“Fair enough.” He pushed himself to his feet. “You beat me. Now, give me a hug.”
“In the middle of a round?” Keith asked.
Kristen should have had the same thought. Once Butters wound his arms around her, he didn’t let go.
“I got her! I got the Steel Dragon—trapped by her own human emotions.”
Beanpole chose that opportunity to step beyond the corner and fire his airsoft.
She almost felt bad using her dragon strength, but this was the game. Her previous team would join together and try to defeat her—all they needed to do was land a single shot—and she’d use her bevy of powers to stop them. It was good training for everyone involved. Plus, it was far more fun this way.
So, as Butters hugged her tighter, she hugged in response, grasped him around the belly, and lifted him to rotate him so his big butt took all the pellets Beanpole had fired. She didn’t even have to drop her weapon to accomplish it and simply squeezed him in her arms.
“Oh! Ouch! Damn it—ow!” Butters said between guffaws of laughter. “No way did I think you’d use a hug against me. You’re a monster.”
“Says the dude who tried to catch me with a hug.” She released him and aimed at Beanpole. Truthfully it was like shooting fish in a barrel. On the SWAT team, he was a look-out most of the time. Sharp eyes and a sense for people’s movements made him absolutely essential when trying to determine where a group of hostiles might retreat to, but he wasn’t particularly adept at airsoft. He simply didn’t quite understand that there were different rules.
This was highlighted when Kristen fired a line of pellets past him while she moved toward him. He didn’t have the foresight to see he was being guided into the stream of fast-moving plastic because it wasn’t something anyone would do in an actual fight.
But Beanpole did it now. She approached and he retreated—directly into her pellets.
“Ouch! Okay, okay,” he exclaimed, shook his head, and smiled. He and Kristen had never been particularly close, but they were happy to see each other all the same and shared a hug.
“All right, where are the rest of your insolent human friends?” she asked in a Russian accent for no good reason.
“If you think we’ll betray our folks to the Steel Dragon, you’ve got another think coming,” Butters said.
Keith was more forward with his approach to eliminating her. “Guys, Kristen’s here. She already took out Butters, Beanpole, and me and she’s coming for you next,” he yelled.
“You’re dead. You’re not supposed to do that,” she protested.
He shrugged. “If you can use leap out of pits dragon powers, I get to use airsoft necromancer powers.”
“Cheaters,” Kristen said and vaulted out of the eight-foot-deep trench onto the ground above them.
“Don’t let her get away!” Butters shouted.
“You’re out. You’re supposed to go to the sidelines,” she reminded him.
“Right. That’s, uh…that’s what we’re doing. Sitting on the sidelines. Yup,” he said, looked down the trench, and ran off.
“We won’t shoot you anymore,” Beanpole said.
She took that as a small comfort because it simply meant they’d do everything they could to distract her and let the rest of the team gain the victory.
At least she knew what to expect, more or less. She pushed deeper into the piney woods but hadn’t gone far before she heard the snap of a branch behind her. When she turned, no one was there. She continued until another branch broke. Again, she peered behind her and saw nothing. Something about the sound had been off, though. It hadn’t come from the ground, she realized.
“Look out below!”
Instinctively, she looked up as Jim Washington plummeted out of the trees toward her. She dropped her gun and caught him as easily as a mother catching a three-year-old.
“You could’ve been hurt, falling like that!” she exclaimed.
“Not with the Steel Dragon to catch me,” he said and altered his voice to sound like a saccharine-sweet princess. It did not match the ex-marine and almost overly professional police officer demeanor that was his normal personality.
Kristen couldn’t help herself. She threw her head back and laughed.
He smiled, still in her arms like a baby, and shouted, “Now!”
An airsoft gun came to life and she spun Jim toward the sound. She was rewarded with a string of obscenities the likes of which she’d never heard from the Wonderkid. It ended with “Damn it, Drew. You shot me, not her!”
She dropped him like a sack of potatoes, retrieved her gun, and raced into the woods. It was dark and shadows from the stark, overheard lights crisscrossed the snow and sand. Even with her dragon vision piercing the darkness, it was hard to see what was going on because her eyes constantly had to adjust to the brighter and darker patches.
The sound of an airsoft gun alerted her a few paces later. Instinctively, she darted behind a tree.
When she stepped out and looked to where the pellets had come from, she saw nothing and smiled. This could only be Drew.
She started forward and was almost immediately forced to duck behind a tree again to protect herself from another salvo of pellets. She might have been using her dragon powers, but that didn’t mean she’d cheat. If she was hit, it was all over.
“Drew, I know you’re back there. Why not simply give yourself up and let the Steel Dragon swallow you whole?” she joked in a sing-song voice.
In response, a snowball caught her squarely in the faceguard. Kristen stumbled, startled by the blow, and was actually impressed when the powder missile was immediately followed by more shots. She flung herself down and rolled behind a tree. Her attempt to wipe her faceguard failed as it was too wet, so she lifted it up.
“Nice trick, Drew!” Kristen yelled. “I can’t hear snowballs.” She darted to another tree and took cover. As soon as she poked her head out, another snowball landed with unerring accuracy in her now unprotected face. The cold took her breath away. It demanded all her control to not fall down laughing right then, but she managed to shelter behind a tree again.
Unfortunately, she realized too late that she’d fallen on her gun and snapped it in half.
She could yell to Drew and tell him she was unarmed. He’d no doubt call for a pause and make one of her ex-teammates give her a gun to even the playing field. He was like that. But that wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want to know his position and ruin the fun. Better still, she wanted to take his weapon from him, watch his grim face laugh as she shot him with it, then find Hernandez and win this battle.
Thinking quickly, she made a few snowballs and cradled them in her left arm while her right hand held one ready to throw. She stepped out from behind the tree.
Drew was waiting for her and immediately, airsoft pellets chattered. She continued to move toward the sound, dodged the string of projectiles, and lobbed snowballs toward the source as she did so.
But Drew didn’t make it easy for her. Every step forward she made was heavily contested. Either a snowball struck her, or pellets were fired that she continually had to dodge. Somehow, he did an excellent job of alternating between the two and kept her on the alert.
Still, she had closed the gap as she was simply too fast for human opponents. She was only a single tree away and almost had him in her grasp when a snowball struck her in the back of the head.
“Damn it, Hernandez!” Kristen flung herself against a tree and looked behind her. It wasn’t Hernandez, but Butters. He had his own armful of snowballs and a wicked grin on his face.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” she said.
“Consider me the ghost of SWAT past then,” he said and chucked a snowball at her face.
She dodged, landed in the snow, and had to roll when Drew fired on her from behind. With no other choice, she army-crawled across the sand and snow, dodged snowballs and airsoft pellets, and laughed like a fool the entire time.
“This is cheating!” she y
elled as she crawled from tree to tree and still attempted to close on Drew.
“That’s what you’ve been doing on us since you went to Dragon SWAT,” Keith yelled.
Drew laughed at that.
Kristen seized the opportunity. She pushed herself up, raced forward to where he was hiding, scooped up a giant pile of snow, and dumped it down the back of his shirt.
“Ah!” he screamed and sounded much like she had as a little girl and Brian had done the same thing to her.
She used his moment of shock to snatch his gun and shove him back with her shoulder. He fell but didn’t release his weapon. He was SWAT, after all. His weapon—even when it was only an airsoft gun—was a part of him.
But she wanted it, so the two wrestled wildly in the snow and each tried to yank the weapon from the other’s hands. Drew laughed and grunted as much as she did. It was a difficult challenge to wrest the gun from the other because both combatants were strong enough to crack the thing in half if they weren’t careful.
The tussle continued and hurled flurries of snow and sand everywhere until she managed to get on her feet and stand over him. All four of their hands were still on the gun and he didn’t show any sign of letting go, so it came as a real surprise when she yanked and he simply released it.
Kristen stumbled back, tripped on a root, and landed on her butt.
She laughed and waited for Hernandez to finish her off. They’d defeated the Steel Dragon using snowballs, of all things.
But the finishing blow didn’t come.
“What was the point of all that?” she asked as she pushed herself up and shot Drew in the chest a couple of times. She could have offered a surrender, but hardly anyone ever beat him. He deserved a few welts in the morning, exactly like the rest of them.
He grimaced as the pellets struck him but didn’t complain. He would have done the same to her.
“The point of that was to buy time for Hernandez. She’s a necromancer, you know.”
“What’s the deal with necromancers? Is that the word of the day or something?” she asked. The word sounded beyond bizarre coming from him. She only knew that it meant a wizard who raised the dead because of Brian’s endless video games.
Drew shrugged. “I heard Keith say it. It means she can bring the dead back, right?”
“Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?”
Airsoft rifles began to fire at her from all sides.
“This is bullshit!” she shouted, but she honestly loved every second of it. She managed to get behind a tree without getting shot, not an easy task now that there were three people against her. Drew made another snowball.
“If you guys shoot me. It doesn’t count,” she said. “It has to be Hernandez.”
“Gotcha,” Butters shouted in response. “Ours don’t count, which means we can shoot you with as many as we like and not feel bad about it.”
A stream of pellets prevented her retort and she dodged—directly into another barrage.
“Got her!” Beanpole shouted.
That meant she was still technically playing.
She darted away from her old team, dodged left and right, and zigzagged to avoid them. After a short distance, she found a trench and dropped into it. Pellets and snowballs whistled overhead.
“Now to find Hernandez,” Kristen said quietly. It was quite a surprise when someone answered.
“Oh, you found me.”
The sandy wall of the trench directly in front of her exploded.
Dirt and grit erupted everywhere. She regretted not putting her face shield down because she could hardly see.
But she could still hear and there was no mistaking the sound of Hernandez firing at her from up ahead.
She stumbled forward and fired as she went. Luckily, she didn’t feel any pellets.
Her luck ran out when another of the demolitions expert’s little explosives detonated and the tunnel she was in collapsed to bury her in sand and snow.
It would have been a masterful stroke—albeit a dangerous one—if it had been used against a regular human. But the Steel Dragon was not a human. She pushed herself up and out of the mound—one arm free, then another, then her head, her back, and her legs until she rose from the tiny avalanche like a monster.
Somehow, her hand found her airsoft rifle. She must have tossed it up instinctively, which meant she could still win this.
Kristen looked up and located Hernandez, who immediately fired. She held her airsoft gun up and blocked the pellets.
“I don’t think so,” Butters said, and a massive weight settled on top of her. Her brain told her that he didn’t weigh that much. She did a push-up and lifted him with her. No sooner did she do so than she felt more weight on her back.
“Suck it, Steel Dragon.” Keith had added himself to the effort to subdue her.
“Indeed!” Beanpole was skinny, but when added to Keith and Butters, she found he weighed more than he appeared to.
“Dogpile!” Jim shouted and practically dove onto the rest of them.
She wheezed, the air almost squished from her lungs. Still, she tried to push them all off. She might have too—she had no idea how much stronger she’d become—but Drew joined the dogpile, and her muscles, already tired from flying, running, and laughing like an idiot, said that was enough.
As she collapsed under the combined weight of her former team, she looked at Hernandez, who approached with a grin on her face.
“I seem to recall you beating me and thinking you were hot shit, Red.”
“It’s good to know you can beat me if we even the odds,” Kristen said. She tried to sound snide but mostly sounded out of breath.
“Do you surrender?”
“Ha!” She laughed. “Never.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Hernandez shot her on the shoulder with a single pellet, dropped her gun, and approached her old teammate.
“Is that it?” Kristen asked, shocked that the woman hadn’t unloaded the entire reserve of pellets. “I didn’t think you’d be one to show mercy.”
“Do you know what a noogie is?”
“A what?”
The demolitions expert plopped down beside her, took her phone out, and gave it to Butters, who promptly started recording video.
Hernandez pulled Kristen’s helmet off, then put her in a headlock—an unnecessary move considering she was pinned beneath so many bodies. With her other hand, she made a fist and rubbed her knuckles across her scalp.
“Noogie, noogie, noogie, noogie, noogie!” the woman said like she was talking to a dog. “I’m giving the fucking Steel Dragon a noogie on the Internet! I rule!”
Kristen yowled as she suffered this abuse but before long, she began to laugh again. The idea of the rest of dragon kind seeing her get a noogie from beneath a dogpile was simply too funny.
Chapter Sixteen
By the time Kristen and her old teammates left the arena, the brisk air had caught up with them. She didn’t really mind, of course. Being a dragon meant being cold didn’t pose any kind of danger for her, but when Beanpole shivered and wiped frozen sweat from the tips of his hair, she suggested they head inside for beers. Hernandez wanted to play another game, but when Drew pointed out that if they stopped now, she’d have bragging rights until the next time they played, she acquiesced fairly quickly to going to get beer and food.
No one knew where to go, so she suggested Buddy’s Pizza, and that’s where they went. The hostess must have recognized her—either from the news or from all the times she’d been there with her family—because she led them to a private back room. With the doors closed and pitchers of beer ordered, the team stripped off their coats, gloves, scarves, and hats and let themselves thaw. Everyone had been warm enough after the match. Even Beanpole hadn’t minded despite his hair freezing, but after the car ride, their cheeks were pink with the cold.
For a minute, she lost herself in the minutiae of the conversation. Hernandez bragged and Keith argu
ed in response and gave her a hard time when no one else would. Butters studied the menu with a cop’s intensity and bounced ideas for pizza off Beanpole, who named the advantages and disadvantages of each one like it was an investment portfolio instead of dinner.
Drew and the Wonderkid talked shop, of course. They argued about the benefits of forcing a door compared to picking a lock. She could tell by their tone that they’d had this argument all week. Kristen let the normalcy of it wash over her. It was a lovely reminder of what it was like to be a human and what it had been like to be her until less than a year before. It was pleasant to not have to think about dragons or mages for a few minutes.
The beers arrived, and with the addition of alcohol to the conversation, any hesitancy to ask their old friend about her new life melted away like the crystals of ice on the ends of their scarves.
“So, be honest, how badly do you miss us?” Butters waggled an eyebrow at her.
She snorted and followed it with a sigh.
“That much, huh?” Jim quipped before she had a chance to say anything.
“It must be tough, working with other folks with dragon powers. You’re not the captain’s little darling anymore, I bet,” Hernandez said.
“No. Definitely not.” She shook her head. “Actually, my boss is a dragon called Sergeant Ridgespine. I think he would happily eat me to spare embarrassment to dragon kind.”
“What did you do that was so embarrassing?” Drew asked. Ah, Drew. She really hadn’t missed how her former boss could cut directly to the heart of the matter.
“Well, I…uh, abandoned my post doing paperwork before I even started it,” Kristen said sheepishly.
“Hell yeah, Steel Dragon for the win!” Hernandez whooped. Keith, Jim, and Beanpole laughed.
“Kristen…” Drew said and sounded equally as disappointed as her parents.
“You know you’re always welcome to come back and join us,” Butters said. “Captain Hansen’s already complained about the lack of our mascot. It’s not good for publicity, losing you.”
The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2) Page 12