The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

“Yeah, sorry. I was trying to get it under wraps.”

  “It’s cool. Its less than what it was,” her old teammate said in a rare moment of kindness.

  “That’s because she’s happy to see me,” Keith said.

  Hernandez threw an arm around his shoulder and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Well, aren’t we all, Rookie?”

  “You know, technically, Jim has been on the force for less time than—”

  “Kristen!” Butters burst from the building and enveloped her in a massive hug.

  “If you crush me any harder, I’ll have to turn to steel to save myself from having my ribs cracked,” she wheezed.

  “Bring it. I need the workout. Plus, can’t your dragon powers heal a couple of cracked ribs?” he asked as he put her down and smiled. “What you doing around here? Are you up for a night of slumming?”

  “That’s what I wondered,” Hernandez said. “What, did you get sick of people treating your bitch-ass with respect?” She grinned and dared her to rise to the insult.

  Kristen merely laughed weakly.

  The other woman frowned. “Oh, shit, what’s wrong?”

  “I’ll tell you guys over drinks. The first round is on me. Are Drew, Jim, and Beanpole off too?”

  “They’re finishing up some paperwork but I’ll text them and they can meet us there,” Keith said and dug in his pocket for his phone.

  “Okay cool. I wouldn’t want to only buy drinks for the members of SWAT I never liked.”

  Hernandez laughed hard at that. Butters put on a fake dopy frown and feigned being insulted. It was a nice moment, one in which to forget all the bullshit of her job and the awkward place between two societies where she would spend the foreseeable future.

  They walked to the bar and Keith chattered about how many views the video of SWAT in airsoft combat had received. Apparently, he had told the kid manning the cameras to post it online, and it was doing very well. She wasn’t surprised. The Steel Dragon was an Internet sensation.

  They reached the bar, ordered a few pitchers of beer, and made small talk for another few minutes. Kristen reveled in it all—Butters’ insistence that the wings weren’t really that great even as he virtually inhaled them by the fistful, Hernandez’s constant, unending shit-talking, and Keith’s bubbling enthusiasm that would forever make him seem as green a cop as could be.

  When Drew, Jim, and Beanpole arrived, they greeted her with the same self-effacing humor.

  “Oh, shit. Lady Steel has come to inflict her will upon her loyal subjects,” Jim said in a horrible attempt at a British accent and dropped to one knee.

  “I hope I can drink a beer before you enlist us to hunt another dragon,” Drew said, but he didn’t reach for one until she poured it for him. He was always a cop first and a human second and, given their history, he probably thought that the chances of them hunting another dragon on their off time were actually fairly good.

  “Hi, Kristen,” Beanpole said. He still seemed shy with her, but he was shy with everyone, really. But you didn’t necessarily need people skills to be a good cop, especially if your go-to role was as a lookout who didn’t let anyone get past him.

  “So…” Jim turned to her and raised an eyebrow after everyone had talked shit for a few minutes about Captain Hansen and her obsession with filing forms in a timely manner. In that moment, she could feel tension, as if her old team had an aura of their own. She supposed she could feel their emotional state with her new powers. It was an odd realization.

  Still, tense or not, she filled them in on the bare outline of their earlier callout. She used the opportunity to tell them about the trials and tribulations of her own job, hoping she could bitch and moan about work with the rest of them, but it didn’t work. As soon as she mentioned that two dragons had been fighting, Keith told everyone to shut the hell up so he could hear her talk about the battle.

  “It wasn’t a battle for Dragon SWAT,” she explained. “They surrendered like rich assholes always do.”

  “Man! I wanted to hear how a Steel Dragon fares against your garden variety fire-breather,” the Rookie said. She made a mental note never to share such details with him. He’d probably post it all online. He and Hernandez started an argument about how the dragon powers they’d seen might stack up and everyone else ignored them.

  “It’s still great that you went out on your first real bust,” Drew said, a proud cop.

  “Yeah…I guess,” Kristen muttered.

  “Wait a minute, spill it. Why are you disappointed to apprehend these two dragons?” Jim asked.

  The side conversations at the table stopped and Kristen sighed. She supposed this was what she wanted, but she didn’t even want to think about it and risk getting pissed at the whole situation again. After a moment’s hesitation, she took a sip of her beer and told them about the battle.

  She mentioned the burning homes and the firefighters too frightened of the dragons to stop the flames. They winced when she described the church that the dragons had demolished like it was nothing but a sandcastle on the beach. She mentioned the land they’d burned and the ancient oaks they’d incinerated. No one interrupted, even when she described the plush accommodation where the dragons had waited for their cases to be finalized. She added that one dragon had already walked free and the other likely would in the morning. Finally, she told them about the twenty-two people who’d died and how each victim would be given a price tag that would be paid and that would be the limit of their justice.

  “And after that kind of massive destruction, all they’ll have to do is pay fines.”

  “For human lives?” Jim asked. He sounded even more furious than she felt.

  She nodded.

  “How much are we talking here?” Hernandez asked.

  “That’s a bullshit question,” the Wonderkid protested.

  “I don’t know,” Kristen snapped, and her aura flared alongside the words before she hauled it back under control. “I know they will have to pay tens of millions, although I don’t know how much the final amount is. But that is supposed to cover the houses too, and the church, which I don’t see how they could even rebuild.”

  “A million is a good life insurance payout,” Beanpole said. All eyes fell on the normally quiet lookout. “I know it doesn’t make it okay but at the same time, I’m glad they get something.”

  “No, fuck that attitude, Beanpole. These people didn’t die in a car crash or a goddamn tornado. They were killed.” Jim scowled. Kristen wasn’t surprised to see that this was his reaction. He’d held a grudge against dragon kind for a long time and she was the only reason he tolerated them at all.

  “Yes, Jim, you’re right, but at the same time—” Drew began.

  “Oh, come on, Drew. Don’t fucking start with your devil’s advocate bullshit,” the Wonderkid protested.

  The team leader held up a hand for him to listen. “No, I don’t excuse them and obviously, you can’t put a price on a human life. But listen to me for a second. I’ve seen plenty of shitty, stupid murders like drive-by shootings that killed old people making dinner, car accidents where the drivers turned guns on each other—and shit, I once saw a man who’d been shot in the gut simply because he was in a convenience store when a stooge tried to steal scratch-offs. Scratch-offs! There can’t be a more pathetic, shitty reason to die than that.”

  “So people killing each other means dragons can kill us and get off scot-free?” Jim’s tone was almost a snarl and sounded as ferocious as any dragon.

  “No, Jim. Would you put that shit on the back burner for a goddamn minute?” Drew said.

  The other man scowled and reached for a beer, but at least he stopped talking.

  “I’m only saying I’ve seen many killers get off without paying their due, money or timewise.” The team leader sounded world-weary. “Man, this one time, a rich guy drove his car into a house where homeless folk were squatting a while back and got off with a charge for property damage because the woman he killed didn’t die until a fe
w days after the collision. His lawyer was able to convince the jury that her bruised ribs and fucking ruptured lung were from smoking meth, not being hit by a car. That asshole didn’t pay more than ten thousand—and that was to the owner of the fucking derelict property—and he sure as shit didn’t serve any time in prison.”

  “But simply because there’s human on human injustice doesn’t mean—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Jim, let me finish,” Drew said.

  The Wonderkid slammed his hands on the table, stood, and stormed away.

  Drew continued calmly. “All I’m saying is that humans escape justice sometimes too. You don’t know if this was a one-time kind of thing or what. Maybe most dragons can’t pay damages.”

  “So the rich should be treated differently than the rest of us?” Kristen asked pointedly.

  Hernandez laughed. “Uh, that’s reality. Like, are you fucking serious right now, Lady Steel? Rich folks in this country have health insurance, good neighborhoods—shit, they have roofs that don’t leak. We live in Michigan. Have you ever heard of Flint? Do you think that town would have water problems if the rich gave a shit about it? It sounds like these dragons were richer still.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said, not liking the fact that these cops were making excuses.

  “Justice isn’t perfect,” Drew said matter of factly. “Sometimes, the bad guys get away, but that doesn’t make catching them any less important. And think about what could have happened if you hadn’t been there. That whole town might’ve been nothing but a smoking crater.”

  “I guess,” Kristen said again, still petulantly.

  “Oh, come on, Steel,” Hernandez said. “You never saw this shit happen before? I guess you weren’t really with us that long—”

  “Which is why we should call her Rookie, not me,” Keith interjected.

  Everyone laughed and began to yell over each other why that wouldn’t happen. He simply had a rookie face. She already had a way cooler nickname. Calling a dragon a rookie was like asking to be set on fire.

  “All right, all right, but listen,” Hernandez said once everyone had calmed. “You want to talk about injustice? Let’s talk about injustice. I was once called in for a bomb threat and disarmed this whole mess of C4. I’m talking blocks and blocks worth of it, only to learn that the detonator switch wouldn’t have actually worked. The dumbass kid who put it together didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. And guess what the dude’s lawyer harped on in court? Do you know what it feels like to give testimony under oath that helps get a guilty man off? I told them the bomb couldn’t have gone off—because that was the truth, and I was under oath—so the lawyer convinced the jury to let him go on account of it wasn’t really a death threat. How’s that for bullshit?”

  “I’m from the South,” Butters added. “Which means injustice isn’t about money but race. I was once on a case where five white boys on the college football team beat the shit out of a black wide receiver from their own damn team because he dropped a pass. They all got off because one of their parents was on the city council.” He laughed bitterly. “City councils don’t have any fucking power, we all know that, and yet it was enough to let this guy and all his friends walk.”

  “I’m sure all of us have seen justice go unserved,” Beanpole said sagely. “Except Keith, since he’s a rookie.”

  Everyone laughed but not as uproariously as before. Failed justice wasn’t something that made anyone feel good.

  “It’s merely part of being a cop,” Drew added. “As much as I hate to say it, that’s the truth. We don’t catch ʼem all, you know that, but even some of the ones we do catch get away with it.”

  “It’s fucking crazy to think about considering how many people we have in prison in this country,” Hernandez commented.

  “Yeah, but that’s drug laws plus private prisons,” Jim said as he returned to the table, ready to argue.

  Drew held up a hand to stop the tangent. “It sounds like justice going unserved is something that happens to dragons too. Yes, it’s disgusting—absolutely disgusting—that these two dragons went free, but at least they paid something.”

  “Plus, now the Steel Dragon knows their faces and we all know she don’t give a shit about legal procedures,” Keith interjected. That drew a ripple of laughter again.

  “The Rookie has a point there,” Butters said. “How many more times are you gonna make us circumvent justice? Not that I have a problem with being a dragon hunter but shit, if it’s a million a pop to kill a human, I don’t think there’s any way I can afford to pay what it costs to eliminate one of them flying dinosaurs.”

  Even Jim smiled at that. “Can you imagine them trying to target us with what happened to Shadowstorm? Like if they wanted us to pay that shit off. I can totally see Stonequest in my shitty apartment with my framed posters instead of oil paintings and my TV with its broken speaker. I bet I couldn’t pay for the damage done to one of Shadowstorm’s nuts, let alone the whole damn lizard.”

  “Do you need a new TV?” Keith asked. “Why not rob a pawnshop? Drew just said you might be able to get off with nothing but a slap on the wrist.”

  Kristen shook her head. Her friends were ridiculous. While an outsider might see these jokes as tasteless or callous, she knew the truth of the matter. This was one of the few ways to deal with the horrors police officers saw. As shitty as it was, there were still stigmas attached to seeking mental health treatment, and even with proper treatment and counseling, cops needed to build relationships as much as any other profession. It was simply a little different when they joked about their work than it was when people who worked at a zoo or whatever were unwinding. Dark humor was cathartic, far more so than silently enduring the injustice they all witnessed every day.

  Plus, controversial jokes or not, it made her feel better. As her old team worked through the pitchers she’d bought them and ordered more, she felt the pressure that she’d carried start to lift. She’d missed them, their human problems and human jokes, and their focus on today and tomorrow and on their lives and not much beyond that. It was a perspective that dragons didn’t appreciate, and it was what she wanted to bring to the group that essentially ruled the world—even if it was through the back channels.

  They all left a few hours later. The humans shared a cab and she took flight after her friends had ribbed her unmercifully about flying drunk.

  They didn’t know she could use her healing powers to burn the alcohol off almost effortlessly.

  As a result, it wasn’t a drunk Kristen who flew home but a contented one. She knew she wouldn’t be able to handle every issue that came her way with perfectly delivered justice, but at least she could try. That made her feel a little more ready to face whatever Dragon SWAT had for her the next day.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Obscura was at a loss as to what to think about Kristen Hall, the Steel Dragon and the woman who’d killed her son. She watched her now from across the tavern—humans called it a bar these days—seated with a group of human law enforcers. They appeared to be friends and it was an extremely odd thing for a dragon to do, to be sure. The old dragon was in her human form, and—being a master of her aura—she was hidden effectively from the other dragon despite being only a few tables away. All in all, she still didn’t know what to think.

  Part of her was cautious. After all, this was the dragon who had killed her son, and for all Sebastian’s shortcomings, he was still powerful in his own right. He had possessed powers of shadow—like his mother, he could use the gaseous matter that appeared when he transformed to move from shadow to shadow. In addition, he had also possessed a little of his father’s ability, although he’d never mastered it like the old dragon had. Shadowstorm’s ability to control the weather hadn’t gone much beyond starting storms and causing lightning strikes, but this was still beyond the power levels of most dragons.

  And yet Kristen had killed him.

  She’d fought him to a standstill and collapsed a garba
ge incinerator on him. It was a humiliating way to defeat a dragon with blood as ancient and powerful as Sebastian’s had been.

  Because of this, Obscura knew better than to underestimate her quarry. She knew she was dangerous, powerful, and committed to her causes.

  But she was also infuriatingly close to humankind.

  In theory, she thought she could understand. Kristen—even the name wasn’t worthy of a dragon of her power—had been raised by humans. Instead of a creche, she’d had a crib. She’d never been heated by the flames of a parent and fed meat and had been fed milk like a suckling pig or a side of veal. Rather than learn about dragon culture in schools and on the practice combat ground, she’d learned about it from the outside. Fortunately, the Dragon Council—pack of fools that it was—still believed in maintaining a veneer for the humans. Much of their culture was hidden and would remain so. This explained why the Steel Dragon hadn’t understood dragon culture, but Obscura had trouble understanding why she didn’t embrace it now.

  She had been raised by an inferior species—this much she could understand—but how could she still spend time with them now that she knew what she was?

  The old dragon could hide her disgust effortlessly while she watched. She could even engage in a conversation with a man who’d joined her at the table—no doubt thinking her to be a human woman in the latter part of her second decade—so as to further hide her intent, but she couldn’t look into the woman’s mind and see what she appreciated in these hairless apes.

  They grew louder and louder as they drank more and more beer. Obscura appreciated the effects of alcohol but she was a dragon. If she got too drunk, she could simply burn off the offending toxins and regain control of herself once more. Humans had no such ability, and yet they drank the poison all the same. They debilitated themselves deliberately with no remedy to fix their simple biology other than time and sleep. It was odd, to be sure, but not why she was ultimately there.

  She focused on Kristen and listened to the woman’s conversation while the young man across from her tried to ply her with drinks and poorly crafted innuendos.