The Dragon Done It by Mike Resnick, Eric Flint Read Free Book Online Page B

pictures. But the Big Dictionary . . . well, it's my Bible.
    I cracked the spine backwards until the cover read V to X , then turned it to W . All the werewolf packs were listed alphabetically but, surprise surprise, no mention of the Helmfwolfen . The list went straight from Hatchet-wolf to Hosenhund without taking a breath.
    I closed the book and cracked the spine again until it was an atlas. A quick scan of Bavaria gave me no clues, so I closed and cracked it a third time until it was a history of shapeshifters. Still nothing.
    I sighed, put the Big Dictionary back on the shelf and went to pick up the phone. What I saw outside my office door stopped me in my tracks.
    It was a femme , and she sure was looking fatale .
    She was tall—tall enough so I'd have had to stand on a box to meet her eye. A long, white sweater, soaked through by the rain, clung to her curves all the way down to her knees. Beneath it there was nothing but her. Water on the glass obscured her face. One hand was perched on her hip, the other was holding a handgun—a big one—up against the door. As I watched, she fired a bullet at point-blank range into the glass.
    The door rang like a bell and I saw the bullet ricochet, carving a thin trail of vapor through the rain. It missed the dame's left ear by an inch, maybe two.
    "Hey, lady . . ." I began. Then she fired again.
    This time, when the bullet ricocheted, it took a chunk out of the sidewalk. It also took a chunk out of the glass.
    "Hey," I said again, "what's with the—?"
    Another bullet. Another sliver of glass.
    The dame fired four more bullets, reloaded quickly and calmly, then started firing again.
    The door was tough enough to take this kind of punishment for a while, but not forever. I shot a glance at the filing cabinet—I have my own arsenal of weapons in the second drawer up—but something made me slide my gaze up to the drawer above.
    Another bullet hit the door, then she wiped the glass clean and peered inside, showing me her face for the first time. As a rule I don't gasp. Not unless somebody gives me good reason. She did.
    "Of all the dames!" I gasped. "It had to be you."
    I picked up the hat. Then, without thinking, I strode over to the filing cabinet and did something I hadn't done for nearly ten years: I opened the top drawer, folded myself in half and fell inside.
     
    It was just as bad as I remembered.
    I was falling through dark, bitter air. Icy winds tried to grab me with angry fingers. Way in the distance I could see flashes of what looked like lightning, but what sounded like a giant clearing its throat.
    I fell like this for what felt like a day. During that time I only blinked my eyes once.
    Then, slowly, something began to materialize out of the gloom: a pair of parallel silver lines, writhing like two snakes that had been shackled together but which hated each other's guts. They weren't snakes, of course; they were railroad tracks.
    The tracks came closer. The lightning still flashed, but now there was another light smearing its way towards me. It was centered on the tracks, and followed their jitterbug routine like it was glued to them. Which, in a way, it was.
    Soon I heard a rumbling sound, more metallic than the throat-clearing, twice as loud and getting louder all the time. The wind gusted, blasting into me from the same direction as the approaching smear of light. Then I heard a whistle, long and glutinous, and suddenly it was on me, an immense iron lobster with two hundred wheels, all interconnected with rods and dripping sinews and sprung cables and grinding cylinders. Brakes engaged and the mammoth train screeched to a halt. Steam erupted from a thousand greasy sphincters, oil oozed through toothsome grilles, chains with links as thick as my arm cracked like whips and flaming coals spilled from a great brazier perched high behind the funnel, half a mile above my head.
    And there I stood, just as amazed and daunted as I had been the first—and