“Did you see that?”
“Maybe it was one of the drones. They sometimes go down. You know, we used to use crows for security. They were much better except, of course, they did like to steal the keys.”
“No! There—look.” A figure dressed in black sprinted from one bush to the next. They had used the path so hadn’t even left tracks in the snow.
“I didn’t see—”
“Watch my back.” She raced after the black-clad intruder. “You—this is private property. Stop now and no one gets hurt.”
The person dashed from cover. Whoever they were, they were fast. She turned her speed on to pursue the person across the grounds and left a startled Jasper behind her.
Chapter Six
With her dragon speed activated, Kristen cut through the freshly fallen snow toward the last hedge she’d seen the figure vanish into.
“Come on out with your hands up, kid. This is private property but I’m sure you didn’t know that.” She had found that people often clung to lies when they could. This was obviously private property, what with the eight-foot-tall wrought iron fence, but sometimes, if a hostile thought there was an easy way out they’d take it. In their panic, if you could manage to say the same flawed things they were thinking, it would derail them.
Not this one, though.
The person burst from the side of the hedge—like a face-hugger from Aliens exploding out of a hippopotamus bush—and raced away from her.
“You’re making a mistake!” She sprinted after the fugitive and closed the gap quickly. The person turned and she tried to as well, but she slipped and sprawled in the snow. She pushed herself up and dusted the powdery substance from her face, but the intruder was no longer visible.
A quick scan of the area revealed the tracks in the snow. They led to a bush cut into the shape of a horse, except one of the legs was way too thick. Before she could even give chase, a snowball flew from the greenery and caught her squarely in the face.
“Hey!” she yelled and wiped the snow from her eyes. By the time her face was clear, the trespasser was already gone. The snowball had been clever. They’d blinded her and used the opportunity to get out of her line of sight.
Kristen ran after them again, only to slip once more on the slick ground. “Oh, forget this,” she muttered and transformed into a dragon.
She still didn’t know how to transform while she was moving, so she had to burn a few precious seconds to change forms. Steel confetti enveloped her and obscured her from the material world while magic retrieved her dragon body from wherever it had been.
“Ah, much better,” she said, flexed her wings, and cracked her tail in her fully transformed body.
She bounded in the direction of the trespasser but misjudged her dragon bulk and slid with her back legs instead of using them to launch her into flight. She thumped into the snow and crushed the topiary horse without meaning to.
This time, before taking flight, she dug her claws through the snow and into the dirt. When her wings pumped, she tore huge gashes in the earth but at least she didn’t slip.
Now airborne, she could see the path the intruder was taking. The figure ran from bush to bush, using them for cover but doing something else as well. Disabling the cameras inside, maybe?
Kristen pumped her wings and approached the tiny human.
“Come out of the bush or I’ll light it on fire,” she roared, bluffing shamelessly. She had no intention to incinerate a human for trespassing, even if they were damaging equipment. Still, she had to look like she was, so she tucked her wings and dove at the bush—this one in the shape of a gazelle.
The person heeded her warning and bolted, leaving cover moments before Kristen reached them. The human really was fast. She tried to adjust in mid-flight, but she miscalculated, crashed through the gazelle, and snapped it off at the roots.
Grimly, she realized she really would need to practice more evasive maneuvers. She had used her flight to travel great distances, but it turned out that she was about as effective a hunter as a pigeon. She recalled dropping the duffle bag and acknowledged that she probably should have practiced more with it.
Still, she could follow the person’s tracks through the snow. Or could she? Gusts of wind seemed to erase them and fill them with more snow. It could have merely been a coincidence—she was kicking up a fair amount of snow herself, after all—but she didn’t think so. She had a feeling that if she went back to the bush where she’d first seen the person, the tracks leading from the estate would be gone.
Did that mean she was hunting a dragon right now? The thought startled her, but she dismissed it quickly. She would have sensed an aura.
The intruder broke cover and raced toward the mansion itself.
Kristen had her quarry now. There was nowhere to hide on those brick walls, not unless they made it to the roof and there, the dragon would undoubtedly have the advantage.
She approached rapidly, her claws ready to snatch the hostile up, when the figure spun with a handgun aimed at her. They wore a black ski mask with a slit for the eyes, so she couldn’t tell much, but she saw white skin and pale eyes, and something in the line of the nose made her think the hostile was a woman. A fairly ignorant woman by the looks of things.
Her mental smile was a little smug. This definitely wasn’t a dragon, then. They knew pistols couldn’t harm dragons.
The trespasser fired three times and she felt none of the shots. Either the woman had missed or the projectiles had simply bounced off her. She didn’t like to turn her entire dragon body into steel—that made her too heavy—but after fighting Shadowstorm, she was in the habit of turning her chest, neck, and the skin on her head into steel to protect her vitals. So it was that a silvery dragon that appeared to wear a breastplate, chainmail on its neck, and a helm attacked the person foolish enough to shoot at such a being with a handgun.
The intruder fired a fourth time. Poor, simple, human. They should have known that the Steel Dragon had survived machine gun fire, cars impacting her, and even a rocket-propelled grenade. A bullet wouldn’t—
She felt sudden pain in her wing—sharp, blinding, indescribably real pain. Instinctively, she flapped it to right herself, but the joint felt like fire. Was it broken or perhaps torn? Her dragon body reacted instinctively by using its wings to regain her equilibrium, which only hurt more.
Kristen screamed in agony and a great gout of flame erupted from her throat along with it. She managed to point the jet of flame away from the mansion and thus only burned a topiary bush in the shape of a weightlifter before she crash-landed.
Her spiny body rent the earth below her. It didn’t hurt, not really, except for her wing, which felt like it was being torn to pieces.
She concentrated as she tumbled and changed into her steel-skinned human form as she rolled through the snow. When she pushed herself to her feet and looked behind her, a giant gash in the earth—a swath of destruction—lay between her and the mansion. She’d caused a substantial amount of damage, and the person she’d confronted was gone. Or worse, they were inside.
With a muttered curse, she sprinted toward the building and scanned for some sign of the interloper. Instead, she saw a copper dragon atop the roof. It flapped its wings and breathed fire into the air in a tight line, more like a laser-focused threat of flame than the huge ball of fire she had belched when she’d been wounded by the bullet.
“Do you see her?” she yelled to Jasper. It was obvious the copper dragon was the old man. She could sense his aura like an emotional fingerprint.
“There’s no sign of her. She didn’t get inside, though. I’m sure of that.” Jasper sounded confident, so she decided to trust him. That was something she’d learned on SWAT—trust your teammates.
“Did you call for backup?” Kristen asked.
He nodded. “That line of fire will alert the rest of dragon security. I flashed an aura too so even if they weren’t watching, they’ll have felt it.”
She nodded
and knew what to do now. Secure the scene, try not to mess up the already vanishing evidence, and wait for backup.
Chapter Seven
“All right, let’s go through your version of events one more time,” Sergeant Ridgespine said. He’d arrived a few minutes before with more officers from Dragon SWAT. Kristen supposed she should have been relieved but the dismissive way he spoke had begun to really piss Kristen off.
“I pursued the intruder on foot.”
“The intruder that’s not on any of the cameras.” Skeptical didn’t even begin to describe his tone of voice.
“She appeared to know where the cameras were, sir.”
“Uh-huh. And that’s how he completely avoided every single one of them. And then there are the footprints in the snow. Those that don’t exist.”
“Like I already told you, some kind of wind came through and cleared the tracks away. Plus, I think it was a woman, not a man.”
“And this wind happened to ignore all the tracks you left behind, not to mention the vast amounts of property damage you caused. None of that was affected by this wind.”
Kristen clenched her jaw. “Yes. I assumed it was magic. Maybe she was a mage.”
“Right. So which spell would that have been, then? The one that cleans away the tracks of an intruder but not the ones of the pursuer?”
“I don’t know! Timeflash can put things back the way they were. There has to be some kind of spell that can do that but for tracks.” She tried not to get frustrated, a near impossibility.
“Does there? This is your second day on Dragon SWAT, Steel. You didn’t spend any time with Atramento learning about magic, so what makes you think you’re an expert on it now?”
“What else could have allowed them to get so far in? Or it could have been a dragon using some kind of magic ability.”
“A dragon whose aura you didn’t sense.” Ridgespine didn’t roll his eyes but his look was so dismissive he might as well have.
“I told you, I’m not the best at auras. Shadowstorm obviously pretended to teach me far more than he actually did, and Stonequest and I only trained a few times together.”
“Can you read my aura now?”
She gritted her teeth. His aura was as plain as day—disbelief, disinterest, and a dollop of disgust for good measure. “Yes, I can read your aura.”
“Good. Do you know what else can read my aura?” Ridgespine gestured to a cluster of human-shaped dragons. One of them saw him and came over with a glass sphere in their hands.
“I’ve seen one of those before,” Kristen mumbled. There had been one on the roof where she’d found Death’s body.
“Then you know that this device detects and records dragon auras. It's far more sensitive than even the most adept dragon. Do you know what auras we’ve found on it?”
“No, sir.”
“We’ve found Windfire’s. Do you think he snuck in and tried to assassinate himself?”
“No, sir, of course not.”
“We found Jasper’s. Shocking, I know, and we found yours. That’s it, Steel. There was nothing more than that to be found at all. Not a speck of evidence to support either a dragon or this lady mage of yours.”
“Well, if that device exists, couldn’t another device exist that could block that one?” Even saying it, she knew she was grasping at straws.
“The aural sensor has existed for centuries. In that time, dozens of dragons have tried to improve it or block it and not one of them has been able to. I think if someone had cracked that nut, they might have done more with it than trick a security guard into destroying one of the most finely landscaped gardens in the Americas.”
“They planned on doing more. It was lucky that I stopped them.”
“By getting shot.”
“Yes, Sergeant. And I’m telling you, this handgun hurt.” Kristen had already shown both Ridgespine and a mage trained in the healing arts her damaged wing. Except, of course, it was no longer damaged. The bullet had penetrated her wing near the joint, which caused her to crash, but it had exited as well. By the time the other dragons had arrived and she transformed into her dragon form to show them, the wound was healed. There wasn’t even a scar to mark the bullet’s passage. “I think the gun, the possible magic effects to cover their trail, and their obvious knowledge of the camera positions means we’re dealing with a professional.”
“A professional you scared off.” Ridgespine probably used a more respectful tone before squashing an insect.
“A professional who probably wasn’t prepared for two dragons to be here. Think about it. I was the only unknown factor. If I hadn’t been here, think of what might have happened.”
“My guess would be nothing.”
“Someone could have died!”
“Yeah, I don’t think so, Steel. Maybe you think you would have died of boredom, but you made sure that didn’t happen either. Here’s what I think. You made up the whole damn thing. We know a dragon didn’t come out here. Of that, I have no doubt. Which means, for your little hypothesis to be correct, some kind of human assassin with a magic gun and wind powers infiltrated the best damn security I’ve ever seen and the only person who stopped it was the same person who wrecked the damn landscaping.”
“Sir, it wasn’t a magic gun. I’ve seen this kind of tech before. The bullets could have been made from pieces of dragon.”
“Enough!” Ridgespine snapped. “That’s macabre and disgusting.” He shook his head, appalled at the suggestion. Okay, so obviously Stonequest hadn’t told the sergeant about the bullets that had killed Death. Before she could speak, he continued and talked with such fury that the words came out of his mouth punctuated with spittle. “Here’s my hypothesis. The Steel Dragon arrived here, promptly got bored—like she seems to no matter where she is—and rather than talking to Jasper and learning a few damn things about our world, she went on a little joyride.”
Kristen shook her head. “No, sir. That’s not it at all. Why would I have crashed?”
“It’s common knowledge you can transform into steel in both your human and dragon forms. My guess is something spooked you in flight—one of these fool drones, probably—and you failed to compensate for the extra weight and crashed.”
“No, sir. I’m telling you it was a human.”
“Do you have any idea how fucking insane you sound?” Ridgespine roared. She hadn’t heard him swear before. He used the word with vitriol that would have impressed Hernandez and made Kristen’s mom suffer a stroke. “Humans are not threats to us. There hasn’t been a rebellion in centuries. And even in those rebellions, it wasn’t the humans who did a damn thing to dragon kind. They had to make dwarves and pixies to even pretend that they could stand against us.”
“But—”
“And then, on top of this ridiculous claim that a human with never seen before magic powers led this attack—an attack which there’s exactly zero evidence for, other than the damage you caused, of course—you claim that they hurt you with a pistol? It’s fucking ridiculous and an insult to everything Dragon SWAT aspires to be.”
“Stonequest will corroborate my story. He took in Death, the dragon assassin who was hunting me with—”
“I don’t think so, Kristen.” It was Stonequest. She was so worked up talking to Ridgespine that she hadn’t even seen him arrive. His team had accompanied him and they paced along the tracks she had left through the snow.
“You don’t think so? Tell Ridgespine what we saw—”
He shook his head and frowned at her, draining away the confidence she’d worked so hard to maintain.
“Come talk to me, Lady Steel. In private.”
She nodded, beyond confused that she was being led away from the investigation. They tromped through the snow until they reached a water fountain that was beginning to ice over.
Finally, they stopped. She could sense Stonequest’s aura pounding against her own, urging her to calm, to lower her voice, to breathe deeply, and most of all, to be quiet.
But she had trained enough with her aura to throw off any effect another dragon could put on her.
“Don’t you try to dismiss this, too,” she warned him.
“I’m not!” he protested.
“Your aura says otherwise.”
“No, Kristen, listen to me. I merely want you to calm down. I have a few questions.”
“Question one. Steel Dragon, how does it feel to lose your damn mind?” Kristen said sarcastically.
“No! damn it. I believe you. At least, I want to. You’ve practiced turning into steel while you’re in flight?”
“Yes! That’s all I’ve practiced. It makes me heavier, so I need to know what to do about that. I already told Ridgespine that my chest, neck, and head were steel, but not my wing.”
“And you don’t think you would’ve turned your wing to steel to defend yourself from the handgun?”
“No. Absolutely not. The first three shots either caught me in places that I had turned to steel or missed completely so I didn’t feel them. I thought the fourth would do the same so I didn’t bother to further transform—wait, you believe me that there was a shooter?”
“I don’t think you trashed this place for fun,” Stonequest said slowly.
“So tell the rest of them that you think someone else was here. Maybe then they’ll stop looking at me like I’m crazy.”
He shook his head and for once, actually looked nervous. “If I start corroborating your story, many more questions will be asked.”
“I know. That’s basically the point of an investigation.”
“The point of an investigation is to maintain security.”
“The point of an investigation is to catch criminals!” Kristen shouted in response. She hadn’t meant to raise her voice but didn’t regret it either.
“Sure, yes, you’re right, at least mostly. But there’s a reason that open investigations aren’t public knowledge, even in the human world, correct?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Can we please rewind to you getting shot again?” Stonequest asked and tried and failed to placate her with his cop voice.
The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2) Page 5
