The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  A biker tried to swerve out of her way, but she had come in too fast for him to react. She snatched him by the shoulders and yanked him off his motorcycle, then dropped him as the biker ahead turned a gun on her and started shooting.

  Her captive fell from her claws and onto the grass on the side of the road, where he rolled to a stop. She didn’t turn to see if he was okay, but she did notice that one of the other motorcycles slowed and fell away from the convoy, no doubt to rescue their fallen comrade—or finish him off.

  But that wasn’t her concern at the moment. She was the only member of her team in position to stop this robbery from happening. It was strange how when it was boring, she hadn’t cared, and now that there was action, she didn’t want these guys to escape. Either way, someone else would have to pick up the stragglers.

  Kristen flew on and pushed herself to maintain her speed and stay close to the trucks. She reasoned that if she could pick up another of the bikers, it might end the chase. If they didn’t want to leave anyone behind, disabling one could force another rescue. That would leave only two, and against a dragon, that seemed like lousy odds.

  The thieves seemed to have the same idea because one of them swerved out from behind the trucks and began to fire indiscriminately at her.

  She reacted by reflex, gained altitude, and tried to stay clear of the potentially lethal bullets. But almost as soon as she did so, she realized it was a bluff. Before, the thieves had taken careful aim and conserved their ammo. The person firing at her now delivered a veritable barrage. That could only mean he wasn’t armed with a pistol loaded with dragon bullets but an automatic weapon with old fashioned slugs.

  Reasonably sure of her assessment, she descended and turned her wings to steel. Sure enough, the bullets only sparked when they struck her. If they’d been dragon bullets, they’d have torn her to shreds, despite being made of metal.

  Another biker veered out from behind the vehicle in front of her. This one had a handgun, which in this fight meant they were far more dangerous than their cohort with the automatic weapon.

  They had, however, appeared in front of a pissed-off, steel-skinned, fire-breathing dragon.

  Kristen used her dragon-granted powers and unleashed a great gout of flame at the armed biker.

  The thief’s bike left the ground from the force of the blast and its gas tank exploded. This catapulted the bike into a somersault that pounded the rider against the pavement three times before they finally came to a stop in the grass on the side of the road.

  No one would go back for that one, she knew. His helmet was scattered along the road together with what had been inside.

  Another thief emerged from between the trucks immediately behind her. This one already had a gun aimed at her, and because he was behind her, she didn’t know how she could reach him. She wasn’t practiced enough at flying to shoot fire behind her. While she could slow and try to trick him, the motorcycles were fast and maneuverable. She wasn’t foolish enough to think that losing speed would lose her pursuer.

  Which meant there wasn’t a thing she could do. The weapon was leveled at her and no other dragons were nearby. If the shooter squeezed the trigger, she wouldn’t be able to do a thing but hope the bullet didn’t strike her in the heart.

  Before he could fire, another biker accelerated from behind the back of the truck, going so fast that their front wheel left the ground. They pulled up beside the gunman and shook their head vehemently.

  A curl of blonde hair protruded from the back of the helmet, and—although she couldn’t see through the vizor—Kristen thought that she knew who the rider was.

  It could only be Constance, who had killed Windfire with dragon bullets and had, thus far, made no real effort to kill her.

  The biker gestured at the Steel Dragon and the woman shook her head once more.

  She tried to use the opportunity to gain the advantage, but the bikers were ready. Constance gunned her engine and rocketed past, going from seventy to a hundred and twenty miles an hour in an instant and outpaced the lumbering steel dragon.

  The other thief with the gun swung between the trucks before she could slow enough to catch him. She pushed herself higher and gained altitude in time to see him accelerate down a side road and into the forest. He was beyond their reach already. There was no way a dragon could follow a motorcycle if the bike was able to drive on asphalt streets while she’d have to deal with tree cover.

  The only other biker—the one at the front of the pack—turned down another side road.

  That only left Constance ahead. Kristen tried to gain on her and for a moment, she seemed to do so.

  She was almost close enough to blast the woman with fire when her quarry slowed and brought herself close.

  Crazily, she lifted her vizor, no doubt to confirm her identity. She was about to incinerate her, but there was something in the woman’s eyes. Compassion? Pity? Respect? Whatever it was, it made her hesitate and in that moment, Constance throttled up and hurtled away down the next road to the right.

  Kristen, furious at herself for not eliminating this dragon murderer when she’d had the chance, gave chase.

  She pursued her determinedly, but the smaller street was much more difficult to navigate. The trees almost covered the road completely, so she only caught glimpses of the biker here and there.

  Constance wasn’t able to go as fast as she had on the other wider, straighter road, but the Steel Dragon couldn’t reach her. If she crashed through the trees, the fugitive would no doubt simply race away, and she didn’t want to light the canopy of this forest on fire. She’d already seen quite a few houses tucked into the woods, and given that it was spring, even these country homes were likely inhabited.

  That left her with little choice but to pursue, even though she couldn’t close the final gap.

  Return to us! Kristen felt Heartsbane using her powerful aura to communicate with her since she was much too far away for voices to carry.

  She flinched when she felt the aura tug at her and her quarry veered toward a fork in the road that was frustratingly obscured. The assassin had no doubt chosen her route ahead of time.

  Frustrated, she chose one of the directions at random, only to realize that she’d taken the wrong one. She flew higher and moved to the other road, but the bike wasn’t there either.

  It seemed that Constance and her team had vanished into thin air.

  She briefly considered landing in the woods and trying to pursue on foot. It seemed likely that the killer had simply stopped under the dense tree cover in an attempt to wait the dragon out, but she knew that even with the woman’s apparent hesitation to shoot her, that would be a risky thing to do.

  Disgruntled, she returned to her team and accepted that the ambushers had escaped.

  When she reached the convoy, it had stopped and the dragons prowled around it, as frustrated as she was.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Lyn Hernandez arrived home at her apartment building late after another long day at SWAT. She trudged up the steps and wanted nothing more than a long, hot soak in the tub but knew that she wouldn’t get to do that yet. First, she’d have to go to the roof to check on her…experiments.

  When she let other folks come over—which wasn’t often and mostly only Keith because she’d made him swear he wouldn’t talk about it—she didn’t let them go to the roof, despite it being the favorite part of her apartment.

  Up there was where Lyn had her little lab, as she liked to call it. That was where she’d developed the flash grenade and smoke bomb turned landmine. She tested trip wires, motion sensors, pressure plates—obviously—as well as her favorite part of it all, the explosives themselves.

  She didn’t use C4 or anything like that, but she had a working relationship with virtually every fireworks manufacturer in Michigan, so her little bombs would detonate with fountains of green sparks or bursts of red and orange or whatever she felt like cannibalizing for her lab that day.

  There were
disadvantages to filling one’s workspace with traps, though, especially when it was open to the world. The first of these was that she always had to check the space before she could actually go home.

  Ever dutiful, she walked past her apartment and onto the roof to make sure nothing had gone off. She was very glad she did.

  Someone had been up there. She saw that immediately. The tripwire across the top of the stairs had been triggered. A burned-out canister tacked to the side proved that someone had faced the shower of sparks that she had left for them.

  One of her pressure plates was messed up too, although this one wasn’t activated but had simply been crushed deeper into the floor. She might have wondered more about what could have done such a thing but had spent so much time trying to get the damn things to work that it didn’t come as a surprise that this one seemed to have had something dropped on it without going off.

  Lyn did not check her apartment rooftop every day because her traps could cause damage to the building. They could, sure, but there were sprinklers on the roof as well. She made sure to do so every day because her traps had killed two pigeons and once cost a cat a good chunk of its fur.

  This had happened years before—back when she hadn’t known how to properly calibrate her toys for people instead of animals—but the idea of hurting an innocent cat or even a pigeon still spooked her. She’d adopted the damn cat—Blasterface, she called him—and she didn’t want to have to adopt another one, but she’d be damned if she skipped the roof only to find a dead cat in the morning.

  Despite her concerns, there didn’t seem to be anything else wrong. Only the tripwire at the top of the stairs—which probably hadn’t been a cat given that it was strung at about a feline’s eye level, plus the pressure plate which she hadn’t been able to get to work at all.

  The whole situation was weird, but nothing that couldn’t be pondered in a bath. If she hurried, she might still have time to call Keith over.

  She was occasionally bisexual, which was an oddity she saw no reason to advertise. While she strongly preferred the company of men—that was one of the reasons she liked working on SWAT so much—she was sometimes more interested in female partners. Keith was nice because he was such a sweetheart. He was undemanding and enthusiastic and he didn’t mind her cussing. It was convenient and the added bonus was that they had both agreed that it should be kept discreet. Granted, the rest of SWAT knew about it by this point, but it wasn’t a big deal.

  These were the thoughts that went through Lyn’s head as she walked down the stairs, unlocked her apartment door, pushed it open, and heard the click of an explosive device being triggered.

  Her brain told her to disarm it—turning bombs back into potential explosives was what she did as a job, after all—but her instincts told her to get the fuck away from the door before she blew up.

  Instincts won, and she dove toward the stairwell. Years of airsoft practice turned the dive into a roll but she was moving too fast. She came out of it and tumbled down the stairs. Momentum flung her into a somersault, and she protected her neck and head with her arms as she careened down the first flight of stairs and impacted with the wall of the first landing.

  “Fuck this,” she moaned and rubbed her left shoulder, which had taken the brunt of her landing. She didn’t stop moving, however, and scrambled down the next flight of stairs, around a corner, and hoped she would be safe from any flying shrapnel. There, she waited and took slow, shallow breaths so she could hear as much as she could from the bomb in her apartment.

  She waited for an entire minute and nothing happened.

  Finally, she shook her head. “Maybe I need a different hobby,” she muttered quietly. There were disadvantages to working with explosives all day and spending her free time playing with even more. It made any unexpected click seem like a trigger and any out of place smell seem like some kind of chemical attack.

  That didn’t seem to be the case now, however. She pushed away from the wall, walked up the stairs, and pushed her apartment door open carefully. It definitely hadn’t been blown off its hinges, which was a plus.

  Lyn sighed. She hadn’t overreacted like that in years and told herself she was probably on edge because of the roof. Still, she’d fucked her shoulder up for no good reason.

  The thought and the irritation it engendered continued until she stepped inside her apartment.

  About five feet inside and lined up with the doorknob was a bomb-like device. A metal cable now hung loosely from it. Obviously, it had been connected to the door until she had opened it.

  She wasted no time, flicked the lights on, and moved toward it. If it had some kind of delayed fuse, it could still be dangerous.

  Within moments, she saw that was not the case. Her entire apartment was covered with glitter and even the ceiling above the device was more sparkly than the floor around any stripper’s pole she had ever seen. The rest of the apartment was absolutely swimming in it too. There would be no easy way to clean it either. It was absolutely everywhere.

  Lyn tried to make herself smile. It was only a joke—a dumb, weirdly specific joke made with some of her own tech stolen from the roof. Someone who knew her must have done it, but who? None of the members of her SWAT team knew a thing about explosives. That was why she was so essential, after all.

  Keith had seen her lab, but he had been at work with her all day and then headed to the gym. It couldn’t have been him.

  With all these thoughts running through her mind, she crouched and examined the bomb-like device. It was definitely one of hers. She normally filled the pressurized canister at the top with something stinky, but whoever had done this had switched that for the now inescapable glitter.

  She began to consider how she would prank whoever had done this. It could have been Karl Gantz. He was the demolitions expert on another team, and she had certainly bandied words with his dumb ass before. He quickly became her preferred candidate until she noticed a sheet of paper attached to the underside of the bomb. She checked once more to make sure the device wasn’t armed and finding nothing, turned it over to see the missive.

  Stationary was a more accurate term than simply paper, and her theory of who had maybe done it immediately went out the window. The paper itself was beautiful but the handwriting convinced her that it couldn’t have been Gantz. He typed up every report he submitted because his handwriting was so bad. This was written elegantly in ink and contained only three words.

  Bemused, she read them out loud. “Bang. You’re dead.”

  Something about those simple words delivered with such elegance sent a chill down her spine that the bomb hadn’t. Gantz wouldn’t have joked about that. He would have used a note to say, “Gotcha!” She felt in her gut that this wasn’t a coworker prank at all. It was too elaborate and too specific. It seemed like weird serial killer shit.

  It was a threat, of that she was certain, and whoever had placed it had done a great job of freaking her out. She left her apartment and the glittery mess and called Keith on her phone.

  While she could usually handle anything, no matter how weird, she didn’t want to be there tonight. In fact, she didn’t want to be there until she found the source of this threat.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The rest of the escort mission went well enough. When they delivered the trucks to Harandhyl’s mansion, he thanked them profusely and instructed his staff to start unloading with such eager attention that for a second, Kristen could almost believe that nothing had happened.

  The reality, though, was that something had.

  They had been attacked by humans armed with bullets that could hurt dragons. She couldn’t state with total certainty that they were the same technology and the same group, but she was damn sure that was the case. The woman was definitely Constance, which meant that the bullet that had injured Heartsbane and almost sent her plummeting to her death had been made from a dragon’s body.

  The wound had been so bad that they’d had to call a car and c
omplete the rest of the escort without her. She had already made it back to HQ, though, and thankfully without further incident. That was where the team was now headed.

  Kristen tried to remain professional, but as she followed Stonequest, Lumos, and Emerald over the Motor City, she found it increasingly difficult. She wanted to make a difference in this case—no, she needed to—and could feel in her bones that this whole thing with humans harming dragons was all centered around her. Beyond the simple fact that she wanted to understand more, she wanted to stop these people from killing dragons. Yes, she agreed that they had too much power and should show humans respect, but killing them wouldn’t do anything but set off an inter-species war, something she was terrified of having to take sides in.

  All of it came down to these bullets. Who made them and out of what? How many were there? All were questions that Stonequest dismissed when she asked him.

  “Look,” he said when they landed on the roof of Dragon SWAT HQ, “I know Heartsbane was hurt back there and that you have a theory as to why, but I need you to back off on this one.”

  “She could’ve been killed,” she argued, unable to suppress her instincts.

  “You’re right, she could have but she wasn’t,” Lumos said. “We were lucky, and we all know you helped. Let Stonequest write it up and we’ll move on to the next mission.”

  “You mean escorting more of some rich old dragon’s priceless crap?” she demanded.

  Their leader gave her a cold look and the golden dragon looked uncomfortable. Emerald was the only one who laughed, and even that was short-lived, more of a guffaw that withered to a chuckle under Stonequest’s look.

  “What? Sorry.” Emerald shook his head. “It’s only…well, she’s right. We all thought it. That was supposed to be a bullshit time-killer mission. Instead, we almost lost someone.”

  “Which means it’s out of her hands,” Stonequest said.