The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  She glanced at her old team leader, who only shrugged. That meant Butters was telling the truth, then. Still… “Thanks, you guys, really, that means a lot to me.”

  “Hey, not all of us want you back.” Hernandez stuck her tongue out and Keith elbowed her in the ribs.

  “I don’t think it’s that simple, though. I might have…uh, mentioned that I could simply peace out, but Stonequest didn’t like that at all.”

  “No surprise there. He recruited you, right? Dragons must get gold doubloons or something for a referral bonus.” Jim grinned.

  “It’s more than that,” she continued. “Stonequest said that us operating together would give all of you—humans, that is—more legal freedom than the dragons are strictly comfortable with.”

  “That’s bullshit,” the Wonderkid cut in. “Dragons use humans to help them all the time. Shit, I know mages are a step above people or whatever, but they’re still people. How come they’ve singled you out for working with us?”

  “I think because I actually listen to you guys. When I told Stonequest about our engagement with Shadowstorm, he was so relieved—like, unbelievably relieved—that it was my idea. Dragons sneaking into each other’s homes and killing each other is frowned upon, but humans doing the same thing is basically unthinkable.”

  “You know…” Keith drawled. He’d finished his second beer and she could hear it in his voice. “You might not be able to work with us every day, but we could still help you out occasionally. If you asked us for help, of course, or better yet, simply bossed us around. You wouldn’t get in trouble then, right? That’d be no different than Stonequest using human SWAT to help his investigations, which he totally does.”

  “He has a point,” Beanpole said. Everyone turned to listen. He didn’t talk often, so when he did, everyone paid attention. “If you enlisted our help, Captain Hansen couldn’t really get us in trouble. Humans working under dragon orders have a fair degree of legal latitude.”

  “Oh, man, legal latitude. That’s something I’d like to have in a back alley with a dragon threatening to eat me.” Hernandez chuckled.

  “What would you do?” Keith asked her.

  “Shit, what wouldn’t I do? As it stands, if I was cornered by one of them, I’d be all like, please sir, eat this arm and let me go peacefully. If it was up to me and the same rules of self-defense applied as they do to people? I’d tell him to fuck himself and toss a firecracker down his throat.”

  Everyone laughed at the absurdity of it.

  “I hear that,” Jim said. “You guys know I served overseas, right? It’s not talked about much, but we saw dragons in combat over there. It was the most unbelievably fucked up thing you can imagine. At least when our military drops bombs, we have to consider the cost of it—civilian damage, if it’s good intel, political backlash, shit, even the cost of the damn bombs. Dragons merely get to burn shit with no consequences. With a little legal latitude, I’d post that shit all over the media.”

  Everyone nodded and looked somber.

  “Way to bring the fucking mood down, Jim,” Hernandez said. Everyone at least attempted a chuckle as gallows humor raised its head once again. “What about the rest of you?”

  “I’d try to get my hands on whoever made the food at that rooftop party Kristen took us to. An official requisition of resources, I’m sure that’s how the dragons think of it. Hey, food!” Butters cheered as their waitress brought in four pizzas. If it was anyone but this team, Kristen would have thought it an absurd amount of food, but she knew there’d be no leftovers.

  “What about y’all?” the sniper said, pizza stuffed into his cheeks, once everyone took a slice.

  “I’d go treasure-hunting,” Keith said as if it was the obvious answer. Everyone laughed but he yelled over the din. “No, no, hear me out. Look, there’s a whole stash of treasure that’s been taken, right? Sarcophaguses from Egypt, jewels from Africa—shit, Nazi gold is still out there. Who do you think controls all that?”

  “I have definitely seen priceless artifacts in dragon homes,” Kristen said.

  “See? I’d go treasure hunting and return it to the rightful owners, namely the people who actually made it. We all know the dragons didn’t.” Laughter and nods responded to that statement. Kristen was actually impressed. It was yet another example of dragons’ oversized control on human culture.

  “Beanpole?” she asked.

  He swallowed his pizza, took a swig of beer, and cleared his throat. “This isn’t as clever as the rest of yours, but I’d want to read more about dragons and learn about their powers, their strengths, and their weaknesses. That kind of thing.”

  The team absolutely died laughing. Jim laughed so hard he cried. Butters almost choked.

  “What? Why is that so funny?” Beanpole asked.

  The Wonderkid wiped his eyes and answered with a grin. “Because there would have to be a fucking infiltration unit of the utmost skill to pry that kind of knowledge from their talons. There ain’t no way dragons will part with that level of intel. Not in a thousand years, not unless we—what did you say Kristen? Snuck into their houses or whatever. We’d need a damn mercenary team to accomplish that shit. What about you, Kristen? What would you do with more freedom from dragon rule?”

  “Take myself off administrative leave, for one,” she said before she could stop herself.

  Her friends’ response was identical to what a group of children would do if one of their own had been put in timeout by a teacher. They groaned in unison and cursed her superiors, telling her that administrative leave was a part of the job. Only Drew remained silent.

  Once the protests died down, she turned to her old team leader. “Drew?” she asked.

  “Actually, I wondered about something you said earlier.”

  “Oh yeah, what?”

  “You said something about dragons sneaking into each other’s homes and killing each other?”

  Kristen blushed and clenched her jaw. She hadn’t really wanted to talk about the case.

  “Oh shit, did y’all feel that?” Hernandez caught the edges of the table like she was holding on during an earthquake.

  Nods all around the table answered the question.

  “Did something make you embarrassed there, Miss Steel Dragon?” Jim asked, and looked embarrassed himself.

  “No, why would you say that?” she lied.

  “Because we felt your emotions like a damn tidal wave.” Butters laughed, although he also looked like he’d been caught raiding the cookie jar.

  She sighed and allowed herself a laugh. “I guess beer and dragon powers don’t go that well together.”

  “It’s more like keeping secrets and your old team don’t go well together. Now, what’s the deal?” Drew sounded concerned.

  “Yeah, I know, Drew.” She took a mouthful of beer. “This is police business, right? If any of this gets out, I might be forced to eat the leak.”

  Her team nodded. Jim said, “Spill it.”

  Kristen told them about the attacker no one else had seen, the late-night infiltration that hadn’t shown on the cameras because the system had been wiped, the dragon she’d been powerless to save, and the human woman who had somehow bested the Steel Dragon.

  At the end of it all, she expected to be berated by her team for her failure or to be chastised for acting outside the boundaries of her job—or even jokes about the dead dragon. She didn’t expect what actually happened.

  Keith put a hand on her shoulder. “They might not think that you’re qualified to work with them yet, but we know you are. You’ve had a ton of excellent training from some of the best people I know. You had less experience than me, but compared to you, I’ll always be the rookie. They should respect that.”

  Everyone nodded except Hernandez who made gagging sounds at the kind words.

  “So…you’re not mad?” She was shocked.

  The other woman shrugged. “Okay, you abandoning paperwork in a tantrum is fairly embarrassing, but I’m not surpri
sed. And it’s not like any of us think you made this attacker up.”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “We know,” Butters said, and the others nodded.

  “Maybe you can use your human training to help the investigation,” Jim said and sounded like he was thinking out loud. “That time you tracked me, you noticed all kinds of things about the situation I didn’t. I bet there are clues dragons would miss, especially if it’s a human attacker.”

  Kristen looked at her friends’ faces. All of them looked eager to help like they believed in her and knew she could do this—except for Drew, who looked concerned.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked her old boss.

  “I think that Jim and Keith are right. You do have good instincts and an eye for this kind of investigation. It makes sense for you to go back to the crime with your sergeant to get to the bottom of this.”

  She held his gaze and fought the urge to use her aura on him. As always, she didn’t want to manipulate her friends and besides, he adhered to protocol with the fervor of a religious man. She doubted she could sway him much with her abilities, so she didn’t try.

  Although she wouldn’t lie either. “I’ll…consider that. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it. It’s nice to have friends like you.”

  “Then why the hell are you standing up?” Keith asked.

  Kristen smiled and pushed her chair in. “I have an early morning.”

  “Bullshit!” Hernandez said. “You said you were on administrative leave.”

  She shrugged. “Call it a late night, then. I’m going to pretend I can beat my brother in videogames.”

  More groans followed. No one on the team was a gamer and they simply didn’t get it.

  But the excuse suited her purpose. She said her goodbyes, paid the tab despite her team’s protests, took to the sky, and headed home. Brian had been only an excuse and she definitely wouldn’t see him tonight. She’d need her rest if she intended to go through with the plan already forming in her head.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next morning, Kristen found Windfire’s mansion much as she’d left it. Cameras still pointed at her, although she noticed the sky was empty of drones. The window that had been broken in her pursuit of the woman who’d killed Windfire was taped up with black plastic but had yet to be repaired. She landed, noted that her tracks were still in the snow, and approached the mansion.

  It was taped off with good old-fashioned yellow police tape. A quick look confirmed that the front gate was taped off too. There were warning signs not to enter under penalty of law, the usual protocols that a secure scene necessitated, except there was no security.

  She had spent her flight over there concentrating on her aura in an attempt to perfect a balance of professional interest and concern for Windfire. It was important that no one thought she was taking this personally. She wanted other dragons to see her as professional, the newest member of the community who wished to contribute to those who’d built it up. She’d prepared arguments, questions, and a series of things she might look for.

  It turned out she didn’t need any of that. The estate was empty. She stepped past the tape and waited for an alarm to go off. When one didn’t, she proceeded up the steps to the mansion and, finding that it wasn’t even locked, she slipped inside.

  The interior of Windfire’s home was eerily quiet. Kristen hadn’t realized how much noise the ever-present security cameras had actually made. There had been an electrical hum to the hallways that was now absent. No motors whirred to track her movements as she made her way down the hall.

  The first place she wanted to see was the surveillance center. She knew dragons understood tech, but she also knew there were vast gaps in their knowledge of it. They simply didn’t see the need for things until well after their adoption. She hoped they’d overlooked something there.

  As she booted the system up, she thought it a little odd she had to boot it up at all. If they didn’t have guards to man the crime scene, why not leave the security system online so at least they’d know if there were any intruders?

  The system went through its boot sequence and she was reminded again how extensive the security system was. There were well over a hundred cameras on the property, both inside and outside, so virtually every inch of the mansion and grounds were covered. Motion sensors were plugged into spreadsheets that logged any activation, plus the drone network. It must have cost a fortune to build and maintain and yet it hadn’t been able to save its patron in the end.

  Kristen looked through the footage, but—like Timeflash had said—there was nothing. The recordings had been deleted.

  That made her pause. She hadn’t actually asked Timeflash if the data had never been recorded or if it had been deleted. If deleted, it meant that it had existed, which meant maybe it still did. The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed that this couldn’t be the only place where Windfire stored data. He had backup generators, so why neglect a backup hard drive?

  She stood from the chair and checked the time, shocked to see an hour had already passed. It really was easy to lose oneself in computers. If Windfire had a backup, where would it be? She pondered this as she patrolled the house.

  After twenty minutes of lackluster searching, she had nothing. She’d punched a hole in one wall, only to find it led to a dumbwaiter. Soon after, she’d found a safe behind a painting, but her steel grip revealed that it was filled with hundred-dollar bills and a small pile of gold but no hard drive. She photographed the contents before she slammed the door shut hard enough to jam it closed.

  This would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Kristen couldn’t tear the entire mansion apart. Even if she brought in dragon SWAT to help—something Drew would no doubt have advised—she couldn’t simply say, “I think there might be a hard drive hidden somewhere because Windfire had a backup generator and probably knows more about security than the rest of you dinosaurs.” No, if she wanted to make any progress, she had to be smarter.

  While she still didn’t know much about the attacker, she did know Windfire—at least to some degree. He was paranoid and seemed to be something of an expert on security. Where would he hide something?

  The answer struck her like a lightning bolt.

  Where no one would look of course, or where no one could see.

  She ran back to the security room and began to flip through the cameras that showed the interior of the house—hallways, kitchen, dining room, hallway, bedroom. Windfire certainly was thorough and yet he’d missed a hallway.

  With a frown, she checked the diagram of the mansion and went through the cameras once more. Yup, she was sure of it. In one of the hallways on the second floor, there was dead area that no camera could see. Based on the diagram, it wasn’t much of an issue. There weren’t any doors to rooms there or anything, so if someone tried to hide from the cameras, they’d be stuck in the middle of a hallway where a guard would see them easily. That aside, there was definitely a security hole she hadn’t noticed before.

  Kristen left the room and climbed the stairs to the second floor and the dead area. She noted that although it looked like the cameras pointed to it, they in fact faced slightly toward the floor, which effectively made this small location invisible to the security system.

  Not sure what else to do, she turned to steel and punched a hole in the wall. It went straight through. She muttered a quiet imprecation. This was nothing but a wild goose chase. Disgruntled, she peered into the hole and saw that the other wall was perhaps four feet away. That seemed like an awfully large space to put between walls, even for the architect of an extravagant dragon mansion.

  Intrigued now, she moved a few feet along and punched through the wall again. This time, her fist found metal and she realized that a steel wall had been built behind it. She poked through the wall in a few places with her finger until she found the edge of the steel. It really was a large amount of metal—like a walk-in safe or something.

  She
was sorely tempted to simply break through the wall, but she thought about paperwork in the paper dungeon and decided against it. Instead, she probed carefully until she found what she was looking for.

  A piece of the baseboard gave under pressure from her toe and an entire panel of sheetrock rotated inwards to reveal Windfire’s secret room.

  Cautiously, she stepped into the void between the walls and confirmed that there was a metal door inside. It had an electronic lock she didn’t think she could break, but it turned out she didn’t need to. When Dragon SWAT had shut the security system down, they’d disabled the lock as well.

  Silently, she thanked Windfire for not wiring the room to lock in the case of a power outage, turned her body to steel, and entered the tiny space.

  Room was, in all honesty, a generous word. It was more like a closet—an incredibly secure closet. The walls formed a faraday cage around it, and there was only a single hard line going in.

  Inside was a second computer system that could only be what she’d searched so hard for. She couldn’t think what else Windfire would keep there except a backup. When she turned the computer on, she was shocked to find it didn’t even have password protection. Did this mean the dragon knew he might be killed? The more she puzzled over this locked room that seemed to open for her at the slightest touch, the more it seemed to indicate that he might have left this there as a kind of failsafe. He would have known that his death would be investigated by Dragon SWAT. Maybe the system had opened this room for them so they could actually find it. Too bad no one had actually looked.

  But would this system be deleted as well? Kristen felt certain that the intruder wouldn’t have had time to. It didn’t seem likely that this system could be hacked from afar, but what if someone had returned while Dragon SWAT had left the estate unguarded?

  The only way to find out was to try the computer.

  When she accessed it, she found that the logs were intact. Either the intruder hadn’t known about this backup, or her interruption had forced her to skip this last necessary piece of cover-up.