Authors: Jason Hightman
If only he could warm himself, if only his fire were stronger.
He had expected the final battle to take place at Issindra’s palace, but the Hunters had changed matters, unfortunately.
Using rats for spies, he had seen the street battle from a safe distance. And he had not been pleased. The confrontation had come too soon.
Still, it’s all gone well enough. This is the perfect city for such a masterpiece of death to begin,
he was thinking.
Death is everywhere here. Today a crowd panicked over the smallest of fires. Imagine the chaos that will be created with a massive firestorm, blazes stretching to all the overpopulated cities of the earth. The Tiger Dragon will soon learn this power from the Japanese, and her children shall know it as well. It is going to be historic.
The plan had not been easy to pull together,
he admitted to himself.
But it was all working: The two most powerful Serpents on earth would join forces today and begin a new tribe of Dragons, renewing the entire species. The Dragonhunters had only to follow the trail and they would be swept up in flames, perishing along with that lying Black Dragon.
And the Ice Serpent would be there to see it all, to put it into his book, and be remembered forever as a hero to his kind.
His book would be found. The first man to find it would fall under an unbreakable spell and, possessed by magic, immediately copy it as quickly as he could, in every possible language. His book would go out into the world, where it would kill billions.
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a way to die.
Simon had held his tongue long enough.
He and Key had been patient for over an hour in the dim storage room of the Tiger Dragon’s Palace. The
scent of death leaking from the tigers’ feeding chamber was getting to him almost as much as the fact that everyone was ignoring him. Sitting on a crate amid the cedar-and-rot smells of the attic-like space, he glowered at the others.
They were still chattering about the location of the Dragons, staring at the little television set Alaythia had managed to steal from an empty office up above. The news showed two growing areas of paranormal activity. On the northern edge of Bombay, flocks of birds were dying, dropping out of the sky, and people were wracked by painful convulsions, choking for air, suffocating amid buildings whose glass windows rippled and warped unnaturally. Meanwhile, the southern edge of the city reported an intensely hot rainfall, and people falling ill with a disease that rapidly blackened their teeth and fingernails, and left them unable to walk. Disturbingly, the news showed oceans of people crawling on the ground, as if held down by unseen hands. Insects and worms swarmed everywhere, locusts darkening the stormy city in deafening black tornadoes.
“It’s the harbor,” said Aldric. “The Japanese Serpent is going to meet the Tiger Dragon there, one coming from the north, one from the south.”
“It looks that way,” Alaythia nodded. “The Japanese Serpent could be headed to the harbor to get out.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he tried to leave on one of his own medical syndicate ships to ensure it gets away. From what we hear, there’s always a lot of money tied up on those boats—they carry everything from expensive medicines to a cargo of dead bodies for medical experiments—and Issindra has been targeting them.”
“Care to guess what
she
is thinking?” Aldric prompted her.
Sachiko interrupted, looking out the stormy window at the distant harbor. “She would want to continue the rendezvous. A union with the Tokyo Serpent has been her aim all along, hasn’t it? Why would she give up now?”
Alaythia looked at her, considering the idea. “I think you’re right. And the harbor might be a perfect place to join forces, symbolically. It’s where the Japanese Serpent has been invading her territory. Why not begin their truce in a place of strife?”
Taro seemed to affirm this in Japanese, and Simon saw many of the others nodding. Simon couldn’t believe it, shaking his head, wanting to disagree.
Alaythia stepped beside Aldric, pointing to a spot in the harbor on the giant city map. “It’s obvious they’ll end up somewhere along here in the harbor. We have to cut them down right there, fast, eliminate them. Crush them before they proliferate. One assault, one result.”
Taro raised an eyebrow to Aldric. “You were afraid for
her
safety?”
Akira pushed Aldric aside to get a look at the map. “What’s the best way to get there?”
Simon had had enough.
“This is a
trap
,” he said loudly. “This entire palace is a trap for anyone who comes inside it. The Tiger Dragon will
not
want to go into a difficult battle out there when she can bring her enemy
here
and get rid of him on her own turf, in her sleep chamber. She’ll find a way to bring him to the palace.”
Key looked like he wanted to hide.
“So what would you have us do?” Taro asked, point-blank. Simon hid his surprise that the Samurai was even interested.
“We can’t
all
go out there,” said Simon, pointing to the map, the harbor. “There’s two of them, and they’d have us all at once, out in the open.”
“Simon, if we gamble on them coming here, and they don’t, we’ve lost our chance,” said Aldric, “and it’ll be very hard to bring down two Dragons in that sleep chamber of hers. It’s a closed space, full of traps. We’d get sacked.”
“Not if we let her take down the Japanese Dragon,” Simon protested. “Then we face only one Dragon, and we can bait her into leaving the chamber. Then we get her.”
Alaythia looked at Simon. “If we spend all of our energy preparing for them here, we could miss an opportunity to get them while they’re distracted fighting each other. Having all of us out there now gives us better odds of surviving. You get what we’re saying, don’t you?”
“It’s crazy to go where
they
would want us,” Simon responded. “Right in the middle of a gathering of two Dragons—or worse: a crossfire. We’d be trying to work with two battle groups against two Dragons. At least we have a confined space here, Dad.”
“Simon, in Tokyo, you thought we didn’t know where to look for the beast, but we did. Things are not always as they seem. All the training in the world is nothing next to experience.”
“You’re wrong. The way to do this, is to put them where
we
want
them
. The Tiger Dragon will take care of the Japanese Serpent, and then we take on the Tiger Dragon, right here, where the Dragon would never suspect an attack. We’d start a fire, in her own palace, just before sundown. She’d leave her chamber, and we’d take her. She’d be cornered.”
The Chinese Black Dragon looked at Aldric, his old eyes communicating agreement.
“You would leave the Japanese vermin to her, instead of us?” said Taro. “I can’t say that I like this.”
Alaythia shook her head. “Simon, you’re counting
on a lot of things going right…but if we miss our chance at the harbor, the death they’d cause together could be devastating…What other choice do we have here?”
“Simon’s choice. It’s a good one,” Key interjected. Simon looked at him, grateful, knowing how hard it was for him to speak up. No one seemed to know how to take this sudden alliance.
“Enough talk from children,” rumbled Akira, in a voice that ended the matter. “We need to move on the harbor. We finalize our attack plan now.”
In agreement, the Hunters drew closer, studying the map of Bombay as Key looked at Simon, frustrated. But Simon was looking at the Black Dragon, and all three of them realized there was another way of tackling the problem.
T
HESE ARE THE PIECES
, thought the Ice Dragon, picking gnats from his frosty goatee and watching India quiver far below his hotel window.
And they are all in place now.
He had seen the two centers of destruction outside slowly moving toward each other at the harbor.
The Japanese Serpent is headed to the rendezvous. So is the Tiger Dragon. Look at the madness they create in their wake. And soon the Dragonhunters will be on their way as well.
I need only to watch the fireworks,
he thought. He laughed and snorted, and wanted to cry at the beauty of it.
This is the beginning of the end.
But another brilliant mind was at work in Bombay this evening.
Simon St. George had a plan of his own. His father had given him a mission, along with Key, and it was one of extraordinary importance. The mission was:
Stay out of the way
. He and Key were to stand watch with Mamoru and the Black Dragon, who insisted he could protect the boys in the event of an emergency. If they sighted anything unexpected, they were to report it, calling the others on their cell phones.
Now, that’s excitement,
thought Simon in frustration.
They were in some kind of factory, closed for the night or perhaps recently shut down, in a room filled with heavy machinery parts. Mamoru had found it, safely out of the way should the Tiger Dragon return home, but with a clear view of the entrance to her palace.
Simon watched from a window. The sun was abandoning India, and the bustling city was cast in gray from the storm clouds.
Aldric had taken Alaythia—he refused to fight without her—and Mamoru resentfully landed the job of watching the boys and the old Dragon. The big Samurai pinched the flab under his own chin thoughtfully, and eyed the Black Dragon with distrust.
“Mamoru, don’t you think it’d be smarter if you were with them?” asked Key, staring out the open
window. “They only left you here ’cause they still don’t trust Ming Song.” He looked over at the Black Dragon.
Simon listened, pleased, but he didn’t take his eyes off the window.
“You’re starting trouble again,” Mamoru rumbled. “You listen too much to Simon. Simon is very bad. You know this. Why do you want to be trouble?”
This cowed Key a bit, but he didn’t give up. “It’s just a fact,” he said simply. “Your skills are needed out there, aren’t they?
Do
you trust him?”
“I don’t know,” said Mamoru, after a second’s thought. “To me, he just looks like a little man…”
“He doesn’t look much different as a Dragon.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
The Black Dragon moved slowly to the window. He nudged Simon to take note of several guards at the Tiger Palace who were staring curiously up at them. The Black Dragon tapped his smallish claws together,
click, click, click,
and as they sparked, the guards were zapped by jolts of electricity from the lamppost they leaned against.
Mamoru watched carefully. To him, the Black Dragon looked more harmless than ever, an old Chinese man, chortling, amused. But there was something in his laugh that remained Dragonlike, and Mamoru couldn’t see past it.
“There is still the matter of the Ice Serpent.” Mamoru thought out loud. “We have not accounted for him, and what he might do.”
Key looked disappointed, thinking. He brought out a netsuke, the ivory carving of the good Dragon, for emphasis, and Mamoru seemed moved by it, but only for an instant.
“Come on, let’s not be totally stupid,” Simon added. “We’re safe. Hidden. We aren’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, my dad could be killed out there. You could make the difference.”
Mamoru glared at Simon. “What’s the English word for ‘talks too much’?”
“What’s the Japanese word for ‘pig-headed’?”
Mamoru would not continue the debate, settling into a rusty chair, resting his head on one hand, and ignoring the boys’ arguments completely. Key continued talking, always respectful, and his heart was in the right place, but Simon could see this tactic was going nowhere. He quietly crossed to the back of the room, picked up a large piece of some unknown machine, and conked Mamoru over the head with it.
His eyes on the Black Dragon at the window, Mamoru never saw what hit him. He fell forward from his chair with a grim drumroll.
“Sorry, Key,” Simon said. “Sometimes talking goes nowhere.”
“I knew what you’d do. I was keeping him distracted,” Key answered, but his eyes were filled with shock now that he’d actually seen it happen. He looked down guiltily at Mamoru, the babyfaced Samurai unconscious on the floor.
Simon made sure he was out cold, and then he turned to the Black Dragon. “Well. You’re the new babysitter.”
Elsewhere in the city, the other Hunters were rushing to the harbor, to try to stop a deadly rendezvous.
They had rented a weathered but sturdy off-road vehicle, and were doing their best to get to the harbor through the growing storm. Flooded streets were only one concern. Parts of the road cracked and lifted as Taro sped around the earthquake damage. They were at least half a city away from the harbor, but the supernatural tremors from the Serpents were reaching out, rippling through Bombay and even beyond.
In the backseat of the vehicle, Aldric and Alaythia kept their eyes on each other but neither said a word. It was the eyes of the other woman behind him that bothered Aldric. He knew what was on her mind. With the others preparing their weapons all around him, he looked back to Sachiko with what he hoped was a confident gaze.
“You can trust the old Dragon with your son,” he
told her. “If Alaythia says he’s honorable, then he is. And Mamoru will protect him as his own, I’m sure. He won’t be alone.”
“I left him,” said Sachiko, “with a Dragon.” She smiled, and the daggers shooting from her eyes were as sharp as anything carried by the Samurai.
You had better be sure of yourself.
Issindra, the Tiger Dragon, let her tiger-striped tail swish back and forth. She was watching the Japanese cargo ship prepare to survive the storm. Facing a hard rain, crews worked desperately to load the last few crates from the dock, even as many of the men collapsed from a strange sickness. The approaching grayish clouds were turning black, like ink poured into milk. The Tiger Dragon licked her skin with feline arrogance. Her eyes tore into the darkness, waiting for the Dragon of Japan to move into her sights…
Come get your ship
, she thought.
Come see who’s waiting, dearest.
The Japanese Dragon, appearing in his veiled form as a human doctor, was settled wearily into the back of a yellow-topped black taxi, but the driver had just stepped into the rainy street to push crawling beggars out of the way.
The Japanese Serpent watched as the cabdriver
fell to the watery road, succumbing to the terrible disease that had brought down everyone else on the road in front of him.
Nuisance, a sorry flaw in our design
, thought the Dragon.
I’ve no control over this magic; it just pours out of me like a leaking faucet….
The Serpent had spent the past hours limping through the city’s vast slums and neighborhoods, waiting for his wounds to heal. He had hoped for an easy, undisturbed passage to the cargo ship, where he could regain his strength quietly, but there was no escaping the supernatural madness gripping Bombay. He curled his mouth in disgust at the torrent of locusts swooping from above, the bugs pockmarking the windshield, and tried to restore himself to a calm, stoic resolve.
India is vile as death itself
, he thought, for he could see the tiny insects, bacteria, and viruses floating in the air, squirming over the buildings, living on human skin.
The world was a filthy toilet, and people lived in it without knowing.
He got out and left the car, ignoring the pathetic people crying for help and the cold dirty water rising around him. He realized his own body was being affected by his proximity to the Tiger Dragon. The bacteria on his own skin had grown, the tiny creatures now visible. Stunned, he watched the swarm of liquid
blobs drip onto his metal leg. Shaking them off, he became aware that his vision was blurring. For several revolting moments, he could only see himself as a human. And the heat in his body was rising and falling erratically. He was used to supernatural ripples—but not ones that affected him.
He looked up beyond the human refuse ahead, and wondered what the buildings would look like wrapped in the coils of his beautiful silver-and-gold fires, with the embers of a dead Indian Tiger Dragon drifting across the sky….
A bloated city burned clean and made sterile by the perfect efficiency of the flame.
Use me
, his power beckoned.
You do have the strength. See what your fire can truly do.