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Steel Dragon 3 (Steel Dragons Series)
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Steel Dragon 3
Steel Dragons Series™ Book 3
Kevin McLaughlin
Michael Anderle
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2020 LMBPN Publishing
Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design
http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US Edition, February 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-778-5
Print ISBN: 978-1-64202-779-2
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Kevin’s Author Notes
Michael’s Author Notes
Books By Kevin McLaughlin
Books By Michael Anderle
Connect with The Authors
The Steel Dragon 3 Team
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Dave Hicks
Deb Mader
Debi Sateren
Diane L. Smith
Dorothy Lloyd
Jackey Hankard-Brodie
James Caplan
Jeff Eaton
Jeff Goode
John Ashmore
Kelly O’Donnell
Micky Cocker
Misty Roa
Paul Westman
Peter Manis
Rachel Beckford
Veronica Stephan-Miller
If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
Chapter One
Kristen Hall had always enjoyed going to the gym. She was athletic by nature, so it provided a place to both exert herself when there wasn’t a sport to play and a way to hone her body for when it was time to go back onto the field.
Being a dragon only heightened that appreciation. Instead of sports, she now hunted criminals, but the drive was the same. This was a place to build, grow, and sculpt herself into the next better version of who she could be.
Although, admittedly, there were differences in being a dragon when it came to exercise. Training her human body had direct effects on her dragon form so she still worked out in the shape of a human, but her abilities could only be described as supernatural.
While before, she might have been able to bench-press a hundred and thirty pounds a few times, she was now well beyond her own weight as a measure. She did reps of hundreds of pounds regularly and currently, did reps of ten with two hundred pounds of weight. Melissa Heartsbane spotted her—not smiling and possibly not helping if she needed it, depending on how she felt in the moment.
Despite her pretty platinum-blonde-girl appearance, Heartsbane was tough. Her namesake came from her dragon power of aura, which was stronger than most. She could overwhelm almost any human’s emotional state and replace their feelings with whatever she wanted them to feel. This ability extended even to some dragons although the two had trained closely together ever since Kristen had been falsely accused of killing a dragon. Heartsbane didn’t trust easily—in her youth she’d been betrayed by her own powers into giving others false feelings too many times—but she’d come to trust the Steel Dragon.
Although that didn’t mean she would help out with a spot.
“Come on, human, is that all you have?” she snapped and flashed her aura so Kristen felt a wave of disappointment surge over her. Heartsbane probably didn’t feel that way but she often seemed to think tough love was the way to strengthen someone. It could be exhausting at times but right now, with two hundred pounds pushing down on her for the thirtieth time, she appreciated it. She wouldn’t disappoint anyone—not Heartsbane, not the rest of her team, nor or the humans who’d raised her as their own daughter.
“Yeaaaarrggh!” she shouted as she shoved the weights up and straightened her arms. Heartsbane grinned and guided them to their place on the rack. “Flames on, girl. You did good.”
“Thanks.” Kristen sat, wiped her sweaty brow and the bench she’d lain on, and stood. “But I still don’t see the point of all this. I can lift over eight hundred pounds in my human form and way more than that when I’m a dragon. What does it matter if I can lift two hundred pounds thirty times?”
“Was it easy?” her companion asked.
“No, not at the end, but most of what we do here is more—”
“Practical,” John Emeraldeyes cut in. Everyone called him Emerald and in his dragon form, he was green and gifted with no unusual powers. He could fly, breathe fire, and use his dragon aura, but that was the limit. As a result, he was called a common by other dragons, something of a derogatory term although Kristen didn’t see why. Emerald still had powers beyond what any human had and was committed to training. He was young for a dragon—ba
rely a century—and had spent his life pushing his abilities to the limit. She had abilities he would simply never possess and yet she wouldn’t dare take him on in a real fight.
Although sparring was exactly what he wanted her to do now.
The two teammates donned headgear and light gloves, climbed into a boxing ring, and began their bout.
Kristen had never seen the point of boxing or sparring with gloves. She thought martial arts and especially mixed martial arts made more sense, but much of what the dragons did to train involved limits. It was a necessity given that they could all transform into dragons and simply incinerate any workout gear they didn’t like.
Emerald’s right hook caught her across the chin and made her pay dearly for her wandering mind. Her sense of balance almost failed her, but she caught herself and tried to keep his dreadlocked head in the center of her vision.
“Are you all right?” Emerald asked. He didn’t sound jovial—he never sounded jovial—but there was amusement there.
“I’m fine. Let’s go,” she said and decided she really wanted to punch him in his emerald green eyes.
She pressed an attack and he blocked and let her fists connect with his forearms.
“Good…good attack,” he coached as she tried to penetrate his defenses.
He blocked her blow to his gut and caught her across the head hard enough to knock her off her feet. It was easy to overdo it when one fought with dragon strength. Instinctually, her skin turned to steel.
“Shit, sorry,” she said and pushed to her feet. The limits they applied to themselves included restraining powers and abilities like her steel skin.
“It’s all good,” Emerald said. “Although I’d appreciate it if you turn it off before you hit me.”
“You got it.” Kristen transformed into her regular, pinkish, freckled hue. Her hair changed from steel strands to fiery red. That was her unique ability and why she was known across the world. Not only had she been raised by humans and grown up thinking she was merely a regular girl—albeit unusually fast and strong—but her power had never been seen in dragon society. Kristen Hall—Kristen Steel to the dragon community—could change her skin to steel when she was in human or dragon form.
The steel was malleable enough to still grant her a full range of motion and strong enough to shrug off grenade blasts. In both her bodies, it made her heavier, but in her dragon form, she could still fly while covered in steel, although she was more sluggish and less maneuverable.
“Don’t worry so much about turning your steel reflex on like that,” Stonequest said. He was the leader of their Dragon SWAT team and the dragon she’d known the longest.
“I don’t want to rely on it.” Kristen raised her gloved hands again and resumed sparring with Emerald. Dragons were expected to be able to multitask. She had filed reports while running laps and been drilled on dragon manners while performing aerial acrobatics in her dragon form.
“You don’t. I’ve seen you turn it off many times when it makes sense to do so, but there’s no point in acting like you don’t have the ability.” Stonequest would know. He could turn his dragon body to stone—a beautiful marble, in fact—that granted him some of the protection her abilities granted her. It was real luck that she had grown up in Detroit, where his team regularly patrolled. If she’d had to transition from human to dragon with a different mentor, she could only imagine how much more difficult it could have been. Stonequest continued to give orders despite the fact that her partner continued to strike at her. “If you get hit, turn to steel. Make your enemy have to work to hurt you unless there’s a reason not to.”
“Yeah, like maybe you don’t want me to break my hand,” Emerald said before he swung another punch at her face. She dodged and somehow—miraculously—managed to catch him in his mouth.
She’d aimed for his eye, but she’d take it.
“Damn, Steel.” He spat blood. “Good hit.”
“Thanks.”
Despite all her time with Dragon SWAT, it was still weird to train with them. When she’d been a police officer on the human SWAT team, drawing blood while sparring was definitely considered extreme and was generally avoided. Dragons were different. If she and her opponent went a whole round with neither bloodying the other, it was assumed neither had really tried.
It kind of made sense, though. It could take a human a week to heal from a split lip. Emerald’s was already back to normal. Along with all their other powers, dragons had healing abilities that could mend their wounds in a fraction of the time it would take a human to heal. Even broken bones weren’t much of an issue for dragon kind. A split lip was practically nothing.
“If you knuckleheads are done pummeling each other, join us for some tai-chi.”
Kristen was glad to take the advice from Lumos and step out of the ring. She was exhausted—the bench presses had been the last of a long series of weights that Heartsbane had insisted on—and the bouts with Emerald were always exhausting.
She walked across the gym, chuckling to herself at the absurd amount of weight that seemed to be the default setting for so many of the machines in the gym. The amount of iron they lifted casually in there would have put most human bodybuilders to shame, and yet that was what it meant to be a dragon. It was a privilege, an undeniable privilege, to have so much power when humans simply did not.
No one was more aware of that than Lumos. He was old—thousands of years old—and by far the oldest member on Dragon SWAT. Despite that, he wasn’t arrogant as so many of the ancients seemed to be. He didn’t even seem to be particularly ambitious. He respected Stonequest as their leader and never challenged him for dominance of the group, even though he was literally centuries older than the Stone Dragon.
Lumos cared more for humans than most dragons did, an impressive characteristic given that he—over the course of his long life—had probably seen more die than almost any other dragon on the planet. He had an ability to glow—illuminate was what he preferred it to be called when the other dragons weren’t ribbing him—that was useful against certain other dragon abilities but didn’t seem to have much advantage beyond that. In his human form, he looked like an old, spry white man with an impressive mustache and pointed goatee. Someone might have compared him to Colonel Sanders if the dragon hadn’t been millennia older than the fried-chicken icon.
Currently, he led the last member of the team in a tai-chi sequence.
Erin Timeflash was the member of Dragon SWAT Kristen liked the most despite spending the least amount of time with her. In her human form, she was a caramel-skinned woman with dark curly hair and an affinity for purple. Her yoga pants currently featured a cosmic purple design. In her dragon form, she was a gorgeous purple dragon with the most unusual ability Kristen had ever encountered.
The dragon could restore broken things to the way they originally were. Her powers were limited so she couldn’t fix an entire city and she couldn’t mend anything living, only inanimate objects. Still, her ability was like something from a fantasy movie. If a car had been crushed in a battle, Erin could unwind the damage done to it. If a historical building was demolished by two dueling dragons, she was often called in to put it right.
This ability gave her an affinity for humans because it was their objects she so often repaired. Dragons didn’t build things per se—why bother when there were millions of people to do the work for them?—So Erin was quite familiar with architecture, design, and the pinnacles of human construction in a way most dragons simply were not.
This made her empathetic to people and a soft-spoken champion for the mages who often helped her restore the damage her dragon kin wrought in the world. Because of her abilities, she was away quite regularly so it was a treat when she was around.
Kristen fell into step with her and followed Lumos’s lead. Stonequest, Emerald, and Heartsbane joined the exercises too.
There was a time when the Steel Dragon might have dismissed the movement of energy that Lumos spoke of while he guided thei
r cool-down, but now that she was a dragon, it all seemed so obviously true. Her body possessed rivers of energy. How else would she be able to transform? Working with Lumos and his tai-chi exercises had given her a fluidity of control she had previously lacked, and she relished them now and went through the motions with ease.
A knock at the door to the gym unfortunately disturbed the measure of peace the routine brought.
That someone knocked at all was odd. The gym filled most of the fifth floor of Dragon SWAT Headquarters. As such, it was used by all the dragons who worked there. Even now, others who weren’t part of their team labored away at various machines.
A knock was intrusive and basically conveyed the message that they intended to interrupt, which meant it wasn’t a dragon at the door but a mage.