Read Tesser: A Dragon Among Us (A Reemergence Novel) for Free Online Page B

with a powerful underhanded swing. The sturdy wooden door burst inward, splintering the doorframe and cracking in half as it fell completely off the hinges. It was as if the door had been made of glued-together toothpicks.
    Shit, Paul, that door sleep with your wife?
    The man dropped the ram and stepped aside to let the rest of the men in the breaching stack pour through the doorway past him.  
    The first man into the apartment started yelling immediately, "Boston Police! Search warrant! Face down, hands on your heads!"
    Henry's thumb twitched reflexively on the safety of his M4, moving the selector to fire. His index finger hovered over the trigger guard, ready to retract and send a high velocity round into anyone who threatened his life or the lives of his fellow officers. The tension was incredible. Delicious.
    "Clear!"
    "Clear!" The SWAT officers barked out as they moved into the apartment and fanned out, checking rooms for signs of life. These early morning raids were almost always successful at catching the suspects in their underwear asleep in bed, and in the first thirty seconds of this raid, it was looking good.
    Henry's assigned job on this raid was the ass end of the stack. He was to push deepest into the apartment with one of the more experienced officers on the team and arrest the person in the last bedroom. Surveillance indicated that there was only one person in the apartment, and that's where they were supposed to be.
    Henry and his teammate moved into the apartment quickly, past the other officers as they covered movement in every conceivable place. Like Henry, all the men on the breaching team had military experience, and he felt comfortable with them.
    However, anything could go wrong.
    The officer in front of Henry raised his leg and snapped it out in a powerful kick at the closed bedroom door. The cheaper interior door was hollow, and the kick well placed, causing it to blast inward on the hinges and bounce off the wall of the bedroom. The two men were moving into the room before the door had a chance to come back at them.
    Their perpetrator was in the bed.  
    There he is.
    The leading officer yelled as he slung his M4 and grabbed at his cuffs, "Boston Police! Hands where we can see them!"
    That's the point where something went wrong.
    The suspect was curled on his side in the fetal position facing them, and as the other officer went to grab the man's arm, he launched a kick out and it struck the cop straight in the groin.  
    Fuck.
    The lead officer let out a whimper and collapsed, bouncing off the edge of the mattress before hitting the floor.  
    The perp leapt up like a ninja in the darkened bedroom and launched his entire body at Henry. He screamed and spread his arms wide like some insane, drugged-up bird of prey.
    Henry might've been the runt of the litter his whole life, but one thing he had was speed.
    Henry stabbed his M4's barrel out as a reflex, and caught the man square on the jaw as he came down on him. Henry felt and heard the man's jaw break, but could do nothing but fall as the now unconscious drug dealer's body fell on top of him, pinning him to the floor. Henry let out a grunt as all the dead weight squished him down against the dirty, smelly rug. Henry's finger never moved over the trigger.
    Another officer stepped into the doorframe and saw the situation and laughed. "Shit, Henry, you're supposed to be on top of him."
    "Kiss my ass, Ethan. Check on Lawrence; he got hit in the junk," Henry said as he pushed the drug dealer off of his chest.  
    Ethan stepped over Henry and checked on the downed officer, Lawrence. Henry cuffed the scumbag with the broken jaw and left him lying on his side. He moaned in pain as Henry started to walk away. He'd need to be checked by the EMTs before he was moved.
    "What happened?" the team leader asked as Henry passed him on the way out of the apartment.
    Henry put his weapon on safe and dropped the magazine as he replied to the sergeant in charge of the