Dragon Conjurer 8, page 1
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Chapter 1
“It’s so fucking cold,” Steffi said through chattering teeth.
“This place is like that circle of hell that’s just all ice,” Nick agreed through the comms.
We’d been pulled out of bed at an absurdly early hour this morning for a mission in Greenland, and it was the kind of cold that made my dick try to become a turtle. We were somewhere north of the Arctic circle, and despite the hour creeping close to mid-morning, it was still completely dark around us.
“According to Dante’s Inferno,” Elisabeth said. “The ninth circle of Hell is reserved for betrayers, where they lay entrapped in ice as their eternal punishment.”
“What kind of lunatic would ever choose to live in a place like that?” Ronin demanded.
We’d been trekking through the snow for what felt like an hour, but I knew it probably hadn’t been more than twenty minutes since we’d left the jet. We’d stopped so Nala could get a feel for the monsters we were hunting, and she’d pulled up a small pillar of rock from beneath the thick blanket of heavy snow under our feet.
“Come on, we’re getting close,” Nala said, and she used her earth-bending powers to press the short rod of stone back into the snow. “They’re just over the next hill.”
“Can you tell how many there are?” Steffi asked beside me as she held up a bright golden orb of energy for us like a lantern.
“Not really,” Nala said and brushed a bit of fluffy white snow from her gloved hands. “The snow is really messing with all the natural vibrations. It’s like trying to see through a fogged-up window.
“Burkhard said there was something else displaced out here with the Akhluts, right?” Elisabeth asked, and then she blew hot air into her cupped hands.
“Yeah, a Meh Teh,” I answered. “It’s basically a Yeti.”
Steffi started to say something else, but her words were cut off by an ear-splitting howl, and we all braced ourselves against the sound.
“Sárkány,” I said without another thought, and Zofia popped out of thin air with a deafening fwoomp sound. “Steffi’s with you today, Zo.”
The air was so frigid that within a few seconds of extending her dragonfly wings, my fairy-girl had realized she was in danger of serious injury to the thin golden membranes of her wings from frostbite. I’d immediately told Steffi to put her wings away, and that when we got closer to our targets she would fly in style for this mission.
My red-eyed dragon blinked sagely at me, and she took a step over to my pink-haired girl. Then Zofia leaned down to allow Steffi to climb up onto her back.
“Bianxifa,” I said, and Beyblade appeared in a blinding flash of orange light.
“Ugh, yes, some warmth!” Nick practically cheered as he climbed happily onto my fire dragon’s back. “It’s so good to see you, buddy.”
I held back a chuckle when I spotted a subtle shiver race down Beyblade’s red scales as he adjusted to the below-freezing temperature. My fire dragon puffed out a hot breath and shook his shoulders slightly, and Nick shuddered pleasantly from the touch of warmth.
“I hope everybody’s ready,” Nala said with a warning hint in her voice.
None of us had a chance to answer because a fraction of a second later a pack of horrifically combined monsters raced over the next hill at us.
The Akhluts were a disturbing combination of orca whales and white wolves, and they had the bodies of the Free Willy ocean mammals with huge muscles, and the very furry legs of arctic wolves.
“Shit,” Nick cursed into the comms as Beyblade took off into the frigid air.
“Yeah, there’s way more of them than Burkhard said,” Steffi said as Zofia took flight behind my fire dragon.
“It’s nothing we haven’t handled before,” I reminded my team.
Elisabeth shifted her form into a fierce polar bear, and beautiful white fur sprouted up all over her body as she leaned forward on all fours. Right as she completed her shift, the frontline of running Akhluts reached us.
Nala simultaneously raised herself onto a pillar of stone, and she constructed a sudden, long wall of stone that the orca-wolves smashed into nose-first.
“Dewch yma!” I called over the almost melodic cries of the monsters, and I felt the invisible presence of my stealth dragon as he materialized beside me. “Do your thing, buddy, but stick close to me.”
An almost inaudible growl of acknowledgment hit my ears from my left before my camouflaged dragon trotted forward through the thick snow. Since I’d first conjured him two weeks ago, Griff had become an integral part of the team. He often appeared already camouflaged and worked in full-on stealth mode until all our targets were dealt with, unless he felt like showing off, that is.
The snow quickly turned a muddy shade of red from the buckets of blood that began to spill from the Akhluts around us, and my team worked through the creatures’ numbers with the level of ferocity I’d come to expect from them.
The Akhluts were an Inuit myth, and they were everything I’d expected from my knowledge of the legends. The orca-wolf hybrids were known to shift from one form to the other in order to live both on land and in the ocean, and it looked like we’d caught them on their way back to the frigid waters of Baffin Bay. The Akhluts were just as ferocious as I’d expected, too, as they snarled, snapped, and clawed at my team, and vast numbers seemed to make the ground shudder beneath the snow.
Steffi, while safely on Zofia’s back, was as feisty against the wolf-whales as she always was. My fairy-girl blasted brutally forceful orbs of golden energy down at the Akhluts. Steffi formed a strong golden lasso with one hand, and then she used it to hold one of the orca monsters in place as she pelted the top of its soft-looking head with a barrage of dense spikes of energy.
After a few long seconds, the orca-wolf’s blubbery head caved in from the pressure, and its small black eyes splattered outward as its brains were pummeled into pulp.
As Steffi worked from Zofia’s back, my gloomy-purple dragon blasted out short and targeted confusion attacks. In the two weeks since our mission against the Curupira, I’d kept Zofia on the sidelines until I was sure her front leg was totally healed after her sudden crash-landing in the jungle. In her downtime, my mind-control dragon had become increasingly more precise with her attacks, and she’d even gained better control over the rest of her body during short mental attacks. Though she still vibrated during her blasting assaults of confusion, Zofia could now stay airborne, and she was even aware enough of her immediate surroundings to be able to lash out at attackers.
I smirked with pride as I watched my fairy-girl and mind-control dragon work together as a stunningly seamless team, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of how well Nick and Beyblade worked together. Then I turned to see how my best friend and my fire dragon were doing.
There was a wide swath of melted snow and muddy earth behind Beyblade, as well as a trail of charred orca-wolf bodies. Littered in among the burned whale carcasses were Akhlut corpses plugged full of bullet holes from Nick’s .45 pistol.
“Got enough ammo?” I’d teased my best friend on the flight as we were coming into the tiny airport that the local postal service used for supplies to the remote research station nearby.
“Never.” Nick smirked back at me as he strapped a seventh magazine to his belt.
I chuckled at the memory, and I had to admit to myself that he’d been right. Nick was definitely using plenty of rounds on these blubbery beasts.
“You might be able to save some rounds if you aim directly into their eyes,” I suggested in the comms.
“I’m trying, but they’re sort of hard to see in that black and white pattern,” Nick answered back.
“Try their blowholes if you can get a clear view of them,” Nala suggested with a breathy huff. “Just another option!”
“Oooh,” Nick replied with a grin in his voice. “Good idea.”
I turned to see how my earth-bending girlfriend was doing, and I was completely unsurprised to see Nala, who was bundled up as snugly as the rest of us against the negative twenty-something windchill, in the middle of skewering an orca-wolf straight through its wide mouth with a long spear of rock.
The Akhlut floundered on the thin rod of stone for a few seconds like a fish on a hook. Then its body fell limp a moment later when Nala curved the stone forward and ripped it right through the monster’s upper jaw and brain.
I grimaced at the horrific spray of blood and chunks of monster flesh that splattered forward, and I turned to check in on my foreign girlfriends.
Elisabeth was locked in a paw-to-paw wrestling match with one of the Akhluts. The French shapeshifter was using her massive polar bear paws to hold back the razor-sharp claws of the Akhlut’s wolf paw, and the monster snapped its rows of lethal teeth at Elisabeth’s bear legs.
I was about to send Griff in to help my shapeshifter, but Ronin beat me to it as she darted forward like an anime warrior in the snow. My Japanese girlfriend nearly blended into the white landscape with her white astral armor, and she wielded a lethal-looking naginata. The seven-foot-long bladed staff sliced cleanly through the shiny black flesh of the orca-wolf’s back, and the monster’s entire spine wrenched backward into a distorted C-shape.
The beast’s agonized scream ripped through the soft snow flurries as buckets of blood poured down its back and hind legs, and the snow turned a shade of red that Rob Zombie would have appreciated.
The perpetual night around us was interrupted only by the flash of Ronin’s white astral armor, and the steady streams of bright fire from Beyblade’s mouth. My eyes were straining in between the dark and short flashes of light around us, and it was like trying to fight in a strobe light.
“Steffi,” I said, and I looked up to my fairy-girl as she soared low above the ground on my gloomy-purple dragon who looked black in this low light. “Can you cast some kind of huge lantern up for us?”
“Um,” Steffi responded, and I could hear the desire to do so in her voice mixed with a touch of uncertainty. “I’m not sure. I’ve never done something like that before, but let me give it a try.”
“A little light would be really helpful,” Nala chuckled.
I watched and mentally cheered on my pink-haired girl as she forged a large ball of golden energy between her hands. Steffi shaped the ball and coaxed it until it blew up as large as a yoga ball, and then she gently nudged it into the open air above the middle of the battlefield.
The ground below lit up with a soft golden glow, and while it was no replacement for actual daylight, Steffi’s golden orb was a vast improvement on the blackness of extended night this close to the north pole.
“That’s amazing!” Nick cheered.
“Wow, what a difference,” Nala said with a grin clear in her voice.
Even Elisabeth, with her enhanced animal vision, let out a roar of approval and thanks before she sank her sharp teeth into the spine of an orca-wolf.
“That’s incredible, Steff,” I praised my fairy-girl. “Thank you!”
“I’m not sure how long it will last,” Steffi laughed lightly as she returned to blasting sharp spears of energy out at the monsters below her. “But I can make another one if it fades--”
Steffi’s voice cut out all at once, and I saw her smile drop in an instant as she squinted at something up ahead.
Then I followed her gaze, and I let out a sigh.
The Meh Tehs had appeared.
The Yeti-like monsters slowly joined in the battle as they lumbered more awkwardly forward than the agile orca-wolves moved. They stood a few feet above our heads, and in the glow of Steffi’s lantern, I could see they looked down at us with keen gray eyes. In the dim light, it was hard to get a total idea of how many of the Yetis marched toward us, but I guessed there were at least twenty-five of the snow sasquatches.
“Shit!” Nick growled, and then he fired off three shots and took down a Yeti in short order.
Luckily, it was a hundred times easier to keep track of my team and the number of monsters around us now that I had more consistent light to see by.
Griff tore the monsters apart just in front of me, though I could only track his movements and efforts by the shallow footprints in the snow, and the screams and torn limbs of his victims. My stealth dragon worked incredibly efficiently to rend the wolf limbs free of the Akhluts’ orca bodies, and the landscape of previously pristine snow was a horrific painting of dark red blood and brown mud.
Beyblade’s fire attacks were incredibly effective against the snow monsters, but his flames were melting a great deal of the snow, and the ground was rapidly becoming a slippery mess of thick, oozy mud.
“Nala, we’re getting some serious mudslide situations here,” I said into the comms. “Can you firm up the ground for us a little bit?”
“Sure thing,” my earth-bending girl answered, and then she raised her pillar up a little higher to get a better view of the muck around us.
Nala took a deep breath and raised her hands up and moved them horizontally out in a steady and smooth motion, and the mud all around us hardened into a firm platform of earth.
“Excellent,” Ronin said briefly as she shifted her horse stance to the side and slashed her naginata straight into the belly of an Akhlut, and she gutted it like a fish. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Nala grunted as she raised an enormous boulder up over the heads of two Yetis who had gotten a bit too close to Elisabeth.
The Yetis cried out in horror for a second until their calls were suddenly silenced by the crushing and snapping sounds of their skeletons under the weight of Nala’s attack. Then a thin puddle of blood slowly spread out from the edges of the boulder, and Nala cracked it into little pieces and flung the sharp dagger-like pieces of stone into the black-and-white faces of a nearby group of Akhluts.
My team was doing an excellent job, as usual, and I couldn’t help the flash of almost smug pride that rose in my chest while I watched them work as a cohesive team to take down the monsters around us.
The ground quickly filled with the dismembered, crushed, and burned bodies of the orca-wolves and Yetis. The majority of the snow in a fifty-yard radius was now completely melted, but thanks to Nala’s earth-bending powers, the ground was no longer an enormous mud puddle.
Elisabeth’s white fur was splattered with brown mud around her polar bear legs, but Nala and Steffi didn’t appear to have gotten much mud on themselves. Ronin’s feet were muddy up to the ankles, but the rest of her body was only the beautiful glowing white energy of her astral armor.
I was about to call Griff back to my side when a sudden roar behind me caught my attention, and I turned around fast to search for its creator.
My mouth fell open with shock as another pack of dog-legged creatures raced toward us from the hill just north of our location.
“Fuck,” I growled.
This new group of monsters reminded me heavily of a typical werewolf, but their fur was a near-perfect shade of white. They ran forward on their hind legs like people, but their heads were those of a wolf on steroids. Then they opened their motorcycle-sized canine mouths in ferocious growls, and they revealed terrifyingly long fangs that dripped with thick strings of opaque drool.
I was just relieved Beyblade’s fire melted the snow around us. At least the white wolf-monsters wouldn’t be able to blend in as easily once they finished racing forward.
“Incoming!” I announced to my entire team through the comms, and then I braced my feet. “Trylle frem!”
Thor burst forward from his tattoo in a blindingly bright indigo flash of light, and the moment the snow werewolves reached us, my black storm dragon jumped into the fray. He snatched up one of the snow werewolves in his huge jaws and snapped its spine like a toothpick, and then he sucked in a deep breath and blasted a blinding fork of indigo lightning from his mouth.
The current jumped from the closest dog-legged monster and into the next three behind it. The beasts convulsed and seized violently on the ground for a few long seconds before a million joules of electricity burned them up from the inside out.
The smell of singed fur reached my nose just as I realized what these monsters were.
“Guys, we’ve got some Adlets here joining the party,” I announced to my team through the comms. “There are maybe two dozen of them.”
“What?” Steffi asked. “That wasn’t in our brief!”
“No, it was not,” Ronin agreed with a huff.
“What’s an Adlet?” Nick asked.
“They’re basically like werewolves,” I explained. “They’re an Inuit legend like the Akhluts, and they’re really fast, so keep your eyes open.”
“We’re on it, Dyl,” Nala huffed, and she raised a series of stone spikes straight up from the ground to skewer a group of orca-wolves like horribly macabre lawn ornaments around her.
Between the efforts of my fierce warrior women, the aggressive attacks of four of my dragons, and the never-ending barrage of bullets from Nick, the monsters’ corpses continued to litter the ground. The once beautiful landscape around us looked like the set of a B-rated horror movie at the end of a long day of shooting. Wolf limbs, chunks of whale blubber, and charred husks were everywhere, and the ground was a disturbing shade of dark red from the river of blood that flowed downhill toward the cliffs that dropped into Baffin Bay.
Then the final cries of the incinerated Yetis and dissected Akhluts and Adlets died down as Steffi’s golden energy lantern began to flicker and fade above us. We were plunged into eerie silence and darkness at the same moment, and the only light that could be found was the ethereal glow of Ronin’s white astral armor.
