Page 89 of Her Psycho Beasts

This is, after all, business.

The serpent’s double-story complex hidden in the quiet, leafy industrial area is disguised as a vaccine testing facility. One of Mace’s many ‘charitable contributions to our weaker human friends’. The entire thing is a ruse for his secret venom harvesting program. Barcoded serpents come here and pay their secret tithe to their king, having their venom milked and processed to be made into weapons.

Like the bullets they’d used to try and kill my brothers at the gates of Animus Academy a few months ago.

As such, millions of dollars’ worth of venom is stored here like treasure. This facility is integral to Mace’s strategy, and who better than themostsuperior species to take that all away from him?

Tying my hair back as I stride around the side of the complex, I locate the security office and black out the cameras angled at the back of the property. I have to climb over a gate and discreetly break a window, but once I’m in, I find two serpents sitting in the tiny office with eight big screens. They whip around, fangs bared, eyes wide, but I fling two ropes of fire around their necks and watch their airways sizzle until their deaths.

Satisfied that both worms are now lifeless, I zap some of my power through the computer. Dragon-magic is a powerful, adaptable weapon and we modern dragons have come to find ways to assert our power over these new modern monsters. Because of this, tripping the system so that the cameras would now be stuck on the same five-minute loop is easy.

I take out my phone and chooseI Am the Antichrist to Youby Kishi Bashi and the Nu Deco Ensemble. It’s a masterpiece that never fails to bring a tear to my eye. If humans are good for just one thing, it’s their music.

The six minute length of the song should do the trick.

When I first heard this song, it immediately reminded me of Scythe; part inspiration, part tragedy. He’s like the angel of death come to deliver justice in the most painful way before he returns to his underworld kingdom deep below. Tonight, I will channel him and hopefully make him proud. He’s like the big brother I never had, teaching me things my father never could.

I stroll out of the guard’s office into the dim corridor, pocketing their swipe cards. The night shift have turned off the main hallway lights, but I make quick work striding to the main working floor. I use a swipe card to get inside and come out onto a mezzanine viewing platform that runs around the perimeter of a warehouse-sized workspace. The platform is close to the ceiling so the supervisors can get a good view of anyone slacking off.

I take a moment to look upon them all. Worker worms in white protective caps, lab coats and gloves hunch over their work tables. The air is so thick with the scent of serpent and venom that it’s stifling.

Off to one side is a series of fridges that carry the raw venom of each type of snake common here. Eastern Brown, Coastal Taipan, Death Adder, Tiger snake; so many different types of worms with so many different vile secretions.

The whole place needs to be purged.

A couple of the workers notice me as I stroll along the platform towards the walk-in fridges, running my fingers along the steel railing. As I get behind the metal units, I peer down, tapping my fingers on the steel and count how many there are.

Twenty is quite a lot. But it’s not nearly all of it.

Most of the goods areunderthe building, deep in an underground system where snakes like to hide things from the council and human government.

The platform here terminates in a set of stairs leading down to the ground floor. Fire dances along my fingers as I make my way down the stairs.

A few of the serpents freeze before backing away as they see me. I smirk, tendrils of flame shooting from my fingers towards the workers in the row closest to me. Her plastic pipette catches fire and she screams, tossing it down and jumping back.

But a seven-foot-tall blond male dragon in a grey suit steps calmly out from the manager’s office. I stop in my tracks, steam immediately billowing from my nose.

“Xander,” Ragnar Firewing drawls, green eyes glittering maliciously. “I didn’t think I’d ever have the misfortune of laying my”—he cocks his head in a way that deserves murder—“eyeson my onetime brother-in-law ever again. I imagine you came here to disrupt things?” Ragnar shrugs. “We’ve levelled up the security since your little alliance with the Boneweaver girl.”

“I can’t deal with this,” I mutter under my breath.

“You really think your father wouldn’t know about this?” Ragnar indicates the facility at large, trying to get my attention. “Involve himself in a cause such as this?”

I’d thought he’d consider it beneath him. He’d always taught me that serpents were beneath us, the foulest of the foul. Liars, thieves, traitors. A Drakos alliance with the Nagas was unthinkable.

Perhaps things had changed more than I’d estimated.

“Mace is different to the serpent kings before him.” Ragnar smirks, making me want to shatter his face. “He understands the same things we do. He understands theproperway of things.”

The tiny fizzing sound that only my superior eardrums pick up suddenly makes itself known to Ragnar. His eyes widen only a millisecond before the flammable gases in the tubing of the entire row of industrial fridges explode. A fireball is born, molten, eternally hot, and engulfs half of the lab.

“Oh dear,” I deadpan. “You better go deal with that.”

Ragnar snarls and has no choice but to run to the other side of the floor towards the firehose, while the serpents are screaming and sprinting towards the fire exits.

Except I’ve electronically locked all the doors.

Calmly, I remove my jacket, waistcoat and pants, carefully folding them to maintain their creases and setting them on the floor. I leap into the air, shifting as I do, grabbing my clothes in a claw and flapping hard to accelerate towards the ceiling and fanning the flames. Putting my head down, I smash into the fibreglass ceiling, sending shards spraying like rain and allowing more oxygen to fuel the fire.

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