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“All my people are exceptional,” Rafael said.
Benito stepped back closer to us. “Give the word and they are ready.”
“Dragon is going over,” Smitz yelled, not into the radio.
We turned to see the dragon falling backward, claws scrambling at the BearCat, which was reversing as fast as it could as the edge of the cliff started to crumble under both the dragon and the BearCat.
I prayed, “Dear God, don’t let them go over, please don’t let them go over.”
The radio crackled to life in my hand. “The dragon will have to stand up on his hind legs to flame,” Edward said.
Benito conveyed the information to his earpiece, then replied to us, “They have observed the dragon, they know what to do.”
The BearCat backed up. The dragon fell. And now two people we’d never met using the skills they’d honed on video games were about to try and slay a dragon.
55
I ran for theedge of the cliff, but Rafael caught my hand. “Benito says that minimum safe distance is this way.” Normally I would have listened to him, but…
“It’s a dragon, a real live fire-breathing dragon…”
“Minimum safe distance with a view,” Rafael said, “none of us have seen anything like this.” I let him lead me to the spot his bodyguards had chosen for him, because he was right, it would be really stupid to have survived Deimos kidnapping me only to die in the explosion when we killed him.
The dragon’s back was almost camouflaged in the dark brown water, as if all the dragon had to do was lower its head and swim away, except here the Meramec River was only twenty feet deep and that wasn’t enough water for the dragon to swim away in, if Deimos could swim. I had so many questions I wanted to ask about him as a dragon. He might be the last of his kind and we were going to kill him. I smelled wolf and then the scent of Richard’s skin, as if I’d buried my face in the curve of his neck. My thoughts had drawn him to me; we were both biologists with degrees in preternatural biology and here was a real, fire-breathing dragon. They were supposed to be a myth, as in never existed. There was a small part of both of us that wanted him to swim away to safety, but the rest of us knew he was evil andif we let him escape he’d do more evil things to us, the people we loved. If he got loose on the freeway or a neighborhood he could kill hundreds, and if he gained control of Jean-Claude and his instability was in charge of every vampire in the country…disasterdidn’t begin to cover it.
I stood there gazing down at probably the last fire-breathing dragon on earth with Richard’s thoughts and mine so intermingled I couldn’t tell which belonged to who, but it didn’t matter. We’d both come down to the same decision. Deimos had to die. If we could have saved the dragon we might have tried, but Deimos was the dragon. He’d been that first or maybe he’d been both. Son of Ares and one of the Furies, Drakon, Deimos, stood up, river water pouring off thirty feet of him, twenty feet and that long, serpentine tail hidden in the dark river.
He raised his head skyward, and flame roared upward in a huge plume. I could feel the heat even from this supposedly safe distance. Rafael put his arm around me and I think it was a protective gesture from the heat, but if the dragon had been closer and aimed that curling orange fountain at us, no amount of arms holding me would have kept either of us safe.
I was too busy looking at Deimos like he was wildlife, history, myth that I missed the drones. I almost forgot about them and why we were standing there until a fireball replaced Deimos’s head, and then the shock wave hit us and I would have fallen except for Rafael’s arms and Benito grabbing us both. Somewhere in there the sound registered, like the physics of the explosion was in separate pieces, or my mind divided it up so I could understand it.
The body fell backward into the river, sending the waves sloshing backward and outward. I expected the body to sink, but it was too wide and fell at an odd angle so that it lay half in the water and half on the bank. Distantly I heard shouting and realized it was the main group of police yelling their victory cries like at the end of a war. I knew that Richard had already contacted the university he taught atfor the necropsy. He wanted to do one like they did on whales that washed up on the beach. I wondered: Would they need a bomb disposal unit for the necropsy? Or did bomb techs only do human-made explosives and leave the natural stuff to the scientists?
Rafael’s phone rang; he glanced at the number, then said, “It’s your fellow marshal Otto Jeffries.” Officer Smitz was still with us, even though we’d let him have his radio equipment to himself, so we’d keep using everyone’s legal names until we were alone, so Olaf was still Otto for now.
“Hello, Marshal Jeffries, she is right here,” Rafael said, and handed me the phone.
“Otto, what’s up?” I asked.
“The head is gone, and the stump burned, but we still must take the heart to be sure he does not rise again.”
I stared down at the massive body in the river. “Richard has already contacted his university. They’re putting together a scientific team to do a necropsy to learn what they can about dragon biology.”
“It is a vampire,” Olaf said.
“I know that, but it’s also a fire-breathing dragon and I for one would like to know how the mechanism worked that let it breathe fire, wouldn’t you?”
“It would be interesting, and help arm us better if we ever encounter another one, but until the heart is cut from the body is the vampire truly dead?”
I thought about that for a minute. “I’ve never had any vampire or shapeshifter that could heal itself after it was decapitated or heal a wound that was caused by fire. Have you?”
He thought about it, too. “No, I have not. Will we not hunt anything together this trip?”
“Deimos cracked the wall and let sunlight kill all the other vampires, and their deaths killed their animals to call.”
“What of Kane?” he asked.
“Kane’s dead.” My stomach tightened. I hadn’t thought aboutAsher once I saw the dragon. I prayed again that Asher would be all right, but I needed to call and be sure.
