If he were any kind of a sorcerer, if he were the sorcerer the family—the world—needed, he could put these men to sleep, or create an illusion so real they’d believe it, or stop time long enough to get in and out and save the day. But he wasn’t that kind of a sorcerer, or any kind of a sorcerer really, so he fell back on what he knew.

A car blew up on the far side of the parking lot.

The men with the clipboards turned at the sound, and after a short discussion, one walked briskly around the corner of the building. He ran back.

Confused by the amount of talking—Humans were usually a lot more attached to their cars—Jack blew up an SUV and a pickup truck. Roar of sound. Pillars of flame. Full-on movie special effects.

That got everyone’s attention. The area around the ice emptied of witnesses.

He landed as gently as he could, but the asphalt cracked beneath him. Wings in, head down, careful to stay behind the building, he examined the ice. The axes had etched thin lines, evidence that in a hundred years or so the men wielding iron would actually reach the doors. The chainsaws had done more damage, but from the number of broken chains tossed aside, the ice stood a good chance of winning by attrition. The blowtorches had melted deep grooves. As Jack watched, the ice filled them in.

He took a step back, drew in a deep breath, and flamed. Dragons and Frost Giants were natural enemies. The ice didn’t melt, it vaporized.

As a patch of the steel door began to scorch, one of the tanks fueling the blowtorches exploded. Most of the shrapnel melted in the superheated air, but a sudden pain in his left shoulder snapped Jack’s teeth together as instinct took over before he could gasp. The flame cut off.

Inhaling while flaming was fatal; his mother had told him that when he first started to smoke. Fatal, and messy.

The wound was minor; the shard had barely penetrated the scale. He touched it with his tongue, checked for poison out of habit, and ignored it to examine the building. The door was clear, so Jack hooked a claw under the handle and pulled it open.

Off was like open.

He changed to skin to walk into the building, stumbled, and remembered, as blood dribbled down his arm, that the injury wasn’t proportional to the change and an eight-centimeter cut at twenty-meters tall was an entirely different matter at just under two meters. Plus, it hurt. A lot.