Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 1)

by Kevin McLaughlin

“One of the BB’s got me,” her teammate said, wiped his brow, and showed her a bloody hand.

  Kristen’s stomach twisted. Keith had gotten hurt—he was actually bleeding—and it was all her fault. Without thinking, she tightened her hold on the man’s shoulder. A bone crunched under her grip before she hurled him across the room. He catapulted into a row of bicycles that clattered on top of him. Although he groaned in pain, he didn’t move any more than the man she had thrown into the punching bag.

  Keith approached. “Damn, Kristen, calm down. I’m fine.”

  “Sorry. When I saw the blood, I… I won’t let anyone else on the team get hurt, especially not our Rookie.”

  “I’ve been here longer than you,” he protested. It was true, of course. He’d been the Rookie since before she had joined the team, but a steel dragon—even one that hadn’t known what she was or the extent of her powers—could skip a few steps in the nickname hierarchy. “And besides, it wouldn’t have happened if we’d taken those goons down together.”

  “I can’t allow that. Not after what happened to Jonesy.”

  “I don’t like that he’s gone either, but we lost him in what was practically a war zone, not a pawnshop robbery.”

  “There’s still no reason to risk your life when I can turn my skin into steel.”

  Keith clenched his teeth and shook his head but he said nothing more to her. Instead, he spoke into his radio. “We have secured the back room. The hostile is holed up behind the bars. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “Roger that,” Drew replied. “We’ll tell him to surrender and Butters will light up his location with a few warning shots if he doesn’t comply. I want you two stationed behind cover. Be ready to nab him if he tries to make a run for it.”

  “The fool thinks broken glass and a few metal bars count for cover. I’ll shave his damn beard with a few rounds.” Butters laughed over the radio. Kristen didn’t doubt that the man could do it. He was the best shot out of any officer in Detroit.

  “Roger. Moving behind cover.” Keith crouched behind a riding lawnmower that was near the back door of the storage room.

  Kristen moved to stand directly in front of the door that led to the showroom.

  “Kristen, Drew said to take cover,” her teammate protested.

  “Then stand behind me. I won’t let this guy get away.”

  “He won’t get away. We disabled his getaway vehicle and he’s lost his two cronies. He’ll surrender as soon as Butters fires his warning shots. And even if he doesn’t, we can catch him when he tries to run through here. I won’t even complain if you use your dragon speed.”

  “I won’t let you get hurt twice in one day.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Red!” Both the curse and the nickname sounded false coming from him. Those were Jonesy’s words. Keith couldn’t say them with the same casual vitriol. “The bleeding has already stopped and besides, I volunteered for SWAT. I’m here because I believe in being a police officer. Someone has to risk their life to keep our communities safe and I’m willing to do it, not hide behind my partner.”

  “Things have changed, Rookie. I can’t let you get hurt for no good reason.”

  “Protecting our city is a good enough reason to get hurt.”

  She shook her head. On the one hand, she could understand what he was saying. After all, she had signed up for the police academy and spent her first few months on SWAT without knowing the extent of her powers. She had been willing to risk her life for the safety of others and she respected Keith for being willing to do the same.

  On the other, though, those risks were no longer necessary. As a dragon, she could protect her friends—she had to protect her friends. She wouldn’t let one of her own die and didn’t have to, not anymore and not ever again. While she could understand Keith, she also could not step aside. Something in her gut simply wouldn’t let her.

  “We have you surrounded!” Drew’s voice sounded odd, amplified by his megaphone but muffled by the brick wall between them and the showroom area. “We have the back covered and we both know you won’t come out the front with that damn rifle in your hands. Put your weapon on the counter where we can see it and your hands up behind your head, and the judge will be more likely to take a plea deal.”

  “In your fucking dreams, copper.”

  No sooner had the hostile yelled the words than Butters took his shot. Keith had overreacted by moving to the back of the storeroom. The bullet didn’t penetrate the brick wall.

  Kristen retained her steel skin all the same.

  Gunfire erupted from inside the pawnshop.

  It wasn’t the singular shot Butters had made but a cacophony of blasts. The sound triggered a mental image of the man wielding his assault rifle in a wide arc to shoot from the hip like a stupid movie villain.

  Even though it was unlikely he would hit anyone—they were all most likely behind cover—she felt immediate pangs of dread for the safety of her team. One of the shots might somehow catch someone in the neck or one of the major veins in the leg. She had to step in.

  “You’re gonna need your fucking steel dragon to take me down,” the hostile bellowed before he resumed his indiscriminate fire.

  Well, that settled it.

  She kicked the armored door to the showroom open.

  “Butters, hold your fire,” Keith yelled over the radio at the same time that a shot rang out.

  The flash from the barrel was vivid, even across the parking lot, and she realized she was in the way. Rather than try to avoid it, she simply faced it stoically and took the bullet in the chest.

  “Kristen!” Butters screamed from his distant vantage point.

  Of course, she was fine. She had hardly even felt the high-powered round.

  “Well, if it isn’t the steel bitch!” the hostile said and swung his assault rifle toward her. She made no effort to stop him.

  The look on a criminal’s face when they shot her and saw that their bullets did nothing filled her with a perverse sense of glee. She loved the power she felt in that moment and how obviously terrified it made her adversaries.

  He delivered six bullets into her chest before he stopped, panic in his eyes. Not only had his shots done absolutely nothing, but his gun had jammed. That was a good sign, which also might indicate that whoever had armed the men who’d tried to take Detroit over and killed Jonesy hadn’t returned yet. Those guns had been far more effective than the one the man in front of her now tried desperately to fix.

  “I give up!” he said finally and flung the useless weapon aside.

  “It’s too late for that,” she replied and moved toward him.

  The felon screamed and tried to run—something that more and more of them seemed to do, which she thought was a good thing.

  Kristen darted forward and caught him by the collar as easily as a snake catches a rat. She kicked his legs out from under him, slammed him to the floor, then put a foot on his chest to pin him in place with the weight of her steel body.

  “I…surrender,” he wheezed as if he hadn’t fired at her friends at all. For all she knew, one of them could be dead or dying, bleeding out into the parking lot because of the pathetic, desperate actions of this worm. It would be so easy to stop him from ever hurting another soul. All she had to do was press a little bit harder with her foot—

  She shook her head, knowing she couldn’t do that. Keith was barely hurt and the man she held trapped beneath her steel foot hadn’t been the one to hurt him. Her friends were probably fine too. But if they weren’t, she would be well within her rights as a dragon to— Angry at herself, she stifled the thought. She wasn’t above the law. In fact, she served the law, exactly like her father had done before her. Being a dragon did not mean she could kill at every opportunity—not unless she had to, she reminded herself—even though most dragons would completely disagree with the sentiment.

  So, instead of crushing the man’s ribcage, she took hold of the steel bars that separated the showroom floor from the vault-lik
e space. She bent them as easily as a child would bend pipe cleaners. Once she’d made a roughly man-sized hole, she picked the hostile up from the floor, stuffed him through the hole, and bent the metal back around his arms so he was splayed and trapped and escape was impossible.

  Only then did she respond to her radio. Drew had yelled over it for a while now.

  “Damn it, Hall, report. Did you take fire? Is the hostile in custody, injured, or dead?”

  “It’s all clear in here, Drew. Is Butters all right?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Red, that’s not your goddamn business,” Hernandez bellowed. Lyn Hernandez knew how to swear properly but of course, she was mistaken. Butters was Kristen’s responsibility. If he’d been shot, the guilt would rest on her shoulders.

  “Yes, everyone is fine. We’re coming in now.” The team leader did not sound amused.

  Drew, Beanpole, and Hernandez approached the front of the building. Butters shifted his bulk in his vantage point and continued to guard the team from behind his sniper rifle. It was unnecessary—she had told them she’d eliminated the hostiles—but she appreciated it all the same. Also, if he was still taking aim, it meant he was fine, which meant the man she had wrapped into the steel bars could live.

  She shook the idea from her head. The inner conflict seemed to be ongoing. She didn’t want to be an executioner, but the urge to protect her own seemed to be growing stronger every day. Humans were simply so defenseless compared to her.

  Kristen swallowed.

  Had she actually thought that? Seriously, had she really thought of herself as something more than human?

  Before she could explore this new revelation of how her powers were affecting her, Drew strode through what remained of the front entrance of the pawnshop with Hernandez and Beanpole on his heels.

  Despite the fact that the front of the store was all shattered glass and therefore easy to see into—and her telling them it was clear—they still spread through the room to check every corner and cubby until they could verify for themselves that it was secure. It was protocol and made sense—unless you had a steel dragon on your team. Still, they did what they had trained to do and what had now become instinctual.

  Only then did they look at her handiwork.

  “For fuck’s sake, Red. Why not crucify the asshole and be done with it?” Hernandez demanded disdainfully.

  Kristen opened the door that led from the caged-off area to the showroom and looked at the hostile. She snorted a laugh. Hernandez was right. “Okay, maybe that was a little too much.”

  He was vertical, his legs in front of the counter and suspended about a foot above the floor. He’d tried to scramble across the counter after she had released him but he’d only made it that far before he realized his arms were securely trapped in the steel bars. Each one extended like he was ready to do jumping jacks, or—as Hernandez had said—he had committed a crime in Rome thousands of years before.

  “You know, you do have handcuffs,” Beanpole said. That was the closest thing he had ever said to actual criticism.

  “But what would the reporters say then?” Hernandez jerked a thumb toward the parking lot.

  Three news vans and a handful of reporters armed with microphones had been joined by a small crowd of people with their smartphones up, no doubt recording Detroit’s most famous police officer. Some of the more desperate reporters were already interviewing the pawnshop clerk, but Kristen could be fairly certain he’d be edited out of the segment before it aired.

  Drew sighed. “They’ll say what they always say—that SWAT’s dragon cop disabled another sack of criminals all on her own without letting anyone else get so much as a scratch.”

  “The Rookie was shot,” Kristen protested.

  “That’s bullshit. I’m fine,” Keith called and stepped through the doorway from the storeroom. “It hurts more to have a flu vaccine. You didn’t need to—holy shit, that’s awesome.” He pointed to the man held by the steel bars. “I cuffed the two goons back there. They’re fine by the way.”

  Drew chuckled and shook his head. “It is…something else, Hall. The captain will be pleased that no one was hurt. But next time, you need to work with your partner and your team. We could have talked this guy down.”

  “You can still get me down,” the hostile complained from his place on the wall.

  “I couldn’t let anyone else get hurt,” she responded.

  The team leader clenched his jaw. “Part of our job is getting hurt.”

  “It doesn’t have to be, not anymore.”

  At that, the rest of her team shared a glance. Obviously, they felt similarly to Keith.

  “And is part of our job straightening metal bars after you’ve turned them into a one-man cage?”

  Drew looked like he wanted to say more but Beanpole jumped in. “Not to mention media relations.”

  The other man sighed at that. “Ugh, thanks for the reminder. We’ll talk later. Beanpole, Hernandez, I want you on the front of this building. Don’t let any of the media in here but if they want video of this asshole, I don’t see how we can stop them.”

  The criminal struggled against his steel bindings but it was a futile gesture.

  All business once more, Drew turned to Kristen. “Hall, you’re not to say a thing about any of this. We don’t comment on open investigations and all that.”

  “What’s the investigation, sir? These assholes tried to rob a pawnshop and the security cameras caught the whole thing. Our dragon stopped them,” Keith said. He was undoubtedly the most excited to have her on their team. Despite his earlier protests, he loved taking pictures of her aftermath. The captain had already had to order him to stop posting images of her missions on social media.

  “Okay, maybe you can take a few questions.” Drew relented reluctantly. “But seriously, Hall, you are part of this team. You can’t continue to run into every situation like a one-woman army.”

  “Of course, sir.” She nodded, even though she damn well knew she could.

  Still, he was at least right with the concept of teamwork. She found the media was the most impressed when she talked about the efforts of her team and let her work speak for itself. She had a feeling that the hostile trapped in the steel bars of the business he tried to rob would quite likely go viral. If so, those who wished to strike fear into the heart of the Motor City would have another reminder of who they’d face if they tried.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The reporters came armed with ever more barbed questions. Kristen was certain they’d play the story about the criminal who’d tried to rob the pawnshop and ended up as wall decoration. Unfortunately, it seemed she was now famous enough that if they could get a good sound bite from her, that might be the bigger story. She tried to keep a cool head as the wave of microphones and cameras accosted her.

  “Ms Hall, how does it feel to do more for the city than the Detroit police department has done in the last twenty years?”

  “I think that’s a mischaracterization of the men and women who serve our community.”

  The reporter looked disappointed at her textbook response.

  “Ms Hall, does your team like knowing that they’re the most protected SWAT squad in the city?”

  “My team protects me as much as I protect them.” It was a white lie but it sounded better than the truth—that over the last month, she had personally eliminated or apprehended every hostile armed with a weapon more dangerous than a letter opener.

  “I’ll take that as a yes, then.”

  She shrugged. She’d already been misquoted dozens of times. What was important was that there no sound bite.

  “How does it feel to be the Lost Dragon?”

  That was a new one. “Excuse me?” she asked, hoping for clarification. The reporters calmed, eager to get an answer.

  “You grew up thinking you were human, only to discover you were a dragon while on the force. How did you find out you were a dragon, and do you think there might be another Lost Dragon
out there?”

  There was a moment of silence as every microphone pointed toward her.

  Kristen knew she had to be careful with her answer. She didn’t want to explain what had really happened—that one night, Frank Hall’s sister had shown up with a baby, begged the Halls to care for it, then vanished, only to die that same night under mysterious circumstances. No one had looked deeply enough into her family to ferret out that Aunt Christina had worked for some kind of biology lab that was run by the dragons, and she wanted to keep it that way.

  “I don’t know if there are other hidden dragons out there, but I will say I discovered my powers when pushing myself to the limit. Maybe the best way to find out if we have the heart of a dragon is to push ourselves past our comfort zone to inspire the ones we care for.”

  “You’re saying kids should risk their lives and hope they have steel skin like you?” one reporter asked.

  “No! No, not at all.”

  “If there are more Lost Dragons, will you all work against the current dragon-dominated system?” another reporter asked.

  Now that was a loaded question. Answering that one wrong would not only draw the ire of her team but maybe the dragon community.

  Fortunately, before she could answer, two police cars arrived with officers to collect evidence and photograph the crime scene. They promptly pushed the reporters away, which only pissed off those who’d yet to properly record the man dangling in the pawnshop.

  Drew put a hand on her arm. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  She nodded and seized the opportunity to escape. They strode quickly to their SWAT van, but before she could get inside, Hernandez thrust herself up close and glowered at her.

  “Ms Hall, Ms Hall, how does it feel to be even more self-centered and stuck up than the average white girl?”

  “Cool it, Hernandez,” the team leader said.

  “No, fuck that. I worked hard for my reputation as a mean-ass bitch, and now—thanks to little miss Lost Dragon—everyone thinks I’m a goddamned damsel in distress.”

  “No one thinks you’re a damsel in distress.” Kristen tried to smile and assumed the woman was joking.