Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 1)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “The same as before. You—Butters, and Beanpole—watch our backs. Hernandez and Keith, disable the bombs but don’t go near that entrance to the tunnel on your own. I’m with the Steel Dragon and the Wonderkid. We’re gonna make some damn noise and get these fuckers to run.”

  They separated and focused on their roles.

  Kristen turned her skin to steel—the enemy expected to face the Steel Dragon, so they’d make sure that was who they believed they faced—but she didn’t rush ahead.

  Instead, she, Jim, and Drew hurried to the far side of the building opposite the entrance to the basement and the mercenaries’ escape route.

  The anticipated volley was delivered and the bullets struck the ground in front of her, but none of them actually made contact. When she considered the situation for what it was, it seemed obvious that the perps didn’t want to hit them yet. The bullets wouldn’t hurt her and if they injured one of her teammates, there was a good chance she wouldn’t proceed into the building. Their actions were all designed to drive up the adrenaline levels in the SWAT team in order to rile them up and push them into doing something stupid.

  They wouldn’t fall for it, however.

  Instead, Butters would let them think they were. He opened fire on the gunman. Windows shattered and the cursory assault on his three teammates ceased for a moment. Having a sniper like him on the team had enormous advantages. While the plan wasn’t to simply shoot the hostiles, he was good enough that he could.

  They reached the far side of the building and ran up the stairs to the third floor so they were as far away from the basement as possible.

  “It’s time to make noise of our own.” Drew kicked a door open and fired inside. It was empty, but his shotgun was damn loud.

  “My turn.” Jim mirrored his team leader at the next room and peppered the back wall with assault rifle fire.

  “They heard you and want to come to the party,” Beanpole said over the radio. “Hernandez and Keith, move on my mark…” There was a long pause. It couldn’t have been more than ten seconds but to Kristen, it felt like hours. “Mark!”

  They’d worked all this out beforehand, or something close enough to it anyway. When Beanpole gave them the cue and a hostile darted out from one of the empty rooms and fired his assault rifle at the trio, she wasn’t surprised.

  She blocked the bullets with her steel skin.

  “Funny, they didn’t use a taser despite having an open shot,” she said once the hostile had vanished into a room.

  “Not with you on top of the building, they didn’t.” Drew grinned. So far, they were winning the mind game behind the actual firefight.

  Jim cut the conversation short when he stepped out from behind her and fired at the attacker, who’d poked his head and the tip of his weapon into the hallway again. He retreated hastily into the room he’d emerged from.

  They followed and found the door closed, so the team leader shot the doorknob, careful not to stand in the actual doorway. The force of the blast swung the door inward. A taser fired through the open space. It missed because the Steel Dragon hadn’t forced entry and didn’t stand in the aperture. The hostile inside cursed. They really had been right about this whole thing being a plan to eliminate her.

  Too bad for them, it wouldn’t happen.

  “Wonderkid?” Drew nodded.

  Jim ducked, stepped into the doorway, and fired into the room. No shots were returned. “We’re clear, but I have no idea where the asshat went to.”

  His teammates entered cautiously behind him. They searched quickly and found it empty, but something was odd about it. Kristen couldn’t quite place her finger on it.

  “Hey, Drew,” Hernandez said amidst a crackle on the radio.

  “Talk to me.”

  “These aren’t bombs.”

  “Then what are they?”

  “Some kind of incendiary device. But I don’t get it. I can’t see them trying to burn the building on the Steel Dragon.”

  “Roger that.” No sooner had he responded than one of the devices ignited in the room the three of them were in.

  It had been hidden under the bed so they hadn’t seen it. Now, it poured enormous clouds of white smoke into the room.

  “Get out!” Jim yelled and stumbled into a framed poster of a shitty painting on the wall. He fell right through it.

  “Shit!” he shouted. “Secret tunnels.”

  “Kristen—outside. I’ll get Jim.”

  As little as she wanted to obey Drew, she left the room and stepped onto the outdoor walkway of the motel.

  A moment later, the team leader dragged Jim out. Wonderkid coughed violently but pushed himself to his feet, so she assumed he would be all right.

  “It’s exactly like we thought. This is all for you, Kristen.” Drew gestured toward the smoke that poured from the motel room. “The hostile in there was hiding behind that picture. He had sights on me and one of those tasers but didn’t shoot. I think they want to stun you, then suffocate you. Obviously, the insides of your lungs don’t turn to steel or you wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

  “New plan?” she asked.

  “Nope. It’s time to come up with a different strategy. We’ll follow them to the basement. Don’t go into any of the motel rooms. I bet they knocked holes in the walls of all the ones they’re in. If we stay out here, Butters has our back.”

  “That makes sense,” Jim said and wiped his eyes. “That shit’s nasty, though, whatever it is.”

  Drew nodded and activated his radio. “Hernandez, Keith, fall back and get gas masks. Are any of these devices at their exit?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Keith replied. “That’s where they’re mostly clustered.”

  “Then that’s where I want you to be. Hernandez, disarm as many of these damn things as you can. Keith, you know what to do.”

  “Drop the pin.”

  “That’s right. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have noise to make.”

  Kristen grinned and started down the concrete balcony. She punched the next three doors open, careful to never stand in the doorway. In the third one, they found another mercenary, who didn’t make his escape as quickly as his ally had. He tried to vanish behind one of the shitty prints of a painting, but Jim shot him in the leg, and he cried as he fell.

  She caught him by the scruff of his neck and pulled him out of the room.

  “Gas mask,” she said to him.

  He shook his head so she lifted him by the shoulder and dangled him out over the parking lot.

  She returned him to solid ground when he hastily became much more compliant. He removed the gas mask and gave it to her.

  “Drew?” She handed it to her leader.

  “No, you take it.”

  “Oh, come on,” she protested, unable to help herself. She didn’t want any of her people to choke to death while trying to save her life.

  “No. They want you to choke on this shit. Let them know that won’t happen and it should speed up their exit.”

  Kristen didn’t like it but she saw the wisdom of it. She was their target and their entire reason for using smoke instead of explosives. It made sense to render their plan obsolete so she put the mask on.

  They proceeded along the balcony and opened the rooms as they went. The fifth one contained another hostile. He cursed loudly when he saw her gas mask but that didn’t stop the incendiary from detonating.

  “Do you want to go get him?” she asked Drew.

  “No, no. There’s no reason to be rude. Let him tell his friends what’s up.” He spoke into the radio. “Butters, let us know if you see movement. Keith, make sure you have Hernandez’s back.”

  “Sir, it looks like migration season from over here,” the sniper responded after perhaps fifteen seconds.

  “Shall we corral these assholes?” Jim asked.

  “That’s the plan. Kristen, you take point. I want you with us. If any of these assholes are watching—and they’re pros, so I’m sure they have at least one guy on overw
atch—I want them to know you don’t rush into shit anymore. We need to look like a team so they know their only option is to retreat.”

  She nodded and the three of them ran toward the stairwell above the entrance to the basement. They encountered no more hostiles.

  Butters, meanwhile, seemed to take great delight in shooting at those who fled from the second floor. She wished she could watch him work. Drew had said he didn’t want them to kill anyone and definitely didn’t want prisoners, so each of the shots must have been placed on the hostiles’ tails. The idea was to keep them moving.

  There was still the guy whose leg they’d shot. Although they hadn’t cuffed him or anything so hopefully, he’d escape. She didn’t like the idea of him bleeding out so they might have to take at least one prisoner with them if he was left behind. They simply hoped it wouldn’t make whoever was behind all this skittish. But there was time to worry about that later.

  “Here they come,” Drew shouted over the radio.

  Kristen tensed when gunshots sounded from the first floor. That was part of the plan, she reminded herself, but she still felt a pang of dread in her chest when she thought about her teammates down there.

  A moment later, Keith yelled and it was over. “Goddammit! They got away. Those motherfucking professional hitmen outsmarted us yet again and got away.”

  Drew put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him away from the entrance to the basement. “Maybe a little ham-handed with the dialogue in the end there, but the delivery worked, Rookie.”

  They retreated to the SWAT van and simply watched while smoke poured from a few more motel rooms and dissipated on the wind.

  “We disarmed a good number of those things, but whoever goes in to take out the rest will need to be careful,” Hernandez said.

  “It’s a good thing these assholes chose another abandoned building. I don’t want to think what that smoke would’ve done to regular folk,” Butters muttered as he joined the group.

  “Or the Steel Dragon,” Beanpole added.

  Kristen nodded. It felt damn good to have her team back. Although she’d never physically left, she now saw what they were talking about. They could never have accomplished what they had if they hadn’t worked together. The training they’d put in had them working as a team again. She had thought that would make her weaker, but after this operation, it made her proud that she hadn’t gone it alone. And then there was the fact that the hostiles had again used weapons that would’ve made steel skin an obsolete defense.

  She only had one question.

  “Keith?”

  The Rookie grinned and stuck his tongue out. “Oh, not to worry. I dropped the pin.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Drew asked.

  Keith opened the tablet. A map of Detroit displayed on the screen, and there—only a block from where they were—a red blip moved farther and farther from the SWAT team.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  From a safe enough distance to keep their pursuit undetected, they followed the tracker to a warehouse. Along the way, Drew shared the location with every SWAT team in the Detroit Metro area.

  They waited a few blocks distant from the target until enough teams were in place to surround the building. A dozen vans, each filled with at least six heavily armed members of SWAT was a good start, but that wasn’t all. Hernandez had watched the mercenaries’ retreat closely and located the steam tunnel they’d used to enter the warehouse.

  She’d then—with perfectly understandable glee—collapsed it so they could no longer escape underground. The explosion was intended to be loud enough to cue the hostiles into this fact. If they tried to escape the way they had come in, they would find their path blocked with rubble.

  Minutes later, another twenty or so police cars had joined the SWAT vans. Drew ordered everyone to close in, and they advanced like a pod of orcas hunting fish. They all reached the building within a minute of one another. There were so many damn official vehicles that Kristen didn’t think they’d even need officers to arrest the mercenaries. They could simply open the car doors and if they tried to flee, they’d be caught like fish in a net. It was another example of why teamwork was so important. The people inside obviously knew what they were doing, but against a force like this, even professionals would be intimidated. She had no doubt that if she had tried to face them alone, she’d have been defeated.

  “We have you surrounded,” Drew declared over the loudspeaker once everyone was in position, obviously enjoying this bust. It was almost comically one-sided.

  Still, part of her thought about how it could go bad. If the mercenaries were able to escape despite their exit being collapsed and every available police car and SWAT van in the metro area bottling them in, there’d be nothing they could do.

  “Someone’s making for the roof,” Butters reported and gunshots responded from the tops of all the nearby buildings. Snipers pinned down the dragon who tried to escape. She was quite certain there was a dragon inside and could feel an aura. Plus, who else would try the roof except for someone who could fly? It wasn’t like there was a helicopter there or anything like that.

  But whoever the dragon was, it didn’t have steel skin. The volley of sniper rounds kept it inside.

  Drew waited about thirty seconds before he picked up the megaphone connected to the loudspeaker again. “By now, you’ve discovered that we collapsed your tunnel.” Feedback echoed from the megaphone for a moment and he fiddled with the controls, then held it up. “We’ll open the front door from out here. If you throw your weapons down and come out one at a time, you’ll actually get to talk to a damn lawyer. If you shoot, we’ll simply blow you to hell. Oh, and thanks for choosing an empty building by the way.” He sounded downright cheerful.

  They waited perhaps ten seconds before they pulled open the larger hangar-style door on one side of the warehouse. About ten seconds after that, a hostile emerged, his hands clasped behind his head. He didn’t look particularly scared, only pissed.

  Kristen thought that was good. If he was afraid, he might try something desperate or his boss might try something. Pissed meant he understood the gravity of the situation.

  Five seconds after that, another hostile followed, then another. She was surprised when the procession stopped after only nine people. It seemed impossible that such a small force could have caused the city such a headache—which only served to indicate how professional they actually were.

  Her surprise at that, though, was nothing compared to the shock she felt when Sebastian Shadowstorm exited the building with his hands raised and a smug look on his face.

  At first, she thought she was mistaken. She wished that was the case, but she wasn’t. His hulking frame, ponytail, goatee, and black-and-red gloves left little doubt as to his identity.

  They’d talked about him working with the enemy but to actually find him there with the mercenaries directly after a mission still felt like a true betrayal. She knew that he had played some kind of role in the attack on Jim, but she’d told herself that he must have poked around in the wrong places. Her assumption had been that he had asked questions that had alerted the real mastermind to Washington’s clandestine meetings. Now, however, she saw that wasn’t the case. Sebastian Shadowstorm’s presence could only mean one thing—he was Mr Black, the dragon who had already tried to destroy the city once.

  It was Mr Black who had killed Jonesy—and who had been training her.

  Everything she’d learned—her new abilities, her understanding of her dragon aura, the precision with which she could wield her dragon strength and speed—all came from the dragon who exited the building.

  She simultaneously hated him and owed him a great debt. More than anything, she hated that he’d set up this contradiction inside her mind. She hated him for what he’d done and yet he had made her stronger too and showed her things about her true nature while the rest of the dragon community had ignored her. Had it all been part of a plot? Was she merely a pawn? The idea of being ma
nipulated so effectively cut her to the core.

  Kristen couldn’t help herself. She strode forward to confront the dragon. “You spineless lizard. I trusted you.”

  Sebastian smiled. “Yes. I suppose you did. It’s unfortunate that this is how you found out about my training methods for the Steel Dragon. I must admit, I continue to be impressed. You’ve learned more than I realized, especially about your limitations.” She couldn’t decide if he meant to look vicious or endearing and assumed that was exactly what was so damn dangerous about him.

  “Your…what?” She wanted to trust him but was that simply his aura? He’d said it didn’t work on dragons, but she obviously could no longer trust him fully.

  “My methods. I apologize for killing your friend, Kristen, really, I do. I didn’t know there was a new dragon in Detroit and if I had, I would have been more careful not to take what is rightfully yours.”

  “That’s appalling. You can’t talk about people like they belong to dragons,” she said icily.

  “But of course we can. That’s why the world is stable, after all. No one likes it when our pieces are taken by another. If I had known at the time, I wouldn’t have done what I did.”

  “Bullshit! You’ve tried to kill me!” she shouted, her face inches from his.

  “I protest, Kristen. I’ve done nothing of the sort. Did you not notice that these mercenaries appeared around the same time as the party I threw in your honor?”

  “You didn’t throw that party—” she began in protest.

  “But I did. This is my city, Kristen, as much as it's yours—or as much as it will be yours once you fully come into your power. Nothing happens here without my knowledge. You were the first thing to surprise me in some time, and discovering that you were raised here only made me wish to help you thrive and grow stronger despite the muck and the filth all around us. I knew that training you wouldn’t be enough. You learned with me, yes, but the team of men I hired was to help you evolve and come into your powers. It is only in fire that steel can be tempered. I sought only to give you that which is rightfully yours—power.”