There was little left but the smell of burning flesh and a mess of swirling ash that settled thickly on the spotless floor.
Then it was dragon on dragon.
Humphrey and Orion met in a blur of limbs, their eyes gone dragon, their skin rippling with scales. Orion landed a solid punch to the older man’s face, and he shook his head, droplets of bright blood splattering from his nose. Where it touched the floor, it crystallized into red-white ice.
They backed off and circled each other. Then Orion let out a massive burst of flame that rolled toward Humphrey, a blossoming plume of orange and black. Humphrey countered with a frigid cloud that flashed into steam as it met the fire.
Nikolai was grappling with Humphrey’s hired muscle, his fingers wrapped tightly around the man’s wrists. Where his fingers indented the thug’s skin, it blistered and reddened. Nikolai’s cheek was marked with an unwholesome-looking bloom of grayish frostbite. The man attempted to throw Nikolai, leading with his hip – some kind of martial arts move – but Nikolai wrapped his arm around the man’s throat as he turned. He braced his neck from behind as he twisted his head sharply. There was a sickening crack, and the thug slumped to the ground, his neck broken.
Dr. Kowalski cowered in the corner. Alcott stood over her, smoke wisping gently from his nostrils as if to remind her that should he wish to, he could vaporize her, leaving her as nothing more than a settling cloud of soot. Her face was a ghastly parchment color and she looked as if she might vomit. The whites of her still-human eyes were visible as she gazed up into Alcott’s contemptuous, implacable face. Not just a monstrous excuse for a mother, but a coward as well, his expression said. And when his eyes briefly flickered to Cadence, crackling with frost and fury as she guarded her dragonlings, his eyes briefly softened with approval.
Her attention was snatched back to Orion as he seized Humphrey bodily and slammed him to the floor. Humphrey’s breath left his body on a feeble icy grunt that would have shamed a dragonling. He held up his hands as though trying to shield himself from the inferno he knew was coming.
Orion flamed him, the center of his fire as blue-white as a welding torch, as intense as his rage. Waves of orange and red washed over the defeated ice dragon, and his scream was, mercifully, brief.
Orion didn’t stop until a beeping alarm on one of the incubators indicated that the temperature of the whole room had risen by several degrees – he wouldn’t risk harming the eggs. And besides, there was nothing left of Humphrey but a charcoal shell that glittered here and there with the frosty white and iridescent blue of an ice dragon’s scales.
Cadence briefly closed her eyes, and allowed her claws to retract and her scales to melt back into her skin. She turned to the nest, reaching down to soothe her brand new dragonlings.
“Are you all right?” Orion husked, rushing to her side.
“I’m fine now that my babies are safe. How did you get away from the guards?” Cadence asked, cradling a tiny ice dragonling in her arms. The dragon snuggled up against her and made a purring sound as Cadence stroked its soft scales. Orion had his arm protectively slung around her; she was still shaking.
“I knew there was trouble as soon as we saw the guards outside,” Orion said. “They were all ice dragons – I recognized a few of them from our previous visits, but some of the ice dragons were wearing fire dragon uniforms.”
Orion picked up a fire dragonling and stroked its head, and it blinked up at him happily and burped out a tiny spurt of fire.
“That’s what was bothering me about them. I couldn’t put my finger on it,” Cadence said.
“I told Nikolai, and as soon as that door shut behind us, he and the other men subdued the guards and then we just all joined in and melted the doors down.”
Dr. Kowalski rushed up to them. “You will protect me,” she said desperately. “I can help you have more babies. I can ensure that your hatchlings survive every time.”
Cadence let out a carefully directed blast of ice, enough to freeze Dr. Kowalski’s hair, and coat her face with frost, but not enough to kill her. Dr. Kowalski staggered back.
“The Dragon Elders will take over the clinic, and use the technology for the good of all dragons,” Orion said to her. “As for you, you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.”
Then he hugged Cadence to him. “And now, I’m going to take my family home,” he said, and planted a tender kiss on his dragonling’s scaly head.
Epilogue
Orion was able to put his legal skills to good use when Humphrey’s clan tried to claim the two ice dragonlings from Cadence’s hatchlings. It turned out that when the Elders had created the law five hundred years earlier, they’d written it in such a way that it had been assumed that a dragon would have either all ice or all fire dragonlings. The law was written in such an unclear fashion that Orion was not only able to argue that all the hatchlings should remain with his clan, but was able to get the law overturned.