Dragon 7 Chapter 9

I had spent three days locked in solitary confinement.

The quiet was the worst. Sometimes I just spoke to hear something. It made me seem like a madman, or I supposed a mad dragon.

All attempts to get a message out with my phone had failed, the concrete apparently wasn’t conducive to service. My phone had died anyway.

Getting up from the cot, I went over to the wall and started to scratch miscellaneous thoughts and images into the wall with a claw to keep myself busy. I wasn’t much of an artist, but it was something to pass the time.

Solitude was like hanging my sanity from a thread and flicking it for fun. There were a few times I considered just busting myself out and fixing the problem, but I was always able to talk myself back. I wouldn’t be the one to expose paranormals in Philly.

We had to keep a lid on things and ride out this FBI hunt. If Norton couldn’t find anything from us, then he’d move on. He wouldn’t waste his time watching us like a hawk after a while, he’d chase a lower hanging fruit.

I wasn’t going crazy, but I felt like I was just one string away from plunging into it. I hadn’t expected it to be so tough.

“Oh is that food I hear?” I perked up to the clack of the guards’ stupid boots on the concrete floor.

A little zap of lighting went between my fingers without speaking a word. Somewhere in the maddening silence, I had managed to trigger the magic without words.

The zap sparked elsewhere in the room, zipping across the space and into the metal bars of the bed where it grounded.

With three days of absolute boredom and silence, I’d gotten more than a little practice in. And it was a focused time I wouldn’t have ever gotten in the outside world. At least there was something good that had come from the absolute shit circumstances.

The slot in the door slid open, and I took a quick stride across the room to catch the tray before it splattered onto the floor.

They’d caught me with that the first time. Never again.

Assholes.

“How’s it going in there, fanger?” A pair of eyes appeared in the slot while I had my hands full with the tray of food. And I didn’t miss the small wisp of smoke in the eyes.

“You know, something is wrong with your eyes. You should get that checked.” I took the tray and shoveled the tiny amount of food in my mouth. It was not enough food for a dragon.

“Something is wrong with your face.” He shot a childish comment back. “Fuck. You guys ready?” he asked someone behind him.

“Oh, is it time for me to get out, or maybe I get my phone call finally?” I laughed. They were abusive fucks and I was going a little stir crazy.

The man came into view as the door opened, and I quickly finished shoving the food into my mouth before they took it away.

“No, fucking fanger. You aren’t ever getting out, or your phone call. You don’t technically exist. Unfortunately, your paperwork has been lost. But you know the best part of fangers? They heal so damn quickly.” He smirked as two more guards came in behind him and he started to loosen his belt.

I shook my head, not quite taking them seriously. “That’s not happening.”

I threw the tray at him and he grabbed the metal tray, punching a hole through it in a strange show of his strength.

“Fanger, you’re fucked. You might as well submit. The second you came here, we knew exactly what you were. You’ll die here after you tell us everything, but first we need to soften you up a little.” He smirked as his pants fell down and he snapped his belt threateningly.

Half Naked was out of his mind if he thought I would submit to him. And he’d given me a critical piece of information. If there was no paperwork of me being in the prison, then they couldn’t pin me for escaping.

“Okay. So you aren’t even playing dirty. You have thrown the rules completely out the window. I can work with that.” Damn, I was apparently feeling really chatty after all the solitude.

One guard, Sparky, flanking Half Naked pulled out a baton that crackled at the end with electricity. “Don’t even try. Fangers still get shocked.” The amount of electricity on that thing was certainly too much for a human.

“Uhh…” I didn’t know what to say. The poor dude was clueless, and I was happy to show him his error.

Half Naked cracked his belt at me while the one with the baton charged me, a gleeful smile on his face as he pressed it to me.

But all of them faltered when I didn’t even twitch. I just smiled at them.

“Okay. I think you need to broaden your horizons and damn am I hungry.” I grabbed Sparky, shoving him against the door and slamming it shut with his body.

I was rough enough that the smell of blood entered the air, and my stomach gurgled hungrily as he hit the floor. The guards would taste like shit, but the titan’s influence on them might give them a little extra mana to make it palatable.

My jaw crackled as the beast pushed forward.

“He’s a fanger. Look, he’s gonna shift.” Half Naked shouted and drew a taser, stabbing it into my side as I held the door closed.

“Yeah.” I shrugged off the electricity. “I have fangs, but I think your scope of the world is small.” Blue and bronze scales shifted over my body. “Because if you think that those are going to do anything to me, you haven’t met one of me before.” I grew and my prison uniform bulged before the neck ripped and my pant legs and sleeves tore open for my new mass. Using my clawed hands, I warped the hinges to lock the door in place for a moment. I didn’t need my prey escaping.

I stood eight feet tall wrapped in scales with a dragon head that was starting to drool at the prospect of a meal.

Half Naked came at me, smoke streaming from his eyes as he threw a punch.

It hit me in the chest and actually knocked a little wind out of me, making me cough.

“Fucking Fanger. What are you, a snake?” He tried to swing for my face, but my jaws snapped open, catching his forearm and severing it with a crunch.

“Don’t call me a fucking snake. I’m a dragon.” I muttered over the man’s scream. Electricity shot from my finger to the radio in the last guard’s hand before he could radio out any update.

He let out a little shriek and jumped back.

Sparky tried to get up but a swift kick with my heel kept him down.

Half Naked’s arm had a rich smoky taste, but it also came with a strange magical heat. It was like I’d just eaten something that wasn’t going to agree with my stomach.

I backhanded the radio-holding guard into the wall. He bounced off and came back at me, swinging. The coward went for my balls.

Goldie sprang into action with a thought, and a trident speared him, pinning him to the ceiling.

“You are all trying to fight well above your league.” I pulled the speared guard closer, like a fine piece of steak on a fork. His upper body crunched in my maw. “But I’m starving, and I’m tired of this place.”

Half Naked whimpered seeing his lackey die. “What the fuck? We didn’t do anything to you fangers.”

I froze for a moment, trying to figure out if he actually believed what he was saying. I wasn’t sure how it looked on my draconian face, but he looked completely terrified. “You put me in a prison cell and lost the keys. Let’s reassess ‘didn’t do anything’?” I hummed at him as I took another chomp from the guard speared on Goldie as a giant fork.

Damn I was starving.

“No, you are monsters. Animals. You aren’t humans, yet you fucks pretend to be them. You should be in cages.” The guard seemed to have gotten himself worked up enough to override some of his fear, but he was still clutching his missing arm.

“Well, I was raised human. I found out what I was later. I get the fear of the unknown, but we mind our own business.”

He just stared at me accusingly. “My wife died this spring. A fanger tore her throat out on her way home. She started to become something else, and I shot her with my own goddamn hands. So don’t you try and take the fucking moral high ground.” He pulled out a gun and shot me three times, which was really more annoying than anything else. A 9mm did nothing to my scales. “You fucking fangers ruined my life.” He kept firing until the gun clicked empty.

I felt a modicum of sympathy for him. But that was quickly washed away when I remembered where I was and what he was about to do to me. Even if terrible things had happened to him, he’d made choices that were tough to undo.

Snapping my fingers, a jag of powerful lightning hit him in the chest and threw him against the wall. A large burn mark appeared through his uniform and his heart.

He gasped for a few breaths before he slumped over.

My appetite was ruined.

Goldie returned to my arm and what remained of the other guard dropped to the ground.

I pushed my tongue into my teeth to get loose a piece of something as I stepped away from the third guard. “Going to continue to play dead?”

Nothing.

“Okay. Well, I have to make sure.” I lifted my foot over his head.

“Wait. Please.” He held his hands up. “I have a wife and kids.”

“So do I, asshole. And that didn’t matter to you one bit.” My foot crushed his skull.

I shook the blood off my foot, but it really didn’t want to come off.

Rather than try to bend back the hinges, I just broke them and shifted back to my human form as I stepped out and replaced the door.

I was really wishing I’d spent more time learning the invisibility spell. It would have made my escape so much easier.

Stepping down the hall in my shredded orange jumpsuit, I realized I was leaving a single bloody footprint with each step. I probably looked like the perfect visage of a villain.

But I certainly didn’t feel like one.

Electricity jumped from my fingers into the first electrical socket I saw. Then I dialed the strength of my magic up to eleven.

Lights exploded all around me, the remaining lights shorting out and going dark instantly.

I smirked, but then those lights flickered back on. They had to have some sort of backup power.

I wondered if I could blow that too.

Pushing more and more electricity into the socket, I heard a muted thump in the distance and the lights whined as they dimmed back off.

“Okay. Time to get the fuck out of here.” The first door I came to was locked, an automatic response as the power went out. I had to grab the door and strain to rip it open.

I paused. I did not want to give Norton more ammunition. I needed to be careful, even if there was no documentation on me being at the prison.

“Fire is a great way to clean.” I muttered to myself. I turned back down the hallway I had come and breathed deep before letting loose a torrent of flames that cooked the hallway all the way to the poorly propped up door. It fell over and the bed, along with the bodies, caught fire.

My dragon’s breath was hot enough to make nearly anything catch fire or just melt.

I kept up the flames, cremating the men who’d assaulted me and burning away any trace I might have left.

“Good. Now to just rip my way out of here.” There was a loud crumbling as the concrete behind me cracked and a wall toppled, exposing another area of the prison.

“Not bad.” Going that way would be easier than going back through the more populated parts of the prison. I didn’t want to kill everyone if I didn’t have to, and I would if I wanted to get out without more trouble following me.

I pushed through the rubble, an annoying siren going off as I stepped into an empty, half court gym. Apparently, they weren’t on the same electrical system as everything else.

Lifting my foot, I breathed more fire carefully, getting rid of the blood on it before walking across the gym and making a hole in the wall beyond it.

I smiled as the hole I made led outside. The green grass made me smile, although it was hard to see it in the darkness of the night.

Stepping out onto it, I wanted to stop and sigh. I wanted a moment to just wiggle my toes in the grass, but I needed to keep moving.

Picking up the pace, I headed for a chain link fence and tore a hole through it before I kept on running, getting clear of the prison and into the woods.

I wasn’t quite sure where I’d been taken, and I was still wearing a torn up prison uniform.

My current plan was simple; get clear of the prison.

With the ground under my feet and the smell of nature around me, I was feeling far more centered. A smile grew on my face, and I turned back to see the prison on fire. It looked like it had spread. The area beyond mine was on fire as well.

That must have started when I’d overloaded the electrical system. Teaches them to cut corners. That probably shouldn’t have happened, but prisons weren’t exactly known for being built with safety as the top consideration.

Feeling for my mates, I could feel them all in a single direction. I kept heading through the woods, my legs pumped with draconic strength. I leaned into the run, feeling the wind in my face and loving every second of it.

I wondered what was going on with my wives. Based on the guard’s words, they likely hadn’t been able to find my location and were losing their minds. I’d wondered why nobody had showed up, especially my pregnant dragon wife.

And if they weren’t able to find me, that meant everything was likely going to shit as they no doubt were on the verge of strangling everyone else.

I’d had plenty of time to think in solitary. Simon had been dug up, and they’d at least claimed to have prints. Which, was fair given I did kill him. But if they’d truly turned that murder into charges, they wouldn’t have been able to lose my paperwork.

Which means they just used that image to get me to come along with them.

There had to be additional motive beyond locking me up.

Simon being dug up and me going missing would cause ripples throughout the Philly council and the greater paranormal community.

They were causing chaos with the move. Chaos that they likely hoped to use.

The big question was who would benefit from the chaos?

Norton wasn’t working alone. He wasn’t smart enough, and he needed inside information to have found Simon.

Someone inside the paranormal community was working against me.

My first thought flickered to the gnomes and dwarves. Despite my attempts to mend the relationship between our species, they were still cagey at best.

They thought I owed far more gold to them than I’d ever give up. But this didn’t feel like something they would do.

I needed to get back and start sorting everything out.

The treeline ended and I stumbled to a stop in the middle of a road.

I scanned around, not feeling comfortable shifting. It was too easy to be spotted.

My phone popped out of my bracer and I tried to start it, but the stupid thing was still dead. Four days of no charge was too much.

After a moment, an idea came to me. I scratched an enchantment on the trunk of a tree with a claw before pushing my mana into it.

“Come here, Pixie.” I whispered into the night as I tried to summon the gold coin that she should still be wearing around her neck.

I knew it would take a little bit for her to reach me, so I crouched low before springing up into the tree to wait.

I had spent three days in complete solitude. Waiting a little longer wouldn’t hurt.

AN - I love the guessing as to who's doing this. I thought about making the breakout bigger and giving you hints, but I liked the flow here.