28

The two pressed Cobb down on the bed gently, removed their hands and filed out of the room, pausing to escort me back out of the doorway and into the main room again. “Will he be all right?” I felt a twinge of concern. The guy did after all put his butt on the line with me, that had to count for something. Unless it was supposed to go down that way, it was quite a coincidence having a second shade hiding in the room guarding a second book. I shook my head and threw the thought away. Cobb had things so swirled up that I was getting overly paranoid.
I walked back into the library and looked at the book in the circle. I t had been scorched, and some of the pages burned from the book. I guess someone didn't want the book read by prying eyes like mine. I looked to the shelves for a similar scorch mark, figuring if the shade WAS actually guarding a book, I might see the same result when it was destroyed by Cobb. A quick scan of the room showed no scorch marks. Maybe it was my magic spell that caused it to burn? No telling at this point. Best thing that I could do was to keep researching.
I went back to the books, lacking anything else productive to do. For the next week, I went over the books, reading legends from the dim past, observations, both recent and ancient. Speculation on speculation. I have to admit, the fae have a love of forming opinions and recording them in the most long-winded, obscure, and sideways manner. I had to take breaks every ten to twenty minutes to keep my head from aching with frustration as the writers slowly approached their subject amidst flowery phrases and foggy passages.
I suppose if you wanted to say that was how they protected their information, making it so hard to read that no one would want to, maybe you might be right. I was certainly getting closer to that opinion with every book I read that fae had dictated or copied. After each day Larry, Fawn and I would go over to the police gym to do self defense with Fawn and her team, and push weights to decompress. Then it was over to Larry and Fawn's to put all our heads together and see what we had.
After four weeks of research, reading, referencing and more reading, we got what we thought was the best picture about dragons and their magick.
1. Dragons are very long-lived, possibly immortal unless felled by illness or violence.
2. Dragons are highly intelligent, and coupling this with their lifespan, they could very well be way past human genius.
3. Dragons are easy to damage and extremely hard to kill. This is because of their ability to hide the essence of their existence in concentrated somewhere in their bodies. Unless you hit the right spot, you could theoretically blow them half to pieces and they'd grow back in a matter of moments, which I'm sure is very painful, and would give the dragon a real motivation to doing unto the author of their hurt. They have scales like lizards, and in large dragons these get tough to penetrate. Bullets will do the job, but also garner the shooter a LOT of unhealthy attention.
4. Dragons have many dangerous natural weapons. Don't laugh, claws as big as your thigh in the rally big dragons, teeth straight and needle like, and long as your forearm. And, yes, they breathe fire. Their mouths are set up like a natural combustion chamber. Three chemicals come together in the mouth, fuel, oxidizer, and one that jells the mix together. and whoosh, napalm barbeque at two hundred yards.
5. Dragons are inherently magickal.. They not only can concentrate their essence, but they can work spells. The three we cataloged are mostly body control, such as hardening of their scales, and giving their teeth and claws razor sharpness. The 'fireball' magic is the scary one. The dragon works up a mouthful of two of the three chemicals, casts a squeezing and aiming spell on the material, and adds the third chemical. Reports of one-thousand yard shots of exploding dragonfire we found throughout the personal accounts.
A few modern records of Anolyn's fight with four Canadian CF-18 Hornets, resulting in a wounded pissed off dragon and four obliterated Hornets. The report went that Anolyn attacked Prince Edward island, and the Four Hornets were scrambled from Bagotville to intercept, the aircraft broke into two flights and one circled while the other attacked. Because of his lack of heat and maneuverability, the sidewinders failed to get a hit, and the Hornets went to guns and the first burst hurt Anolyn.
The dragon recovered before hitting the ground and a fireball engulfed the Hornets and obliterated one, and the other crashed when the heat caused the engine to flame out. The other two had the same difficulty with their missles, and Anolyn's fireballs tracked the maneuverable CF-18's and blew them out of the sky.
6. Dragons seem to prefer intelligent prey, and more than one ancient scholar stated that this was because the dragon saw intelligence as a threat to it, and thus killed anything showing any kind of problem-solving ability in it's territory. Others thought it was just that dragons saw intelligent creatures as more sporting to hunt.
And this is the thing's territory I was going to invade, and try to set up an underground railroad out of without turning into a burnt and crispy snack.
7. Dragons are sensitive to magick, and magickal weaponry can kill them without having to strike their essence. This was the information out of the two scorched books that the Halifax police were able to pull from the scorched and burned pages. They'd copied each page faithfully in the language it was written, and I took the pages back to Cobb's library where the desk translated them for us.
8. Dragon magic is subject to different rules than fae magic, and also from human magic. This meant that my magic might not be able to affect Anolyn's effectively unless we were able to find a way that wouldn't have me going straight at it. The plus side is that human magic affects, and is unfortunately affected by every other magic. It's kind of like human magic is the base or origin for the others. Just a guess on my part, but that turned out to be a useful observation later, who knew?
Basically, Dragon magic came from the dragon itself, and dragons had a BIG mess of magic to call from. Their spells were both devious and extremely powerful. The fae noted that taking down a spell from one dragon that had put a bubble over five fae wizards remained in place until three more fae wizards were able to join the other five in the dispelling.