Obviously, she would do no such thing.
Instead, she turned toward the hole and glared defiantly at the sniper in the distance, even though he was much too far away for her to see.
At a flash of light from one of the rooms on the eighth floor—the third window over from her right—she held her right hand up between her and the shot that had been fired. If she hadn’t possessed dragon speed, it might not have worked, but since she did, she was able to move her hand into position before the bullet covered the hundreds of meters.
It struck her palm and it hurt like hell.
Kristen didn’t look at the wound. Instead, she simply lowered her hand, squared her shoulders, and continued to stare resolutely at the window while the last few stragglers in the room moved into the hallway.
Only then did she move and reached slowly for her radio, all the while keeping her eyes trained on the window that had been the origin of the flash. Another gunshot didn’t appear, so she activated the device. “Eighth floor, third window from the right. He must have taken all his shots from there.”
“I can confirm. I saw the last shot,” Butters said.
“You mean the shot Hall was too damn stupid and stubborn to dodge,” Drew yelled into the radio. “Now get the hell off the stage, Hall. Do you hope he tries a rocket on you next? Take cover. That’s an order!”
She shook her head. A feeling had come over her—one she’d felt before but only since she’d been a dragon. It was a feeling of possession, that someone had tried to take what was hers. She recognized it as a sense of loyalty she felt to the people who served her. At least, that was how Shadowstorm had described it. She was still a human, though, which meant people didn’t serve her. It was her job to defend them.
“Hall. Hall! Get out of there!” Drew ordered.
Sharply, she shook her head once more, reminded herself that Drew was her superior, and left the stage to take cover.
The auditorium was totally trashed. Apparently, wealthy donors flipped chairs and created chaos when they were terrified as much as the less wealthy did.
When she stepped from the auditorium and into the hallway, Drew was on a radio, confirming that units were already on the way to the site to try to apprehend the shooter. She could tell from his tone of voice that he knew what she did—by the time Detroit PD arrived, the sniper would be long gone. There was no chance that someone with that kind of skill and experience would also wait around for the cops to drive there and ascend eight flights of stairs to apprehend him.
Kristen considered apprehending him herself. She was fast—damn fast—and her training with Stonequest, the leader of Dragon SWAT, had improved her skills. If the hostile was a dragon, there was a chance she’d be able to sense his aura the way Shadowstorm had taught her.
But in the next moment, Keith was in her face and she knew that if she ran off, her team would follow her. None of them had steel skin, so that was the last thing she wanted.
“Holy crap, Kristen, are you okay?” Her teammate’s eyes were wide and he stared at the pockmark in her left shoulder.
“Yeah. We’re lucky he only shot at me. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? It looks like that one got through.” He grimaced like he’d been tasked with removing a piece of roadkill from a sidewalk rather than assessing her injury. The look was too much for her. It was so damn human.
It made her smile, then laugh. She dropped her tough visage. “No, Keith, I’m not sure. Actually, it fucking hurts like hell.” She tried vainly to maintain the smile and felt tears well in her eyes. Reality began to sink in. She was hurt—hurt bad—by someone else who thought they could kill the Steel Dragon. Her worst nightmare had come back to haunt her.
Keith grinned. “Don’t expect me to pity you. You may have been shot more than the rest of us, but it doesn’t count unless it breaks the skin.” He put a hand on her other shoulder—the uninjured one—and held her eyes with his for a second. His look said far more than his words did, that he knew that she worried for herself and her friends and the city. That he knew there was nothing he could say and that they’d both signed up for this crazy, selfless job knowing they’d face enemies like this and yet it was still impossible to prepare for it. He didn’t say any of that, because it wouldn’t do for the whole damn team to burst into tears. So instead, his hand on her shoulder would have to do. And instead of crying, she would have to quip in response.
“So that last bust we had where that bullet grazed your neck and left a burn didn’t count?” It was a joke about fear. He could have died and they all knew it, and yet he hadn’t. When you were on SWAT, it meant you had to joke about it, as scary as it was.
“I got burned in the neck by a bullet! Of course that shit counted.”
Kristen laughed again, which was a mistake. The pain in her left shoulder and arm flared and she had to close her eyes and grit her teeth.
“Holy shit, Kristen.” Keith swallowed. The lack of blood had made him think she was less injured than she really was. Now, he understood. “Doctor! We need a doctor!” He rushed to her side as she sagged.
There was no way a human—any human—could support Kristen’s weight when she had her steel armor engaged, but Keith tried. This simply meant that instead of collapsing onto the floor, she tumbled on top of him.
“Doctor! I need a doctor!” he bellowed from beneath her bulk.
Drew was there before any doctor was. She looked at him and shook her head to try to clear the tunnel-vision brought on by the intense pain.
“Drew. I’m fine… I only… I need some air,” she mumbled and told herself she would be fine. There was no other option. She’d be all right because she had to be for her friends and for the city.
“Stop talking, Hall. You’ve been shot. You’re probably going into shock.”
A doctor raced over with two nurses. Between the five of them, they managed to lift her steel body onto a gurney and pushed her down the hall.
“It hurts, Drew,” she said.
“I know, Hall. Getting shot hurts,” he responded calmly.
“Like it really hurts,” she repeated. The shock he had mentioned made sense to her. She couldn’t think much beyond the idea that she was in trouble.
“I know, but look, Hall—it’ll get worse before it gets better.” He clenched his jaw. “That first shot hit you, Kristen. It was aimed at you. The hostile must have known you would take the stage and had that position planned in advance.”
“Obviously.” She laughed. Oh, that was a mistake. Fresh pain wracked her shoulder. Her tunnel vision closed in until she couldn’t see anything, only hear the calm, quick voices of the doctors and nurses, the sound of the gurney as it rolled through the hospital, and the squeak of shoes on tile.
A red blob blossomed in the middle of Kristen’s perception and her vision returned. At first, it was merely bright white until it resolved into a circle connected to some kind of arm—a light mounted to the ceiling.
When she could finally see clearly, she turned her head to take in her surroundings. They had pushed her into a room with way too many lights. Everything was bright and white, the scrubs of the doctors and nurses the only color she could make out in the fluorescent glare. She missed the children’s ward with its carpet and brightly colored pajamas. Here, the sense of urgency was palpable. Every monitor on the walls seemed essential and every machine waited to spring into action.
A nurse had already activated one of these machines, attached it to the patient, and cursed under her breath. Kristen had seen enough medical drama shows to know that the machine should display her pulse and blood pressure, but it was designed to read human flesh, not dragon steel.
“You’re gonna need something stronger than that,” she grumbled to the woman, who jumped when she heard her. Obviously, she’d thought her patient was unconscious.
“Kristen, shut up and listen to me. Whoever this person was, they were obviously a professional. The distance is…well, it’s insane. It looks like i
t’s over two thousand meters. They knew the bullet would hit you before the sound and probably counted on it. Also, that first one missed your Kevlar. That might have been sheer luck for them or it might have been exactly what they hoped for. A rifle like that might have been able to punch through your armor. We simply don’t know.”
“It didn’t,” she said and pointed to the place where the second round had been stopped by her body armor.
She thought about the hand she’d held up to stop the bullet. While she didn’t think the bullet had punctured her steel skin, she also didn’t think there had been no damage. She wondered if the impact had broken any of the bones in her hand. If it had, the shots that struck her chest could have done even worse.
“Catch the asshole,” she grumbled and looked around the room. Hospital staff washed their hands and put breathing masks on. A nurse drew a table up and placed some kind of a bag on it. She unrolled what was simply a long piece of fabric with pockets to reveal dozens of steel implements—pincers, pliers, scalpels, knives, and clamps. With practiced movements, she slipped some of these implements a few inches out of their pockets, ready for easy access, no doubt. Kristen didn’t like the looks of the tweezers the nurse seemed focused on. They would have to go inside her and that was a painful thought.
“Hall, stop moving. You need to let the doctors work.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will if you let them work. Think about it. If that sniper made all those preparations, he might have used a different kind of bullet.”
“What are you talking about?” She knew, though. It terrified her, but she knew.
“He might’ve used a bullet that could kill a dragon. Don’t you remember what Shadowstorm said? Lead wouldn’t kill him. This guy might have taken the same precaution. Whoever he was, he targeted a dragon and seemed to know how to get under your skin.”
“Yeah, well, it didn’t work,” Keith said and forced a grin. She had totally forgotten about him and had lost track of him when her vision had faded briefly. Gratitude for her teammates suffused her.
“It might still be doing its job, though,” Drew snapped at the Rookie. “Hall, there’s no exit wound—do you understand me? The bullet’s still in there. We need to get it out. That’s what I told the doctors and they agree. They’re not familiar with your uh…physiology, but that doesn’t mean they can’t recognize effects. Your left arm… Well…it looks like your veins are rusting.”
Kristen looked around the room, which bustled with activity. A nurse continued to attach sensors to her, but the machine they were connected to provided no useful information. It read her blood pressure as over three hundred and her pulse at zero beats per minute. Two doctors argued in hushed voices while they watched Drew talk to her. A flash of a paranoia surged. What if they were targeting her? But that was insane.
Drew was right. There was a bullet inside her body—maybe something worse than a bullet. It had to come out.
“Yeah, fine. Get it,” she said.
“You’re still steel, Kristen. The doctors can’t even get an IV in although they’ve tried. That’s what I’m saying. You need to let the medical staff work on you.”
She looked at her right arm as a nurse jammed a needle against her vein. The needle snapped like it was nothing more than a toothpick.
“No!” She snarled and jerked her arm away. There was no way for her to know what was in that bag of fluid. It could be drugs or it could be something that would stop her powers or even something that could let her powers take control of her. These people—these humans didn’t know! She was a dragon—the Steel Dragon. How could humans think they could help her? The arrogance of the idea made her furious.
A flash of heat made all the nurses and doctors take a few steps away from her with looks of terror on their faces.
Only Drew stayed close. She trusted him. He was one of hers, so she hadn’t made her aura affect him. But she hadn’t meant it to affect the doctors either. She was losing control and was afraid that using the drugs or medicine or whatever the hell the doctors would do to her would make her lose even more control.
“Kristen, listen to me. These people need to help you. We need that bullet out, but we can’t do that if you’re wearing your armor. You need to turn it off.”
“No!” Her steel skin was all that kept her safe and she was at her most vulnerable now. Even when she’d fought Shadowstorm—a full-blown dragon—her steel skin had been what had kept her alive.
Her aura rose inside her, an unbidden force, a tidal wave of fear that she could unleash on Drew to wash away his will and make him leave her alone. She fought the urge. Drew was her friend, not her servant or her minion to be ordered about as she saw fit.
“Kristen, if we don’t get that bullet out, there’s no telling what it could do to you. Drop the armor now. That’s an order.”
Strangely, him ordering her around helped. She had been raised by people and was a person, and Drew was not only her friend but also her boss. That grounded her and reminded her what she was and where she was from. She wouldn’t use her powers on him. “He’ll come for me! Don’t you get it? This is what he wants. He wants me to be afraid of my powers.”
“No, Kristen. Shadowstorm can’t hurt you. We drove him from the city.”
“Who do you think hired that sniper?” she retaliated acerbically.
The look on Drew’s face said he’d already had the identical thought. “Even if he did, we have men scouring that building as we speak. You’re safe now. I’ll keep you safe.”
She shook her head. Talking had become more difficult. Her throat and neck began to burn even worse than her left arm. She wanted to look to see if what Drew had said was true—she wanted to see if she was rusting—but she didn’t dare. It took every ounce of self-control she had to maintain consciousness. If she saw her armor coming apart, she didn’t want to think what her aura would do to the people who tried to help her. She had to turn her steel skin off, but if she did, she’d be as weak as any other human. In her moment of weakness, she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t risk her life.
“Kristen, if you don’t drop your steel skin, you might die. If that happens, we both know that no one will be able to protect us from Shadowstorm. We need you, Kristen. We need your powers to keep us safe, but if you don’t let me protect you while the doctors do their work, you won’t be able to protect us ever again. We’ll die.”
Damn it, that worked. The idea of losing people got through to her. She couldn’t let the sniper win, and if he had used some weird bullet that poisoned her, she had to let the doctors help her or there would be no one to protect her team, her family, or her city. If she died, she had no illusions about what would happen to Detroit. The devastation she’d put off would return. The Motor City would crumble to scrap without her. Nothing would survive but junkyard dogs.
Kristen couldn’t let that happen. She clenched her teeth, took a few deep breaths through her nose as she nodded, and dropped her steel skin.
The pain doubled, tripled, and grew ten times as bad. She felt a twinge of something in her right arm and fought with every ounce of strength she had left not to turn back into steel. It wasn’t poison, it was medicine. It was only the IV. Still, she clenched her teeth as the nurses pumped her full of drugs and the doctor looked at her shoulder.
“Scalpel,” he said and his hand moved outside her line of sight.
She heard nothing more after that. Blackness seized her and she passed into a place of nightmares.
Chapter Fifty-Four
It was beautifully cool flying above the clouds. They kissed her cheeks with dew and Kristen tried to embrace them and plunged into the billowy pillows of whiteness like a kid diving into a swimming pool.
She felt the coolness with her fingers, only to discover that she didn’t have two arms, but four. Two of them were familiar—upper arm, forearm, wrist, and hand—except the fingers were longer, clawed, and scaly. These weren’t human arms, but those o
f a dragon. She held them up and sliced through the clouds like a swimmer. Her scales were silver and delicate, more like those of a fish than a reptile.
It surprised her to realize that her other two arms weren’t arms at all but wings. They had upper arms and forearms, but the fingers extended from the palm into long, delicate versions of themselves. Silvery webbing stretched between them like the wings of a bat. She found she couldn’t control her wings the same way she could her dragon arms.
It required no conscious thought to flap them or when to simply coast. She didn’t have to adjust them to the microvariations in air pressure. All she had to think was faster, deeper, and her wings responded. They worked as automatically as her lungs, an extension of her that gave her the skies.
It was an exhilarating and liberating feeling, an intoxicating sensation. She willed herself—her dragon form—to go faster and faster and her body obeyed her commands. With her arms and legs tucked against her scaled body, her wings pumped harder and faster until she burst from the top of a cloud and into a vista of blue skies, where the ground was nothing but a memory.
Mountains of clouds rolled in slow motion. She floated above it all.
Ahead of her, a single cloud seemed…different. Larger than the rest, it rose up from the table of fluffy white like a monster emerging from a pool of water. It was large, so much bigger than she was. It towered higher and higher and eclipsed the sun with its thick gray billowing shadow. Lightning cracked inside it, but she couldn’t hear any thunder, only wind rising to buffet her.
Despite her wings functioning perfectly only moments before, they now seemed powerless to resist the wind. Great gales pounded against her dragon body, but they didn’t come from the storm. Instead, they moved toward it. She was filled with the horrible sensation that she was being devoured—that this cloud would consume the steel dragon as easily as a blue whale swallowed krill.
It was a foe that strong armor would do nothing against, a force that sought metal the way animals sought water. She could not defeat water, wind, and lightning with steel. And yet, she couldn’t escape.
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