the mages had yet to be moved closer to the dragons.

She hadn’t protested this because of the sheer opulence of her room. Her somewhat naïve assumption had been that the reason the mages had yet to be moved was simply because it took time to prepare a room as perfectly as hers had been. It was decorated with art—originals dating from the renaissance by masters so famous even she had heard of them—and the comforts were beyond decadent. The bedding was hand-dyed silk. The chairs were gorgeous antiques that had once belonged to princes. Even the bowl of fruit contained delicacies from all over the continent. She understood that one couldn’t exactly whip up another room like that, but after she saw where the mages were staying, she wished the dragons had at least tried.

It was like day and night. Where her room had a private bathroom and kitchenette, the mages shared one. While the television in her room was as modern as any she had ever seen, theirs had a corner of badly burned-out pixels. Amy led her to her room to show her rough cotton sheets, a poorly made chair that looked like it had been uncomfortable even when it had been new, and bland walls. It wasn’t dirty, which was good, and didn’t look dangerous or anything like that, but compared to what she’d been given, it was quite spartan. Her space was easily ten times bigger and she had a feeling that the dragons who stayed there permanently probably had even nicer rooms.

“This is where they have put you?” Kristen asked. She couldn’t help the question any more than she could keep the disdain out of her voice and reminded herself of her mom when she’d first seen the dorm in college. The mages’ situation was about on par with dorm living. “I can’t believe they make you sleep here and have the audacity to treat you like they did down there.”

“Aw, this ain’t so bad,” Larry said. “I’ve traveled with Windlock—well, I used to…” It took Larry the briefest moment to gather his feelings again, and she wondered how long he would have to do that when he spoke about his old boss. “Okay, I’ve seen better places, but I’ve seen worse as well. I’d say this is about on par and maybe a little nicer. The sheets are clean and they have the fridge stocked, which is a nice gesture.”

“This is nice?” she asked.

“Well, sure,” the mage replied and seemed to relish her discomfort. “Dragons make sure we mages are fairly well cared for. I think they see us like expensive cars. You gotta make sure to refuel us, keep us clean, and out of the rain.” He chuckled. “But at the same time, you don’t need to keep your Rolls Royce in the living room. Even the nicest cars get mud on the wheels. I don’t think most dragons spend too much time thinking about our feelings and all that.”

“They most certainly do care about our feelings,” a woman wearing mage robes said as she approached. She spoke in a British accent and had face tattoos that hopefully augmented her power as they didn’t do much for her look.

He shrugged, never one to shy away from conflict. “I guess. I saw the wine they have downstairs. It’s a couple of decades older than what they have up here.”

“At least they give us wine,” the woman protested sharply. “They don’t have to do anything but pay us a wage. We’re lucky to stay here. We don’t pay rent, you know. At least we didn’t.”

“Hi. I’m Amy, and what was that supposed to mean?” the girl said and extended her hand to the mage.

“Charm is my mage name,” the newcomer said and took her hand. “But I suppose you can call me Priscilla, Amy. It’s nice to meet you. Even if you are walking around here practically naked.”

“What?” Amy asked, obviously confused until she saw that Priscilla quite pointedly looked at her wrist, sans bracelet.

“I heard what happened downstairs. You two had fake cuffs?”

“Yup.” The young mage beamed and nodded at Kristen. “She gave them to us.”

“Ah…pardon my interruption then.” Priscilla visibly deflated when she saw that the Steel Dragon herself was responsible for the breach in protocol.

“Is there a problem?” Kristen asked. “I thought mages would be pleased to see a dragon trusting them to use their full powers.”

“As you say, my lady.” The woman bowed formally, her expression unreadable.

“No, no fuck that. Tell me what you’re actually thinking. I don’t do this deference to dragons bullshit.”

Priscilla looked quite affronted when she dropped her F-bomb but uttered a guffaw when she said bullshit.

“Well, I can see I don’t need to stand on formality with you.”

“No, but I would appreciate it if you would tell me why showing respect to these people is a problem.”

“Well…some of us… That is, I’ve heard—”

“Out with it!”

“Some of us are worried that now you have let your mages ‘off the leash,’ so to speak, the local dragons might watch their mages more carefully. Not that any of us are unfettered,” she was quick to add. “I don’t think anyone here would dream of such a thing. To break such tradition seems a very American thing indeed. It’s simply…well…”

“You’ve said all that so say the rest,” Kristen told her, both amused and annoyed with her hesitation. It was good the woman was saying something but a pity she was so frightened of her.

“It might make our lives a little harder is all.” Priscilla avoided eye contact as she said this and fixed her gaze on the floor, no doubt as she had been trained.

“I’m sorry if I’ve already caused you problems and I don’t see how I can promise to help you once we leave, but I don’t have any other choice. I need my people at full strength so we can confront and hopefully defeat these technomages,” she explained, feeling somewhat guilty but knowing she didn’t have a choice. This was life and death. Period.

“It merely seems rather extreme,” the woman managed.

“We live in extreme times,” Kristen said. “These two saved lives today. Without their full power, some of my people would have died.”

“Yes, well…I guess I hope you catch them, then. I want everything to go back to normal.”

“I don’t know how soon that’ll happen,” She saw that her words only made Priscilla feel worse, so she decided to change tactics. After all, they were stuck until Brian found something. “But surely it can’t be that unusual to see a mage uncuffed. What happens when you retire?”

She wasn’t proud of asking a question she thought she knew the answer to, but it seemed the gentlest way to go about learning more about mage culture.

“Retire?”

Her jaw tightened reflexively. That was about what she’d expected. “Do you mean you never retire?”

The mage tittered nervously as if she could laugh away the idea—or had been taught to try to do so, anyway. “Why would we ever stop serving in such an illustrious and honorable position?”

“Mages don’t retire,” Larry told her in low tones. “The term of service is for life. It’s not a bad life, I’d say, especially if we’re lucky enough to get a good dragon like Windlock or you. That’s what we hope for as mages.”

“So you’ve all accepted a life without freedom,” Amy said bitterly. “And you merely hope to have a decent master?”

“I’d say Windlock was better than decent,” he countered. “And Kristen is good other than the making us risk our lives every damn day thing.”

“I never said you had to work for me,” she reminded him.

Larry shrugged. “What could I do, go freelance? I’d have been executed within a week.”

“But…but that’s practically slavery!” Kristen was appalled. Of course, it wasn’t a surprise and she’d had similar discussions with her mages and a few dragons. Mostly, she had learned to temper her reflexive judgment and reminded herself that change took time and that both humans and dragons needed to adjust their attitudes and perceptions. Still, at times like these, some of her instinctual protests against injustice pushed through her control and common sense.

“We get paid quite well,” Priscilla said after another bout of her nervous laughter.

“But you can’t spend it on whatever you want. You can’t spend it on a retirement home,” Kristen said.

“It’s no wonder the mages form terrorist cells and try to rebel,” Amy muttered.

“No kidding,” she agreed. “I could possibly convince myself that dragons rule humanity with a relatively light claw—most of them, anyway—but it seems they have their tails wrapped around the throats of the mages of the world.”

“That’s not quite true,” Priscilla said loudly as she looked around to see if such a seditious conversation was being overheard.

Larry looked glum but he nodded. “It kind of is, though. Free mages need to hide and flee. They live in fear, knowing that at any moment, a dragon could swoop down and kill them.”

“Or they can dedicate themselves to a life of service to the noble dragons,” the woman said, but even after talking to her for such a short amount of time, Kristen could hear the falseness in her voice. She didn’t believe it any more than the rest of them did.

“And power blockage,” Amy added and shook her head in disgust.

“It’s a nightmare as far as I’m concerned,” Kristen said. “I grew up human and abhor the idea of slavery.”

“It’s not slavery, not really,” Priscilla said.

Perhaps she could admire the mage’s dedication to her position in the world. She wasn’t sure that if she had magic, she would have been able to stay so loyal to a power structure that so completely disenfranchised the mages.

It was a troublesome thought and one that should not be shared with Priscilla, but she couldn’t shake it. She made sure Amy and Larry would be all right—the woman assured her that dragons rarely came into the mage quarters, so they’d be able to rest and recuperate their powers without being harassed—and wandered to the roof of the castle to see yet another city built on the backs of the powerless.

Yet, she reminded herself wearily, human beings weren’t necessarily much better. History contained a long list of rulers who had abused their people, and she was honest enough to acknowledge that dragons couldn’t be blamed for every dictator, genocide, or human rights atrocity. It was, she decided, a conundrum that might take her entire life to unravel.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The view from the roof of Castillo Montalbano was breathtakingly beautiful. Kristen could see over a gently descending hill planted with orchards of olives and grapes and beyond the farmland where pampered pigs ate acorns like princes until their inevitable slaughter. With her dragon eyes, she could see into Florence as well, the city filled with stone apartment buildings with their red-tiled roofs. Her gaze drifted to the Duomo itself, which dominated the city like a gorgeous gem on the twisted hand of the stony metropolis that seemed older than Detroit could ever be.

She wished her mood matched the view, but it didn’t. If the truth be told, she felt terrible. A book her dad used to read to her as a kid summed her mood up perfectly. “It’s a beautiful day to be grumpy.” Though she might use a few other choice words than grumpy.

The problem was that she didn’t know what the hell she was trying to save in Florence. She had left Detroit behind, sent her family scurrying away, and obeyed the Dragon Council’s demands, and for what? So she could protect a society of slavers? Whenever Kristen thought she had made some kind of progress in understanding why the dragons did what they did, she found a new piece of the eternal puzzle that had previously been hidden in shadow. She shouldn’t have been surprised that mages had no choice but to serve for their entire lives—because on some level, she already knew this and now that she thought about it, seemed to recall Larry mentioning it when he told her his story.

How could the dragons not see this as slavery? When the humans had changed their rules and fought their wars over this very practice, the dragons had thought to fix the entire problem of free will with a stipend? It was disgusting, made all the worse by the casual way the dragons didn’t bother to even think about it. But, the voice of reason within reminded her, it was no different to human trafficking or forcing women into brothels and children into factories, except that it was on a larger and more widely accepted scale. Still, both were anathema to everything she believed in. They were un-American and guaranteed to stir her protective instincts.

She sighed and recognized that she stood on somewhat shaky ground. They weren’t in America, but the freedom to decide what to do with your own life had to be a universal right, didn’t it?

But maybe that was only an illusion. After all, mages didn’t have any more choice about what to do with their lives in the States than they did in Europe. There was Canada, where at least some of the dwarves would hide mages, but a life spent in hiding was not a life of freedom.

Kristen had known there were problems when she arrived and she knew she would continue to fight to keep the peace. That was why the magic-wielding terrorists had to be stopped. Their plan of simply burning everything would hurt innocent lives. But again, she found herself looking at them from their perspective. So much of what they based their rebellion on was part of her personal struggle.

If she had known for her entire life that she could do nothing but serve a dragon, could she have accepted it like the mages she’d met had? If her home, her salary, and even her vacations would be determined not by her own will but by the will of her master, how readily would she have complied? If she had been forced to wear a cuff that hampered her natural abilities for her entire life, she might very well see violence as the only viable option.

After all, a war was fought in the United States to end slavery. No doubt innocent lives were lost and yet, it had to be done. Dragons might well have been involved somewhere in the background, but that had essentially been a human conflict, a war that resulted when neither side was willing to concede defeat.

Kristen didn’t want a war, and that was a truth her conflicts always circled to. Wars between people were devastating enough, but a war between humans, dragons, and mages… She shook her head. Normally, she thought of it in brutal numbers. Millions, hundreds of millions, and even billions. But there, looking out over Tuscany, she couldn’t help but see it played out before her.

How many of these fields would be burned?

How many centuries-old trees would be uprooted?

How many cathedrals and places of worship would be irreparably defaced?

How many buildings would be burned to the ground?

Too many. The answer to the question was always the same—too many.

And yet, what choice did the mages have? A claw at their throat or fight was hardly a choice, but they might believe it was the only choice they had been given.

Kristen sighed. She was tired and frustrated and felt like she didn’t know enough about what was going on—a familiar feeling. Now, though, she also felt like she looked at it from too many sides. She could see how regular people would fare in a war, why the dragons were scared, why the mages were desperate, why the dwarves wanted no part of it… In that moment, it was too much to process.

She hadn’t realized she was crying until Drew appeared on the roof beside her.

“I thought I’d find you here,” he said but didn’t elaborate on why he thought that.

With a deep breath, she wiped her tears. At least she didn’t gasp or sound like she’d been crying or if she did, he didn’t let on that he’d heard anything unusual.

They stood there for a while, looking at Florence sprawled below them. For a minute, it was pleasant. Drew being there took her mind away from the drain in which it had swirled, but before too long, it returned to the same old frustrating topics.

She waited for him to say something, offer some advice, or share an anecdote that might help her to see what to do, but he remained silent. He looked out at the city and leaned his body on the wall in front of him.

“Why did you come up?” she asked him finally, but before he could answer, she replied to her question. “Because right now, I can’t seem to come up with a reason to come back down. It’s insane—insane—that mages are treated like this and that the dragons act surprised when mages reject their rule and fight back.

“And it’s not only mages, either. They’ve treated me horribly too. Their justice system is an absolute joke. I was falsely accused and spent a week in prison. Meanwhile, Obscura—an actual murderer—spent a few more weeks there than me and was granted leave, and why? Because a rich asshole agreed to pay her bills? That’s what their justice system seems to think of human lives—that they’re nothing but a few gold coins to be shelled out. I thought that was bad enough, but what they’re doing to the mages is even worse.”

Still, Drew focused on the city and stood in silence to simply let her speak until she’d offloaded it all.

“I’m tired of it all,” Kristen continued. “I’m tired of finding a new low, a new level of corruption, a new group of people being stepped on. We came here to keep the peace, but that’s merely another way to say we came to fight for the status quo. I can’t support that, not anymore. The center cannot hold, not even if it’s held for hundreds of years. It simply can’t. Not anymore.

“And what’s really crazy is that it’s not like I can side with the mages either. Yes, they’re fighting for their freedom and that of their brothers and sisters, and thus far, they’ve hurt far fewer people—a tiny fraction of a fraction’s worth—compared to the dragons, but that doesn’t mean they’re right.”

She drew a ragged breath and exhaled in a sharp burst. “Do you have any idea how many times Constance and I talked?”

“I don’t,” Drew said and didn’t seem to mind her ranting at all.

“I don’t either. That’s how many times it was. Not two times, or five, but often. I understand why they’re doing this and what they hope to accomplish, but not once—not once—did she talk about how to rebuild or how to bring the dragons to justice. And by that I mean actual justice as opposed to their vigilante terrorism.

“You say you thought you’d find me here, and I have to say I’m surprised to hear that because what I want to do is fly as far as I possibly can, find a tiny villa in a part of Europe no one goes to, and find a beach and a man who will accept gold to be my personal chef and forget about all this.”

He nodded, took a moment to absorb it all, and cleared his throat. “So why haven’t you?”

Her laugh was loud and bitter. “Don’t dare me!”

Drew smiled. “I do. I dare you to run off. Right now. I’ll cover for you, I promise.”

She snorted another laugh but she shook her head. “You know I will never do that.” Fucking Drew, calling her bluff like that.

“So, if you won’t run away, what will we do about it?"

At first, the question only infuriated her because she didn’t know. That was the problem and was why she was up there—to think. “I don’t know the answer to that,” she said, surprised at herself because admitting her shortcomings hadn’t made her angrier but calmed her somewhat.

Drew only nodded and looked at her like he did during training sessions—like he waited for her to make the next move.

Kristen sighed. Despite being a dragon that might very well live for centuries if not millennia, she couldn’t outwait him. “I know that leaving things as they are right now is totally unacceptable. Dragons want to continue to operate as they have, and they can’t.”

“Okay,” he said.

“But the technomages’ plan to burn the house down with everyone still inside is fucking crazy. That’s how dictators are made and innocent people are killed.”

“Okay.”

“So…we need some kind of a third option. Another way to help shift the power between dragons, humans, and mages.”

“Okay.” Drew sounded like she had outlined a five-year plan despite her only having admitted that she didn’t know what to do.

“So do you know how to do all that?” she asked. “Because I don’t have a fucking clue.”

He chuckled. “I don’t have any idea of how to even begin with all that, but I’m sure you’ll find the answer.”

She shook her head and sighed. “How can you say that? I’m not infallible. I might fail.”

“You might. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take if we want you to succeed.”

“But how can you be so sure?”

“I’m not,” he said with a gentle shrug. “I wasn’t sure you would stop those gangs that tried to start a civil war in Detroit. I wasn’t sure you would beat Shadowstorm or Obscura. Hell, I wasn’t sure you would get out of dragon prison.” Drew smiled. “And I sure as shit wasn’t sure that flying to a remote corner of Canada with you to stop a group of terrorists from detonating a bomb big enough to kill dragons would work, but I believed in you all the same.”

Kristen rolled her eyes. She couldn’t help it. “Gee, thanks, Drew. It’s good to know I have my own mindless servant.”

“I’m not mindless. I follow you because I choose to. You make good decisions. If you stop doing that, I’ll let you know. We all feel that way about you. We know you’ll work this out, and if you want help from any of us, ask.”

“Okay. Okay, thanks, Drew,” she said and realized that she could ask him what he would do right now but also that she didn’t feel like she needed to. He merely smiled, nodded at her, and went downstairs.

Somehow, she felt better already, although she still wasn’t sure how to fix anything. She wasn’t sure if there was a way to simply fix it, but she knew that at the very least, she would take action. Not for the dragons, and definitely not for the mage cells, but for everyone. For herself, for her family, for the kids she grew up with in Detroit, for people fleeing their homelands—for everyone. She would find a way to right the wrongs that caused all this strife in the first place.

Somehow.

It wouldn’t be easy, she knew that, but she’d never wanted an easy life anyway. There would be struggle ahead and sleepless nights, but she wouldn’t quit, not until she saw a way through all this or until someone finally stopped her.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Dammit, Havington, you said this would be routine!” Sarah shouted. She still wore her flower mask.

“Shut the fuck up, take that mask off, and get me some gauze.”

She cursed him again but she did as he’d ordered. He would need her finesse if they wanted any chance to save Stephano’s life. He’d been shot and then fell from the roof and seemed to have internal injuries.

Ron had been shot as well, but his wound didn’t seem too severe. The cell leader had already had Beth patch him up, give him some meds, and put him to bed to rest.

He didn’t think saving Stephano would be nearly as easy.

“Sarah, damn it—Sarah, I need you here!” he shouted.

“I’m doing what you asked,” she called in response.

“Good, right. Gauze—there on the neck. Now, I need you to keep his lungs breathing okay?”

“What?”

“With your goddamn magic, Sarah. Will that be a damn problem?”

“No, sir. No, I can do that.”

“Good, that’s good,” Havington said as he watched Stephano’s chest start to rise and fall. “Be careful to not overfill his lungs or you’ll cause them to burst.”

“Damn it, Neal,” she said and sounded like she had already fallen into the pit of despair. She never used his first name. That she did so now was not a good sign.

He didn’t need his underlings to indicate that they were in bad shape. They might have done better if the damn Steel Dragon had given chase. She would have followed them through an alley and been wounded by all manner of dragon parts, but she hadn’t.

They’d rushed to the base to try to save Stephano even though—those thoughts could come later. Right now, he needed to focus.

“Keep him still, okay, Mani?”

“I don’t know, boss.”

“I’ll try to remove any shards of bullet I can find, but he cannot move. Do you understand me?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Mani said and held Stephano by the shoulders. The patient didn’t even flinch. He was beyond unconscious.

Havington focused on the man’s energy and found the shards quickly enough. The body did not want the pieces of bullet in there and fought against them with his help. He grasped the shards, pulled them out, and let them fall on the floor.

As soon as they emerged from the wound, blood started to flow.

“I think a vein’s been cut,” he said and looked at the swollen discoloration around the injury. “I’ll try to suction it out.”

“He’ll need more blood,” Sarah said through gritted teeth. She was still trying to maintain Stephano’s breathing. Soon, she’d have to beat his heart for him as well.

“I fucking know he’ll need more blood. Bunny! Damn it. Bunny, I know you have the same blood type. Get yourself hooked up to an IV.”

Bunny—the only one of the team who always used her mask name—looked frightened but she did as she was told.

Havington focused on getting the blood out of Stephano’s wound.

Moving blood was difficult. It was like water magic, kind of, except moving a swimming pool of water didn’t have veins that might get sucked dry. He had to be very careful. If he drew the blood too quickly, he’d drain the man dry.

“Havington!” Sarah snapped. “He’s losing his pulse.”

“We do this now,” he said and psyched himself for what he had to do. He reached out to Stephano’s blood—feeling it all through his body confirmed that the internal bleeding was dire—and pulled. Gently at first, oh so gently, then harder and harder.

Blood began to pour from the wound—more and more blood and then too much blood.

“Bunny!”

“I’m ready.”

He glanced at her to confirm that she had indeed inserted a needle into her vein and had a length of hose ready to go, but that proved to be Stephano’s undoing. As soon as Havington looked away from his patient, he accidentally yanked on the blood in the man’s veins.

“He’s got no pulse,” Beth said.

“I’m so sorry.” Bunny spoke at the same time.

“It’s over,” he told them. When he’d yanked on the man’s blood, it had sprayed out and soaked him.

But he knew whose hands this blood truly belonged on.

“The Steel Dragon did this,” Havington said as he stepped away from Stephano’s body.

“For fuck’s sake!” Sarah shouted and stormed away, alternating between weeping and swearing. She and Stephano had been close.

“I’m so sorry,” Bunny muttered again and again. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Mani’s eyes were wide. He shuffled to sit on a couch next to the unconscious Ron as if to make sure the other wounded man was still alive. In a daze, he pulled his ram mask down. Havington could tell from his shaking shoulders that the large man was weeping.

He knew they were at war. Inevitably, he knew they would lose people and yet, after all five attacks had gone so well, he hadn’t thought it would happen so soon. He looked at his team. They were all taking it hard, worse than him. They looked like a pack of whipped dogs instead of the elite fighting force they had trained so hard to become. He couldn’t let them sink into despair. While he was their leader, he was more than that. He was their friend—their family, exactly like Stephano.

“We can’t let Stephano die for nothing,” Havington said, his voice quiet and tight after working on the dead man’s body for so long.

“Give it a rest, Havington,” Sarah said. Her eyes were already swollen from her tears.

He shook his head. “We won’t let Stephano die for nothing,” he said with more strength.

His team turned to him and the attention swelled his confidence. It didn’t feel earned, not after Stephano dying, but what choice did they have? They had to stop the Steel Dragon.

“If Stephano dies and we let it go, the dragons win,” Havington said and tried to put conviction behind the words he didn’t yet feel. “This is what they’ve done for millennia. They intimidate us, they roar and breathe their fire, and demand to have their way and we let them. It’s us. We are the ones who emboldened these beasts. Our parents, our ancestors, mages we all know who we’ve lost to dragon servitude. And now, they send their little shiny lapdog here and expect us to blow away in the wind from her wings, but I say enough.”

His team looked at him now with equal parts hope and fear. Sarah, though, was nodding. That subtle encouragement gave him what he needed to keep going.

“If we—that is, the five of us here in this room—can manage to take vengeance on the Steel Dragon, the world won’t be able to turn away. We can do this. It’s up to us and we have to because of Stephano. I want the streets to run red with the Steel Dragon’s blood. And when she’s dying in the gutter, we’ll be there to tell her that enough is enough. She killed one mage too many and whatever comes next is her fault.”

“You’re damn right,” Mani said. Bunny nodded and even Sarah agreed. Ron was still unconscious, but he had been closer to Stephano than any of them. He wouldn’t back out, not until the Steel Dragon was eliminated.

“Do you have a plan, Havington?” Sarah asked, her tone careful and measured, a good sign from her.

“We had a good look at her team and I hate to say it, but we’re outgunned,” Havington said as he looked around. The others nodded. Good. They weren’t idiots. “There were two mages, plus some of her old cop friends, and I bet there were more of her other allies from Detroit waiting to swoop in if needed. We can’t beat them with only the…the five us.” They had been six for so long, it felt like losing a part of their body.

“For now, I want everyone to get some rest. Bunny, you have first watch. Sarah, I need you asleep and ready for action. Mani, you too.”

“What will you do, boss?” the man asked. “You threw magic around out there too.”

“I’ll get some rest too but first, I need to make a few calls. The Steel Dragon’s not the only one with friends.”

He stepped into a smaller room, shut the door behind him, and called one of the other cells in Europe. It wasn’t easy to get through as they used burner phones too and he had to find a contact of a contact before he could speak to the boss. Finally, he connected to the person he wanted.

“Three minutes, King,” the leader of the other cell said, a man who went by the codename Cobalt. Havington was King of course. He had been since he’d started wearing the mask with a crown.

“Cobalt, it’s time. We need the Condor,” he said and wasted no time with niceties. If the man said he had three minutes, that’s what he meant and not a minute longer.

“Negative. The Condor stays in the nest until it’s time to break bones.”

“It’s time to break bones,” he insisted.

“We will not reveal the capabilities of the Condor until such a time as we deem it necessary.”

“And when will that be, Cobalt? The Steel Dragon already destroyed our most powerful presence in the States and arguably, the world. We took action here and now, she’s targeted us despite us moving to Florence.” There were codes for major cities as well but given that the Steel Dragon already knew they were there, he didn’t want to waste time going through the necessary clues to tell him where they were. “Did you simply want to wait for her to attack you? Let her destroy as many cells as she can while you keep the Condor all to yourself?”

“Once we reveal those capabilities, there’s no going back,” Cobalt whined.

“There’s already no going back. Constance tried to kick this thing off and the Steel Dragon stopped her. We took action and she’s trying to stop us. We have an opportunity here. She doesn’t know the city like we do. Plus, we already engaged in a fight. She’ll underestimate our next confrontation.”

“Because you lost.”

“And if we lose again, you’ll be next—unless your plan is to keep the Condor safely tucked in its nest while you watch each and every cell get burned out.”

“You should never have engaged with her,” the other man insisted.

“It was that or let her find us. Will you help, or should we retreat and give this continent to the dragons as well?”

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Cobalt replied.

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t be?”

“The Condor takes flight,” the man said but didn’t sound happy about it. The line went dead.

Havington nodded with satisfaction and took a few deep breaths to bolster himself. The other cell leader hadn’t been happy about it, but he had said he would send the weapon. Victory would be theirs.

He left the smaller room and returned to the larger area of the crypt that housed their base. While he’d been on the phone, his team had moved Stephano’s body to one of the few tombs that didn’t have some kind of carved statue on top of them. They’d covered him with a white sheet that was already stained with red spots here and there.

Obviously, moving the body had dampened the mood as everyone once again looked somber.

“The Condor is coming,” he said.

That earned a gasp from Sarah and nods from Bunny and Mani.

“We fucked up that bad, huh?” Ron asked. Good, he was conscious again. It was time to fill him in on the details.

“We set things into motion,” Havington said. “Once it arrives, this fight will be over and the foundations of dragon society will be shaken.”

“So we sit tight until then?” Ron asked and tried to sound positive.

“I’m afraid not. You were burned, Ron. They defeated us and gained access to that footage. We need to operate under the assumption that they have your face.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” the man protested. “I knew I fucked up when I didn’t kill that dragon.”

He shook his head. “Expecting one hundred percent success in operations like this is unrealistic, but it’s unfortunate all the same. Either way, you can’t leave our crypt except on my orders and never without your mask. There are too many damn cameras in this city. The others will go to your apartment soon and scrub it.”

Ron winced. “You don’t have to scrub all of it, do you? I have a couple of signed comics there—”

“We can’t make them sort through it before they burn the place. Sorry, Ron. It's already a huge risk sending them there at all. We can’t waste time sifting through for one or two items.”

“I told you those were a waste of money,” Mani muttered.

The other man looked grumpy but he didn’t protest. He understood how profoundly screwed they would be if the Steel Dragon found their base.

“Everything you need will be provided.” Havington tried to sound cheerful. It wasn’t Ron’s fault that he was now trapped there. That blame lay firmly with the dragons. “And look on the bright side—no more shopping duties.”

“Sorry, you guys,” the man said as he grasped how much more dependent on all of them he had become. And after him making such a fuss about having his own apartment despite recently moving to Florence.

“It’s unfortunate but not all is lost. If the dragons do get your face from the video feeds and we are able to prevent them from finding us here, we might be able to use that too.”

Dragons were predators, first and foremost, and everyone knew how to catch a predator. All you needed was a little bait.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

When Kristen came inside from the roof she was almost run over by her brother. At any other time in their lives, this would have qualified as the first blow of a wrestling match. Now, however, in the middle of a dragon stronghold with deadly mages in the city, she controlled her impulse to try to perform a body slam on him.

“Kristen! I have big news! Come on.” Brian strode away from her with as much as speed as he’d plowed into her with.

“What is this about?”

“I have a suspect!”

“What? How? I thought you said there were hundreds of hours to go through?”

“It’ll be easier to show you.” He didn’t slow so she followed.

They reached the lab where a bank of computers was hooked up to multiple monitors. He sat in the middle of it all like this was the job he was created for and for the first time, she was pleased with her decision to allow him to come. Even though he’d gotten the data after the firefight, it hadn’t felt like a success. It had felt like he might have died if they weren’t careful. Him being inside a lab was a much better option as far as his sister was concerned.

“There are over two hundred hours of total footage of the several-hour concert, thanks to all the different views from various cameras placed around the venue. I was able to cut that down somewhat since I didn’t watch the opening band or any of the footage between shows, but that still left me with close to a hundred hours to go through. Vert really likes his angles.”

“It still doesn’t explain how you did this in less than a day.”

“I cheated.” Brian grinned wickedly. “I wrote a search protocol that looked for facial expressions. Since most of the people at the concert were smiling, enjoying themselves, and dancing, I thought maybe someone contemplating the murder of the star of the show might look a little glum.”

“And that worked?”

“Sure. Facial recognition has become quite good, and…well, you said Vert used his aura on the crowds and it showed. Almost everyone was smiling and moving, which narrowed it down to a few hundred hits. Out of tens of thousands of people, I think that’s good. And that’s our guy right there.”

He played a few seconds of footage. Sure enough, smack dab in the middle of the crowd and fairly close to the stage was a man with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache. While everyone else danced, grinned, or bobbed their heads, this man stood completely motionless and glared at the performer.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean it's him, though,” Kristen pointed out. “He might have simply not liked Vert using his aura on his girlfriend or whatever.”

“Oh, it's him,” her brother insisted and his grin shifted to a grim expression. “Watch this.” He scrolled through a few clips until the suspect reached into his jacket.

Brian pressed play and they watched in stunned silence as he drew a gun, aimed it at Vert, and opened fire. He targeted the members of the band methodically while the people around him first flinched from the noise, then plunged into full-scale panic.

Once the musicians fell, he joined the crowd and was instantly lost in the chaos.

“I’m impressed that you found him,” Kristen said. “I’d say congratulations, but we still have to catch the asshole.”

“I’m happy to do my part,” he said, his smile wide.

“How far back did you track this guy through the footage?” she asked when she noticed multiple videos queued up. “Do you have any idea how he got in? I assumed this was a sniper job from outside and the reports of local gunfire were wrong. Shouldn’t there have been metal detectors or something to identify the gun?”

“I tried but the cameras aren’t really for security. There’s nothing usable from his entrance, but…”

“What?” she asked, already positive that this would be one of his theories rather than hard facts.

“Well, I’m no expert, but these are mages, right?” He wiggled his fingers in a charade of a mage casting a spell.

“That’s more than likely,” she confirmed.

“So…magic? Maybe he could have…like, mind-wiped the security guy or…I don’t know, floated the gun above the metal detectors? He could have been invisible or something and—”

“Magic, got it. Good idea,” Kristen said and cut her brother off before he betrayed what corners of the Internet he liked to haunt. “Do you have any images of his face that are clearer? Mustache, I got that, but I’d like to ID him.”

“Oh, I’m way ahead of you on that.” Brian brought up several images of the man’s face. “He’d spent most of the concert close to the stage, no doubt because he needed a close shot for his pistol, but that means there are a ton of shots of him.”

“Can you—”

“Identify him based on his face? Of course.” He brought up more windows of information. He showed her a driver’s license, a French EU passport, and even an address of an apartment he’d bought in Florence. Apparently, Ronald Bisset—Ron, according to some of the documents he had found—had paid in cash and had been in the city for less than a week.

“Then we move,” she said and flexed her aura to tell her team that it was time to get ready.

“All right!” Brian said and stood quickly.

“Not so fast, Zed.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because you’ve just proven how useful you are working intel. If you think I’ll take you into the field again, you’re crazy.”

“Oh, right—no, fuck that! I thought you would tell the team what’s up over lunch. Solving your case for you made me hungry.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lunch was hasty and unceremonious. By the time they were finished, they were ready to move. Kristen headed toward the roof with the other dragons but Amy stopped her.

“You should take a car with us,” the girl said.

“There’s no point in keeping quiet anymore. They know we’re here,” she explained.

“So that means they can’t shoot you out of the sky?” Drew interjected. “Take the car with us humans. You’re too valuable to this operation to risk.”

“Orders, Lady Hall?” Stonequest asked pointedly, thus reinforcing the hierarchy of command.

“I won’t send the dragons in without me on point, but I see the danger. Amy, fly with me and give me a shield as we go. Everyone else, I want you in the car five minutes ago. Let’s move!”

Everyone responded with a “Yes, ma’am,” and they were on their way.

A few minutes later, they reached the apartment building. If not for Brian’s detective work, she never would have expected it to house a cell of international magic terrorists. It looked much the same as many of the others around Florence, although the neighborhood was marginally quieter than some.

“Drones,” Kristen said and Heartsbane and Emerald complied. They released drones from their talons that Brian took control of from the base.

“Zed has wings,” her brother said.

“If you could not refer to yourself in the third person, that would be great,” Kristen said over a headset that the EU team had designed. It fit inside her mouth and was thus close enough to her eardrum for her to be able to use it.

“Okay, sorry. I won’t do it again.” The briefest of pauses followed. “Naw, I can’t help it. Zed out!”

The drones banked away as the dragons fell into formation and circled the building like hawks.

“I have eyes on the window. It looks normal. The dude has an impressive collection of comics, still mostly in boxes, but I don’t see any scrolls or anything,” Brian said.

“I still want in there,” Kristen responded. “With Larry’s experience using magic to track, we might be able to find something that leads us to them.”

“We need to move fast,” Drew said from below where their car had pulled up. “These guys will try to close this loop and prevent us from finding anything.”

“Lock down the bottom. We’ll go in from above,” she instructed.

The apartment itself was on the top floor, so it was a shorter distance for the dragons.

“We’re here,” she told the ground team. “I don’t want anyone going out of this building, even if they don’t match our perp.”

“Understood,” Drew confirmed. He snapped orders to the others, the commands easily audible to her keen dragon ears, even from this high up.

“Brian, anything else?” Kristen asked.

“Zed sees nothing but the comics,” he replied.

“What do you see?”

“One open blind to…like, his game room or whatever. The rest of the curtains are closed but if I had to guess, I would have to say I don’t think anyone is home.”

“Hernandez, how are you doing?” she asked over the radio.

“I’m one of two people who have to run up four flights of stairs and you ask how I am? I’m fucking tired,” the woman replied between heaved breaths. “But I’m also in place,” she said once she met Kristen at the front door to the apartment. “Larry will be here soon.”

“Anything?” She asked as demotions expert began to poke and prod with her tools.

“No. I don’t see any kind of trigger here. I don’t think they left us a bomb. Well, not my kind of bomb anyway.”

“Larry?” she shouted down the stairs.

“Just…a minute…” he wheezed.

“Larry,” she urged him.

“I’m coming…I’m coming… Just let me…catch my breath.” He stumbled toward them, beyond winded. A painfully long ten seconds followed as he waved his hands in front of the door “Okay, yeah. Don’t go in there.”

“Why not?” Kristen asked.

“This door is warded to hell and back. If we do anything other than open it with the key, this whole place will explode. I…I’m honestly impressed. I didn’t know a piece of wood could take this much magic without going up in flames.”

“Define hell and back,” Hernandez said.

“Sure,” Larry replied. “If we open this door, you, me, and the Steel Dragon are nothing but ash. I wouldn’t give the entire floor much better odds than that either.”

“Don’t open that door,” Kristen ordered.

“Thanks, boss, but we kind of realized that for ourselves,” the other woman quipped.

What to do…what to do…what to do, Kristen thought before she had an idea.

“What about the ceiling?” she asked Larry.

“Good idea,” the mage said, stretched, and sent blue tendrils of energy from his finger to the ceiling of the hallway. They penetrated the sheetrock as if it were water and vanished. A moment later, he smiled. “I don’t think the wards extend that far. Too bad you can shift into a dragon and not into a little mouse.”

“That’s not quite what I had in mind,” she said and spun to sprint toward the roof with her dragon speed.

She burst out onto the roof and immediately transformed into her dragon body.

“Are we under attack?” Stonequest asked as he shifted into his dragon form and hunkered close to the roof to make himself as small a target as possible.

“Nope, the roof is.” She raised her tail as high as she could and pounded it into the roof. The ax blade on the tip penetrated the tile and most of the ceiling. “Anything, Larry?” she shouted.

“Nothing!”

That was good enough for her. She raised her tail again and repeated the blow twice more. Using the momentum of her tail to lift her, she transformed into her human form, fell into the hole, and shattered the occupant’s coffee table.

“Are you all right in there?” Stonequest asked from above and extended his huge dragon head over the hole.

“I’m fine. Totally fine,” she said and untangled herself from what was left of the coffee table. “Get everyone on the roof. I want more people in here.”

“I don’t think that’s smart, Kristen!” Larry shouted. He had already reached the roof, so he spoke to her through the hole. “I feel a major build-up of magic in there. You must have tripped something. Get out! Now!”

His warning served no purpose. In the time it took for her to process what he had said, the temperature in the apartment soared to a hundred degrees. Her skin reddened like the world’s worst sunburn and blisters formed on the exposed parts of her body—her face and hands—before she could turn to steel.

“Kristen!” Amy yelled from the roof.

“I’m okay,” she responded, knowing full well that was an almost ridiculously optimistic assessment. Kristen had never quite understood spontaneous combustion, but she did now. The heat built rapidly until papers on the kitchen counter burst into flame as if they had been soaked in gasoline and touched with a spark and the furniture and carpet followed. A split-second later, the entire apartment erupted into flames as the heat continued to grow. Everything made of glass exploded like a horrible celebration of heat.

Kristen raised her arms—she was made of steel, so it was more reflex than actual self-defense—before the shards of glass from the TV struck her. By the time the slivers of glass had fallen, they’d already melted. The exploding cups in the kitchen had the same fate. No longer were they reduced to shards but instead, were now puddles.

The flames extinguished themselves as the furniture had already been reduced to ash. For a moment, she thought that signaled that the trap had completed, but it only meant that the flames had already used all the oxygen in the room. She knew this because she could no longer breathe.

A little dizzy, she crouched and tried to leap out of the hole in the ceiling but she was too heavy. She clutched the edge of the hole but it wasn’t strong enough to support her in her steel form. While she could easily jump out if she assumed her human body, she would be roasted like a rotisserie chicken so that wasn’t an option.

Frustrated, she looked around for a way out. Her vision had begun to close in—she was running out of oxygen in her blood—but she knew she couldn’t panic.

She looked at the brick walls of the apartment and her semi-delirious mind used vital oxygen to wonder if her steel body would melt before the brick would. It decided that yes, indeed, she would become a puddle before the brick was destroyed. Could she break through it?

Thankfully, instinct clicked in with a possible solution. Her mind pointed out to her that the fire had shattered the windows to the apartment and she could escape without having to destroy the structural stability of the building.

Kristen stumbled toward the window and forced her oxygen-deprived muscles to go faster and faster. She needed to get out of the building and hopefully get clear of the sidewalk. It would be a disaster to save herself only to crush a resident of Florence below with her super-heated body.

She managed a decent jog—every muscle protesting as she did so—and flung herself at the window with her arms outstretched.

A flare of elation was short-lived and she sprained her wrist when she collided with the magical barrier that contained all the heat. Kristen fell heavily. She had barely enough strength left to punch uselessly at her prison before the still rising temperatures forced her brain from delirium to unconsciousness.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It wasn’t magic that told Amy her friend was in trouble. Larry might have called it the bond between a dragon and their mage and others would have called it friendship. The most prosaic might simply call it common sense. Whatever it was, it didn’t take rocket science to realize that Kristen needed help.

“Kristen’s in trouble,” she shouted.

“I know!” Stonequest retorted. He was the only one who’d dared to approach the hole in the roof. At first, he’d tried to reach her with the tip of his tail to haul her out, but even with his stone-like scales, he hadn’t been able to keep the appendage inside long enough to accomplish a rescue. The tip had already had its scales peeled away by the heat but he still looked like he intended to go in.

The simple truth was that it would only mean there would be two dead dragons at the end of this instead of one.

Drew—Kristen’s old boss, apparently, although Amy was shocked to find out the two had never hooked up—yelled at Kristen over the radio. She didn’t respond and it seemed fairly obvious that her radio must have long since melted. But what else could a regular human do?

For that matter, what could a dragon do?

This trap had been made for dragons. A mage had spun the web of spells that held it all together, and a mage would have to be the one to undo it.

“Can you see it, Amy?” Larry shouted.

She could. A magical sphere held the spell in place and trapped Kristen within. If it wasn’t about to roast her friend, she might have found it appealing. It looked like the heat would be completely trapped inside the apartment, so at least the mage’s neighbors weren’t at risk of having their homes burned.

The Steel Dragon now shouldered that risk all alone.

But that wasn’t all the young mage could sense with her magic abilities. She could also see there was a core to the web of magic in the middle of the apartment. She told Larry as much.

“Yeah!” he shouted in response. The heat was so intense that the aperture roared like a furnace. She knew she didn’t have much time. “I call those knots. That’s what is holding the spell together. If we could get to it, we could unravel it, but to get to it, you need to go inside the heatshield. I can’t say I’m in a hurry to see how fast a non-steel-covered human cooks.”

“I have to go in there,” she snapped. The tar on the roof had begun to melt and turn to slag. Everyone took a few steps back. From her angle, she could see Kristen passed out in the charred apartment. Everything that could burn had already done so. They had to do something or the superheated air would burn the dragon’s lungs if she didn’t suffocate first.

“My stone skin is better in my human form,” Stonequest yelled over the roaring sound. “There aren’t chinks like in my dragon body. I’ll go in and get her out.”

“You won’t be able to jump out of there in your stone skin any more than Hall could in her steel,” Heartsbane said, her tone dire.

“What other choice do we have?” he countered, obviously pissed at the entire situation. And why shouldn’t he be? This was the second trap they’d walked into. At this rate, the mages would trick them into killing their own team to start the war while they simply watched the chaos.

“My stone should be more heat retardant than steel. I might be able to outlast the spell.” He sounded as if he tried to psych himself up. “Unless anyone has a better fucking idea?”

“I do,” Amy replied and, before anyone could stop her, she rushed forward and drew her magic around her into a protective field. She had practiced making shields and right now, she poured everything she had into this one.

First, she formed a sphere around herself and fashioned the front of it into a point she hoped would be able to puncture the sphere that contained the heat. With that in place, she added more and more layers of shielding around her until she was wrapped like some kind of a magic onion.

She did this while she sprinted toward the hole. Before anyone could stop her, she took a deep breath—the air inside would probably be none too good to breathe—and dropped in.

The young mage landed on the floor of the apartment. Even with her shield, the room was fearfully hot. She could feel her skin start to burn like she’d been outside in the sun for hours. The soles of her shoes melted. In the time it took for that to happen, blisters began to form on her skin. All this happened while she tried to protect herself with everything she had. These mages were obviously skilled at what they did.

She held her breath as the air was painfully hot and probably devoid of oxygen anyway, but that didn’t matter. While she wouldn’t have time to waste, she didn’t need too much of it. The core of the spell—the knot, as Larry had called it—was directly in front of her.

Focused on her task, she drew her shield tighter around her body—something she probably should have done, to begin with—and used a piece of it to strike the invisible swirling vortex of energy she could sense in front of her.

It didn’t break.

More blisters began to form. If it weren’t for the lack of air, her shirt would have already caught on fire. The thought was sobering but she couldn’t quit, not yet.

Amy tried another blow on the vortex of energy. This time, it shook the spell and the entire apartment rattled. It didn’t break but it told her she was on the right path.

She focused on a third blow and realized full well that she wouldn’t have the power for a fourth. Again, she pulled her shield as close to her body as she could while her skin grew hotter and hotter as the energy of the spell got closer. While she retracted one spell, she expanded the other. It didn’t take any corporeal form but she imagined it like a hammer. A massive sledgehammer with a spike at its tip that grew heavier and sharper while it begged to break free and crush the foe the mage had set it on.

When it was ready, she set it free.

It was like a dam breaking. At first, there was nothing as if the energy didn’t want to move. In the next moment, more power and force than she had realized existed poured out of her and into the spell.

It pulled at her and demanded that she fuel it with more and more of her power. She gave it everything she could but still had to maintain two spells. If she dropped her shield, she’d be roasted, but if she failed to break the containment spell, she and Kristen would be cooked.

The hammer spell pushed aggressively against the knot in front of her. As it did so, it drained her strength. A headache blossomed viciously in her temples, her heart began to pound, and blood trickled from her nose. Her muscles seemed sapped of every ounce of energy they’d possessed. Amy let her body collapse purely by reflex. Who needed to stand, anyway? Still, the heat assaulted her and she curled, trembling from the loss of the energy she had spent. By sheer force of will, she kept her mind focused on the two spells. She couldn’t let them slip. If either one did, it would be the end.

Blackness crept in from the sides of her vision. Her breathing slowed and her heartbeat grew so fast it didn’t seem to be regular at all. Unless something changed, she would die of a heart attack.

She had almost reached the point where she could no longer sustain the effort when the spell shattered under the pressure.

It was as if every thread that held it together had been made of elastic. When Amy sliced one, they all simply unraveled. The core of heat she had faced dissipated to nothing at all. The sphere that contained the spell had shattered completely. She had done it.

But that didn’t mean the superheated air or the brick walls of the apartment were suddenly cool. She realized she was waiting for a gust of fresh air that wouldn’t come. Her initial belief had been that if she could only break the spell, she’d save Kristen. Somehow, physics had gotten in the way.

Amy tried to strengthen her shield to protect her already blistered skin but using the hammer spell had taken so much out her. She wouldn’t be able to hold the shield for long but realized that she couldn’t do this herself. There was simply no way she could manage alone. It was like Kristen always said. They had to work together.

So, with her last trace of strength, she took a breath—not so much for oxygen but to give her vocal cords something to use—and shouted for help.

The reply was instantaneous.

Stonequest pounded through the roof in dragon form. His massive wings flapped and created great gusts of air to dissipate the heat. He scooped Amy up in one claw, then snatched Kristen with the other and leapt upward.

The wind rushing over her skin was a blessing but it wasn’t enough. Every inch of her body still hurt. She didn’t understand why the dragon flew over a field of cool grass or why he’d cruised so casually over an ice cream parlor. Didn’t he know those things were cold? Why was he flying so slowly anyway?

A part of her reasoned that it might be because her brain was shutting down. That would explain why she couldn’t hear anything and why it felt like she was moving toward the middle of a traffic circle.

Amy heard the screech of car horns and the colorful Italian curses of a scooter driver and in the next moment, her skin felt blessedly cool.

She looked at a man who protected her from the heat with his umbrella. He had very dark skin, a broad-brimmed hat, and a long coat, both of which were the same color as his skin. His umbrella cast shade that was blessedly cool like drops of ice on her skin. Actually, like rain. It was like his umbrella was raining on her.

“Thank you.” She gasped at him and tried to smile but he didn’t respond. He merely stood above her and his umbrella—was it somehow made of water?—sprayed her with water. Was he a mage?

“If you’re waiting for him to say you’re welcome, it’ll be a long wait.”

Amy turned to where Stonequest, now in his human form, cradled Kristen in his arms. He stood in a pool of blue water. She realized she was in the water as well, which was why her skin didn’t currently feel like death.

Kristen’s body was still steel, and although Amy had seen her change her clothes to steel a few times, she hadn’t done so this time or they had already melted away as she was stark naked in Stonequest’s arms. She had never seen steel breasts before and might have been jealous of their shape and ample curves if her friend were breathing. But with her highly reflective steel skin and without her clothes, it was very easy to see that she was not breathing.

Stonequest’s muscles bulged as he lowered her slowly into the shallow water. The young mage was suddenly reminded of Viking burials, of people being sent out to sea and set on fire. Was that what was happening? Had Kristen died and Stonequest was honoring her somehow, or—

Kristen gasped as soon as he submerged her body.

He sighed, made sure she was stable, and splashed through the water to the other woman.

“Are you all right?” he asked Amy.

“Yeah,” she said and immediately realized it was a lie when she saw her blistered arms. “Thanks to that mage you found.”

“You mean him?” Stonequest pointed at the man who still used his magic abilities to spray them with water.

“Who else?” she said and looked again at the man to thank him. She frowned when she finally realized it wasn’t a man at all but a statue. It held a pole in its hand that sprayed water into the air. That’s what had looked like an umbrella.

“You should make a contribution to some of the art museums before you go,” Stonequest said and shook his head.

Amy nodded, still shocked that she’d mistaken a statue for a man. Had she hallucinated that badly? How close had she come to dying? And that was with her using her magic to protect herself. Even though her control had increased significantly and she knew she had more natural strength than any mage she’d ever met or faced, it was a harsh realization that with the right spells, subtly cast, she could have her brain cooked.

A simple nod was enough to make her entire body shake convulsively. She had used everything she had on those two spells. Her body trembled like an out of shape athlete at the end of a marathon.

“That was a damned stupid thing to do,” Stonequest muttered after he checked Kristen, who was breathing heavily but breathing.

Amy gave him a pained smile—she didn’t want to think how much it trembled—and replied, “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

“You saved Hall, which of course I’m thankful for, but look at you. You’re shaking like a leaf and you’re covered in blisters,” he told her as if this was somehow news to her.

“If I hadn’t gone in there, you might have died,” she replied. Even that sentence almost drained her of her ability to sit.

“I’m more expendable than you,” he retorted. “Our team has dragons who can fight. You’re our most powerful mage and our greatest asset besides the Steel Dragon herself. You need to be more careful. If you had made a shield for me to go in there, I might have been burned but I can heal much faster than you.”

“Or you might have died.”

“Like I said, I’m expendable. You’re not.”

She didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed. Her body protested and reminded her she didn’t have the strength for either.

“It's what she would have done for me,” she said, which shut him up, most likely because it was true and also because they both knew Kristen would risk her life for even the least valuable asset.

Amy didn’t know if Stonequest finally admitted she was right, nor did she find out the name of the fountain that had helped her. After saving her friend’s life and having won this little verbal spat against a dragon, she passed out.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kristen didn’t exactly know how she’d gotten from the inferno of an apartment to a fountain in the middle of a traffic circle, but she knew Stonequest had something to do with it.

He had a stupid grin on his face as he moved to hold Amy’s head out of the water.

“Is she—”

“She’ll live,” he replied. “And thanks to her, so will you.”

She took a moment to study the young mage. Her breathing was regular, and her aura seemed strong enough. She wouldn’t die, then, which meant she could focus on less immediate concerns—like the pang of guilt she felt looking at her injured friend.

“Do you mean her burns are my fault?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The mages did this to her, not you. I’ve never seen heat like that.” Stonequest gestured to Kristen’s body. “It completely burned your clothes away, even though they were steel at the time. That’s never happened before.”

“It completely what?” she asked, looked down, and realized that she was completely naked. Her skin was still steel but now, instead of her dragon SWAT uniform, she bared steel breasts and…everything else for all the world to see.

Which, currently, was a fair number of people.

She sat in a fountain in the center of a traffic circle. That alone would have drawn gawking but on top of that, she had been dropped there by a dragon, firetrucks and paramedics now raced toward her, and their approach made everyone pull over to gawk all the better. And, oh yeah, she was completely naked.

“Stop staring at me and do something,” she yelped at Stonequest while she tried to simultaneously cover her boobs and crotch. At least no one could tell she had red hair down there when she was in steel mode. Currently, that didn’t feel like much of a victory.

He laughed. “What? Do you want me to take my clothes off and give them to you?”

“No!” Kristen shouted. That would be far worse. This was Europe—Italy, no less. If they both got naked, everyone would think they something erotic in mind.

She transformed into her dragon body and almost toppled the statue that sprayed water on her as she did so.

“Kristen…take it easy. It’s not like I’ve never seen a naked human body before. I’m hundreds of years old. I’ve been around.”

“Yeah, well, I haven’t. Don’t tell me to take it easy.”

“So, wait…” Stonequest grinned like an idiot. “You’re okay with me seeing you completely naked in your dragon form but not your human one? What’s the difference? I can tell you’re a female in your dragon body as easily as when you are in your human form. I prefer your dragon body if I’m honest.”

“That’s not an opinion I asked for.” She fumed and he simply laughed. “Right now, I need to know my team is okay.”

He nodded, still chuckling, and pointed to the team a block away. It looked like Heartsbane and Emerald had evacuated everyone else. Kristen made a quick headcount, saw they were fine, and focused her attention on Amy.

“She suffered second-degree burns, at least,” Stonequest said to two paramedics as they eased the girl onto a stretcher. “Plus, she might be suffering from hypoxia.”

“We know, sir,” the man said in an annoyed Italian accent. From his tone, he sounded like he rescued mages from fountains after a dragon rescued them from apartment buildings all the time.

Stonequest nodded, not bothered by the paramedics’ self-confidence in their ability to do their job, then switched to Italian and said a few more things as he followed them toward the ambulance. He gestured to Kristen, who had difficulty keeping her dragon body contained inside the traffic circle, then crossed to her ahead of the stopped traffic.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “You were quite badly burned as well.”

She waved his concern off, an odd gesture when made by a giant talon. “Dragon healing powers. My skin itches—even in this body—but it’ll be fine soon. That apartment is still on fire.” She gestured toward the building. It looked like the fire had indeed spread outside the sphere of magic, which wasn’t a surprise. It had been so hot in there, she wouldn’t be surprised if the bricks had absorbed enough thermal energy to make items and furnishings in the neighboring apartments ignite.

“It looks like the Florence fire department has it covered,” he replied.

Kristen was about to admonish him when she saw that indeed, three fire trucks sprayed water into the blaze while a fourth had a ladder extended to help people down. Already, the bottom floors of the building had been evacuated.

“What were you talking to the medics about?” she asked Stonequest. It seemed, for the moment, anyway, that the danger had passed.

“I told them she’s a mage and that I wanted Larry to ride with her in the ambulance to Dragon SWAT HQ. He’ll be able to provide some treatment before the healers the dragons employ attend to her properly.”

She couldn’t help but think about what would happen to anyone else who was hurt in the apartment. There’d be no magic to cure their wounds. Mages only helped dragons, not regular people.

“What happened? How did you get me out of there?” she asked as the two of them strode toward the rest of the team.

“Like I said, it wasn’t me who saved you. It was Amy. She made some kind of shield and dove in there. Somehow, she was able to protect herself and destroy the spell. From the way Larry talked, she shouldn’t have been able to do either. He said the spell must have taken considerable time to put together and probably multiple mages as well. She shouldn’t have been able to break it.”

“She jumped in?” Kristen was horrified that she almost caused her new friend's death but also damned impressed that she was able to do what she did.

“Yeah. It was a real Kristen Hall move, if I may say so. Once she deactivated the spell, I scooped you both up.”

“I still can’t believe she could do that. How powerful is she?” The last question was more for herself than Stonequest.

He shrugged, obviously as unsure as she was. “I don’t think we’ve come up against her limits yet. I’m merely glad she’s okay. She’s a huge—”

“Asset to the team, yeah, yeah. You didn’t chew her out for saving my ass, did you?”

It was his turn to look like he was wearing nothing at all. He blushed.

“I don’t want anyone to get hurt on my behalf either,” she said and spared him from having to reply. “But I won’t lie, it means a lot to me that she risked her life to save mine. I expect that from you cops, but from a civilian who has done this for less than a month?”

“She’s a real asset,” Stonequest agreed as they stopped alongside their teammates.

“Did we get anything from that apartment?” she asked them.

Heartsbane shook her head. “I peeked in there once the heat started to dissipate. It’s a wreck. And now, it's soaked. If there was anything, it’s gone now.”

“What’s our next move?” Drew asked.

Behind them, wood cracked and bricks fell, followed by a dull explosion.

Kristen turned to see that the top floor of the apartment building had partially collapsed.

“That,” she said and gestured at the structure, pumped her wings, and became airborne. “Stonequest, with me. It’ll be hot and your stone skin might protect you to help save some people. It shouldn’t be as hot as the magic was. Emerald, Heartsbane, I think there was a water tower two apartment buildings over. I want that dumped on this fire. Now!”

The dragons transformed and vaulted upward to swoop after her.

“What about us?” Drew yelled from below but she had no idea what to tell him. They couldn’t rush into a fire and there were no signs of the mages. Then, an idea occurred to her. It was cruel, yes, but it made the most sense.

“I see a few news crews arriving. Make sure you tell them this was a trap set by the technomages and that they get footage of the dragons dropping water on the blaze.”

Drew didn’t look too happy about being put on PR duty but he snapped a “Yes, ma’am,” all the same and led his team toward the news van.

Kristen flew over the building. About half of the top floor had collapsed and the other half was still standing but was filled with flames. She wouldn’t be able to do anything about it in her dragon form.

“Stone, look for survivors in the rubble. I’ll go into the fire.” Without thinking, she transformed into her human body, only to remember that she still didn’t have any clothes.

She landed amongst the wreckage, stark naked yet still protected by her steel skin. Ah, well, so much for modesty. Lives were at stake.

Kristen raced into the building. Compared to the magic-fueled fire from earlier, the heat was almost nonexistent, at least for her. For the humans she heard coughing and screaming for help, it would be more than enough to kill them.

When she kicked a door open, a little old woman stood holding a baby in her arms. She scooped her easily into her arms while she held the baby, then raced to the closest window. A firefighter met her at the top of the ladder and she put her down. If the man was shocked to see a naked woman with steel skin saving lives, he didn’t show it. He merely gestured at the old lady to give him the baby and climb down the ladder before he shouted a question at the dragon.

She didn’t need to speak Italian to know that he asked her to check for more survivors.

Kristen glanced at Stonequest, who dug through the brick as if it were nothing but a ball pit at a kid’s playground. He dragged someone from the wreckage—a young man with badly mangled legs. Again, she thought about what a mage might be able to do for him but now wasn’t the time. There were more people inside the burning section of the building.

Conscious of the fact that time was running out, she raced into the building again.

The fire had intensified, but she could still hear someone screaming for help. She kicked down door after door. Most apartments were empty—a good sign—but someone still called frantically. She had begun to wonder if it was a trap or something when she found a young woman holding two screeching cats.

“Can you walk?” she asked and cursed her lack of languages.

The woman nodded—she understood English, thank God—and put the two animals in Kristen’s hands before she ran out of the apartment. She followed and yelled at her to come back. Not realizing that they were already filled with smoke, the occupant had headed instinctively toward the stairs. She had no way to know that the safest way out was through the wreckage.

Kristen led the way, a kitten in each arm—they conveniently covered her breasts—and the woman followed.

When they emerged from the blaze, a news helicopter filled with photographers hovered nearby.

“Is anyone else inside?” Stonequest shouted.

“No. All clear,” she replied.

He gestured to the sky and Emerald and Heartsbane dumped the water tower onto the top of the burning building.

That, of course, was the moment the photographers had waited for. It was a rare sight for dragons to help people, unfortunately, and rarer still to see two dragons pour the entire contents of a water tower on top of a building. Better yet, in the foreground of a dramatic image of a dragon-spilled waterfall smothering a fire, the photographers caught a beautiful, steel-skinned woman, who was completely naked except for the pair of kittens she held in front of her breasts.

It didn’t take a media expert to guess what the front page of every newspaper on the planet would be the next morning.

Their vehicle had been damaged so the flight to base was an awkward one for Kristen. For starters, none of the dragons understood why she now felt uncomfortable about giving the humans rides when she hadn’t before.

“You’re always naked in your dragon form,” Emerald had said. “Why does it matter if your human form doesn’t have any clothes when you’re in your dragon form anyway?”

“Just…can you please give them a ride?” she had said through gritted dragon teeth.

“You can give me a ride, boss,” Hernandez said with a wicked smile. “I’m not a dude.”

“No, but you’re still a perv.”

The woman had only chuckled and seemed to enjoy seeing her nude steel body even more than Keith had. Finally, she persuaded Stonequest to take the two of them. He looked even more embarrassed than she did about the whole thing.

Butters and Drew got on Emerald’s back. She couldn’t tell who looked more uncomfortable. Butters’ southern sensibilities apparently couldn’t handle it. Every time he looked at her, his dark cheeks grew even darker or—worse—he giggled like a fool. Drew, meanwhile, looked like this would be the end of any respect police had ever been shown in history.

Kristen sighed. Maybe it would have been different if a naked male police officer had saved people, but a steel-skinned woman with a figure like hers? This would do nothing but help public perception of cops and dragons. She could see that. It was awkward for her but would be good, she kept telling herself. It would definitely be good.

She looked at Beanpole and gestured for him to climb on her back. She’d only agreed to take the quiet lookout because he seemed even more uncomfortable than she did about the arrangement. For some reason, that was okay. With the humans situated, they flew to the base.

“That was very slick, Steel Dragon,” Emerald shouted en route. “I’ve never helped people like that before. Not that directly. It felt good.”

“Aw, shut up, you big softy,” Heartsbane said but her aura made it quite clear that she agreed.

“Did you find anything in the apartment, Stonequest?” Drew shouted over the wind.

“I’m afraid not. I got a few survivors out and had a minute to check where the apartment had been, but there was nothing. Between the blaze, the water, and the building collapsing, I think we’re back to square one.”

“Not quite,” Butters interjected. “Yes, we’ve lost a lead, but I’ve never seen dragons save people like this before. Not in Detroit, not in the States, and not ever. If our goal—I mean our big, crazy ultimate goal—is to stop a war between humans and dragons, this kind of thing is really important. People need to see that we can all work together to solve problems better than humans or dragons could alone.”

“Very true,” Heartsbane said. “Plus, every teenage boy and most teenage girls will soon have a photo of Kristen saving kittens while dragons fly around in the background. If that doesn’t do something for interspecies relationships, nothing will.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Kristen and the other dragons landed at the Dragon SWAT castle a few minutes before the ambulance carrying Amy, but she couldn’t do anything but wait for her friend to arrive. Although once she remembered she was still naked in her human form, she asked Heartsbane to get her some clothes.

Freshly dressed, she was on hand when the ambulance finally stopped close to the entrance.

“How is she?” she asked Larry, who hovered over the girl. Given how worried he looked and that he was a mage, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see him literally hovering. But although his hands were extended over the patient, his butt was firmly anchored to one of the benches along the side of the ambulance.

“She’s burned fairly badly—second-degree burns almost everywhere. They put in an IV and I’ve been sensing for nerve damage. She has a few serious places, especially on her face and hands. Hopefully, the mages here can help her.” He didn’t take his eyes off the girl as he spoke.

In fact, the paramedics had to ask him to stand and step out of their way so they could unload the stretcher. He didn’t understand at first—not being fluent in Italian—but soon realized the meaning behind their fussy pantomime and let them do what they needed to do.

Kristen had sent orders to fetch the healers, and the local dragons had listened.

A non-magical doctor, two nurses, and two magical healers were there to greet Amy.

The paramedics and the dragons’ medical staff had a brief conversation in Italian that even without the language, she could tell was one team filling the other in on wounds and what they’d done for the victim. In minutes, they rushed the young mage down a hallway toward the infirmary.

“I think maybe I should stick with her. I have already identified much of that nerve damage so I could save them some time,” Larry said, his gaze still locked on Amy. There was an intensity to his voice that Kristen took for something more than concern about a fallen sister-in-arms.

“Go ahead. I want her healed and if you can help, you should. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He hurried away without a backward glance.

She watched him go and wondered how the mage felt about Amy right now. He was older than the young woman by at least a decade, but it wasn’t like someone could simply turn their feelings off. Plus, since she’d discovered she was a dragon, she had spent time with beings who were centuries old. A decade didn’t seem like much anymore. And then there was all the time the two mages had spent together. She was bemused by this new possibility.

Could the two be falling for each other? It was an interesting idea to think there might a be romance blossoming in the middle of her little crew. Better them than her, she thought grimly. Romance wasn't something she'd even had time to even consider since becoming a cop.

Wearily, she shook her head to scatter thoughts of what could have been as she climbed the stairs and hurried to her room. When she’d first joined Detroit SWAT, she’d found Drew attractive—any heterosexual woman would, she thought. And Stonequest was also attractive with his carved-from-marble physique. There was also something about Jim, she decided. How nice it would be to pretend she could flirt and decide between the three rather than trying to stop dragons and mages from reducing their enemies to ash for the umpteenth time.

That she thought the idea of flirting sounded fun spoke volumes about how pathetic her love life truly was.

Still, dreams of her saving men with guns swirled in her mind as she sank into her bed for a precious time of sleep. Her burns were already in much better shape than Amy’s, thanks to her dragon healing powers, but it was still exhausting to regrow a body’s worth of skin. She realized how lucky she was to have two leaders working with her. Between Drew and Stonequest, her team could handle itself for a few minutes. If anything came up, they could call her.

A knock on her door demanded that she wake far sooner than she wanted to.

“Come back next year!” she called.

“I have pizza,” Brian replied.

She groaned and pushed to a seated position. Her poor brother was probably scared shitless. He must have gotten pizza thinking that sharing it would make her hang out with him and thus assuage some of his fear.

“Come in,” she said and glanced down to make sure she was dressed for once. Not that he would have been anything but disgusted to see his sister without clothes on.

He marched in, a pizza on a silver platter in one hand—the opulence of dragons never ended—and his laptop in the other. She snatched a slice of pizza and waited for him to do the same, but to her shock, he didn’t even so much as sniff at it.

“All right…so the EU passed a law in 2019 that all new cars sold on the continent have to have eCall built into them,” he began without preamble.

“I’m sorry, what are you talking about?”

“Ronald Bisset’s new car. What did you think I’ve been working on?” he responded.

Kristen rubbed her eyes and willed herself to focus. “Ronald Bisset is the guy whose apartment almost roasted me and Amy alive.”

“Yeah, that’s the guy—wait, what? Are you okay?”

She shook her head and snorted a laugh. “I’m fine—fine enough, anyway. It’s good to know my team is finally big enough that someone’s always working.”

“Amy’s okay too?”

“Yes. Or she will be. Okay, so you were saying Ronald Bisset has a car. Tell me why I care? We found nothing at his home so why would his car be different?”

“Bisset used nothing but burner phones. Hell, for all I know, he might have not used a phone at all. The dude was careful, real careful, but it seems he bought a new car before he moved to Florence.” Brian had focused immediately on his information.

“A new car with eCar?” she asked tiredly.

“ECall—come on, Kristen,” he responded, obviously enjoying having an edge on her mental state at that moment.

“And that is?”

“ECall is an emergency system that automatically responds to a crash by signaling local EMS. Our mage has a unit in his car.”

Kristen tapped her foot as she started on another slice. “I don’t want to eat this entire pizza by myself but I will if you don’t get to the point.”

“Help yourself. I already ate and it’s not as good as Buddy’s anyway,” he said with a shrug. She was impressed by how committed he was to trying to change. He continued, “It seems a key feature of eCall is that—in order to get help to people in crashes quickly—it has GPS built-in. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a way to turn it off. Europeans care way more about privacy than Americans do, but good old Ronald Bisset must have let it slip his mind because he never disabled it. It’s tracked his location ever since he bought the car.”

Brian grinned even wider as he popped open a window on his screen that showed a red line superimposed over a map of Europe zoomed enough to include Paris and Florence.

“Do you think this guy will take us to his hideout here in Florence?” Kristen asked with the first glimmer of understanding.

“I can try that if you want, but I have something better.”

Her ears perked up. “What could be better than knowing where their base in the city is?”

“I think I know where they make their bullets. He goes to a farm in the south of France.”

“Because he went to a farm? I’ll need more than that. Bisset might have family out there.” She hoped he was right, but she’d do them both more good to play devil’s advocate.

“This is not a family farm passed down over the years. It’s not locally owned but is registered to a corporation.”

“What corporation?”

“Franco Farms. It has existed for about six months and was set up by another corporation that was set up by a shell corporation, and so on and so forth. I can trace the money, but it will take me time to do it if you don’t want anyone to notice.”

“Don’t do anything that will get you caught. No one knows we have a techie yet. I don’t want them to know that given everything else they know,” she muttered. “Is the car there now?”

Brian shook his head. “No, it’s parked in the suburbs somewhere outside Florence right now. I have an address too, but it’s at the home of someone who’s owned it for eleven years. It seems fairly normal so far, not like the farm.”

“From your tone, I can only guess that you have a plan?”

“Hell yeah! We know where the farm is. That must be where they have another dragon imprisoned. I say we swoop in, bust every damn mage in that place—Stonequest doesn’t think there can be many more than we’ve already seen or else they would have used them—and save the dragon if it’s still there. After that, we can drop in on Mom and Dad.”

Kristen smiled limply at her brother. “Brian…dropping in on Mom and Dad won’t be any part of any plan.”

“But how stoked would they be if we simply showed up at your villa or whatever. Mom would lose it!”

“And say we miss one of these mages and they follow us there? What happens then?”

“We could be careful—”

“Brian, I know you’re trying to help. You are helping. This is a great lead and we will use it, but we can’t spring into action and then go visit our parents. If that’s what you think you signed up for, it might be better if you went home now,” she said but tried to keep her voice kind.

“Oh, come on, Kristen, that’s bullshit. I knew this would be dangerous. I bet I understood better than you did when you became part of Dragon SWAT. I did some research.”

“I don’t think running searches on the Internet counts as research, I hate to say,” she countered.

He flushed crimson at that but at least he didn’t argue. “All right, so if you think this farm is so important, what do we do about it? I assume you don’t want to leave it there.”

“No… No, of course not. And I agree we need to move quickly. What else can we get on this farm? I’d like to know how many mages are there. If there are regular workers, that kind of thing.”

“I can’t simply show you whatever you want, Kristen. It’s not like I have a satellite or a drone in the clouds.”

“Why not?”

“Huh?” Brian startled and looked both confused and excited at what she was asking.

“Why don’t you have a satellite and a drone to watch this place?” Kristen asked and tested the idea herself as she said it.

“We don’t have a satellite or those kinds of drones,” he replied and sounded much like a kid telling his mom that no, he did not have a bicycle and why was she making him leave his birthday party to go into the garage.

“These dragons probably have access to surveillance satellites,” she added.

“Really?”

“It’s never come up before, but yeah, I’m sure they do. Do you think fire-breathing dragons would let cameras they couldn’t monitor into space? Without them interfering with the rocket launches? I’ll put Stonequest on it but I’m sure we can get eyes on that place.”

“Okay, sure, and then what?” He had opened a document on his computer and was taking notes.

“If we had eyes on this farm, could we trace every car that visited there in the last month or so?”

“Uh…I would probably need a drone to get license plates, but yeah, sure.”

“And if you had the cars—”

He finished her thought for her. “We could track these assholes wherever they go and make sure that when we catch them—”

“We catch them all,” she finished.

Brian nodded and typed furiously. “This might take a few days to set up.”

“That’s fine,” Kristen said. “Now, go tell the team and leave me to finish this pizza and sleep off the repercussions.”

“Sure.” He scooped his laptop up and excused himself.

She thanked him as he left, not sure if he heard her and beyond caring either way. Her only focus now was pizza and a mattress—a blessed, blessed mattress. She would lay down for a moment and rest before she finished the pizza.

Seconds later, she was asleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It took three days for Brian to acquire the necessary satellite footage. Three long days of waiting for another dragon to get shot, or another bomb to go off, or waiting for Castillo Montalbano itself to come under attack. The team encountered nothing besides frayed nerves. Even so, Kristen was relieved when they received their intel and were ready to spring into action.

For a time, she had thought it wouldn’t happen. The European Dragon SWAT team had protested strongly against using a drone. Rosso, in particular, argued against the idea, which increased her suspicions regarding the Italian dragon until he explained that using a combination of satellite and traffic cameras was a better option because it would be more discreet.

She might have challenged him on the issue, but her brother had been quite pleased with the idea of surveying their enemies with traffic cameras, so she had relented. Fortunately, it had worked.

He followed four vehicles that regularly came and went from the farm. They now had four more probable terrorists—two women named Bethany Cruz and Sarah Mitchell and two men, Mani Espinoza and Neal Havington—plus Ronald Bisset. Based on the profiles, they were fairly certain Havington was the leader, as Espinoza had a massive pair of shoulders and the mage who had thrown fireballs at them had been of a more slender build.

Two of the suspects, Havington and Mitchell, had not left the farm in the three days that they had been observing it, but the other two seemed to like to spend their time in Florence. They were the subject of Kristen’s briefing.

“We’ll strike them both as fast and as quietly as possible,” she said to her assembled human and dragon force. “We’ll split up because I think the two mages with the most power—our sources suggest those are Havington and Mitchell since she hasn’t left the farm—are out of the city.”

“Why don’t we simply raid the farm?” Rosso asked. He and a group of his European dragons were in on the briefing too, apparently so he could play devil’s advocate.

“These technomages already know we can locate and attack their bases,” she explained. “I want them to know we can hunt them when they’re in public too. They’ve had the advantage in intel over us for a long time. I hope this mission will send the message that those times are over.”

“Plus,” Stonequest added and stared sternly at the Italian, “if we raid the farm first, these two mages will go underground and we won’t see them again until they join another cell and use whatever they’ve learned about us to hurt us. We must eliminate them first and then your team raids the farm. That way, we clean up this mess that’s come to Florence.”

Rosso nodded. “As long as we hit the farm as soon as this is over.”

“We will, and I want your team ready, Rosso,” Kristen assured him. “Because of that, I’ll divide my people into two teams, one to target each of these mages.”

Nods from her team confirmed their assent. The Italian’s mages didn’t look pleased to be left out of the operation, but they were all more interested in a strike on the nest rather than picking up the vermin that were hiding in the city.

“I’ll lead a team to take Bethany Cruz at work. She’s a security guard at the Uffizi. Apparently, she had waited to get the job for a long time before she moved here. I hope that if we apprehend her there in a public place she seems to care about, she won’t put up much of a fight. Drew, Keith, Jim, you three will be with me, as well as Heartsbane.”

“This kind of feels like bringing a paperclip to a knife fight,” Keith said with a nervous laugh.

“Don’t feel that way, rookie,” Drew interjected. “These mages have trained to fight dragons while you’ve trained under me. We’ll bring this Cruz in cleanly and quickly. With that done, we’ll get a couple of bottles of wine and start aerating them for the other team.”

The Rookie nodded but didn’t seem convinced. “She’ll have magic, though.”

“And you’ll have Tazers,” Rosso said with a shrug. “I contacted the Uffizi. They agreed that you can have stun guns and projectile tasers as well.”

“Guns might be better,” Jim muttered.

“We’ll be fine.” Heartsbane snorted. “Two dragons and three cops against a mage? Like Drew said, we’ll race the rest of you home.”

“B Team will raid Espinoza’s house,” Kristen said to bring the meeting back on track.

“Can we stick with Mani?” Butters asked with a chuckle. “Espinoza is a mouthful.”

“Sure. Mani, whatever. Stonequest, Emerald, Beanpole, Butters, and Hernandez will make up a team. I’ll send Larry too because it’s far more likely to be magically trapped like the other apartment was.”

“How’s Amy?” Keith asked.

“She’s all right,” Larry said and chewed his lip. “The mages are doing great for her, but Lady Steel and I agree that she should sit this one out. We’ll need her if this goes south and maybe at the farm.”

“It won’t be a problem,” Stonequest said. “We have the stronger dragons and the humans with the better eyes. I’d say we’d wait for you to start in on the wine, but we don’t want to wait that long.” A glimmer of a challenge was visible in his eyes.

“All right, enough chest-beating,” Kristen said, inwardly relieved that her teams could still keep a light mood while preparing to face a possibly murderous mage. “We strike them clean and fast, get them back here, and raid the farm tomorrow before lunch. Brian’s watching by satellite, but I can’t see how they could get a dragon out of there in less time than that. We hope that none of them know we’re coming, but we should all still assume that they are prepared for trouble, so be ready. Any questions?”

There weren’t, so everyone got to work.

“Do we still have eyes on this asshole?” Stonequest asked over his radio. He, Heartsbane, Larry, and Hernandez were at the bottom floor of the apartment, ready to take the steps to the second story and capture Mani.

“Our target is still watching an Italian game show and laughing uproariously. I’m kind of jealous. I wish I could see the screen,” Butters replied. He and his partner Beanpole were stationed across the street on top of another apartment building. When they’d all first started working together, Butters and Beanpole had seemed uncomfortable about using nicknames but honestly, Stonequest found them easier to remember than proper humans’ names like Keith.

“Then we’ll go in,” he confirmed and led the ground team up the stairs.

They were in place in less than a minute. It could have been less, but Emerald and Stonequest didn’t use their full speed to better accommodate the mage and the human cop.

They surrounded the door.

“Does he know we’re coming?” Stonequest asked Butters.

“I don’t think so. If he does, he must be a beast at poker. As far as we can tell, he’s still enjoying the hell out of his show,” the sniper replied.

“Check the door,” he ordered Hernandez and Larry.

The woman went about her task with tools whose purpose Stonequest could only guess at and seemed satisfied after only a moment. A curt shake of her head told him there were no non-magical traps.

“Larry?”

“Don’t make me rush this. I might set it off.”

He nodded. They had expected the apartment to be trapped, of course, like the last one had been. At the same time, they had also hoped that since the mage was actually inside the apartment, the trap wouldn’t be armed. It seemed logical because no matter how committed you were to a cause, it was still crazy to willingly roast yourself alive.

“This one’s different, then? Hall’s mage couldn’t undo it from the outside,” Emerald asked. Stonequest needed to remind him to stop calling Amy Hall’s mage, but now wasn’t the time to break down a lifetime of grammar habits.

“Yeah, this one’s different. I’d have it done if you’d simply shut up and let me—”

A pop issued from inside the apartment and a flash of light from under the door.

“Brace yourselves!” Stonequest ordered his team. Everyone complied instantly. Emerald and their leader each stood to the right and left of the doorframe and Hernandez and Larry stood a step behind them.

Nothing else came from the apartment. Instead, Butters yelled into his radio. “Go, go, he knows you’re here—go!”

The team surged into action. Stonequest kicked the door open. Emerald and Hernandez raced in with their weapons ready. It was kind of impressive to see the dragon with a gun. Dragon SWAT had never really bothered with petty firearms—why bother when one could simply take their true form and unleash fire upon one’s foes?—but he had taken well to the weapon as well as the human tactic of fully securing a location.

“Living room’s clear!” the woman shouted.

“The bedroom is too!” Butters shouted over the radio. “He went into a bathroom or something. Move now. He went straight there so he must have a tunnel or something. Damn it, Beanpole, where are you going? Beanpole!”

Stonequest used a burst of dragon speed to race through the living room, the bedroom, and into the master bathroom. Once inside, he found nothing at all—no mage and no secret door. Nothing but a faint trace of magic.

“The asshole’s not here,” he said.

“That’s because he’s outside,” Larry shouted from the hall.

“Emerald, go!” he ordered, but it didn’t need to be said as Emerald had already raced into action. He hurtled through the living room and sprinted down the hall. Gunshots came from the hallway—no doubt a pistol loaded with dragon bullets.

Stonequest raced into the hallway as well.

“He went down those stairs. I’d have pursued but standing orders—”

“It’s all right, Emerald. I don’t want you to get shot. Larry, do you think you can cover us? I don’t want to take any of these bullets but I don’t want him to get away either.”

“I can try,” the mage said, and the three of them ran down the hall, now shielded by a sphere of magic. They reached the top of the stairs and looked down to where Mani stood and aimed his pistol at them.

“You assholes will never take me alive!” he shouted vehemently, fired a few shots, and ran out into the afternoon sun.

“Shit. Butters, do you have eyes on him? Butters?” Stonequest yelled as he jumped down the entire flight of stairs and followed the mage outside.

The sniper didn’t reply as he was too busy laughing.

The dragon thought it a bizarre time for gallows humor until he saw what had happened outside—and what Beanpole had accomplished.

The mage was crawling away from him, obviously delirious, with a tranquilizer dart protruding from his neck. Beanpole strolled along beside him. “It’s good to know I’m not an asshole,” he said a second or two before the tranquilizer worked its way into the mage’s bloodstream and made the man pass out.

Stonequest strode toward them, both proud and impressed at how well the operation had gone despite the mage somehow leaving the apartment and almost escaping. He retrieved a pair of magic-blocking handcuffs and slipped them on the unconscious man.

“Let’s hope Kristen’s team is already done with their job,” he said, but he knew that was too much to hope for.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Uffizi was by no means a small museum. It was three stories tall and consisted of two long hallways lined by rooms filled with art and separated by a courtyard in the middle. Inside, they contained art more valuable than anything Kristen had imagined—priceless works by Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and even Botticelli, including The Birth of Venus. Her mom had a coffee mug printed with that painting so she recognized it immediately.

A replica of Michelangelo’s David stood outside. Across from this, a covered walkway was filled with statues she couldn’t even hope to name. They approached through a wide plaza surrounded by buildings made of sandy yellow brick.

On a clock tower above the Uffizi, Heartsbane was stationed in the bland coveralls of a maintenance worker. Keith and Jim were at the main entrance, ready to pop the mage with a tranquilizer and cuff her if she made it past their teammates.

Kristen and Drew would go in and it would be easy enough to play the part of American tourists. They weren’t sure exactly where their mark—Bethany Cruz—would be, but she worked as a security guard so they at least knew she’d be in uniform and would pay attention to the patrons.

They reached the top floor—where the tour of the museum started—without locating Cruz. Kristen was no art buff, but it was hard to not be impressed with what she saw. The Uffizi boasted one of the most impressive collections of art from the Renaissance period in all of Europe. Everywhere she looked, she recognized images that had persisted in pop-culture even after hundreds of years. An angel played some kind of guitar—a lute, maybe, although she wasn’t sure—that was way too big for it. Statues of people who’d lived centuries before included a marble torso of someone from ancient Greece. Pre-renaissance paintings were displayed as well. They seemed flat and somewhat lifeless compared to the works of the great masters, in her opinion, but they were still gorgeous. Most were images of how people represented the divine so long before.

“It’s amazing what people have done, isn’t it?” Drew said. “It’s inspiring.”

“It is,” she agreed, although at that moment, her gaze settled on another of the great subjects of the Renaissance—a portrait of one of the dragons who had helped to stabilize the region and thus enabled the Renaissance to happen. The Occiodoro family of dragons was as important to the people of Florence as the Medici’s had been, perhaps more so. If they had not made alliances with neighboring cities and put an end to the constant skirmishes that had marred the Dark Ages, who could say whether the Renaissance would ever have happened?

Primus Occiodoro stared out of his painting and looked like he understood all of this. He was in his human form but his eyes were still gold, and one of his hands had been painted as the claw of a dragon. In the background were the rolling hills of Tuscany and a dragon flew over them, incinerating cropland.

“That’s Occiodoro’s true form in the background,” one of the staff said. The woman had mousy features and looked exactly like Bethany Cruz, their target. Her accent wasn’t local either.

“Is that right?” Kristen said and looked away before the woman recognized her.

“It’s said there would have been another three Italian masters of the Renaissance period, but in his rage at their failure to capture his benevolence, Occiodoro burned them all. This painting was done by Michelangelo, but there are no records of the two ever being together. It might be the reason Michelangelo was spared the same fate as the long-lost masters,” Cruz explained. Kristen looked at her out of the corner of her eye while the woman fixed her gaze on the painting. There was a bitterness to her voice, one Kristen had heard before when talking to Constance.

“Do you think all dragons are like Occiodoro?” she asked and tried to sound polite.

The guard startled at the question and looked at her more intently. She immediately froze, recognition plain on her face.

“I believe some dragons believe in justice. Do you?” Kristen persisted.

“I…you’re the Steel Dragon. I, uh…I saw your face in the newspaper.” Cruz studied her and the scrutiny made it clear that she saw much more than only her face.

“I know who you are too. And I want you to know that we’ll do everything we can to make sure you get a fair trial. If you’re not your cell’s leader and can help us get to him, we think that might help your sentence.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cruz replied. “If you’ll excuse me.” She moved to walk past them, but Drew stepped in her path.

“Don’t.” He shook his head. “We have the exits guarded. There’s no way out.” He took out the pair of magic-dampening cuffs that Stonequest had given him.

“Come with us willingly, cooperate, and prove to the dragons that you got caught up in all this and that you mean to change,” Kristen said.

“Dragons won’t forgive,” Cruz said and spat in her face. She didn’t run and instead, raised her hands and let Drew cuff her as the Steel Dragon wiped the spit from her face.

“It’s smart of you to come with us, ma’am,” Drew said.

“I might not even make a note of your spit if you don’t try anything funny,” she added, happy that the woman was in cuffs.

“Excuse me.” Someone tapped the Steel Dragon’s shoulder. “Can one of you direct me to where I can see the Botticelli?” The woman’s accent was slightly American and slightly Italian like someone who had grown up in different places.

“Sure.” She pointed without turning fully away from Cruz.

“That room?” the woman asked again.

“Yes.” Impatient now, she turned to see who this was and also to reveal the cuffed security guard. Handcuffs should be enough to turn off even the most persistent of tourists.

The error of that assumption was immediately apparent when she turned into an unexpected punch.

The blow was strong enough to hurl her into a statue of a woman looking at the sky—and reduce it to only a torso when her skull connected and shattered it.

Kristen pushed to her feet and grimaced. Her collision with the marble had inflicted a fair number of scratches. She was bleeding from her head and could feel a bruise bloom on her shoulder. It might have been enough to take a regular human out of a fight but of course, she wasn’t any regular old human. She was the Steel Dragon, and her healing powers already began to shrink the bruise and seal the gash on her forehead before she had stood.

“Ma’am, I need you to back the hell away,” Drew said as he released Cruz and reached for the taser at his belt.

“Yeah…that’ll be a no,” the woman replied.

“I warned you.” He grasped his weapon but before he could draw it, the woman delivered a driving chest kick into him that catapulted him out of one of the windows and into the courtyard below.

Kristen ran to look out the window and saw that he had landed in a crumpled heap. There wasn’t a pool of blood—thank God—but he wasn’t moving either.

“If he’s dead, I swear to God I will kill you,” she said. “Try picking on someone your own strength, you coward.” She walked toward the woman, who must be the mage who wore the flower mask—Sarah Mitchell was her name. Their intel said she was still on the farm, though, and she hadn’t displayed anything like this kind of strength in their last fight.

“I’ve looked forward to a challenge,” her adversary said and advanced toward her with slow assurance like a parent who knew their child was about to come running toward them despite words that said the opposite. “But I should probably warn you. If you fighting your hardest depends on whether that traitorous rat outside is dead or not, you’ll lose.”

“I don’t know who the fuck you think I am, but let me give you a clue,” Kristen said and turned her skin to steel as the woman approached.

“I know who you are. You’re a traitor to those who want equality in the world. You could have taken the chance to prove that dragons truly are better than the blood that courses through their veins, but you didn’t. You’re a disgrace, but I think I have you at a disadvantage. I am the Condor—but you can call me Katrina—and I’m here to kick your ass. I might not be as shiny as you but I am most certainly equally as strong.”

As if to prove her point, Katrina’s skin turned to iron.

Kristen froze when it happened. She had never seen anyone display an ability like her steel skin before. Stonequest's stone form was kind of close, but this woman was beyond mere marble. Plus, time and time again, dragons and mages had told her how unusual her powers were and how unique this ability was. And maybe it was, as this woman didn’t look the same. Yes, she was covered in metal and yes, she could move as fluidly as she could, but while Kristen’s steel skin gleamed like a new stainless steel blade, the iron form she faced was darkened like the spikes on the top of a cast-iron fence.

Katrina was fast too, and in the moment that Kristen hesitated, her opponent raced forward with a burst of speed and threw a shoulder into her chest that launched her through a wall.

It was like being a rookie in Dragon SWAT all over again. She didn’t understand how this mage—was she a mage?—could be so fast. Constance had been fast, yes, but she’d also avoided hand-to-hand combat unless forced into it. This woman seemed insistent on it.

Rather than attempt to rescue Cruz, she stepped through the hole in the wall to where the Steel Dragon untangled herself from a frame and a piece of painted canvas that was worth more than her parents’ house a few times over.

“Everyone, get out of here!” Kristen shouted at the throngs of tourists. Some had snapped pictures of her, apparently thinking that a woman bulldozed through a painting would make a great story to tell once they’d returned home and changed into regular clothes to live their regular lives again.

No one listened to her, no doubt because she was dressed like a tourist herself and still struggled with the artwork.

As Katrina came closer, though, she stopped her attempt to minimize the damage and simply ripped the painting to free herself.

This drew more gasps from the tourists and a storm of camera clicks as people hurried to document the sacrilegious behavior.

“She’s not wrong, you know,” the attacker said as she released another burst of speed to reach her target. Before the Steel Dragon could block, an iron fist pounded into her gut. She doubled over and the woman grasped her by the throat and lifted her off the ground by her neck. “This exhibit hall is about to be closed for repairs.”

That finally seemed to penetrate the tourists’ complacency and they began to scream and run frantically to one of the two exits to the room.

Kristen saw all this but hardly processed it while she attempted to break the woman’s hold on her throat. It was strong like the grasp of a dragon but impossible to break because her fingers were dark gray, almost black iron. She had broken dragon grips before by hammering on them with her steel fists, but that didn’t work on her adversary.

“You’re pathetic. You could have been so much more—like me, even. Alas. Instead, you’re merely a glorified guard working for corrupt leaders.”

She stared at Katrina while she choked her. It was almost like looking in a mirror. The skin was an obvious similarity but there was more to it—the way the woman’s hair fell, her nose, the curve of her mouth, and hell, even her figure. It was all similar enough to her for the two to be sisters.

In silence, she processed all this while the other woman squatted and thrust up with enough force to hurl her into the ceiling. She careened into it, through the roof, and into the late afternoon sun of Italy.

“Heartsbane!” she shouted before gravity could drag her down again.

“Hall?” the dragon exclaimed. She stood barely a stone’s throw away on the roof and watched the sides of the building instead of the middle because who in their right fucking mind would be able to throw someone through a roof?

“Get the team! I met our hostile!”

She let gravity take hold and fell into the museum through the hole in the roof Katrina had made using her body as a wrecking ball.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Kristen plummeted toward her opponent and grew ever closer, but Katrina saw her coming and stepped smartly aside.

As a result, it was the antique marble floor that she cracked rather than the woman’s face.

Her adversary wasted no time and kicked her savagely in the gut. When the iron foot met her steel-covered ribcage, it sounded like the world’s largest gong had been struck by the world’s largest hammer.

It didn’t hurt as much as being choked had. She was used to being pummeled and could knock bullets aside, so a punch from an iron fist wouldn’t disable her. Not by itself, anyway.

Katrina seemed to realize this as well as she snaked her hand out to grasp her steel hair. Kristen recognized the danger of that, so she spun and knocked the other woman’s legs out from under her—this time, it made the sound of massive wind chimes being struck twice—and she fell heavily to deliver a significant amount of damage to the flooring.

The woman crawled away and pushed to her feet before her opponent could scramble on top of her.

“What are you?” Kristen demanded and braced herself as her attacker ran toward her.

“Your worst enemy,” Katrina replied before she lowered her head and drove into her. Again, their two metal bodies gonged when they struck but this time, the ringing was cut short as the force of the attack hurled the Steel Dragon through a wall and into the hallway.

She struggled to stay upright—being forced through a wall was not great for one’s sense of balance—although the other woman seemed to have no such concerns. She strode through the hole to where the mage cowered, her hands cuffed together. With deft movements, she tore the bond apart like it was nothing more than a Christmas ribbon. The spell that had previously limited the mage’s power dissipated like it was nothing but a small flurry of dust caught in the wind.

Katrina refocused on Kristen and each step of her iron body cracked the floor beneath her. If the fight continued like this much longer, it was almost a certainty that the entire Uffizi gallery might collapse from the extensive damage.

It seemed Jim had similar concerns about fine art as he shouted an insult when he reached the top of the stairs to the floor they were on. “That metal statue looks like a cheap knock-off of the Steel Dragon.”

The woman smiled at the challenge. She surged at Kristen, kneed her in the gut, and raced toward the Wonderkid.

From her place of agony on the ground, Kristen saw that he didn’t even try to run. Instead, he raised his weapon and fired three tranquilizer darts at his attacker’s chest.

The iron-skinned woman didn’t bother to deflect them. She simply let all three darts bounce off her chest like they were nothing more than ping pong balls. Jim had no time to run before she caught him by the throat and lifted him off the floor—her favorite form of intimidation, apparently.

Fortunately, it didn’t work this time around. The rookie—showing some experience for once—had hidden on the other side of the doorway and directly beside Jim. “I guess tranquilizers don’t work, huh?” he said and took a step toward Katrina.

“Not unless your intention was to prove your incompetence,” she replied.

“No, not really.” The Wonderkid gasped, his voice rough as his vocal cords were being crushed in the woman’s iron hold.

“What about tasers?” Keith asked innocently.

“Wha—”

He fired a taser before she could finish and she fell forward and dropped her captive as she did so. Her muscles spasmed, useless to help her as she tumbled down the stairway and demolished a few of the stairs.

“What the fuck is she?” Jim wheezed as he tried to scramble away from the collapsing staircase.

Kristen scrambled to her feet and ran to her two friends. “I don’t have a fucking clue. I’ve never seen metal skin on a mage before.”

“Maybe that’s because she’s not a mage,” Keith said as he stared down the stairway.

“What else could she—”

She wasn’t able to finish her question as the Rookie shoved her back with enough force to make even her steel body move. “Run!” he bellowed.

Seconds later, the stairway exploded behind them.

Not like a bomb or a spell. It exploded like a massive dragon with iron scales destroyed it in search of its prey.

“She’s a dragon!” Keith yelled repeatedly as he ran down the hallway.

Kristen braced herself, prepared to be struck by the dragon. She didn’t want to transform inside the museum unless she had to, so it was with ease that the mage was able to run past her toward the dragon’s claws.

Katrina, now in dragon form, roared as she caught the mage in one talon and lashed out with her tail to shatter the windows overlooking the courtyard in the center of the Uffizi. She took to the sky with the mage in her claw.

“Now!” she screamed at her partner. “Do it now!”

“We’re not supposed to be seen,” the mage shrieked and her terror betrayed the existence of the secret she was supposed to keep.

But whatever was at the heart of the argument would have to wait as Heartsbane had already transformed into her dragon form and taken flight. She divebombed Katrina and attempted to rake her claws across the dragon’s iron hide, but her assault was ineffectual.

“You can’t hurt me. You’re nothing but flesh,” her adversary roared as she pumped her wings and pushed the other dragon aside.

“Mind over matter, bitch,” Heartsbane growled and her eyes flashed with temper.

A sudden and overwhelming urge to stay down overpowered Kristen. She felt like the sky was filled with death, dragons, bullets, fire, birds, needles, the dark—everything that had ever scared her. She wasn’t alone in feeling this way as Jim and Keith both flung themselves prostrate and cowered with their hands over their heads. The few people still in the museum did the same and made no attempt to look at the unseen sky.

Even the people outside near the statue gallery and large courtyard in the front of the Uffizi reacted in terror despite all of them trying to flee the area only a moment before—a much more sensible choice when two dragons were in combat.

Even the mage yelled at Katrina to land, to go down, and to get out of the sky.

“It’s her aura, you dolt,” the dragon roared and blasted her adversary with fire.

Heartsbane pulled back and the aural power she’d exercised wavered. Kristen could see it fail in real-time when a group of people near the two combatants scrambled to their feet and resumed their frantic bid to escape.

Katrina saw this as well as anyone and pressed her advantage. She pumped her massive almost black wings and tried to gain height on Heartsbane.

It might have worked if Kristen had been content to sit and watch the battle, which she wasn’t, of course. She launched out of the window and transformed into her dragon form in mid-air. Rather than donning her steel skin, she remained in regular flesh. She weighed less when she wasn’t coated in steel and she was able to gain altitude and catch up to her quarry faster. As soon as she was within striking range, she turned her teeth to steel and bit the end of Katrina’s tail.

The dragon yowled and almost dropped her mage. She remained airborne but only barely, and the Steel dragon released her tail as she dropped lower. Now, Kristen had the advantage of altitude.

The iron dragon understood that she was now trapped close to the ground—never a good position for a dragon—but she didn’t accept it.

She tucked her wings and spread them moments before she made impact. Apparently, she could turn her iron skin off as well and she did so now. She still looked much the same—her scales were a dark-gray, almost black like the color of cast iron, but they didn’t look as dense. With a single powerful thrust of her wings, she rocketed through the covered area of statues and swiped the head off one of them with the tip of her tail.

She turned into the plaza, no doubt with the intention to gain altitude.

Heartsbane was ready. While her teammate had latched onto the iron dragon’s tail, she had gained altitude and moved to the end of the plaza. When Katrina tried to ascend, she blasted her in the face with fire.

Katrina brushed the flames off—her iron-colored scales didn’t seem affected by the heat—and tried to leave down one of the streets.

Kristen was already there, blocked her path, and forced her to turn back into the plaza.

Again, the iron dragon tried to flee but Heartsbane clawed at her face. Apparently, her eyes were as vulnerable as anyone else’s because when faced with a dragon hell-bent on scooping her eyeballs out with her talons, she turned away once more.

This time, Katrina turned her scales to normal and simply tried to fly over one of the apartment buildings, but the Steel Dragon had anticipated this. She slashed at her with the ax-blade tip on her tail. This didn’t hurt her opponent, but it did force her to don her iron skin again. That made her lose a little height and she powered into the top floor of one of the buildings framing the plaza.

Kristen thought that might have been the end, but their adversary was a stalwart warrior. She wouldn’t give in easily. The Steel Dragon pushed off the crumbling building and glided across the courtyard toward Katrina.

“You’re pinned in. Give it up!” she shouted before she unleashed a stream of fire at her.

“Now, you fool—now!” the trapped dragon yelled at the mage in her talon. “Do it now or I’m captured and you’re dead.”

As if to prove her point, Katrina transformed into her human shape, despite still being airborne, and caught Cruz in her arms. The mage was crying as she took a scroll from her pocket and said a few words over it while the dragon held her cradled securely in her arms as if her strength wasn’t lessened even an iota in her human form.

Still, impact with the asphalt at the speed she traveled at would hurt, even if she was made of iron.

It seemed, however, that Katrina had no intention of touching the ground at all.

Cruz continued to mumble the spell until a circle of swirling blue mist appeared below the two women. Katrina fell through it, as did Cruz, although they didn’t come out the other side. Instead, they simply vanished into the ring of blue mist as if it were a door to somewhere else.

Kristen realized that it was exactly what must have happened. Somehow, this mage had a spell that could teleport not only herself but whoever went through it. She didn’t know how it worked but she didn’t think the mage would leave it open for the rest of the afternoon. She pumped her wings and tried to reach the portal.

Close…closer…closer! She transformed into her human form and shoved her feet forward, but the magical gateway closed and she plummeted into the plaza. She rolled for a short distance and ripped the surface like she was a piece of airline debris that had fallen from the sky.

She was all right, though. Steel skin had serious advantages. Kristen pushed to her feet and looked around her. The entire plaza was empty except for her teammates, who raced toward her with their weapons aimed at the sky.

Kristen looked once more for Katrina and Cruz but saw nothing. She reached out for their auras and felt nothing.

They were gone.

“Dammit!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“What’s the plan?” Heartsbane asked as she landed beside Kristen and took her human form. It was odd to see her in coveralls, but that was what she’d worn for the stakeout and despite all her bluster, it didn’t seem like she wanted to get naked in the square any more than her boss had.

The Steel Dragon shook her head. She knew what she wanted to do, which was to hunt this…this dragon. Unfortunately, that would have to wait. “First, find Drew and make sure he’s all right. Then, meet me, Keith, and Jim back here.”

“Sure,” the other woman said and didn’t sound too pleased to be sent to carry a human. Then again, she seldom sounded pleased about anything.

While Kristen waited for her to return, the first responders began to arrive.

Dragon SWAT was the first on the scene. They’d been told about it, after all, and it didn’t take a bright detective to realize that something had gone horribly wrong.

Human police made an appearance as well, much to her relief. While the dragons proceeded to sense for magic and appraise the damage to some of the art, the humans secured the museum, set up a perimeter, and checked on the few people who had managed to stay nearby during the brawl.

EMS arrived only moments later and rushed into the museum. She hoped their haste would prove to be unnecessary, but she had no idea if anyone had been hurt. The other woman—dragon?—had been so fast, she hadn’t been able to focus on anything but her.

Keith and Jim exited the Uffizi but before she could go to them, her least favorite type of emergency responder blocked her path.

“Investigator Hall…Investigator Hall!” A man with an American accent cut through the din of the official interaction and the clamor of the other reporters to ask questions. “How much damage has been done to the Uffizi collection?”

“No comment,” she replied.

“So, some damage has been done?”

She gestured toward the ruined staircase. “Obviously.”

“And will you personally pay for the damages or will the Dragon Council?”

“I think the ones who should pay for this are the—” She caught herself before she voiced her thought. Obviously, the technomages knew they were there and what their intention was, but did the public as a whole know their purpose for being there? According to the papers, they had merely saved lives. “Those responsible, obviously,” she finished lamely.

“Were any paintings damaged?” a female Italian reporter asked but before she could pretend to respond intelligently to the question, an officer from Dragon SWAT shooed her away and addressed the news crews.

“We do not know the full extent of the damage, but without the swift intervention of Investigator Hall, we believe the Uffizi itself could have been destroyed. While we are still assessing the damage, we are thankful for her assistance in this matter.”

Ah, that was more like it. Nothing like a good PR guy to turn losses into a success. Yes, she had stopped the other woman from destroying the entire museum, but she might not have been there at all if she hadn’t authorized the operation to catch Cruz at her place of work.

There would be time to play the blame game later, though. Heartsbane returned with a blessedly conscious Drew. Kristen pulled the two of them as well as Keith and Jim into a huddle among the statues that stood outside the Uffizi.

“What the fuck hit me?” Drew asked. He’d no doubt suffered a concussion as his speech was slightly slurred.

“I don’t know for sure,” Kristen replied and glanced at the other dragon for clues. “Could that have been a mage? I’ve never heard of them harnessing magic to change into a dragon. Is that possible?”

“It once was,” Heartsbane replied. “But it has been ages since anyone has done such a thing. No mage has done that since the first Mage War, and as far as I know, the secrets of how to transform died with the last rebels in that conflict.”

“So you don’t think it could have been a mage?” she asked and didn’t like the answer the evidence was already pointing to.

Her teammate laughed in her face as if to squash any hopes of her thoughts being wrong. “I’m sure that was a dragon. She had speed, strength, and reflexes in her human form, an aura, and—in case you didn’t notice—she could turn into a fucking dragon. The evidence seems to point to one thing.”

“But she looked so much like Kristen!” Keith said. He sounded too excited as if they hadn’t faced a foe who had beaten her and made her look like a little girl on the playground.

“No,” she protested and glanced at Jim and Drew to either confirm or deny what he had said. Kristen didn’t want it to be true. It couldn’t be true.

“Sorry, Red, but it’s true,” Drew said. “I had a decent look at her before she knocked me out. She was exactly like you.”

“Except she fought for the wrong side,” Heartsbane grumbled.

“Which means—”

Kristen finished Keith’s sentence before he could. There was no point in denying it, not when everyone else had come to the same conclusion as she had. “That was my sister.”

She didn’t think she’d ever experienced a more awkward moment of silence. It was so bad that Heartsbane, of all people, was the one to break it.

“We don’t think of siblings the same way as humans do, though, so don’t beat yourself too much up about it. You’re obviously from the same clutch of eggs but she was clearly raised somewhere other than the suburbs of Detroit.”

“I don’t understand,” Drew said, his voice still a little rough from the blow to his head. “We found another of Kristen’s siblings, but that one was chained and they used it for parts.”

“Her name is Stella,” Kristen snapped, perhaps a little too harshly given that he was still recovering from being hurled out of a building.

“I bet they raise most of them like they did Stella,” Jim said and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “That’s the only way they could get all this ammunition, but maybe they had an extra or this one seemed healthier than the others or something.”

Keith took up the hypothesis. “They must have trained her from a kid.”

“But their goal is to kill all dragons,” Heartsbane protested.

“Yes, but Constance also tried to get me to join their side every chance she had. From the way Katrina talked, she must have been indoctrinated since birth.”

“Poor thing,” the Wonderkid lamented and shook his head.

“How so?” Heartsbane asked. “She kicked the Steel Dragon’s ass. It couldn’t have been that bad.”

He looked appalled at her callousness. “Kristen grew up in a normal human family with a focus on justice and honor. Her dad was a cop, for Christ’s sake, and her mom thinks it’s practically dishonorable to not offer people dessert. She had good, decent people for parents. This—”

“Katrina. She told me her name was Katrina,” Kristen said.

“Right, Katrina must have grown up surrounded by people who were at war, fighting for their lives against an overwhelming enemy.” Jim scowled as he considered that. “They were able to do quite a number on my brain in boot camp. I can’t imagine what an entire life of that shit must be like.”

Another moment of silence followed although this one was less awkward, maybe because they were all focused on the same tragic thing—Katrina’s childhood.

Finally, Kristen cleared her throat. “Well, they’re not here and we shouldn’t be here either.”

“What’s the plan, boss?” Drew asked. That was quickly becoming both her favorite and least favorite question, if only because when she had the answer, it was never a good one.

“They will almost certainly move their base now. I had hoped to catch those two mages and take the base in the morning, but we can’t wait. Heartsbane, what do you know about teleportation?” she asked.

“Not much. I’ve never seen it done but mages tend to specialize in a skill. If someone learned to write a scroll that enabled them to teleport, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had more like it,” the other dragon replied.

“Which means they might be able to open a portal or gate or whatever and simply teleport their whole damn base out of there.” The Wonderkid sounded utterly dumbstruck by the idea.

“If they do that, we won’t be able to find them again,” Keith added. “Unless Larry knows a trick to follow them, they’ll be gone.”

“We wouldn’t lose them forever,” Kristen murmured. “They’re murderers, after all. At some point, they’d try to kill again.”

Everyone stared at her, and she realized what she might have inadvertently made them all think. “But we won’t let them, of course. We move, and we move now. Keith, contact B Team. Jim, liaise with Dragon SWAT. We’ll want as much back up as possible. This is it.”

A few minutes later, they were airborne and on the way to a base that no doubt expected some kind of attack. Her consolation was that she very much doubted that they were prepared to face her human team, her dragon allies, and two full wings of dragons from the European Dragon SWAT team.

She hoped that would be enough, but as she began to make her plans, she forced herself to assume it wouldn’t be.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The flight out to the farm took a few hours. Unfortunately, it took the European Dragons slightly less time and they arrived first.

Kristen, Heartsbane, Jim, and Keith were about a mile behind them, far enough away to see them launch their assault. Drew had been left in the city. Although he’d steadily regained his mental faculties after suffering the concussion, Kristen didn’t want to risk him in another offensive. If he was so much as bumped on the head, the injuries could compound and result in serious long-term brain damage.

“It looks like they’ve circled the location,” Keith said from her back. Both men rode on the Steel Dragon as Heartsbane steadfastly refused to let a human treat her like a horse, as she continued to reiterate. Kristen couldn’t catch the details quite as well as the Rookie could with his pair of binoculars, but she could see the ten huge dragons break their formation and start to form a line to surround the farm.

“So much for a sneak attack,” Jim grumbled.

“I told them to wait. We should all attack together,” she complained.

Heartsbane chuckled. “Did you think they would listen? These mages killed dragons in their territory. They’ll rip them apart with claw and tooth. It’ll be wicked.”

“Going in together would have made too much sense?” she retorted. “Damn that dragon pride.”

Kristen pumped her wings to increase her speed but the other Dragons were already in position and she knew there was no way she could close the gap before they obliterated the barn.

“This will be a slaughter,” the other dragon said with glee.

And indeed, it was, only not the way she anticipated.

They were still too far out to see exactly the shape of whatever raised from the roof of the barn, but its effects were immediately obvious. It elevated and aimed at a dragon and the rapid-fire sound of automatic weapon fire followed before the target was obliterated.

“Down—get down!” she yelled as loudly as she could and sent a burst of her aura as well. Heartsbane obeyed and she and Kristen dove behind a line of pine trees.

The European dragons weren’t so lucky.

The turret pivoted sharply to fire a burst of rounds at another dragon. Each volley seemed to have dozens if not hundreds of rounds in it and the target was simply savaged by the ordnance.

“Jesus Christ, that’s a CIWS,” Jim said, aghast.

“A what?” Keith asked, still on Kristen’s back where she’d landed behind the tree line.

“A Close-In Weapon System. It looks very much like the Phalanx devices I saw on navy warships when I was in the marines. They use them to blow up incoming missiles.”

“Except this one fires dragon bullets,” Heartsbane growled. It was almost hard to remember how confident she had been only moments before.

“Get Stonequest on the radio,” Kristen ordered. “They should be here soon and they need to know to stop outside that monster’s range.”

Jim took the device and went to comply, leaving Kristen, Heartsbane, and Keith to watch the carnage.

Although carnage seemed almost euphemistic.

The dragons were not used to dealing with a weapon like this.

The two who had been hit were obviously dead but rather than retreating, the other dragons tried to attack the turret. A third tried to divebomb it as if it could be intimidated. It was struck in the chest with what looked to Kristen to be over a hundred rounds. Its chest was turned to pulp and it fell to a bloody mess on top of the roof.

Another tried to use the third’s attack as cover and managed to get damn close to it, but not close enough. The weapon pivoted and filled the dragon’s wings and torso with dragon bullets. He screeched—Kristen could tell it was La Flamme from his cries—and tumbled from the roof before he crawled beside the barn, close enough that the weapon couldn’t aim at him. He was badly hurt and she knew that with dragon bullets inside his body, he wouldn’t heal.

The turret ignored him and targeted a fifth dragon, who managed to stay alive by tucking its wings and dodging the majority of the rounds. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an entirely effective maneuver as it was struck and plummeted to mewl piteously as it writhed in pain.

The sixth dragon died instantaneously. A single dragon bullet could kill a dragon if it struck the brain. Fifty rounds delivered into the skull left little chance of survival.

The weapon targeted a seventh and again, its aim was true. This time, however, the dragon remained in flight. The tell-tale blueish flare of magic shielding explained its escape. Whoever it was, they didn’t push the attack but called for a retreat. The other three dragons followed. The four of them barely managed to plunge into an orchard of olive trees before the weapon targeted them. It fired into the grove, shredding a tree as easily as a dog could shred a newspaper, but suddenly stopped firing despite the fact that the dragons were still in range and without much protection.

“It must be activated by motion,” Keith said as they all watched it swivel repeatedly, looking for more prey to eviscerate. Now that the four dragons were hiding in the orchard, it didn’t seem to know they were there.

This was a small win but had to be considered a temporary and probably short-lived one. “We have to assume there are mages in there and that it’s only a matter of time before one of them manually targets those dragons. If that happens, we’ve already lost,” she said.

“So, what do you want us to do, Steel, charge in there?” Heartsbane sneered. Kristen knew her well enough to see that she was terrified, although even in her terror, she didn’t let her aura slip and influence the humans. Not that anyone needed much of a reason to be afraid of the automatic death-gun at the top of the barn.

“I don’t know,” she said. She was pissed with herself and more pissed with the European dragons. If they had only waited for her entire team to arrive, they would have had a mage with them. As it was, they were still waiting for Larry.

Thankfully, not for long as it turned out.

Stonequest and Emerald appeared over a grove of trees. She waved her tail at them and they banked slowly to land beside them. The turret didn’t fire at them so at least they were outside its attack parameters if not its actual range.

“What’s the problem?” Stonequest asked as Butters, Beanpole, Hernandez, and Larry climbed off the two dragons. Drew skulked behind his teammates and Kristen fixed him with a hard look. He merely shrugged, but his small smirk held a hint of a challenge. They both knew she would have refused to stay behind if the shoe was on the other foot.

Jim filled them in before she could remonstrate with Drew. The two dragons looked at the killing field with grim expressions.

“This is everything we’ve worried about,” Stonequest said, his voice heavy. “This was why I didn’t want to share any of the details about these dragon-killing weapons. Before, it was only handguns but now, we’re facing military-caliber weapons armed with dragon bullets. The arms race has begun.”

“Nah.”

Everyone turned to look at Butters, who stared at the barn like a quarterback down by six with fifty yards to go and thirty seconds on the clock. “It’s only a dumb robot. I can shoot better than it can.”

For a moment, no one said anything, shocked that even in the wake of the carnage wreaked by this machine, someone was able to stay optimistic.

It was Heartsbane who broke the silence. “Then what the fuck are you waiting for?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“I’m telling you I can make the shot,” Butters reiterated.

“Is this like airsoft, when you say you’ll win but you end up losing last?” Hernandez asked. “Because blowing that fucker up seems damn unlikely.”

“My sniper rifle shoots fat, juicy rounds,” the sniper explained while he patted his rifle affectionately. “All I need is to apply a couple of those rounds to the more delicate parts of the CIWS and it’ll be a pile of junk.”

“There’s no way you can break that gun,” Keith said and shook his head.

“No, not the gun, but the fancy little motors that enable it to point every which way. I can destroy those. Once I do that, we simply have to make sure we don’t stand in front of the damn thing,” he boasted.

“All right, then,” Kristen agreed. “It’s the best plan we have. Stop talking and start shooting.”

“Well, sure,” Butters said and suddenly sounded embarrassed. “The thing is, though, that I’ll need a boost.”

“A boost?” Hernandez laughed. “Ain’t no one here who can lift your fat ass. What do you need a boost for?”

“I don’t have the right angle from down here. And no, I agree, no one can lift a man of my stature in their human bodies, but I reckon a dragon could get me high enough.”

“No problem,” Kristen said but before she could transform, Stonequest put a hand on her shoulder.

“We can’t risk you for something like this. One of us can do it.”

“It’s fine. We don’t have time to—”

Emerald had already plucked three blades of grass and wrapped his fist around them. Without ceremony, Heartsbane and Stonequest each plucked one. Hers was noticeably shorter.

She grumbled about not being an elevator any more than she was a horse, but she transformed all the same and held her dragon claw out for Butters to stand on.

The sniper stepped gingerly onto her hand but apparently, not gingerly enough.

“What did you eat?” she snapped as his feet pressed onto her scaly palm.

“We are in Italy in case you have forgotten, and some of us don’t have a dragon’s metabolism. I have eaten a little of this and that.”

“What he means is that he’s eaten everything.” Keith grinned.

Butters didn’t deny it as Heartsbane lifted him above her head.

“Seriously, this is better training than the gym,” she complained as his head poked above the treetops.

“Slowly now…go very slowly,” Jim said from the ground. “That weapon is probably radar-guided. We can’t make any sudden movements or it might go off.”

“Make it snappy, then, Butterball. I don’t want to have a claw shot off,” Heartsbane snarked.

“I’ll make it as snappy as I can,” he retorted. “But you need to hold completely still for this to work. You’re shaking.”

“Yeah, well, you’re too heavy. What can I say?”

He looked down at every inch of the huge dragon. “I would respond to that but I learned long ago never to talk to a lady about her weight.”

“Just…take the shot.” She grunted, then sucked in a breath and held it in an attempt to stop herself from shaking as much as she had been.

“Okay, here goes,” He raised the rifle, aimed calmly, and squeezed the trigger.

A moment later, they heard the ping of the bullet as it struck the turret.

Kristen was extremely impressed, but the marksman cursed quietly.

“I missed the motors completely.”

“You were three inches to the left,” Beanpole said.

Kristen didn’t know when he’d climbed one of the trees but climb one he had. His legs were clenched around the trunk, while one hand held the binoculars to his face.

“All right. That’s my spotter!” Butters shouted from atop Heartsbane’s claw. He aimed and fired again.

“There you go. You hit the vertical adjustment motor.” The tall, skinny man sounded proud even though his teammate was the one who took the shot. “It won’t be able to aim up or down anymore.”

“Yeah, but it can still rotate,” Jim shouted and pointed at the roof of the barn. The turret now swung slowly toward the source of the attack.

“Shit!” Butters cursed and raised his weapon again. “Steady, Heartsbane.”

“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?”

“Do you see your target?” Beanpole asked.

“I…I’m not sure. I thought that shot would disable the whole thing.”

“There should be a track on the bottom—like a ring within a ring where it pivots. If you can put a dent in that, it might cause the motor to burn out,” Jim shouted, his voice tense as the turret continued to pivot. It was not lost on anyone that the last thing it had aimed at was a group of dragons who had taken cover behind the trees. It was now locked at that angle and aimed slightly toward the ground. Kristen couldn’t be sure if they were within the correct angle for the gun to obliterate them but she knew they were well within range.

“I have it!” Butters shouted.

“Wind from the west,” Beanpole responded as a gust of wind blew across the field that separated them from the barn.

The sniper took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.

It seemed the entire team held their breaths. The bullet hit the base of the machine and it stopped momentarily. Whatever targeting program controlled it wasn’t the smartest as rather than stopping, it tried to push past the dent. A small puff of smoke a short while later told them that the turret had burned its motor out.

“Okay,” Kristen said once the machine had failed to move for a good ten seconds. “We’ll go wide, meet up with the other team and check for injuries, then reassess and strike from there. Any questions?”

Heartsbane cleared her throat. “Yeah, can I put this fatso down yet?”

“Just when I was starting to like the view.” Butters smirked, although when the dragon transformed into her human form and rubbed her shoulder, the sniper was quick to help her work out the knot he had no doubt caused.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Kristen led her human and dragon squad in a wide arc around the farm and closer to where the other dragons still hunkered in the trees. Nothing happened to hinder them, but by the time they finally reached the European dragons, Kristen half-wished the defenders had already attacked. Waiting for the mages inside the farm to launch an assault was agonizing and made all the worse by the dead and wounded dragons in the field.

“We disabled the turret. Is there anything we can do for those dragons out there?” she asked her team as they proceeded cautiously.

Emerald and Stonequest shared a look, and—without prompting—transformed and rushed into the field.

“Stop it, you morons!” she shouted, but her heart wasn’t in it. Most of the dragons who had been shot were dead, but two of them might make it.

Emerald reached the one who had plummeted and who still writhed in pain. He managed to get him onto his back and dragged his body past the tree line toward where the dragons from European SWAT watched their efforts.

Stonequest wasn’t so lucky. The dragon he attempted to save was the one who’d fallen beside the barn. As soon as he reached him, shots rang out.

Kristen’s breath caught in her throat. Was this how he was going to die? Trying to save a dragon who had been too dumb to follow orders? It was a callous thought, but honestly, it would be a horrible way for him to go.

Fortunately, Larry was able to throw a shield up between the shooter and the rescuer to protect him from the dragon bullets. Butters joined the fight and laid down covering fire at the window where the shots had come from.

Using these advantages, Stonequest grasped the dragon with his front talons and pushed into the air with his back legs. A few more mages tried to take a few shots at him, but Larry maintained his shield.

“Nice work, Brockton,” Kristen said.

“Thanks, but that wasn’t me,” he replied.

“But who else could—Amy?” She had finally reached the European dragons and frowned when she realized Amy was with them. She was sweating and had her hands up in obvious concentration as she tried to protect Stonequest until he reached cover.

He bulldozed into the orchard and dropped the wounded dragon, who whimpered in pain. She took that as a good sign, though. At least he could still whimper.

“Amy, you’re supposed to be in recovery,” she chided her although there wasn’t much forcefulness behind the words.

“I hate sitting on the job,” the mage replied and moved toward the injured dragon.

“How is he?” one of the European dragons asked. It was Rosso, Kristen realized, and the wounded one was La Flamme.

“Not good,” Amy replied.

Kristen was surprised to see her, of all people, reply but she seemed to know what she was doing. She held her hands out and blue tendrils extended to the dragon’s wounds.

“Can you help him?” the Italian demanded.

“I’m trying, but the wounds are a mess. There’s a ton of damaged tissue. I learned a few things when I was in the medical wing but nothing like this.”

La Flamme began to cough, a horrible hacking sound that wracked his body so hard, fresh blood began to weep from the wounds.

“Larry, you have to help the other one!” the girl shouted, still focused on the Frenchman.

“Sure,” Larry said, although he looked out of his element. Fortunately, the dragon Emerald had brought back didn’t look nearly as bad as the other one.

“I…I can’t stop the bleeding,” Amy muttered as she sent tendrils of magic to try to tend all the wounds. Kristen didn’t fail to notice that every time she sent out a new tendril of energy, another one vanished. She had seen the young mage dismantle a truck and use all the individual pieces as weapons and stab a dragon’s wing with a telephone pole. The fact that she couldn’t do this was an indication to the Steel Dragon that her mage was still not fully healed.

“Please, you must,” Rosso said. “You cannot let him die, not La Flamme.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” La Flamme said in English. He still had a French accent but it was milder than it had been.

“Don’t talk, La Flamme. Save your strength,” his colleague demanded and waved his hands for emphasis.

“No, I must talk. I must tell you, Rosso, Lady Hall… It was me. It was me who was made to suffer.”

“We know you were shot, La Flamme. Please, stop talking,” Rosso pleaded. Kristen had never seen a dragon cry before, but he did now. Great, fat teardrops that looked like they were made of dirty motor oil fell from his dragon eyes.

“It is my fault that I was shot. All of this is my fault. I told him and he must have told them everything.”

“What?” the Italian asked. “No—no, you couldn’t have.”

A fresh bout of bloody coughs stopped the instinctive protest. Rosso looked more than confused and more than betrayed. He looked like his heart was breaking as La Flamme talked.

Kristen gasped. She didn’t know how she hadn’t realized it before. The two were lovers.

“I did… I told him when she arrived. I told him we were following up with Vert’s sound guy. I told him that we would raid the apartment. I…” More brutal coughs interrupted his confession.

She couldn’t tell if Rosso was weeping because La Flamme was in such bad shape or because he was revealing that he had secrets when he thought he’d known them all. No one stopped his confession, though, not even his lover.

“I didn’t think he would tell the mages… I thought I could trust him…at least that’s what I told myself, but when we were attacked…I knew… I’m so sorry…I knew.”

Rosso raced to the Frenchman as blood dripped from Amy’s nose. The mage fell and her healing tendrils vanished in a puff of magic.

“Who? Who did you tell, you son of a bitch—who?” Rosso demanded, grasped La Flamme’s wounded body, and shook him.

The wounded man took a deep breath, looked him in the eye, and wheezed, “The Masked One…” before his head lolled back and he died.

“The who? Who?” the Italian demanded and slapped his ex-lover across his face in fury and frustration.

“Who is he talking about?” Jim asked, but the distraught dragon ignored him.

He only wept as he hugged the body.

Kristen turned away. La Flamme was dead like the other four dragons in the field. Unfortunately, they didn’t have time to mourn him yet. Not when his murderers were still waiting to kill the rest of them. This Masked One was an interesting idea. Could it have been Havington? After all, the mage had worn a mask when they’d faced him. Could La Flamme have been duped by a human mage?

Those were questions for another day, she thought as she surveyed the carnage in front of her.

“We need to end this now,” she told everyone. They all looked at her—human, dragon, and mage and even Rosso, who seemed to want to do anything but continue to weep.

“This is what we’ve been afraid of. Not humans defending themselves but them weaponizing this evil tech to do what they’ve done today. It will not be an easy fight, but it’s a battle we have to go into all the same. I can’t pretend that none of you will be hurt out there, but I will promise that if you are, I will take vengeance on these sick bastards.”

“Fuck you,” someone shouted from inside the farmhouse and a gunshot followed. It bored a hole in a tree branch not three feet from her head.

She didn’t so much as flinch. “They know their only hope is to defend their base, and hope is the only thing we will let them keep. While I know they killed our people, we have to do what we can to bring them to justice. I want the world to see what a trial looks like—a trial for a crime committed by mages and one conducted by humans, dragons, and mages alike. I want everyone to know what happened here and to see the horrors that making weapons from dragons will cause. When this is done, those who fell here today will outlive us all, for they will be remembered as those who died for the cause of peace. But we will not lose anyone else. Are we ready?”

The others responded with a loud “Hoo-ah!”

Rosso snaked forward to stand near the front of the group. “You can all fight this battle for whatever reason you want. I’ll do it for La Flamme.”

Without warning, he charged.

She didn’t even try to think of a battle cry. “For La Flamme!” she called and the battle began.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The mages weren’t the only ones with a foolish hope. Kristen had harbored a secret dream that the reason the mages hadn’t fired at them while they gathered in the olive orchard was because they didn’t have many of the dragon bullets. She’d dared to hope that Stella was the only dragon the mages had captured and harvested from for ammunition.

It turned out that the enemy had more than enough ammunition. They merely waited for the dragons to commit themselves to the attack.

As soon as Rosso broke into the field, the mages opened fire on him. He hissed—still in dragon form—but didn’t slow enough to take a breath for fire. Instead, he raced forward while he serpentined like the world’s hungriest anaconda until he collided with a tractor that was parked outside the barn.

Kristen thought it was madness—or worse, suicide in memory of his lost lover—but there seemed to be a snippet of strategy left even his grief. Once he impacted with the tractor, he transformed into his human shape. Now the fact that he had drawn all the technomage’s fire didn’t seem quite so foolhardy, as dragon bullets could not punch through iron quite as easily as they could through a dragon’s body.

“Go!” she shouted and led her team toward a truck with what looked like a larger rented trailer to use for cover. She reached it and thunked her shoulder against the vehicle before the mages in the barn shifted their aim. While she was significantly closer to the homestead, she could do nothing but clench her teeth and hope that no bullets hit Emerald, Heartsbane, Drew, Jim, or Amy as they sprinted to the trailer.

Beanpole and Butters laid down covering fire for the team as they ran to the vehicle and bullets blew field dirt past their legs as they ran. Twice, one of them would have been hit but both times, Amy was able to get a shield up and deflect the bullet. It was obvious, though, that after trying to save La Flamme and failing and barely managing to stabilize the other wounded dragon, the young mage now operated well below her optimal power of god-like magical abilities.

Her team thumped against the trailer one by one and drew the same echoed thunk Kristen had when she struck the truck itself, despite the fact that none of them were made of steel like she was.

She wondered how far they’d loaded it with the supplies of this base. How close had the mages been to leaving when the dragons had attacked? Not that it mattered at the moment. Whatever was inside the trailer wasn’t valuable enough to the mages to make them stop their barrage of dragon bullets.

But that was okay in the present situation. The team all wore bulletproof vests—even her steel skin had a Kevlar vest over the top that she’d left in its normal state to better protect her from the bullets the mages now fired into the vehicle. And they’d drawn the technomages’ fire exactly like Rosso had, which gave Stonequest the opening he needed.

While Emerald and Heartsbane had trained extensively with the human SWAT members and thus could help Kristen and her friends pinned behind the truck to lay down covering fire, Stonequest’s experience made him better suited to fighting with the more old-school dragons.

Neither he nor any of the three European dragons who now advanced with him had taken their dragon form. They all understood the inherent risks in a body as large as a dragon’s was. But they didn’t attack armed only with their handguns either. These dragons had all seen action in the first Mage War, and it seemed they had previously faced mages armed with lethal projectiles as they had armed themselves with swords and shields.

She truly didn’t know how effective the attack would be but damn, it was impressive.

He and the dragons sprinted forward in their human forms, stuck together, and used their plexiglass shields reinforced with steel mesh to form a wall in front of them as they moved. When the mages fired at their feet, they lowered the massive shields to the ground.

The swords the European dragons had brought seemed far more ancient than the modern-looking shields were, but they were no less massive. Each of them wielded a blade that was at least six feet long. The weapons were so large they almost seemed cartoon-like and she doubted that a human would ever be able to wield anything like these on a battlefield, let alone one-handed while using a shield. But dragon strength was far beyond that of humans, so after her time among her kind, it hardly surprised her.

That the four dragons were able to use the swords to deflect some of the bullets was quite impressive. They didn’t redirect them back at the mages or anything like that—this wasn’t a movie, after all—but now and then, one of them managed to catch one of the bullets with their sword and the ping was followed by the sound of a careening ricochet.

Whenever a stray bullet made it through their defense, Larry was ready with a shield of blue magic to deflect it.

He was impressive to watch, too. It was obvious that he had worked with dragons for years because he walked into the attack almost as courageously as they did. He didn’t step out in front like them but he stayed close, behind their cover and out of their way, while he provided them with his magical blocks against the hail of bullets.

Stonequest’s push forward seemed to be working, and Butters and Beanpole continued to provide sufficient cover fire from the tree line. That meant it was Kristen’s turn to move forward.

“To the tractor,” she ordered. “Are we ready?”

“Are you sure about this?” Heartsbane asked although she sounded excited to try it.

“Hell no!” she responded. “But we’ll never make it all across the field of fire without cover.”

“Then let’s not waste time.” Emerald had already taken his position between the front of the trailer and the rear of the truck. Heartsbane moved beside him and grasped the other edge of the trailer.

Jim and Drew crouched behind the truck itself. Kristen looked around for the only two people she hadn’t seen in the fight—the only two who hadn’t followed their orders to stick with her—but she didn’t locate Hernandez or Keith anywhere in the fraction of a second she had to look.

“On three!” she shouted and the two men took a deep breath and prepared to run.

“One…”

More gunfire was directed at the dragons.

“Two!”

A lucky shot from Butters struck home and a mage screamed from the hayloft of the barn. The torrent of gunfire slowed to a steady stream.

“Three!”

Heartsbane and Emerald tightened their hold on the front of the trailer and lifted with every ounce of strength they had.

The results were spectacular.

It flipped end over end two full times before it settled heavily between the truck that still sheltered Kristen and the tractor that kept Rosso alive.

The humans had already begun to run to where the trailer would land even before it ceased its tumble.

The remaining mages—obviously quite surprised by such a tactic—opened fire on the trailer itself, which gave the men and Kristen enough time to hunker behind it. As soon as it had settled securely, the three popped out and laid down covering fire.

Something pounded into the van and for a second, she thought the beast Katrina was somehow responsible. Except she wasn’t a beast, she reminded herself. No matter how much she wanted to demonize her, she knew she was her sister. She grimaced, relieved to see it was Emerald, but her relief faded when he tensed in pain and held a wound on his bicep.

“Fucking bullet grazed me. Those dragon rounds…” He didn’t finish, but she knew what he was going to say. She also agreed with the unspoken sentiment. The ammunition fucking hurt.

Heartsbane appeared with Amy in her arms. They’d talked about preserving the girl’s power as much as possible, especially now that she knew a thing or two about healing after she’d spent so much time in the medical ward.

“Hey, Amy,” Emerald said and gritted his teeth. “I’ve told you how I’ve been a shit before but that I respect you, right?” He laughed and chewed his lip.

“Shut up and hold still,” the mage said as she leaned over the wounded arm and bullets streaked over their heads.

While she got to work extending tendrils of energy from her fingertips to pull out any of the shards from Emerald’s arm, Kristen surveyed the battle scene once more.

Stonequest had reached the front of the barn. He and his team pounded at the wooden doors with their swords, but they constantly met resistance and generated showers of sparks. The mages had reinforced the entrance to their base with magic.

She took a few more shots at the mages, but her bullets met a shimmering wall of force. Now that their adversaries had suffered a casualty, they fought more defensively and used their magic to protect themselves as well as to attack.

One of them leaned out of the window at the top of the barn. It looked suicidal given how many people were shooting at him. His entire torso leaned out of the window, a big, broad target everyone immediately tried to shoot, but his allies had him well protected. He went to work and swirled his hands in complex motions until a cloud appeared between them.

Steaming green rain poured from it, which turned out to be acid. Where it touched the dragons’ shields, the plexiglass melted and where it touched their skin, they screamed. Only the swords seemed capable of withstanding the magically conjured corrosive slime, but the dragons were in an awkward position. If they blocked the momentum of the goo, they inevitably splashed it on to each other.

Larry conjured a gust of wind, folded it into itself, and created a swirling vortex that grew in intensity until he launched it skyward toward the cloud of acid to dissipate it.

He wasn’t the only one who thought Stonequest and the dragons were in need of assistance.

An old produce truck trundled toward the barn and backfired continuously. Kristen had never seen anything quite like it. It looked as Italian as the countryside—like it had been spawned there and used to carry bushels of olives since times of yore.

The only thing distinctly modern about it was the person driving.

Keith hooted and hollered at everyone, including the mages, and told them all to get out of the way.

She wondered briefly what had happened to Hernandez, but when she saw smoke pouring out of the back of the old delivery truck she had an inkling what the woman had been up to. Without questioning her teammates, she whirled to her human friends and wrapped them in her steel arms.

Kristen had to piece together what happened next after the battle. At that moment, all she experienced was an explosion powerful enough to destroy the tractor a few inches away from the truck.

She didn’t see any of this, but after hooting and hollering, Keith flung himself out of the vehicle and into the dirt.

Stonequest, likely not wanting to earn her ire, raced to save the Rookie, and when he did so, the other dragons followed his lead. They scattered and cleared the way for the vehicle to bulldoze into the door.

Hernandez had gotten clear long before, and she laughed and laughed as the mages took a few potshots at it.

Then, it exploded.

When Kristen pulled her head up from behind the trailer, she was surprised to see the barn still standing. On closer inspection, she saw that standing was a generous term. The entire front of the structure was on fire, and the roof of the front third had been blown sky-high, only to be rained down as shrapnel in the form of broken shingle.

The barn itself only remained erect because the doors were reinforced with steel and those had needed a frame capable of holding them. That frame was now exposed and badly damaged.

Kristen was able to notice all these details because as soon as the mages had realized there wasn’t anyone to hurt inside the truck, they had stopped firing. She wasn’t naïve enough to think they would have let themselves get caught in the blast, but a girl could dream, couldn’t she?

“Don’t let them get away,” she yelled and raced toward the door.

Even after being blasted by whatever the hell Hernandez had snuck in with her gear, the door was still strong enough to withstand a dragon’s blow. It wasn’t strong enough to withstand three, however.

“Let’s go,” Emerald said. His arm was bandaged but he looked much better. Amy must have removed the dragon scale from his arm already, a damn useful skill to have.

Heartsbane and Emerald raced forward and added their speed and momentum to their strike. Kristen took a step back before she kicked the doors again. She timed it so she connected at precisely the same moment as the other two dragons and between the three of them, the barrier didn’t stand much chance.

It crumpled like a cardboard box karate-chopped by an eight-year-old.

“Where are they?” Rosso asked as he pushed past Kristen and Heartsbane into the interior of the barn.

Hay and pieces of wood burned everywhere, but Kristen only had eyes on the elevator shaft, which protruded through the farm implements and supplies like a steel tower.

The Italian hammered and pounded on it with his human fists but to no avail.

“Sometimes, it takes a woman’s touch,” she said, pushed him aside, and took each of the elevator doors in her steel fingers.

She was able to pry them open like a can of sardines without the delicious interior. It was simply an empty elevator shaft, exactly like they had at Constance’s base.

“I’m going in,” she shouted.

“Wait, damn it. Kristen, wait!” That was Drew, always the voice of caution.

If she hadn’t listened to him when she was a fresh recruit, she didn’t know why she’d listen to him now that she was his boss. She jumped down the shaft and turned her feet and knees to steel to brace herself better when she landed on the carriage.

From above, she could hear Drew’s tireless encouragement and direction. “We trained for this, people. Drop the ropes and belay down. We won’t wait for the investigator to send up a broken elevator.”

Kristen landed with a heavy, solid thunk she had fully expected would crush the carriage. To her surprise, it resisted her mass driven by the velocity of her fall. It dented—how could it not?—but it didn’t break or even crack.

A little disappointed, she began to destroy it. She stooped, transformed her hands into long-fingered, steel-tipped claws, and proceeded to rend the roof beneath her feet like a dog digging a hole. At first, she was only able to make a few full punctures, but once she had done that, her claws were able to find purchase and tear a hole large enough for her to get through.

She didn’t jump in, though. While she might be anxious to win this battle, she wouldn’t leave a gaping hole with jagged metal shards as an entrance for her team. She took hold of one of the sharpened edges and bent it back on itself so it wouldn’t stab anyone.

In the next moment, an iron claw caught her wrist.

Before she could regain her balance and adjust herself to resist, she was yanked with sufficient force to pull her face-first into the reinforced top.

Kristen reacted with dragon speed, but her foe was equally as fast. She tried to pull back but another iron claw latched onto her Kevlar vest, dragged her through the hole, and drove her into the floor of the carriage.

An iron boot descended on her throat to crush the windpipe beneath her steel skin, deny her oxygen, and force her narrowing vision to focus on the person who tried to kill her.

Katrina loomed over her in her iron human form.

She smiled before she twisted the heel of her boot savagely into her neck. “It’s time to die, sister.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Spots appeared in the tiny window of vision Kristen still had left. Already, her peripherals were gone. All she could see was Katrina’s face, although her expression was almost impossible to discern because she was backlit by harsh lights and her iron features were already so dark.

“Why…kill?” she choked through the relentless pressure.

“To end the rule of the dragon oppressors,” the woman answered casually as if she’d stepped away from a pleasant conversation with Constance.

“And…become them?” she asked with the last of her strength.

She wouldn’t get her answer, however, because Drew dropped through the roof and opened fire at her attacker. Sparks flurried from Katrina’s face as rounds impacted. The dragon flinched and took a step back.

Kristen only knew it was Drew when she sucked in a precious breath of air and her tunnel vision receded enough to see the other dragon race forward and backhand the man even more savagely than she had at the Uffizi. Again, he catapulted to sprawl in an unconscious pile outside the elevator doors.

Anger surged and she could only hope it was an unconscious pile and not something far more permanent. She couldn’t check now, though. He had given her what she needed—enough time to take a breath of air. It meant she was still in this fight.

As her focus returned, she transformed her entire body to steel and drove into Katrina from behind. Her momentum was sufficient to bulldoze the woman’s iron body into the wall. It was satisfying, although she had to admit she was a little disappointed that the stone wall broke and not her opponent’s face.

The dragon threw her head back, but Kristen lowered her forehead in time for the back of her opponent’s skull to smack her above the eyes instead of breaking her nose.

Despite her steel skin, it still hurt. Her pain was punctuated by another of the loud gongs that resonated every time they made impact with each other in their metal skin. This time—probably because the blow came directly to Kristen’s forehead—her teeth rattled.

But she didn’t release her opponent, however. She held her from behind and knew as well as anyone that simply because the dragon had iron skin didn’t mean she could forego breathing. Her teeth gritted, she looped her arm around Katrina’s neck and squeezed.

The iron dragon struggled. She kicked at Kristen’s legs and threw an elbow into her gut, but all that did was cause blips of pain that she ignored. She felt her enemy weakening and her movements slow and realized she could win this.

Her confidence built until a boulder removed itself from the wall and pounded into her spine. The blow didn’t break anything—although it damn well would have if she hadn’t been steel—but it loosened her hold around Katrina’s neck.

She glanced down the hall at a mage who wore a rose mask who stood with their hands up to lift more stones to hurl at her. The distraction was costly. She had foolishly assumed that after almost being choked unconscious, the dragon would need a minute, but she didn’t.

Before Kristen’s eyes had snapped to her foe again, Katrina dropped and spun to deliver the full force of a spinning kick into the back of her knee.

No matter how strong she was, her knee was still a knee. It buckled and she tumbled back as her adversary surged into the attack. Like a snake, she thrust from her coiled position and caught her. Rather than choking her, though, she held both her arms behind her back.

Kristen didn’t understand it—if she hoped the Steel Dragon would tap out, fat chance—but all became clear when the mage hurled more stones toward her. They barreled into her chest, one after the other and shattered as they did so, sparking if iron were mixed in with the stone.

Now that her chest had been battered, the other dragon wrenched her arms even harder behind her back.

She screamed in pain as the flower-masked assailant took more stones from the wall itself. One of them was particularly large, and the mage hurled smaller stones against it to carve its tip into a shard small enough to pierce an eyeball.

The lethal stone rocketed toward her face as Katrina whispered in her ear, “Now you see me, now you—”

“Don’t!” Drew and Jim said in unison. The former had not been too severely injured and the Wonderkid had made it down the elevator shaft and into the hallway.

As they stole Katrina’s line, Jim aimed and unloaded his magazine at the mage. She was far too focused on impaling the Steel Dragon with a sharpened stone to be able to block the bullets. Her body jerked as the fusillade struck home and she fell.

It didn’t take an emergency responder to see that she was dead.

Her rock, though, still hurtled toward her target, and Katrina still held her arms immobile. If seeing the mage killed bothered the dragon, she didn’t show it. Rather than call out or gasp or show even an ounce of regret for her fallen ally, she simply kicked Kristen’s legs out from under her to make her fall into the path of the stone spike that had been hurled at her.

It didn’t catch her in the eye, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt when it rocketed into her shoulder. She tumbled a few times through a pile of gravel that had been rock only moments before.

“You won’t stop them, you know,” Katrina said to her as she approached. While she advanced relentlessly on the Steel Dragon, the two men fired round after round into her, but they didn’t have dragon bullets. Their bullets struck her iron skin with dull plinks and bright sparks and nothing more.

Kristen scrambled to her feet and tackled her assailant.

Again, she was able to knock the woman down. As far as she could tell, they were almost identical in speed and strength. She hammered Katrina’s head into the ground and could tell that it hurt, but she couldn’t maintain her hold on her.

While she had trained for combat for barely a year, Katrina must have trained for her entire life. She wasn’t faster overall but she was quicker to respond to attacks in the right way. While she wasn’t stronger, she understood how to leverage her opponent’s anatomy against her in a way that Kristen simply didn’t.

Although she could acknowledge the truth of this, she continued to struggle to keep the woman pinned. Moments later, though, she slipped free and found her feet smoothly as she laughed.

“You should have killed Bunny. She’s the only one of them proficient enough with her magic to make a spell sufficiently powerful to get our dumb and blind clone of a sister out of here.”

“You know about that?” Kristen was aghast. How could Katrina condone such atrocities?

“My teammates respect me. A novel concept, I’m sure.”

Kristen tried to race past her, but the dragon caught her across the ear with a karate chop. It was like she had been trained since she was a child. While she didn’t know much about fighting beyond what Stonequest and Drew had taught her, the Iron Dragon seemed too well-versed in a variety of fighting styles.

“They’re using your own family to make bullets and treat them like cattle!” she yelled as she tried to fend off a flurry of blows from her opponent. They came incredibly fast and while she had been beaten by dragons in her dragon body, she’d never met her match in her human form.

And calling Katrina her match was almost stupidly optimistic.

“Our family is making the world a better place for everyone. How is it different from the humans who break their backs picking apples and cabbages while billionaires rake in obscene profits? How is it different from a mother cat refusing to feed her runts?”

A vicious knee rocketed into Kristen’s abdomen. She might have had the strength to stop it but hadn’t been able to anticipate it. It struck and she doubled over. I can’t win, she realized with growing dread.

“Jim, Drew, you have to get down there and stop them from running off.”

“No problem,” Drew responded, and the two raced away from the elevator.

Katrina glared at them as if the Steel Dragon was nothing but an afterthought, a lousy challenge to be defeated at her leisure.

“Don’t you dare hurt them,” Kristen growled at her adversary as she climbed to her feet again.

The dragon laughed. “We both know I’ve already won. The fight in the museum was more fun than this pathetic spectacle. What do you think you can possibly do against someone like me? I was made for this. I’ve trained every day of my life. You are merely one more dumb dragon.”

A new voice rang out. “You’re wrong about that.”

She didn’t look back this time because she didn’t have to. Stonequest had arrived.

He sprinted down the hall and swung his ridiculously large sword at Katrina.

She stepped back and dodged the blow with a smile. “Now that’s more like it.”

“You talk too much,” Heartsbane said as she joined the fray.

Together, the two dragons pressed Katrina. Heartsbane moved in to strike repeatedly. The iron dragon blocked each of her blows, but that was fine as she merely tried to create an opening for Stonequest. As Katrina pivoted and put her back toward him, she succeeded.

He swung the sword into the woman’s back and the sound of impact was almost shrill. The dragon writhed in pain and a distinctive dent was visible in her back from where the blade had struck her. Kristen had never seen such a thing.

Katrina clenched her teeth and scooted away from him until she reached the wall. “That one was on me, dragon scum. You won’t get to strike me again like that.”

“That’s fine with us,” Heartsbane said.

“Yeah,” Kristen nodded through the pain that Katrina had already inflicted on her body. “We wouldn’t want Stonequest to have all the fun.”

The two women raced forward in tandem and both attacked with everything they had. It was almost immediately clear that it wouldn’t be enough. Heartsbane had less human to human combat experience under her belt than Kristen did. Katrina was able to prevent their blows from hitting her in any of her few vulnerable areas.

Stonequest took another swipe that his teammates both dodged, but the Iron Dragon saw their action and dodged as well. The momentum of the blow forced him to continue his turn and their adversary punched his face so hard that a chip of stone fell off his cheek.

Kristen tried for a headlock again as the woman had moved between her and Heartsbane, but Katrina anticipated it and thrust her fingers into her shoulder. She must have studied the nervous system in some depth as the pressure she applied was enough to release a jolt of pain down her arm.

Gunfire sounded beyond the end of the hallway, and she knew that Drew and Jim had successfully evaded the dragon, but had they made it past her in time? She didn’t know and couldn’t check as it took all her strength simply to hold her enemy at bay.

Apparently, their human teammates hadn’t neutralized everyone, though, as what sounded like a controlled demolition came from the elevator shaft. Dirt and rock poured out the open doors, and she understood that no more reinforcements would be coming.

She rushed forward and again, she was thrust back. Heartsbane tried her aura but to no avail. Stonequest struck with his sword, but Katrina seemed always one step ahead of it.

Despite this, he remained calm and unruffled.

After a sequence of feints and attacks, he swung his sword and Katrina—rather than stepping back like she had done before—took the edge of the blade in her gut. It didn’t cut through her iron skin but it did cause her to double over. Kristen took a deep breath and readied herself to vault forward, put her iron-skinned sister in a sleeper hold, and end this.

Before she could act, fortunately, she realized the Iron Dragon hadn’t taken a blow at all. She’d only used the opportunity to take the blade from Stonequest. With a broad grin, she grasped it with her iron fingers and twisted with such force that he spun into a flip before he released it.

Astonished, Kristen only had the briefest of moments to remind herself once again of exactly how strong dragons truly were before Katrina laid into them with the blade.

In the instant since she had taken the weapon, she flipped it, caught it by the handle, and swung it into Heartsbane’s chest.

Kristen’s blood froze as her teammate pounded into the wall behind her. Her heart began to beat again when she realized that Katrina had used the broad side of the sword rather than the blade.

“It’s unbelievable that your kind managed to stay in control for so long,” the Iron Dragon snarled at Stonequest.

Not one to be intimidated, he engaged her in combat and dodged the sword almost as easily as she had. She jabbed at his abdomen and he stepped aside. When she made a horizontal slice, he ducked beneath it. She brought the sword down on his back and this time, delivered a powerful blow.

Stonequest landed with a thud. Katrina battered his back repeatedly as she smiled gleefully. “I told you! Did I not say that was the last time you’d land a blow on me? Did I not say that?”

The two teammates glanced at him, then at each other before they ran forward as one. The Iron Dragon knocked Heartsbane aside, but Kristen careened into her with enough force to dislodge the weapon from her hand.

They found their feet, both breathing heavily, and it was Kristen’s turn to smile. Katrina was strong—much stronger than her—but she had difficulty with the three dragons. Given that Kristen had spent the last year of her life building the best team in the world, she thought that was good intel to have.

Then again, she wasn’t the only one with a team.

Drew and Jim sprinted into the hallway, pursued by what looked like a living inferno. Flames in the shape of birds and horses raced into the narrow space after the two men until whoever was controlling the spell could no longer see them. The conjured fiery army collided haphazardly with the walls and the spell was broken.

“Do we have an exit strategy, Kristen?” the Wonderkid asked.

“We shot the skull and the ram, but the crown ain’t so happy about it,” Drew said. He sounded both proud and ashamed of how their operation had gone.

On cue, Neal Havington—wearing his skull cap with a crown printed on the front—entered the hallway. He held a pistol in one hand and a spell in the other. Kristen didn’t know which she was more afraid of. The revolver was no doubt filled with dragon bullets, but the spheres of energy strained to escape the mage’s hand.

Katrina dashed toward him with a burst of dragon speed and tucked into a roll before she reached him. He didn’t give Kristen time to make her mind up about whether the spell or the gun was worse and fired his weapon at the dragons.

Weeks of training kicked in. Stonequest, Heartsbane, and Kristen flung themselves down. She grinned and decided they had proved the old adage false. These dragons had been around for centuries. They were the proverbial old dogs, self-assured in their ways, and yet she had taught them a new trick.

The mage didn’t seem to mind missing, though. He bounced his hand and the spheres that had jostled each other for space vanished into the ceiling and walls. A deep rumbling followed as if the rocks were making themselves comfortable and the sound faded into nothing. Kristen had never seen a dud spell before but decided it was bound to happen sometimes.

The logic of the thought was contradicted when the roof caved in.

The destruction didn’t happen all at once. First, a boulder fell from where the elevator shaft used to be, followed by another. By the time the roof itself began to disintegrate, Kristen had already surged forward, taken her dragon form, and spread her steel wings over Jim and Drew as the roof collapsed on them all.

The concrete of the hallway wasn’t all that bad. She was able to knock some of it aside as the two men moved closer to huddle under her chest like baby chicks with their mother hen in a thunderstorm. But above that concrete was a vast amount of earth. Havington had prioritized the part of the passage farther from him, so her tail was pinned first, then her back legs and torso. Through the destruction, she stole a look and confirmed that Stonequest and Heartsbane were already buried in rubble. She doubted that the falling stone could kill them any more than it could kill her, but they were undoubtedly pinned and short of air.

The worst part was that she was in no place to lead the rescue.

Every part of her body was trapped beneath fallen concrete and earth, even her long, sinuous neck and her head. She fought the urge to struggle to free herself as she stared at Havington and Katrina from a tiny gap between the rubble. They stood barely out of reach.

“Let me make sure she’s dead,” Katrina said. “It will be cosmic justice to thrust one of the swords that were used in the first mage revolution through the head of the dragon who is trying to stop the third and final one.”

“You had your chance,” he said and studied the Steel Dragon where she continued to struggle against the rubble and debris. “Why you didn’t finish them off when you could have is beyond me, but that opportunity is gone. The others have already left and we’ll have to hope that killed her.”

“I can dig her out in hardly any time.” The woman sounded petulant and almost whiny like she was being denied dessert.

“Perhaps next time, you will not play when you should be working,” Havington admonished her. “Now come. We have suffered too many casualties, but Bunny has kept the portal open long enough. She holds it open only for us now.”

“But—”

“I said we leave now. When you were transferred to us, you were given orders to obey, correct?”

“Yes…sir,” Katrina grumbled.

“Very well, then. Come along.”

“Of course.” The Iron Dragon moved in almost a blur and stood over Kristen’s head. “This isn’t over, Steel Dragon.” She sneered and hurried to follow Havington out of the hallway to their waiting portal.

That left Kristen in a hallway completely buried in rubble with four of her friends lost somewhere beneath the debris. Despite that, she didn’t feel as bad as she should have. They had lived and they’d forced the technomages to retreat. She had hoped to take prisoners but she didn’t exactly feel terrible about her team ending some of their lives. After all, these people were murderers.

It was with quiet resignation that Kristen settled in to wait. She didn’t know how long it would take, but she knew the rest of her team would get her out. They would stop at nothing to accomplish this, working together to use their formidable sets of skills to help rather than simply keep fighting.

Despite her aches and pains, she felt all right—until she started to feel an itch far away on the end of her tail.

“Jim? You’re under my chest, right?”

“Yeah, Kristen,” he replied. She could hardly hear his words through the debris and felt the vibrations more than she heard him.

“Is there any way you could reach my tail? It itches terribly.”

“That’s gonna be a negative boss,” he replied and tried not to sound amused.

“Drew?”

“Gonna be a no-go for me too. Given how we’re almost being crushed by your dragon boob, I think you’ll simply have to deal with it.”

She sighed. It would be a very long wait.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

There was no way to know how long she was stuck inside the rubble, but given how loud her stomach was grumbling by the time the other dragons on her team dug her out, it had to be around dinner time.

No one had seen the mages escape, but Kristen still knew where they went.

“I haven’t heard of a mage who can teleport in hundreds of years,” one of the European dragons said.

“Well, believe it,” Heartsbane replied. “We think it’s only one of them, but she had to have learned it from somewhere. I think we’ve only seen the very tip of the iceberg of what these mages can do, both with magic and with weapons.”

Kristen could see that was true. No one else had died in the attack—no one else had been able to make it down before the fight was over—but that still left the dragons who had been mowed down by the CIWS. She watched in dull horror as the European dragons moved the bodies of their fallen comrades into positions of repose and incinerated them with their fire breath.

She couldn’t help but count herself lucky. Her team—thanks to their training—hadn’t suffered any losses. She wished she could have extended that same success to the fallen dragons, but that was beyond even the formidable powers of the Steel Dragon.

“I can’t help but think we’re racing toward a cliff and our wings have been clipped,” Stonequest said somberly as he stared at the funeral pyres. “Now, after this turret, dragons will think more about how to defend themselves from human-style weapons while the mages will continue to find more powerful and more deadly applications of the technology. We have to stop them and stop them soon.”

“We will stop them,” she said, her voice a little louder than she’d intended because she was trying to keep it from trembling. When everyone—including the mourning European dragons—turned to look at her, she realized she had better keep talking.

“Today, we saw the effects of what happens when humans, mages, and dragons work together. Our enemies joined forces to manufacture these weapons and somehow convinced a dragon to join them. The only reason we stopped them is because we were working together too.”

“But they got away,” Keith said. He tried not to sound whiny and failed miserably.

“Yes. Havington, Katrina, and Bunny got away,” she conceded, “but wishing for a victory when you got a stalemate is better than losing and being dead. Let’s not mince words. This was a close call. If not for all of us working together, we would never have reached the barn. And, although we suffered losses, we have a victory, even though it’s not the one we hoped for. We disbanded this cell and proved to any mages watching that—no matter where in the world they might be—we will stop them if they murder indiscriminately. All of you should be very proud of yourselves. I know I am proud of you.”

Her team applauded but the European dragons hardly looked heartened. She couldn’t blame them. This had probably caused more casualties than their team had ever suffered. And there would have been more if Kristen and her team of humans and mages had not come to help. Hopefully, the European team would see it in these terms—that by working across boundaries, they had been more successful.

But Kristen had lost people in the line of duty as well. She knew it was hard to look at the positive side of anything when someone you knew died.

With a sigh, she returned to work.

The dragons had dug the rubble and debris out above the hallway she had been trapped inside, which meant they now had a path deep into the earth that led to the heart of the technomage team’s operation.

Kristen descended and looked around at the destroyed computers and maps. All that remained were the traces of clues their enemy hadn’t been able to destroy in their haste to escape.

“I want all this bagged or photographed,” she said to her team. “There has to be something in here that can tell us where they went.”

“And no one touch the computers until Keith downloads everything he can off every drive,” Brian said over the radio. He sounded excited about a new puzzle.

She walked through the wreckage and tried to make sense of it. At the center of it all was a collection of chains so large they could have only held one thing captive—another of her dragon sisters.

Her mind constantly wondered how Katrina could accept all this. She had made it clear that she understood what the technomages were doing to the dragons, and yet she’d seemed fine with it—even pleased. How could someone see such atrocities and let them slide? The fact that the Iron Dragon shared most of her DNA with Kristen also made her uneasy. Were the seeds for such callousness in her blood as well? If her parents hadn’t taken her in, if she’d been left in whatever lab had grown her, would she have been convinced to become a killing machine who worked against her own kind?

Maybe she would have. It was something she had to face.

What continued to bother her the most was that other than the chained dragons—admittedly, it remained a large obstacle—she still couldn’t help but see things from the mage side as well. Death or a life serving a dragon—a life with no chance of retirement, vacation, or privacy—didn’t sound like much of a choice to her. Maybe a few hundred years before that would have counted for much more. But now, in an era of increasing freedom, it seemed downright barbaric. Maybe draconian was a better adjective, she mused.

Kristen shook the thoughts from her head as Larry approached.

“Do you have a plan for how to keep all this evidence properly stored?” Kristen asked.

“Honestly? Not yet,” Larry gave her a half-grin. For him, that was practically an admission that he was beyond frustrated.

“What’s up?”

“You were right about the teleportation spell,” he said and didn’t sound pleased about it.

“I know I am, Larry. I saw Bunny open a portal and take Katrina through it.”

“Yeah, well, I won’t lie, I didn’t believe you. Teleportation is hard. It would have been way easier for her to create an illusion that they vanished than to actually vanish.”

“What made you change your mind?” she asked.

He gestured toward the area of the room where the chains had been. “A spell was cast there. A big one. I’ve never sensed anything like it before either. I would have dismissed it as some kind of ward or perimeter defense but…” He chuckled darkly. “The Steel Dragon herself said she saw a dragon teleport, so that’s what it has to be.”

She nodded. “Can you tell where it leads?”

The mage shook his head. “I’ve already tried but I can’t discover the destination. That’s not too surprising, though, from what I recall of teleportation spells.”

“I thought you said you’ve never done one.”

“I haven’t.” He shrugged. “But when I first became a mage, I read about them. They are complex things and so much can go wrong. If you’re off by a few inches, your feet end up in the ground or you’re stuck in a wall. Most people use scrolls to get it all down, but because scroll magic is inherently more complex than simple casting, it’s possible to write far more in there to make them hard to trace, that kind of thing. My guess is this Bunny has a couple of scrolls with destinations on them. If we had caught her…” He whistled wistfully.

“It’s all right. We scared them off and proved that this world doesn’t belong to them yet.”

Larry nodded.

Kristen was about to dismiss him to get back to his work—she didn’t want to be in this basement any longer than she had to be—when he cleared his throat and looked at her, his eyes even more pained than they had been before.

“What is it?” she asked warily.

“Well, I don’t know if this is good news or bad.”

“You look like it’s bad.”

That made him grin. “I don’t think this was their permanent base. I’ve detected a number of magic signatures around here. I think another cell of mages worked out of here as well.”

“Well, that’s great! That merely means we scared off two groups.”

“Yeah, I reckon it does.”

They spent a few hours picking through the base in search of possible remnants of a trail. Kristen’s feelings spiraled constantly toward despair. She might have sunken completely into it if not for Brian’s pep talk over the radio. Despite the fact that she couldn’t understand a word of what Keith was gathering for him, he was quite excited to get the stash, as he called it.

Finally, even he was done gathering intel and she told the group they would return to base.

“Can we stop on our way home?” Butters asked over the radio once they were airborne. “All that saving the world works wonders on the appetite.”

“That is a negative, Butters. I repeat, a negative,” Brian responded over the radio, his voice sharp with excitement.

“Brian, let’s give the dragons’ chefs a night off. We’re in Italy. We can pick something up. It’s fine.”

“Are you saying you don’t want meatloaf?” Kristen’s brother asked before being shushed by someone in the same room as him.

“Brian? Who is there with you?”

“Just come home, yeah?” he responded.

“You mean back to base?”

“Sure.”

By the time they reached Castillo, Kristen was exhausted. All she wanted was a shower and she was beyond hungry and tired. There couldn’t be enough food or sleep in the world to make her feel right again and a shower seemed like the only thing that could immediately solve a problem.

Or so she thought until she walked through the front door. Brian was there, grinning like a fool.

“Brian, why does it smell like mom’s meatloaf in here?”

Before he could answer, her parents appeared.

“I told you her dragon senses would smell it, didn’t I, Marty?” her dad said as the woman rushed forward to wrap her daughter in a big hug.

“What are you two doing here?” she exclaimed, surprised at herself for how happy she was to see them.

“You show up naked on the front of a newspaper in Florence and you think we won’t come? We were in the south of France so it was only two trains,” Marty exclaimed as if it were ridiculously obvious.

“And they let you in?” she asked.

“Brian vouched for us,” Frank said and beamed at this son.

“Plus, Mom is very persuasive. She started to flash baby pictures of the Steel Dragon and the mage let her right in.” Her brother laughed.

Kristen rolled her eyes. Her mom had one baby picture of her she loved. “Not the one of me in the bath? You know I’m—”

“Naked? Yeah, I know,” Marty snapped. “But now that everyone with a pair of eyeballs knows what that looks like, who cares about your cute little keister anymore?”

Stonequest sniggered at that, which only set the woman onto him. “And you look like you were buried under another stone dragon. Go wash up. Now. Dinner’s almost ready and you’re all filthy!”

No one—not Kristen, not the Detroit SWAT team, and not even the European dragons—had the courage to refuse Marty Hall. The next thirty minutes were a mad scramble through showers and into fresh clothes. Her mom seemed to have a nose for grime and any dragon that skipped a shower was promptly escorted to the facilities and given a bar of soap. She wondered if they would have tolerated her mother if not for their recent loss. As it was, the dragons seemed almost thankful for the distraction.

Finally, they all sat together in the main dining room. It was the first time she had seen it completely full. Usually, the dragons ate first, then their mages, and finally, the few human servants who did the work that was beneath even the mages.

Marty Hall hadn’t allowed any of that. She had cajoled everyone in the castle into the dining room and she served them all dinner at once. The only consolation she made to magical capabilities was to let Amy serve everyone at the same moment. Plates filled with her specialty—meatloaf topped with ketchup, mashed potatoes seasoned with salt and pepper, and a salad of parmesan cheese, egg, and crouton with lettuce—all settled in front of everyone.

Those in the room—human, dragon, and mage—looked at each other and all waited for someone to dig in. She realized that as an investigator, manners probably dictated that she should eat first, which made her relish the moment all the more.

Kristen looked around at all the faces. Some of them were still heartbroken, others merely looked tired, and still others were optimistic about what the future might bring. But in that moment, they were all united around a plate of food and a hungry belly.

She cleared her throat in preparation for a speech as she recognized that this was another moment to bring everyone together. That impetus faded, however, when she realized that she was once again the focal point of this entire conflict which, in fact, was the problem. She shouldn’t be given any special preference because she was a dragon, even if she was a shiny one. A little conflicted, she finally settled on, “What are you all waiting for? Eat!”

The dragons and mages were made uncomfortable by her words, but the humans weren’t. Her family and human friends dug in with gusto.

The dragons took that as a challenge and began to eat. The mages—despite Kristen’s mom’s protests—kept everyone’s plates piled high with second and third helpings and by the time they were all done, the only faces that weren’t smiling from sharing a meal were those of the dragons who had already fallen asleep.

If that didn’t give Kristen hope for the future, nothing would.

THE STORY CONTINUES

The story continues with book eleven: The Masked One, coming soon to Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

KEVIN’S AUTHOR NOTES

Hi there! Thanks for reading book four of the Steel Dragon series! These books have been a ton of fun to work on. Michael and I have really enjoyed the reader feedback as well.

In a lot of ways, this volume was the most challenging so far. After all, we’re well past the initial introduction phase. In fact, we’re gearing up for the finale. Bringing a series to a satisfying conclusion is always tough. As a reader, I usually want a story I’m enjoying to keep on going forever. But all good stories come to an ending eventually, even Kristen Hall’s.

But that’s won’t be the end for this universe.

Michael and I have already been discussing ideas for a spin-off series, set immediately after this one finishes. While the main character will be new, we will see the return of some old favorites, and most important we’ll get to see how the changes Kristen made in the world will impact life in the days to come. She’s certainly been rocking society – dragon, human, and mage alike – to its core.

We all hear that phrase “be the change you want to see” a lot, but it’s usually not so simple. I mean, it would be nice if we could wave our hands and make things around us better. That’s just not how the world works. It’s not how it worked for Kristen, either, if you think about it. Sure, she has magic powers that we all lack. But those have caused her almost as many problems as they solved.

What about the humans she’s worked with? Each of them chose to make a difference in their own way. Captain Hansen chose to accept a novice cop as a SWAT member. (Well, she had her arm twisted a little, right? But when she made the decision, she went in full force.) Drew chose to follow the person he’d helped train. Jim chose to let go of his prejudices. These people all made a difference not just through grand gestures, but through simple changes and choices as well.

My gut says that most of us aren’t ever going to be like Kristen. We’re never going to be the pivot point around which the fate of the entire world revolves. Honestly, I’m sort of OK with that myself. That’s a lot of pressure!

But even though our choices may never spell the difference between life and death for millions of people, we do change the world every day. We sometimes just miss the differences we make. The nurse taking care of sick people during a wave of illness; the police officer keeping people safe; the teacher helping kids to learn and grow; the person who gives a few bucks to a person in need; all of these folks have made impacts with their lives.

It's rare for one person to make such a huge difference that is rocks the world. What’s far more common and ultimately much more useful are the billions of people making small differences every day. We can’t choose to be a dragon with magical powers, but we can choose to act in kindness, compassion, justice, mercy, and integrity in our day to day. That has an impact. When it’s compounded by huge numbers of people all striving together, it matters far more than the activities of any one person.

One personal change that’s happened thanks to my work in this world is that coming back to writing fantasy again after a long break, I’ve remembered how much I enjoy it! I’ve been focused heavily on science fiction for the last couple of years, but spending a year in the clutches of the Steel Dragon has me thinking about stories set in fantasy worlds. I’ve got a ton of books coming out this year in the Blackwell Magic urban fantasy series; picture a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Dresden from the Dresden Files, add in a touch of military academy for flavor, and you’ve got a good idea what these books are like. If you’d like to give one a shot, you can read a short prequel for free by clicking the link here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/ae70xahfa3

So, thanks for that! I hadn’t realized how much I missed writing this kind of story, so expect a whole bunch of these in the months to come, along with the fifth Steel Dragon book and a new trilogy (or more than a trilogy?) in the same world after Kristen’s story is done.

I hope you’ve loved reading all these books as much as we’ve enjoyed spinning the stories. Don’t worry – book five is coming down the pipe soon enough! In the meantime, I do love hearing from readers. While I can’t always get back to everyone, I try to respond to as many emails as I can. You can always reach me at author@kevinomclaughlin.com

Thanks for reading!

Kevin McLaughlin

Written May 28, 2020

MICHAEL’S AUTHOR NOTES

WRITTEN MAY 25, 2020

Hello! It’s another glorious day in Las Vegas and I understand that in two weeks or so a few casinos will open again.

I admit I am looking forward to that happening. Not for the reason that seems obvious (gambling), but the insides of the casinos have something I can’t get to unless they open up.

THE RESTAURANTS!

Seriously, I’m hungry for some of the best Chinese food in America (and China, Hong Kong, Macau… I’ve tested them all, sacrificing my taste buds for you.) So, the best (in my opinion) is Ping Pang Pong inside the Gold Coast Hotel and Casino here in Vegas.

Yes, I have been to Chinatown in LA and tested a couple there. That info is for the two of you who might read the comment above and wonder.

I have tried to find other Chinese food restaurants here in Vegas, and so far, we are coming up with “Well, it’s good…ish.”

Not exactly what I would like. I’ve had food from the Chinese motherland and other countries near China and thought, Well, that’s good, but I’d rather just eat at home.

I’m presently on the dining part of the Gold Coast website looking at the Ping Pang Pong menu (I looked it up to provide the link below) and I see a Black Pepper Beef Medallions I have never tried.

I think I am missing out in life.

I’ve had the Orange Chicken, beef fried rice (no vegetables, extra rice—that is my go-to choice), and tried other recipes when I could. No one I know has ever been less than pleased with the food. Maybe not everyone is a Ponger fanatic as I am, but if you make it back to Vegas, give it a try and share the love if you enjoy it!

Here is the URL https://www.goldcoastcasino.com/dine/casual-dining/ping-pang-pong.

Update on what’s happening next in the Steel Dragon Universe.

Kevin and I have had our first conversations about what’s next, and we have the bones of another story in this world.

Surprisingly, it took very little time for us to agree on the premise and the protagonist’s backstory. Shocking, I know. After giving Kevin so much grief over the last year and a half, I am now worried that this was so easy because of all of the comments I’ve made on podcasts, stage…pretty much wherever I had to provide an example of a challenging (but very successful) collaboration.

If that is the truth—that I mentioned it too often—then I’m sorry, Kevin. If that isn’t true, then thank God we got through that so effortlessly. I raise my glass of root beer in your generally East Coast (he’s in Boston) direction and salute!

BOOKS BY KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN

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 (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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For a complete list of books by Michael Anderle, please visit:

www.lmbpn.com/ma-books/

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