The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “Kristen Hall, Lady Steel, you are under arrest,” Stonequest said and defaulted to formality once more.

  “On what charges?”

  “The charge is serial dracocide. We have completed a path of warning and told you of your crime.” His voice was heavy as he went through the dragon legalese. “In accordance with the will of the Dragon Council, you must come willingly or you put yourself in opposition to this team of enforcement officials. Furthermore, any failure to participate with us will force the Dragon Council to seize your fortune without trial and without regard to the outcome of this trial.”

  “Oh, cut the shit, Stonequest. I don’t have any fortune.”

  He ignored her and pushed through the words he needed to say for a legal arrest. “Your fate will be determined in front of a tribunal. If you attack us, the rules of duel will not apply. We are allowed to use lethal force to subdue you if we must.”

  “This is bullshit, and you know it,” she replied caustically.

  “You’re over a ninety percent match for the DNA found at the sight of Icebreeze’s murder,” Emerald snarled. He sounded pissed.

  “You’re a fucking monster. Worse than human,” Icerain said. “He was my cousin.”

  Kristen cursed. She had thought the blueish pallor of Icerain’s human skin had seemed familiar. If she’d seen Icebreeze’s human body she might have recognized it, but she’d only seen his dead dragon body.

  “We also checked the other recent murders. That same DNA—your DNA—has been found in the wounds that killed both Windfire and the dragon assassin who went by the name Death.”

  Agreeing to give her DNA to Dragon SWAT had been a prerequisite for being hired. She didn’t care that they’d run it, but she couldn’t accept these conclusions. Rather than attempt another verbal protest, she reached for her aura. She wanted to use it to show them that she was innocent. They’d know she was telling the truth because she was horrible at manipulating her aura.

  Unfortunately, the handcuffs around her wrists blocked her powers completely.

  “I…this is crazy! If it’s me, wouldn’t it be a hundred percent match?” she asked.

  “That’s what I said, Steel, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re the best lead we have.” Lumos sounded downright heartbroken.

  “But you saw what happened to Windfire. You have the video.”

  “Which you very conveniently found,” Stonequest pointed out. “How can we be sure you didn’t plant it yourself?”

  Heartsbane stepped forward “Are we really going to let this shit happen? We all know she didn’t do this.”

  Kristen was surprised that she of all people had come to her defense, but there it was.

  “It doesn’t matter what we believe,” Stonequest said. “We have to follow the evidence, and the evidence is damning. Kristen, I don’t believe it was you either, but you have been at every site and now, your DNA has turned up in a wound. We need to take you into custody until we have a better lead. You understand.”

  It wasn’t a question but she nodded anyway. Sometimes, police worked like this, she told herself. Sometimes, they arrested a false lead to goad the true suspect or they made mistakes or…or people were framed… Her veneer dropped.

  She didn’t cry or wail but a single tear fell from her eye. She used the hand that wasn’t cuffed to Lumos to wipe it.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “It’s fine. This will all blow over. You’ll see. We all know I didn’t do it,” she said.

  Not everyone believed that, though, and the four dragons who took her and guided her to a cell were decidedly rough about it.

  Still, Kristen could have weathered all that well enough. She’d seen false leads before and knew the dragons were merely doing what they thought was best. It occurred to her that she might even be able to actually sleep that night too. After all, the cells were surprisingly plush, but as she was escorted to hers, she passed Obscura, the dragon who’d hunted and tormented the humans in her life.

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the Steel Bitch.”

  She punched the shadow dragon’s door but the occupant only laughed. She knew as well as Kristen did that all she’d managed to do was hurt her knuckles. In payment, the dragons shackled her hands together and threw her in a cell a few down from the monster who had terrorized her loved ones.

  Chapter Sixty

  Kristen slept that night despite her predicament. She woke in the morning, ate the food the guards provided, and prepared herself to stand before a dragon judge.

  That moment didn’t materialize, however. Apparently, the dragon prison system worked differently than the human one did. Rather than waiting in jail for bail or a lawyer, the dragons would transfer her to a prison outside the city limits of Detroit. At first, she wanted to protest the injustice, but then she saw the wisdom of it.

  After all, a pissed-off dragon could cause far more damage than a pissed-off human. Bail didn’t really make sense when the accused could simply fly away across an ocean, burning cities as they left. She wondered briefly why Obscura was still there, but assumed there was a good reason.

  When they took her from her cell and put the cuffs on her once more for transport—the cell had the same spell that stifled her dragon powers—she took it all in stride. After all, she was innocent, which meant her honoring the system gave credence to how the system treated the guilty.

  She knew she didn’t commit these murders and was entirely innocent. That didn’t mean she’d be released immediately, of course, especially if she was being framed. That was a train of thought that she wanted to avoid, though. It was possible—of course it was—but to her, there seemed to be a more plausible explanation.

  This occupied her thoughts as they loaded her on a bus with a few other dragons—Obscura included—and drove out to the prison.

  The first piece of evidence she needed to know more about was the gun the assassin had used to kill these dragons. She was fairly confident that Constance had killed all three of them, but that would be a harder sell than simply focusing on the gun. To her, Icebreeze’s wound had obviously been a gunshot and she thought that as the dragons looked at the evidence, this would become increasingly clear. Yes, it was possible that they wouldn’t be able to move past their own biases, but surely they’d be able to tell that there hadn’t been any kind of battle in Icebreeze’s lair.

  The gun would crack the case. She knew it, but there was nothing she could do about that. Stonequest knew about the gun and would follow any leads he could. She couldn’t know this for certain, of course, but she had to believe it, at least for now. Her feelings might change if she had to stay in prison for more than a week but currently, she still trusted him. And Heartsbane, apparently. The feisty dragon arguing for her innocence was still a surprise to her, but it was a kernel of hope she badly needed.

  It was better for her to focus on the assassin, she thought as the bus left the highway and started down a small road toward a building surrounded on all sides by twelve-foot-tall chain fences topped with razor wire.

  What had the assassin said? That she was her “real mother” or something like that? It didn’t seem right. After all, the woman had been a human and she was a dragon. But there could be something there. Maybe she did share some portion of her DNA with the woman or perhaps with a dragon Constance had recruited to her cause. If that was the case, maybe she shared DNA with other dragons. Perhaps they’d all been born together from the same clutch? Or…made, somehow, through magic or technology? Cloned? If so, she had family out there she didn’t even know about. Were they allied to the technomages? Or were they prisoners?

  It was kind of a fantastic thought to Kristen, and it made her skin crawl to think of it. Normal for her was hatching from an egg. Maybe being some kind of a clone or test tube hatchling wasn’t really that farfetched. It could certainly explain the ninety percent DNA match.

  Not that there was a way she could investigate any of this from a jail cell in
side a prison ringed by razor wire.

  The bus pulled through a gate that rolled shut behind it. Once closed, another one opened in front of them and the bus continued onto the prison property. It drove down a dirt road lined by more fences on both sides. She couldn’t help but wonder about the fences. They were twelve feet tall and ringed with razor wire, but that didn’t exactly make them an impediment for dragons. Even in her human form, she had strength from her dragon abilities to rip the fences to pieces. She still wore the shackles that limited her powers, but she didn’t see shackles on the prisoners in the yard. There was no time to consider it, though, before the bus came to a stop.

  The two guards at the front stood, drew swords of all things, and gestured for them all to stand. “You’re gonna exit one by one. We’ll get you checked in, showered, fitted with a prison uniform and an anklet, and show you the yard and your cell. Are there any questions?”

  “Must I endure all this nonsense even if I’m a returning customer?” Obscura asked querulously.

  “How about you skip the shower and we simply put you back in your cell. Does that sound better, smart ass?” The guard was not amused.

  “Certainly,” she replied as if she’d been invited to board a private jet rather than enter a jail cell.

  “All right, then. You first. Get up and come this way. No one else moves.”

  The shadow dragon stood from the back of the bus and made her way forward. When she was about to walk past Kristen, she stumbled. The younger woman was surprised at the dragon’s clumsiness—when they’d battled, she had been supremely graceful—but she understood when her adversary whispered in her ear. “You may have got me locked up here, Steel Bitch, but all you really did was send me home. Welcome to hell.”

  “Fuck you, dinosaur,” she replied.

  “No talking on the bus,” the guard shouted and strode toward them.

  Obscura straightened quickly and held her hands up in deference to the man armed with a sword. Kristen couldn’t be certain, but she thought she could sense something odd about the blade. It seemed to almost drag mist behind it like it was freezing cold. Whatever its nature, the shadow dragon seemed to either fear or respect it. Once the guard brandished the weapon, she kept her hands up and followed him off the bus.

  She watched as he took her inside. A few minutes later, he returned and gestured for her to come next.

  He waited impatiently while she scooted out of her seat and stood, the manacles dangling from her wrists. Her clothes were a mess. She’d slept in them in the cell at Dragon SWAT HQ and didn’t know if it was good or bad that she currently wore her Dragon SWAT uniform. On the one hand, the guards might respect her more, but the other inmates would probably feel quite differently if they knew exactly what she was. Although that might not matter. She was the Steel Dragon, after all, arguably the world’s most famous dragon. If the inmates didn’t recognize her when they first saw her, everyone would know who she was within a week.

  Would she be there that long? She couldn’t imagine it being longer than that. It seemed too unjust to have to wait as the accused without a chance to defend herself, but again, she saw the validity of not letting a pissed-off and possibly murderous dragon run free. Obscura was locked up there despite her case apparently still working through the courts of the Dragon Council, and Kristen thought that was definitely a good thing. She told herself that her temporary imprisonment was the cost of safety for mankind.

  She followed the guard off the bus, obeyed his words without question, and focused her gaze on his sword. It was definitely magic, she had no doubt about that, and he was clearly a dragon. She could feel impatience emanating from his aura. Trying to fight back against him while powerless in her human form was obviously out of the question. Again, she told herself this was a good thing, a price she paid for human safety.

  Her expression calm despite her thoughts, she followed the guard into the prison.

  Once inside, he handed her off to another guard, who led her into a processing room.

  “Name?” she asked, but she could tell from her grin that the woman knew exactly who she was.

  “Kristen Hall—”

  “The Steel Dragon,” the guard finished for her with a broad smile. “My name’s Sangre, by the way. I’m a mage and, like, your biggest fan. It’s an honor to book you, ma’am.”

  “Do you have any idea how long I’ll be in here?” she asked, hoping that Sangre being a fan would be able to provide her with some information.

  “That all depends on your trial, doesn’t it? Speaking of which, why are you here?”

  “Because I was arrested?” she replied, totally unsure of what to say.

  “No, what crime did you commit?”

  “I didn’t commit anything,” she stated.

  Sangre smiled. “Right, sure. Innocent until proven guilty is the American mantra. They’ll respect that here, but I need to write down what you did.”

  “Nothing,” she said again. This was ridiculous. She was all for sacrificing her freedom if it meant the guilty couldn’t walk free, but how would there be a fair system if she had to incriminate herself?

  “You wouldn’t be here if it was nothing, Lady Steel,” the mage said and continued to smile like nothing at all was wrong.

  “Okay…well, I guess you can say insubordination,” she snapped.

  “Yeah…that’s not a reason to be here.”

  “Well, I didn’t do anything, so I guess we’re stuck.”

  The woman frowned for the first time, then picked a feather up. She whispered something to it, and it began to twitch like a wind grew slowly in the room, although Kristen couldn’t feel anything. After a few more twitches, the feather darted over her, out of the processing room, and into the prison.

  A moment later, it returned and went directly to an inkwell and a pad of paper. It wrote, of its own volition, the words, Kristen Steel killed Icebreeze in his own lair without proper dueling rules.

  “See? Was that so hard?” Sangre said and copied the words from the pad to a scroll in front of her.

  “But I didn’t do it,” she protested.

  The woman waved her hand at the protest like she had declined to let her buy lunch. She clearly had no interest in discussing it. “I need to write your crime down, is all. It’s standard procedure.”

  “Okay—”

  “Look, there are more prisoners waiting to be checked in. I’d love to go through all this, but we really don’t have time. Obscura’s here too, right? She obviously built that freaky weird game place and tortured your brother. There are hours and hours of video footage of it. But do you know what she says to me every time she comes in here? The same shit you do. I didn’t do it, I’m innocent, yadda-yadda-yadda. I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m only saying that arguing with me won’t sway the Dragon Council. Only evidence will, which of course will depend on if you’re innocent or guilty. Okay?” Sangre said it all like she was describing what went into her favorite recipe for cookies. Despite comparing Kristen to a true monster, she sounded nothing but peppy.

  “Okay…well, can you tell me how long until I get to plead my case?” she asked.

  “Nope, not really. You’ll be here at least a week, I’m sure of that. It takes that long to present anything to the Court of the Dragon Council, but it could be longer, though. I’d try not to make any enemies.”

  Great, but there’s not much I can do about that. She already had an enemy and she hadn’t even been checked in yet.

  “Now, do you prefer to shower alone in human form or supervised in dragon form?”

  “Uh…I can shower alone?” Kristen asked. She’d seen enough prison movies to be able to visualize prison showers as wide open spaces.

  “Sure. If you don’t need to change into your dragon form again, I’ll slip the anklet on you and you can shower now. There’ll be a fresh uniform when you’re done. You really don’t want to go in your dragon form again?”

  “No. Human is fine.”
>
  Sangre nodded and looked thoughtful. “You know, you’re the first dragon I’ve ever booked who is willing to shower as a human. Most choose a scrub down.”

  She simply shrugged because she had no idea what that meant.

  Another guard arrived and took her to the ablution area. Before she could disrobe, he dropped to one knee and took out a tiny silver band. “This silver cuff is enchanted. It’ll keep you in human form until we remove it. If you try to take it off without the spell, it’ll inject a paralytic into your body that’ll keep you frozen for twelve hours as well as alert the guards that you attempted to tamper with it. Don’t mess with it, okay? We hate cleaning up when you dragons crap yourselves.”

  It was obvious that he enjoyed delivering the threat. Not that she blamed him. How many other people on earth were able to threaten dragons with impunity?

  Kristen agreed to the anklet and he clicked it onto her ankle. She didn’t feel any different but that was probably because she was already wearing the manacles. The guard slipped those off and she found that her powers were indeed still deactivated. That explained the prisoners in the yard who hadn’t had manacles.

  The guard showed her to the showers and she indulged herself. There was no reason to rush—she’d be there a week at least, after all—and the water was hot and the pressure high. She scrubbed her body clean and washed her hair, impressed with the variety of shampoos they had on hand in a prison, then simply stood under the hot water for a while.

  A half-hour later, she was finally bored and surprised that no one had tried to make her stop. She turned the water off and stepped from the shower into a dressing room. There, she found a bright yellow jumpsuit, underwear, and a white shirt to wear beneath the uniform. She dressed, stepped out, and found Sangre waiting for her.

  “Hi,” the woman said. “I finished checking people in, so I thought I’d show you around.”