Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 1)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “People were hurt—”

  “No, they weren’t—well, no one except the people you hurt in the baseball arena and the man you left behind at the last building. They were under orders not to hurt anyone.”

  “Because they’re your people?” she challenged.

  “Because they’re yours.” Sebastian smiled imploringly as if there was nothing more important in the world than that she understand the sincerity of his words.

  “That…that makes sense,” Keith said and nodded.

  She looked at her teammate. He stared at the dragon with wonder in his eyes like an older sibling had confirmed the existence of Santa Claus.

  “Total fucking sense,” Hernandez added and also nodded, her expression one that suggested she was enraptured by his explanation of the events.

  Kristen looked at Sebastian, this criminal mastermind who masqueraded as a member of society, and raised an eyebrow. He might have convinced her. He’d been right, no one had gotten hurt, but Hernandez? That had been too much.

  She flexed her own aura and felt her team’s trust for the dragon seep away. Keith shook his head like he tried to wake up.

  Hernandez’s look of shocked understanding immediately settled into her more typical scowl. “Fucking asshole.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Hall. Like you said, he’s a damn snake,” Drew said to her, apparently oblivious to the fact that he’d been under the dragon’s control as well. She knew he was a snake, and the team leader felt that way as opposed to trusting him because she used her aura to influence her team.

  She hated doing that because, by using her aura, she only confirmed that Sebastian was right. To protect people—her people—she needed to use her dragon abilities, and her ability to control her aura with any level of precision came from Sebastian. No, she couldn’t call him that. He was Mr Black or Shadowstorm but not Sebastian, never again.

  “Indeed,” the dragon said. She could see that he understood what had gone through her head and that she’d recognized him using his aura and pushed back. He looked less than amused but turned away from her and faced Drew. “Don’t you have rights to read me or something? There will be lawyers and trials and all that, yes? I must say, it’s been quite some time since I’ve run afoul of human law. Don’t ruin your chances by insulting one of your captives.”

  “Let’s go. asshole. You have the right to remain silent. I recommend you use it while you can.” He resumed reading Mr Black his rights.

  Kristen nodded. Drew was right. He was a snake and had outmaneuvered her. Worse, she now realized that he knew everything about her—the exact limits of her powers and what she could and couldn’t do. All their training had been a ploy to learn about her and to find out how to hurt her. It was almost too much to comprehend. Compared to his Machiavellian plotting, she really was a child.

  In response to her inner frustrations, she scowled at the prisoner and flexed her aura as she did so. The slight effort she put into it whipped the police around her into a frenzy of curses and jeers at the disgraced dragon. Some of those who hadn’t known about the operation and had been called away from lunch even threw their drinks at him.

  She sneered at him. “Whoops. I guess I haven’t quite learned the finer points of control.” It hadn’t been her intention that the cops throw fountain drinks at him but rather that they simply feel her anger toward the man who’d lied to her and led her on for weeks. The police had taken that anger, combined it with what they knew of the man who’d tried to start a war inside the city and killed a number of their ranks, and this was their reaction.

  The dragon didn’t even flinch when he was showered by sticky beverages and the curses of people she had no doubt he saw as beneath him. “You’re welcome,” he said to her and extended his huge arms to be handcuffed.

  Keith did the honors, although the restraints barely closed around his thick wrists. They put him in the back seat of a cruiser and his massive frame barely fit.

  Kristen swallowed. They’d won the battle and the mercenaries were now off the streets but obviously, Mr Black had another card up his sleeve. He could have snapped the handcuffs like paper—and, for that matter, probably shredded the car like cardboard. In fact, he could have simply flown away. She didn’t know the extent of the dragon’s powers—he had quite conveniently kept that information from her—but she did know that a dragon had never been shot and killed by a gun. Injured perhaps, but not for long, and never killed.

  And yet, he sat in the backseat, slightly stooped, with a grin on his face like he knew the punchline to a joke he hadn’t bothered to tell them.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Mr Black, seated at the table in the interrogation room, almost looked like an optical illusion. He was simply so big. At well over six feet and with shoulders that brought the word “oxen” to Kristen’s mind, she didn’t see how the room could actually hold him. Even if he wasn’t a dragon, he looked like he could snap the handcuffs apart, although he’d made no effort to do so.

  She almost wished he’d use his powers to trash the place. At least she would have known they had actually got to the bastard.

  Drew paced in front of him and demanded answers, but the dragon made no response at all. The man tried every tactic he knew to intimidate the prisoner, but she knew none of it would work. Sebastian Shadowstorm was a master of controlling other people’s emotions with his aura. Less than a year before, he’d whipped every gang in the Detroit area into open rebellion. The team leader’s bluster about being locked away without a key simply didn’t make any impression on him—and especially because she had no doubt he could bend any bars they put him behind.

  After ten minutes of this parody of an interrogation, Mr Black cleared his throat. Drew turned too quickly and she could see the desperation in the gesture. The dragon could have asked for a steak dinner and would most likely have been given it. Still, the officer retained a little of his bluster. “What? You want your damn lawyer?”

  Kristen shook her head. He had probably compelled Drew to ask that.

  “Lawyers. Pah. My lawyer isn’t versed in criminal law, only real estate. Those men who work with me, though, will all need a lawyer. You’ll find there’s a substantial sum set aside for their defense. You’ll also find that the people defending them are quite well-versed in how humans and dragons are supposed to interact.”

  “Then what do you want?” Drew asked.

  “I want you to shut up. I won’t talk to you, you insufferable simian simpleton,” Mr Black stated officiously. “I simply wanted to let you know that if you continue to blather at me, I will use my abilities to make you and everyone in this station piss themselves. You bore me. Your questions are dull and your posture is obvious. Ugh.” He waved a hand dismissively at the man like he was nothing more than a fly.

  “This isn’t a time for puerile threats,” he retorted sharply.

  “Puerile? What a clever word, human. You know, I remember when the English first adopted it from the French in the late sixteenth century.”

  The team leader scowled, left the room, and slammed the door behind him. “I can’t believe this asshole.” He shook his head and moved to stand beside Kristen behind the one-way glass. Mr Black stared at them both. She wondered if his dragon senses empowered him to look through the mirror. The expression of contempt on his face certainly made it seem like he knew he was in control.

  “I know you don’t really have the experience but, Hall, I think you should go in.” He didn’t sound too proud of the suggestion.

  “Me? I’ve never interrogated anybody,” she protested.

  “Yeah, I know. Most people on SWAT never do, but…well…” He uttered a strangled laugh. “The asshole said he won’t talk to humans, and, uh…”

  “I’m not human,” she finished for him.

  He shrugged and forced a smile. “I’d say try to get a confession, but he’s right in that our laws don’t exactly apply to him. Still, if you get him to admit to giving orders to the m
ercenaries, maybe that’ll prove he’s involved enough in human affairs to drag him down with them. They have crimes to answer for—destruction of property and possession of illegal weapons and hazardous materials. Maybe a conspiracy charge. If you can get him to talk about them, maybe you can bring up what happened with the damn gangs. Cops died. Maybe we can get a murder charge to stick.”

  “Do you really think so?” she asked.

  His expression didn’t look confident. “I don’t know, but dragons don’t normally hire teams of mercenaries. The world would be far more fucked up if they did. Maybe he broke one of their rules by doing all this shit. If you can get him to confess, maybe we can transfer him to Dragon SWAT.”

  After a moment’s thought, she nodded. “Okay.” It was worth an attempt.

  She got two cups of herbal tea—Sebastian had always been partial to jasmine—and walked into the room. She knew—and Mr. Black knew—that there was no way she could intimidate him. After all, he’d trained her and sent mercenaries to kill her. Maybe that meant he couldn’t kill her with his bare hands, but it also meant she didn’t inspire anything even remotely like fright in the dragon older than the city she’d been born in. He must see her as less than him. Then again, he probably saw everyone as less than him. Maybe she could use that arrogance.

  “So you won’t talk to humans? Then talk to me. Dragon to dragon.” She pushed a cup of tea across the table and sipped her own.

  Sebastian laughed. Mr Black, she reminded herself irritably, but it was hard to think of him as the criminal mastermind when he laughed in the same way he did when she told him stories about growing up human.

  “So you are,” he said with a smile as he studied her for a moment before he picked his cup of tea up and took a small sip. He looked like a kid pretending to be tied up while playing cops and robbers. The handcuffs really were comically undersized. He closed his eyes, inhaled the aroma of the beverage, and set it down with a look of satisfaction.

  Kristen wondered if he’d had the same look in his eyes when he’d ordered the rebellion that had killed Jonesy. Remembering her partner made it much easier to think of him as the enemy he was. Suddenly, she knew that any attempt to be the cliché good cop wouldn’t work. She was the Steel Dragon and definitely would not sit there and wheedle information from this asshole while he sipped his tea. “How long have you known the mercenary team that tried to kill me?”

  “You mean those brutes who stormed into my abandoned warehouse? I think that maybe those thugs destroyed my property.” He said it all in a phony, saccharine-sweet tone that made the lie painfully obvious and took another sip of tea.

  “Bullshit. You may not be talking to the cops, but your little cronies are. We have confessions from most of them and are working on the others.”

  “A human’s words don’t carry weight against a dragon, Kristen. Face it. You have nothing on me. We’ve faced rebellions like this in the past before—a team of pathetic humans conspires together to try to oust their superiors. It always turns out to be a lie. Always. Their kind isn’t trusted, Kristen, not by our kind.” He put the cup down and raised his hands in a gesture of absolution.

  “So you’re saying you didn’t have a part to play in the gang rebellion that almost burned this city down and killed my partner.”

  Mr Black smiled indulgently. “What would you like me to say? That my aura affected those criminals? That somehow—without speaking, mind you—I inspired a horde of worthless criminals to show their true selves? Forgive me. You know I’m somewhat out of date, but are auras something that counts as evidence in your human courts?”

  “We have multiple confessions from them as well. I’m sure some will identify you as Mr Black. You’ll pay for Jonesy’s death and all the other officers who died that day.”

  He laughed. “Why do you think your criminal system hasn’t made laws that apply to the full range of our abilities? Why do you think there are jurisdictions that one can simply fly away from and leaves their crimes behind? It’s not a terribly convenient system for a human. It’s hard to flee a city, after all, but for a dragon? Come now. Surely you can see how this system wasn’t designed entirely for the people at the bottom. You say I’ll pay for your partner’s life. Tell me, how much is the life of your partner worth?

  “More than yours.”

  “Is it? Last time I checked, bullets were cheap and that was all it took to kill your friend, wasn’t it? A couple of slugs of lead you weren’t able to stop? Think about it. If you had worked with me sooner, I could have shown you how to better use your reflexes. That is so ironic it’s almost poetic—thanks to me, he might still be alive.”

  “You bastard!” Kristen said and pounded the table so hard her fists made dents in the burnished metal. Both cups of tea clattered to the floor. She hadn’t realized she’d turned her hands to metal.

  Mr Black didn’t so much as blink at her outburst. He only chuckled and lowered his cuffed hands to his lap. “Calm yourself. I simply meant that if I had made your acquaintance sooner, I could have helped you. You make a fair point about your friend’s life, though. Other lives were lost as well. A shame…a real shame.” He sucked a breath through his teeth and shook his head. “Perhaps a charitable contribution to the families of the deceased would fix things? It can’t be easy to lose the breadwinner. How about a hundred thousand—”

  “That’s a goddamn insult and you know it.”

  “Let me finish, please. Let me finish. How about a hundred thousand a year for the rest of their mortal lives? I imagine some of them even had kids. A hundred thousand dollars will cover their expenses for a long time. Therapy, college, housing, food—almost anything they could think of. This is what dragons do for people. This is what you do for people, Kristen. You help.”

  “You’re the one who needs help. We have multiple confessions linking your identity to the criminal Mr Black. We have your fingerprints and those of your servants on unopened crates of weapons we found. We also have confiscated the payments you made to mercenaries. Spanish doubloons? Really? That doesn’t scream dragon at all.”

  He paused as if to consider all this for a moment. “So those rats kept their nest right here in the city?”

  “Those desperate men you exploited were more than happy to share what they knew when they saw the writing on the wall for multiple life sentences.”

  “Which together would still equal less than mine.”

  “Just because a human’s life is shorter than a dragon’s doesn’t make it less valuable,” she retorted sharply.

  The dragon snorted at that and obviously found the comment ridiculous. “You know,” he said, raised his cuffed hands, and scratched his check languidly before he lowered them to his lap again. “For a human, you might have had enough. The evidence you have spoken of sounds compelling, even in this country with its ridiculous ‘innocent-until-proven-guilty’ laws. Maybe with one of your lawyers and a jury from this city, you could’ve made something stick.”

  “There’s nothing to make stick. We already have everything. You’re going down, Sebastian.”

  He clucked his tongue and shook his head again. Oh, how she loathed that sound. “Kristen, how can you be so naïve? For a human, this might have worked. But I am a dragon, so this has all been nothing more than a waste of both of our afternoons. Now, here’s what will happen. In a moment, a knock will come at the door. The person will say that a call came in and that you are to release me without charges. You’ll release me, return my gloves, and we’ll be done here.”

  “Bullshit. You haven’t made any phone calls.”

  Mr Black merely smiled. “When you so valiantly appeared at my warehouse to apprehend those terrible criminals, I might have had one of my chauffeurs call Tyler. He does more than fix drinks, you know.”

  “Like I said, bull—”

  A knock came at the door. She answered it and tried not to let herself turn to steel and trash the entire station when Keith explained to her that what the prisoner had
predicted had indeed happened.

  Five minutes later, she watched Sebastian Shadowstorm saunter from the station, transform into a dragon in a dark cloud of shadow, and fly into the approaching evening. She was so angry, she thought she would be physically ill.

  “I can’t believe that fucking monster. I want to blow his goddamn brains out,” Beanpole all but snarled from where he leaned on the front desk. Kristen had never heard him talk that way before.

  “I know what you mean,” Butters agreed fervently. “I want to rip him limb from limb.”

  Reality kicked in and she shook her head and tried to calm herself. She’d let her aura get out of control and could see the ripple effect throughout the station. Everyone seemed angry and on the verge of violence. She tried to settle her own rage but only succeeded in bringing her aura under control. Beyond that, she was still utterly furious. Separating her emotions from her aura was an important ability—yet another she’d learned from Sebastian.

  She returned to the interrogation room to find it empty and finally located Drew in the lounge, eating a donut and staring into the distance.

  “This is bullshit, Drew. He’s the reason Jonesy is dead.”

  Drew shrugged. It was a weak gesture, and in that moment, she hated him for it. “There’s nothing we can do about it right now. He’s a dragon and out of our jurisdiction, and we didn’t really gather much evidence. I liked the line about the fingerprints on the weapons, but he must have known you were bluffing. When we busted the asshole, he was wearing gloves. He even asked for them back.”

  “The gold coins weren’t a bluff.”

  “Yeah, but a few coins in a few pockets doesn’t unequivocally pin them to Mr Black.”

  “He was there, Drew. Can you even hear yourself?”

  “I know he was there, Hall. I was there too, goddammit. Do you think I like this shit? If we want to nail him, we’d practically need him to confess—and even then, I have no idea if that would be enough.” How odd it was to hear her own rage come back at her from another person. She’d let her aura affect him.