Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 1)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  Everyone laughed but Drew. He turned a shade redder and gritted his teeth. “I’ll meet you all there. I’ll bring someone else too—is that cool? I’d like to even the odds. I heard about what happened last time. It sounded like a massacre,” he added with a pointed stare at Kristen. Oh, so he wanted to team up against her too?

  “You can bring whatever bimbo you want to watch me take you down,” Hernandez said and glanced at Kristen. “Or to show the power of teamwork. But don’t be pissed if she wants to go home with me instead of you when it’s all done.”

  Keith looked put out at the idea of her taking another woman out after the game, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Great. We’ll meet there at six.” The team leader nodded. “Now, my whole damn team needs coffee at the same time? That paperwork won’t complete itself. Get to it!”

  The rest of the workday passed uneventfully. Captain Hansen was marginally less furious with them after Stonequest’s visit, but there was still a ton of forms to fill out to put the entire investigation in Dragon SWAT’s hands and out of hers. Unsurprisingly, she wanted this paperwork done even more thoroughly than usual.

  When the day finally finished, Kristen actually looked forward to airsoft. If they all decided to team up against her, she’d have no choice but to use her powers to show them what happened when you messed with the Steel Dragon.

  She drove to the location Hernandez had given her and stopped only once for burgers. They’d probably go out to eat after the game, but being the Steel Dragon and a Hall meant she had a killer appetite.

  Apparently, no one else had her appetite. When she reached the airsoft course, the team was already there, huddled together and talking in hushed voices. They grew even quieter as she approached, which meant she knew exactly what they were talking about.

  “So it’s the humans versus the dragon, huh?” she said.

  Hernandez, Beanpole, and Butters actually blushed. Keith only grinned and stuck his tongue out.

  Drew raised an eyebrow but didn’t look embarrassed at all. “We’ve been practicing tactical maneuvers with you on the team but now, you can try going solo.” Obviously, the idea of airsoft being fun totally escaped his mind.

  “I’m not gonna lie, I’m excited about putting a dragon in her place.” Jim grinned at her. “Although everyone needs to be careful if she picks a chair up. I’ve seen her stop a professional death squad with nothing more than that.”

  Kristen rolled her eyes at her friends. “You know what? Bring it. I’ll keep my skin normal so I can feel if any of you actually hurt me but if it’s the six of you, I won’t slow down.”

  “We wouldn’t dream of it, Hall,” Drew retorted. “Now, mind your sightlines. We’ll come at you from every angle.”

  Oh, wow, it really was no wonder he didn’t come on these little excursions.

  A shadow fell upon them as something massive flew between the setting sun and the ground.

  “What the shit was that?” Keith stammered, held his hand up to block the sun, and tried to see whatever had flown over.

  Wingbeats generated great gusts of air. Beanpole and Butters looked at each other, then aimed their airsoft guns like they were assault rifles. Hernandez only squared her jaw and glanced toward her bag. There were explosives in there, then. Jim sneered. He seemed to understand that if a dragon chose to attack them, airsoft guns and firecrackers wouldn’t do a damn thing against it.

  Only Drew looked unalarmed.

  Another flap of wings was followed by the smell of powdered limestone and a cloud of dust, and a dragon landed before them.

  Kristen sighed a breath of relief. It wasn’t Shadowstorm. She had panicked, thinking it was him, but now that it wasn’t, she was merely curious. This dragon was smaller than him, with mostly orange scales with touches of black here and there, almost like a tiger. What was most unusual, though, were his scales. They reminded her of the marble in the Fisher Building’s lobby and looked like they were made of stone. Marble maybe, as they had flecks of crystal in them and sparkled in the setting sun.

  The dragon took a step forward, then another, and flapped its wings to release another burst of dust that smelled of limestone. The cloud billowed, but when she was about to hold her hands up to protect her face, it dissipated and a man stood in its place.

  “Stonequest.” Drew grinned like he’d completed a perfect bust. “I’m so glad you could make it.”

  “This is your guest?” Hernandez demanded in a strangled tone.

  “I thought we could use some help on the team,” the team leader said and caught the woman’s eye.

  Kristen understood before she did. They would all go against her, Stonequest included. Everyone else finally seemed to understand as nods and grins passed between her team. Not my team, a group of chumps who are about to learn what’s what.

  Stonequest was oblivious to this communication of nudges and glances like the humans were oblivious to the auras exchanged between her and the newcomer. Her aura was one of surprise, then confidence, and finally, challenge.

  His aura attempted to make her feel outnumbered while he simultaneously drummed up courage in the humans. A useful ability that, she thought, to be able to make an enemy feel one thing and allies another. She realized he was smiling at her. He wanted her to see what his aura was capable of.

  “Neat trick,” she said.

  He nodded, impressed. “I know you went to Shadowstorm for additional training. I had assumed he taught you something about auras after the captain’s office.”

  She held his stare, unsure of what to say, and simply went with, “Sorry.” She wasn’t able to put any emotion into the word at all, so it sounded hollow and fake. “If Shadowstorm hadn’t trained me, I’d never have been able to take him on.”

  “I understand. Dragons usually learn their abilities under the supervision of a senior…although it’s been a while since anyone’s needed to learn the basics.”

  “So, you’re not mad I worked with him?” Kristen had wondered how all that worked. In a political system that rested on reputation like the dragon’s world seemed to, she had wondered if learning at his wings would have been disastrous to her reputation, fresh as it was.

  “I understand why you did it. We shouldn’t have kept you at arm’s length, but your position as a human is…interesting. We wanted you to learn how they enforce their laws,” he explained.

  “She didn’t exactly go by the book,” Jim interjected.

  “I know, and I don’t like that Shadowstorm knows more about you than I do. From here on out, I’d rather you work with someone I trust.”

  “Great.” She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her voice and failed spectacularly. “Who is this Mary Poppins of the dragon world you’ve found to babysit the Steel Dragonling?” She hadn’t intended all the sarcasm, but Marty—the queen of sarcasm—was her mom. Sometimes, she couldn’t help it any more than she could help taking seconds at dinner.

  Stonequest hesitated, then scratched his head. “I’ve been called a lot of things over the centuries, but what is a merry popping?”

  Everyone laughed, Kristen included.

  “When do I meet the coach?” she asked again.

  He looked confused. “We start tonight.”

  “Oh,” she said rather dumbly when she realized she’d been talking to her new teacher for a while now.

  The dragon—noticing that she finally understood—held his airsoft rifle up. “Are you ready to see what a dragon can do with one of these things?”

  Drew also held his rifle up. So did Butters and Beanpole, who barely hid their grins. Keith and Hernandez looked downright diabolical.

  “So…seven against one?” she said and studied her team and the dragon they now surrounded. “That sounds good to me. Maybe, just maybe, now that you all have a ringer, you’ll last more than a minute against me.”

  “This is what you’ve wanted, right, Hall? A chance to test your dragon powers?” Drew asked.

  “Well…I
guess? You guys are so whiny when I beat you, I’m merely not sure it’ll be any different this time. I’m not sure I can stand the blow-back if I beat all of you by myself.” She laughed. If there was one thing she’d learned on SWAT, it was how to talk shit.

  “Then let’s even the odds,” Jim said and left the team to stand at her side.

  “I thought I was a dragon and you didn’t like my kind,” she joked.

  “I still don’t like dragons much.” He eyed Stonequest as he said this. “I think history shows what they’ve done with their power to people and that many of them are callous and cruel, but it’d be foolish to keep acting like all of you are the same. You saved my life, Kristen, more than once at this point. I’d be a fool not to fight on your side.”

  He lowered his weapon and reached out for a handshake. She could see the respect in his eyes fighting against his own prejudices. But whatever he felt internally, he did his best to treat her respectfully and that was what mattered.

  But a handshake? What was he, her boss?

  She wrapped him in a great big bear hug, lifted him off the ground, and squeezed, flexing her dragon strength to do so.

  “So…we’re cool then?” He wheezed from the crushing hug.

  Kristen put him down and shook his hand anyway.

  “That all depends on if you can take down that dragon over there.” She gestured to Stonequest.

  “He’s mine. You handle all the puny mortals.” Jim fake-sneered.

  “Who are you calling puny?” Butters laughed louder at his own joke than anyone else.

  The speakers in the arena came to life. “All right, all right, all right. Tactical teams into position. Round one of the evening is about to start.”

  Kristen and Jim ran into the arena and prepared to defeat their friends.

  “I really do owe you,” he said as they took cover behind a canvas tarp stretched between two trees.

  “You can start your debt by pretending to shoot the folks who saved my life.”

  He grinned wickedly. “Sometimes, I really fucking love being a cop.”

  She found that, hard as it was, she really liked it too. There was nothing she’d rather do with her life or her abilities than protect the people around her.

  Especially if that meant giving all your friends welts and making them buy you a beer afterward.

  The klaxon blared for the match to begin.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  The foolish beasts crowded in front of Sebastian Shadowstorm displayed nothing resembling intelligence. They were cattle to be herded, nothing more. One day, he would rule them—or roast their flesh and make them suffer for not asking to be ruled sooner. How anyone could think these creatures were worthy of anything more than being fed table scraps by their betters was beyond the black dragon’s ability to comprehend. Yes, they used tools, but so did crows, and at least crows understood that they were scavengers.

  A blaring horn dragged him from his thoughts.

  “The light is green. Let’s fucking go.”

  He scowled into his rearview mirror. “I am going, you plebian cockroach,” he roared out the window of the 1982 VW bug he currently drove. Humans lauded their inventions, their mastery of machines and medicine, electricity, and frozen pictures, and yet for all their ingenuity, they had invented traffic.

  “Well, go faster or I’ll cram my fucking truck up your asshole.”

  Human beings were disgusting, crass creatures. And yet, this ape had the right of it. The traffic light was green, and it was his turn to go. He admired the efficiency of the systems humans used to govern their day to day activities. At this intersection, all of them bowed to the color of the streetlights without a second thought. Soon, they’d put the same colors on pine trees they’d bring into their homes and virtually worship the things. It really was pathetic.

  His scowl deepened as he eased his foot down onto the gas pedal and the car lurched out and across the intersection. No sooner had he moved forward than the man in the truck behind him raced around his vehicle and leaned pointedly on his car’s horn as he went.

  Sebastian stuck his massive arm out the tiny window of the VW bug and raised his middle finger at the man. It was a human gesture that worked as both an insult and a threat. He found it was rather delightful to use.

  Or it was until the man in the truck’s passenger seat threw a cup of carbonated sugar water out the open window at him and soaked the sleeve of his black suit.

  In that moment, it took every speck of control the dragon had learned over his centuries of life to not transform into his true shape, spread his wings, peel the man out of his truck, and devour him like a human would a canned sardine. How pleasurable it would be to reach out to the clouds and summon the rain and the wind. It would begin to storm and the man in the truck would start to worry about the road. In the blink of an eye, a shadow would eclipse the lightning raging in the sky and the man would be no more than dead meat.

  But he didn’t transform, nor did he summon a storm or bolts of lightning. He didn’t even flex his aura and make the man fail to pay attention to the road and crash his obnoxious vehicle.

  He was in hiding among humans, so he had to behave as one, as demeaning as that might be. Fortunately, he understood the gravity of his situation enough to control himself. The man in the truck was merely a human. Not an enemy, simply an annoyance. Sebastian Shadowstorm had enemies who could do far worse than make his suit sticky. Until they could be defeated or undermined, he would deal with the insults.

  Besides, traffic wasn’t that bad a behavior for humans. The dragon had lived through both the Inquisition before he’d left Europe and the slavery in the new world. Compared to their own past, humans of the modern era were downright peaceful.

  Unlike his enemies.

  They thought they’d driven him from the Motor City, and he couldn’t betray his position for petty revenge. He’d been in hiding for a few weeks, and Dragon SWAT didn’t seem to have any inkling about where he was. Centuries of practice had taught him to control his aura better than almost any other dragon, which meant he could hide it from most of them. Currently, hiding his abilities was the only skill he was able to practice, and even that hadn’t always worked, not against everyone anyway.

  But it did seem to work against Dragon SWAT, and that was what mattered. As long as he remained in Detroit, he was in a position of power. He’d spent decades building up his network of humans to serve him here. This was where his base of power was, and this was where he could most easily take action if he wanted to.

  Or if it was demanded of him.

  Another driver—apparently fed up with the VW bug’s reasonable speed of twenty-five miles an hour—accelerated around him and cut him off, honking its infernal horn the entire time.

  How he wished he had his chauffeur and his limousine right now, but he’d been ordered to come alone and come discreetly, and he had no choice but to obey. Besides, he hardly fit in the tiny car on his own. If Tyler were driving, he wouldn’t have fit at all.

  Plus—although he didn’t really like to admit it—he liked Tyler. No, not liked but appreciated his service. He was an efficient, well-trained servant who was more loyal to his master than he was to his own pathetic species, and it would be a pity—no, not a pity, he told himself, but a waste of resources—to lose the man over a car ride.

  Sebastian turned down Sand Bar Lane and drove to the end of the street. He parked his car, squeezed out of the small door of the tiny vehicle, and assessed the meeting place. It was humiliating. He’d been told to keep a low profile and remain discreet and yet he’d been ordered to meet at a restored steam-powered paddleboat—the only one in the city, in fact.

  The vessel had been built close to a century before, but one wouldn’t know that by looking at it. A fresh coat of white paint practically sparkled in the afternoon sun, the perfect foil for a red paddlewheel and two gleaming smokestacks. Despite the boat being more than twice as old as his VW bug, it looked newer, nicer, an
d far more glamorous. From its interior came the sounds of a string quartet and the smells of roasted meat. It was the most garish spectacle he had seen in weeks, and it filled him with pangs of jealousy.

  He’d abandoned his mansion and moved into a tiny, roach-infested motel. For too long, he had eaten fast food and done nothing for entertainment besides watching television and trying to familiarize himself with the phenomenon that had taken his power from him—the Internet. Now, he was confronted with all he’d lost. There was something absolutely decadent about living the luxuries of decades past while the world raced forward. Obviously, the owner of the paddleboat felt the same way and wanted him to see it and suffer.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe—just maybe, if everything went right—he could earn his place back and more. It wasn’t his fault, after all. It was Kristen’s. How he hated the steel dragon and her allies on Dragon SWAT. He could have defeated her and had been tantalizingly close, but she had outwitted him with that infernal smartphone. But he’d learned from that and knew it was her understanding of the modern world—the human world—which had given her an edge. He would simply have to make it clear that it wouldn’t happen again and he was sure that the Masked One would understand. After all, a string quartet playing from a gilded paddleboat wasn’t exactly typical human behavior.

  Dragons looked down on the obsession with inventions humans had taken up in the last century or so. Every year, there seemed to be something new. The Masked One undoubtedly knew the new kinds of music and transportation in the world, but he chose to live in the past. Hopefully, he could make the powerful dragon see that they shared the same faults.

  Sebastian straightened his shoulders, rubbed the crick in his neck that had come from cramming himself into the tiny VW, and walked up the gangway and onto the ship.

  The interior of the vessel was even more garish than the outside. Meticulously carved pillars supported a ceiling that was painted with images of dragons guiding humans through their own history. The winged creatures stood over fields of battle, on ships sent to discover new lands, and above the kings and politicians who derived their power from the scraps of the dragons’ table.