The bullets simply disappeared with no visible effect whatsoever. The nightmare dragon screeched at our defiance. The sound pierced my headset. If at first you don’t succeed, shoot it another hundred times. That’s what’s nice about belt-feds. “Come on, motherfucker!” I kept on shooting, hammering the dragon as the FN churned out spent brass and muzzle flashes. I hit it in the wings, in its dinosaur snout, and all across its body, but didn’t so much as get a flinch. Skippy cranked us hard the other way, I lost sight of the dragon, and then there was another building and Diamond Steve’s roller-coaster track between me and the dragon. We swayed, and it was Julie’s turn. I had volume, she had accuracy, and there was a series of shots, about two a second, as Julie probed for something vital.

“We’re going to need bigger guns,” she stated with forced calm. The dragon crashed through the roller-coaster track. Mockups of famous landmarks were pulverized into dust and splinters. “Way bigger.”

Skippy was swearing. We were slowing down. It was as if our chopper was starting to rotate along with the main rotors. The tail wasn’t keeping up. We were going to corkscrew it into the ground at a hundred miles an hour. With a few mighty beats of its wings, the dragon halved the distance between us. “Skippy, he’s gaining!”

“I try. Not know why…Spirits are displeased!”

“Because we got hit by a gargoyle missile.” The dragon’s jaws snapped shut a few feet behind us. “Tell your spirits to quit their crying and lose this son of a bitch!”

Another fire bolt streaked past. Somehow Skippy rolled us out of the way at the last instant. The hotel just ahead of us took the hit. The concussion shook us hard, then we were pinging and banging our way through a cloud of expanding shrapnel. Tanya screeched as a chunk of hot metal punched a hole through the wall next to her head. The girl had a set of lungs like you wouldn’t believe.

“What? Is that…Elf! There is filthy elf here! No wonder spirits displeased!” Skippy sounded relieved, like that explained everything. “Stow way…Edward, throw out window elf, please. Fix good.”

Edward grumbled, “No…Elf girl. Nice.”

“What? Exszrsd, no!” Skippy was shocked and dismayed at his brother’s betrayal. “Noooo!” The Hind turned on its side to fit between two towers. The dragon was forced to swing around. Skippy launched into a giant tirade in his native, guttural, nearly incomprehensible language. Despite my having a great natural talent for learning languages, so far Orcish had eluded me. It was like trying to understand someone shaking a bucket of rocks. Edward snapped something back. Apparently he was just as terse in Orcish as in English. They went back and forth as the dragon’s tail swept the twenty-foot neon sign off the top of the Paradisio.