Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 1)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” she said. “You can come quietly, and we’ll get you medical attention.”

  Her adversary laughed. “Oh, I don’t think my employer’s employer would like that. I appreciate the offer, but I would like my hide to remain intact, thanks.”

  Quickly, she weighed her options. Help was coming, but it would probably be human police, not Dragon SWAT. Humans would merely give the dragon additional targets to threaten. She needed to finish this fight before anyone else was hurt. That was a problem because she’d never beaten a dragon in its real form. Stonequest had assured her that doing so was simply impossible.

  But this dragon was hurt, bleeding, and limping. Rather than closing, each of those wounds seemed to be growing slowly worse. Spotted lines of bright red seeped from each injury. She recognized that right away.

  “You had a taste of your own medicine, did you? Someone used dragon bullets on you,” she taunted.

  “And it hurts like hell,” Death agreed. She flapped her wings once and became airborne, then crashed down again where her opponent stood.

  The Steel Dragon didn’t move this time. She held her ground, her guard up, and hammered a blow into the massive chest as the dragon bore down on her. Death bellowed with pain and tumbled back.

  Kristen didn’t waste a moment. She lunged forward and used the massive forelegs as steps to climb up onto her neck. Once she was there, she clamped her steel arms around the dragon’s throat and began to squeeze. Death coughed, bucked, and even rolled over completely in attempts to dislodge her attacker, but she clung tenaciously even when the massive bulk rolled over her.

  “It doesn’t have to end like this,” she said through gritted teeth. “You can surrender.”

  “Never.” The assassin hissed her fury. “I took a contract. I finish it or I die.”

  “It’s your call.”

  She now felt she’d given her attacker more than enough chances and tightened her grasp around the sinewy neck. The dragon tried to cough, no longer able to breathe. She wound her steel arms even tighter and increased their pressure until vertebrae began to crack. All the emotional turmoil from the past few days emerged in a single inarticulate cry of rage.

  The release surged through her and she poured all her fury into her arms and yelled in triumph when something snapped inside Death’s neck. The dragon toppled and was still. She rolled off to one side and came up in a fighting stance, ready in case her enemy was still alive.

  Cautiously, she approached, but all her senses told her the dragon was dead. It was completely still, a difficult feat for a creature with lungs that must have been larger than an entire person. No sound came from its body either, but most importantly, she sensed no aura. Even when dragons weren’t actively trying to influence something, they always radiated an aura. This one didn’t. That could only mean it was dead.

  She looked at the wounds on her adversary’s chest. They were tiny holes. On the dragon’s huge body, they looked like punctures from a pellet gun. She shivered. That was the fate Death had intended for her. She must have waited for her on the roof, ready to fire when she left the hotel. But who had shot Death, then?

  Kristen knew her team was on the way so she’d have backup soon, not to mention a forensics team. But that made her think of Stonequest. He’d been very involved in this case. Surely he’d get wind of it and when he did, he’d no doubt take over the crime scene. That meant if she wanted answers, she had to get them now.

  She returned to the dragon’s corpse, made a hasty circuit around its body, and located the black pouch again. After a quick glance around her, she retrieved the bag and stuck her hand inside.

  The first thing she felt was more of the little scales. The next thing she found was a smartphone.

  Her smile was one of triumph. To a dragon, the phone might have been nothing more than a curious bauble, but to a human, it was the greatest source of clues one could hope for.

  Quickly, she took the phone out and examined it, hunched over it to block the snow—that now fell faster and faster—from touching the screen. It was a cheap Android phone, obviously something Death had bought recently and intended to dispose of. She tried to open it but it was locked and had a button for a fingerprint.

  Kristen wondered how paranoid the dragon could be. Would she have used her human form or dragon form to unlock the phone? The human form would have been more obvious perhaps, but if Death could turn only part of her body into her dragon form, that might be even more secure.

  After a moment’s thought, she picked up the dead dragon’s clawed hand and hoped that she had been like all the others she had met—supremely confident in her own abilities.

  It turned out she was. The phone unlocked at the touch of the dragon’s thumb. It was a good thing her dragon form wasn’t that big. If she’d have been as large as Shadowstorm, it would have had to be her human hand that unlocked the phone.

  She wondered about that. Since she’d died this way, did that mean she would forever remain in her dragon form? What would happen if Kristen died with her steel skin activated? Would she be impossible to cremate? If she was buried, would rust dispose of her body instead of microorganisms? It was an odd and perhaps unsettling thought but irrelevant at the moment.

  Right now, she needed to go through the phone as quickly as she could. She knew that either her team or Dragon SWAT would be there momentarily. Dragon SWAT seemed to have an uncanny knack for arriving at dragon-related crime scenes.

  There wasn’t much on the smartphone. It was obviously a burner with a VPN and a secure browser but nothing useful. But, if the assassin had used the phone at all, they might be able to trace where it had been by using GPS coordinates.

  Kristen called the station using Death’s phone. She asked for computer forensics and once transferred, asked them to run the number and IMEI through the GPS search. The operator told her it would take a minute, but once he had the information, he’d send it to her personal phone.

  Once she’d thanked him and hung up, she went into the building and sprinted up the first stairs she could find, taking steps four and five at a time in her haste to reach the rooftop. Maybe the shooter was still there, maybe not, but there could be something.

  For the next forty seconds, she tried to scour the roof for more clues but found little. Snow had begun to accumulate in patches here and there, but it had barely started. There were no footprints but there was some kind of a spherical device set up near the door. She thought it might have been magic, but she couldn’t tell. A huge crack down the middle of it suggested that whatever it had once done, it no longer functioned.

  She also found a tripwire connected to a flash grenade at the top of the stairs, but that too had been disarmed. That was good luck. She knew her steel skin was impervious to grenades, but her eyes could be blinded as easily as any human’s.

  Still, it all left her with more questions than answers. Who had made it past these traps? Who would have knowledge of both magic traps and tripwires? Was it a person who did this or a dragon? A single culprit—perhaps mourning the loss of one of Death’s victims—or a team working together?

  There was nothing else to see up on the rooftop and she could hear approaching sirens. The police would gather around Death’s body soon, and she assumed she should be there when they did. She bounded down the stairs and stepped into the cold air to find her team already moving toward her.

  “Do we have hostiles?” Drew shouted and sounded breathless.

  “Only one. Dead.” She pointed at Death’s body.

  “Holy fucking shit! Red killed a dragon,” Hernandez cried.

  “But that’s… Kristen, that’s amazing,” Butters sputtered.

  Beanpole and Keith said nothing. The former was wide-eyed but cool-headed, while the Rookies mouth hung open with the corners still somehow turned up into a grin.

  “Nice job,” the Wonderkid said with a nod.

  “Thanks, but it wasn’t only me. Death was injured w
hen I arrived,” she said. “Shot with dragon bullets.”

  “Dragon bullets?” Drew asked.

  “Like the one Death hit me with. Someone gave her a taste of her own medicine.”

  “Any idea who?”

  She shook her head. “The shooter was on the roof with Death, who was up there ready to take a shot at me. But whoever it was, they were long gone by the time I got there.”

  “Well, shit. You did this, though? You killed her?” the team leader asked.

  Kristen merely nodded. She tossed Drew one of the silver scales she’d pulled from Death’s bag. “I found that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Her gun’s up on the roof, aimed at the entrance of the hotel where my parents are—a big damn thing. Other than that, only her cellphone.”

  She took it out and waggled it at her team. Everyone’s eyebrows raised appreciatively.

  “Doesn’t that belong in an evidence bag?” The Wonderkid winked.

  “Dragon SWAT won’t know what to do with it. I already called the station. They’re running its history as we speak. I’m hoping for GPS data.”

  Everyone nodded, then split up to cover the scene. Before another minute had passed, Dragon SWAT arrived. Stonequest was in the lead with three other dragons behind him. They flew between the Detroit skyscrapers and through the falling snow, their wings pumping to create flurries in their wake. Massive beats of their wings as they landed scattered the traces of snow that had accumulated.

  With four concurrent flurries of energy, the dragons transformed so four beings in the shape of people stood with the team.

  “Well done, Kristen! Is this your work?” Stonequest pointed to the dead dragon.

  “Yes.”

  He studied the huge corpse. “What are those strange wounds from?”

  “Someone shot her,” she replied. “With dragon-scale-tipped bullets, I assume. Like the one Death used on me.”

  “But that is Death, right? Someone else fired those shots?” he asked.

  Kristen nodded.

  Stonequest nodded. “All right. So, we have a killer’s killer to find. Clues?”

  “Her gun, a few traps, a bag of silver scales she wore around her neck, and this.” She tossed him the locked phone and he obviously didn’t know what to make of it.

  “It unlocks with her fingerprints,” she said helpfully.

  Stonequest nodded and gestured for two of the other dragons to join him. The three of them made a triangle around Death’s corpse and began to chant in unison. The wind picked up, the stars seemed to glow through the clouds, and she was a dragon no more but a human woman wearing black tactical gear.

  A sudden burst of fear rose in her chest. She’d thought the dragon was dead, locked immutably in its bestial form, but seeing it transform was a reminder that there were more than dragons in the world. There were dwarves that ruled Canada, pixies with unpredictable magical powers and alien to humans, and even mages—human beings who’d mastered magic.

  But it wasn’t only the magic that put Kristen on edge. It was seeing the form that had tried to kill her. This slender female body was the one who had targeted her from afar and hunted her across the city while she had been going about her life. After seeing Death in her real body, it seemed wrong that this was the form in which she had tried to kill her—the one to fear. It was all the more frightening that her body lay in the dry silhouette of a dragon’s frame. The snow that had landed had melted and made an outline around her dragon body. In moments, though, the illusion was gone as snow landed in the dry space and instantly melted.

  Kristen had to turn away.

  “The damn thing won’t open,” Stonequest said.

  “Try her dragon form?” Hernandez said casually.

  He nodded, muttered an incantation over Death’s hand, and it transformed into a claw. That unlocked the phone and he stared at it in obvious confusion.

  “Stonequest…” Drew began.

  “Dragon SWAT appreciates your help, but we’ll take it from here. Dragons killing dragons is our jurisdiction.” Despite having worked together for months now, his response sounded canned and impersonal.

  “Right,” the team leader said and sent Kristen a look that said, let’s go.

  She agreed and they wandered to the SWAT van without protest.

  They piled in with Drew and Butters in the front and the others in the back.

  “Arrogant pricks,” Jim said.

  “Too bad, too.” She held her phone up. “I have the GPS map.”

  Drew and Butters clambered out of the front seats and joined the team in the back. Together, they poured over the data.

  It was like viewing a convoluted obstacle course, a maze made up of the streets of Detroit. The first thing that became obvious to Kristen was that Death never went anywhere twice. She said as much to her team and they all nodded.

  “She must have been crazy paranoid,” Keith murmured.

  “With good reason,” Butters pointed out. “Can you imagine your job description being to hunt down the greatest cop Detroit’s ever seen? She must’ve been scared silly of our Steel Dragon.”

  Hernandez mimed gagging at the compliment but Kristen didn’t mind.

  “Wait, look there,” Beanpole said. “She’s been there twice.”

  “That’s where we are right now,” Kristen said. “That doesn’t help us much.”

  “There’s another place, though. Look, both times, she went to that other place before coming here,” he continued.

  “Do you think that’s where she received her orders?” Jim asked.

  “It must be. Other than that, there’s no pattern at all to her movements. She’s as cautious as hell but still had to get her missions from a boss with a different kind of paranoia,” Drew said.

  “Do you still think its Shadowstorm?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I do, but we’ll need more evidence.”

  “Then let’s go get it.” The Wonderkid sounded downright eager.

  “Should we tell Dragon SWAT?” Keith asked.

  Drew and Kristen shared a look. She broke the silence first. “We gave them the phone. They should be able to figure it out.”

  Beanpole shook his head. “I don’t want to go in without backup. This guy—Shadowstorm or whoever it is—might be there.”

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” Kristen interjected. “Do you remember the last time we had Shadowstorm cornered? We called SWAT in and he fled as soon as he sensed them. He’s incredibly perceptive when it comes to auras. If we call in Dragon SWAT, he’ll simply run off again and find a new hole to hide in.”

  “Well, won’t he sense your aura or whatever?” Hernandez asked.

  “Yes, probably. I’ll try to suppress it as much as possible, but I don’t think I’ll be able to hide it from him.”

  “Then won’t he run off?” Keith asked.

  “He might,” she agreed. “But he might not. The last time we fought, he almost killed me. I think that if he senses me coming and only me, he’ll try to stay and fight. I don’t know why, but I think I’m a real threat to him. Hiring Death was extreme and I’m willing to bet he wants me dead badly enough to fight me.”

  “But Kristen, the last time he fought you, you almost died.” Drew avoided eye contact. It was never pleasant bringing up when someone else almost died.

  “That’s true, but things have changed since then.”

  “You didn’t tell us you could transform,” Keith said. He truly was the dragon fanboy.

  “I can’t, not yet, but I think I know what’s stopped me. I was scared that I’d become someone else, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think I’ll simply become me.”

  Hernandez groaned. “That’s so cheesy, Red.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Are you sure you can do it?” Drew asked once the laughter had died down.

  Kristen grinned. “Nope, not at all. But we have to risk it. There’s a good chance Shadowstorm’s not there, anyway
. If that’s the case, we’d be letting evidence get away for no reason. And if he is there, then yes, I want to destroy him or die trying.”

  No one laughed at that. She grimaced. While she tried to keep her aura from affecting her team, she’d apparently tried too hard. None of them felt her confidence, her certainty in herself, or her devotion to her city.

  But that was okay. That was what it was like to be human. And if she died protecting the people she loved, that would be a very human way to go. And if she did manage to find Shadowstorm, she’d push herself to her very limit. She’d either die fighting him, ridding the city of a parasite that had lived off it for decades, or she’d win. Either way, she would end this, once and for all.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  The crystalline sphere on Sebastian Shadowstorm’s desk began to glow—first a mild yellow, then a dull orange. The device had been made by a mage and could sense auras even better than he could. It meant a dragon was approaching and looking for him. It wasn’t Death, either. The orb would have remained yellow instead of turning amber if it had been her.

  There was no one who knew where he was hiding save the assassin. He hadn’t even shown his thuggish minions his current hideout. It meant that not only had Death failed, but she’d also done so in spectacular fashion. He had no doubt which dragon now approached. It was Kristen, the Steel Dragon, traitor to her kind. It couldn’t be anyone else.

  For her to have discovered his whereabouts, she must have bested Death, either killing her or beating her so badly that she was apprehended by dragon SWAT. That meant there would be no one to punish and no one to torture for their mistake. The Masked One wouldn’t see it that way, though. He’d still very much have someone to place all the blame on. Shadowstorm grimaced when he thought back to the dancers forced to waltz through the gore of their own kind. He didn’t believe humans were any more than cattle, but there were still limits to what should be done when slaughtering meat. Nevertheless, he understood his allies. He’d chosen them, after all.

  Working with the Masked One simply meant he couldn’t fail.