Or a door handle.
The moment that image popped into my head, the ground beneath the dragon’s feet swung open, and he dropped into the dark. A second later, he reappeared from the second door I’d opened in the bottom of the Skyway bridge above our heads, plummeting a hundred feet to crash into the street behind me.
“Why didn’t you drop him into the void?” my father hissed, running over.
“Because it’s one of her private places,” I hissed back. “She gets mad when people litter on the street! I don’t think she’d appreciate me dropping a dragon into her personal space!”
I’d hoped the hundred-foot fall onto asphalt would be enough to knock him out. But while young dragons were weaker than old ones, they were still frustratingly tough. This one must have had an even harder head than average, because he was already pushing back to his feet. He wasn’t even bleeding when he turned to face me again, his teeth bared and sharp and suddenly too big for his human face.
“I’ll kill you!”
I eeped and grabbed as much magic as I could. We’re talking State-Fair-winning-watermelon levels that I rolled into a ball and hurled into his chest. The blast was enough to make the dragon stagger, but it was uncontrolled and soft. My next attempt was much better, knocking him several feet down the street, but still not far enough.
“You can’t keep that up forever!” he taunted, grinning as he dodged my next shot. “It’s funny, White Snake’s mortal claimed you were a terrible mage. Seems that was a lie too.”
“You should know better than to listen to anything involving White Snake,” I said, forming the magic into a spear this time before hurling it at him. It was a beautiful shot, catching the dragon right in the chest. He must have been getting used to my magic though, because he got back up a second after I knocked him down, brushing the dirt from his hands as if this was just a bit of fun.
“I take it you’re working with White Snake, then,” I said, trying to buy myself some time. “How much is she paying you?”
The dragon laughed. “Nothing. I’d never partner with a defeated coward! Everyone saw the DFZ smack her into the river like a gnat. Any reputation she had is mud, and she knows it. No one’s seen her any more than her brother. Even her humans abandoned her. I bought your info off one of her men in exchange for a plane ticket out of town.”
I shared a quick look with my dad, but there was no time to discuss this new development. The young dragon was closing in fast, his silvery eyes glowing in the dark.
“All of Korea is without a dragon,” he said excitedly. “One of the world’s richest territories, ripe for the taking! Every clan in the world is at the Dragon Consulate right now arguing over who should get it, but if I show up with Yong’s head, everyone will know that I defeated him, and all that land will be mi—”
He cut off with a grunt as I slammed a fridge-sized lump of hardened magic into his chest. It was my best shot yet thanks to all that talking giving me time to prepare. Sadly, even that was still only enough to knock the dragon back. As he rolled to his feet yet again, I had a new idea. A much better one. It would be risky, but this was clearly going nowhere, so I decided to take a risk, closing my eyes and dropping to my knees as the dragon began to run.
It’s a terrifying thing, being charged by an apex predator. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel his feet pounding toward me through the ground. If I couldn’t make this work, they’d pound me into paste, so I forced myself to ignore what was coming and focus on what I was going to do about it. Focus on pulling the rich magic of the city into me, and not in pumpkin-measures this time. This was going to take all the power I could hold. After how badly I’d hurt myself last time, the thought of using my full draw again terrified me. But it was that or lose to this cocky idiot, so I stomped my fear down and did it anyway, sucking in magic until my soul felt like it was about to explode.
It hurt just as bad as I remembered. Now that I knew what I was doing, I could feel just how dangerously overfull I was, how thin the part of me I thought of as myself was stretched. Thankfully, I only had to bear it for a moment. That was the beauty of Shamanic magic. I didn’t have to draw a circle or write out spellwork. All I had to do was not lose control, riding that lightning for the split second it took me to whip all that magic into the shape I’d already envisioned.
The instant I had it, the magic ripped out of me. As it left, I worried I’d pushed too fast, that my vision wasn’t strong enough to actually hold all that power together. But all those weeks of practicing must have done something, because even though I’d been working in a terrified rush, the shape the magic took was exactly the one I’d had in my head. Not a spear or a ball, but the streaking silhouette of a train running down the tracks at full speed as it crashed into the dragon who was now less than a foot away.
What happened next I will treasure for the rest of my life. The train I’d conjured was no more physical than anything else I shaped with magic, so
