“I respect the strength and courage that the two of you have shown, Agent Long, Squire Brogan. No one respects strength and courage more than I do. For that, the two of you will have places of honor to watch when I undergo the procedure to take my new body. Then you, Agent Long, will have a place of honor to watch when I debut my new body in my duel with Squire Brogan. Once that—and the Squire—are finished…” He trailed off for a moment and looked and sounded almost remorseful. Almost. “When all is said and done, we’ll have to come to a decision as to what we’ll do with you. In honor of your conduct, I promise to find a way to make it as painless as possible.”
For the first time since Skinner entered, Brogan and Gabrielle looked at each other. Only this morning, things had been so different for them. But neither of them was prepared to give up now. The crime lord was still assuming much. There were still any number of things that could happen between now and the fruition of his plans. Brogan and Gabrielle only hoped they would live to see them—or to have some part in them.
To Holman and Goss, Skinner said, “Let’s give the Squire and the Agent some time to themselves before the water in the pool that I’ve chosen is replaced. Keep this room under guard. I don’t expect we’ll have any trouble, considering the way they’re bound, but keep people posted. Precision, gentlemen—precision.”
“Yes, sir,” Holman and Goss said in unison.
“I’ll see you soon,” Skinner said courteously to his “guests.” Brogan and Gabrielle said nothing in response. They only watched him exit, followed by his men.
There was a beat of silence once the criminals were gone. Then Gabrielle and Brogan, comfortable but shackled, faced each other again. For the first time Brogan acknowledged what he had been thinking before Skinner entered.
“Shit. You and I could make so much better use of this room.”
CHAPTER NINE
The Lernaea resort had several swimming pools. Per Drakkar Skinner’s orders, one of the smaller pools was drained of the water that it contained, cleaned out, and refilled with water from the Orochi River. Then a group of Skinner’s most trusted minions who had come with him on the yacht, and Holman and Goss, came onto the pool deck.
A couple of the thugs, as big and surly-looking a pair of bruisers as one would ever want to see, led Gabrielle and Brogan onto the deck with steel cables attached to the manacles with which the Agent and the Squire were bound. It was now their indignity to be effectively brought in like dogs on leashes to watch the most powerful crime boss in known space get everything that he had wanted for all his life.
Once they were all assembled there, a woman in white with a medical kit slung over one shoulder entered on the opposite side of the pool from where Gabrielle and Brogan stood, and behind her, Drakkar Skinner himself, clad in nothing but a shiny silken robe embroidered—of course—with dragon symbols and figures. It was all very ceremonial, a ritual of ascension or coronation.
Gabrielle was surprised that Skinner was not having some suitably theatrical or processional music piped in for it. That would have made the final grand, dramatic touch to express the vanity, the conceit, the lust for power, of the man posing such a threat to lives across space. But instead, all was solemn silence. Gabrielle, remembering the Lacertan Transition Program protocols, could already guess the reason for the presence of the woman doctor. But she stood by Brogan—as if she had a choice to do anything else—and watched and waited for this insane charade to play itself out.
“Everyone,” Skinner spoke up, his voice reverberating across the deck and on the walls, “what you’re about to see is the proudest moment of my life. It’s a moment for which I’ve prepared myself since I was a young boy growing up on the Arabvania colony planet. When a plague struck that planet, wiping out so many, I was left with a father with a broken heart and no interest in being clean and sober—and not much interest in me except as a target for his voice and his fists. My father taught me about strength, the need to be strong. It was a negative example, but an example just the same. I’ve spent my life applying the lessons I learned from my father. Weakness leaves you vulnerable to anything the universe may throw at you. Today, I claim the greatest strength in this galaxy. Today I will be a dragon. And after me, so will the best of you. Those who may not be chosen now, serve me well and perhaps you will be.”
He gestured to the woman in white. “This is Dr. Samantha Harkins. She has had the wisdom to sign on with my vision. She’s had a lifelong interest in the planet Lacerta and its people, just as I’ve had. But her interest is more in the biology and physiology of weredragons. She is an expert in Lacertan medicine. She’s here to facilitate my transition. Once I’ve drunk and bathed in the waters of the Orochi River from Lacerta, she’ll be administering a drug to speed up my first transformation to my new body, and she’ll be monitoring my overall health. Though, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never been better or felt better in my life. I’m fit and I’m strong, in body and mind—and most of all, I’m ready. I’m ready to begin my new existence—and ready to start a new chapter in the history of space.” He turned to one side of the room where there was a table, a pitcher, and a carafe. Naturally the pitcher was carved with dragon forms and had a dragon-shaped handle, and the carafe was etched with a dragon figure. The man had his obsessions. “Fill the carafe and bring it to me,” Skinner commanded.
A woman standing by the table did as the criminal leader instructed, filling the carafe with water from the pitcher. Meanwhile, since the moment Skinner mentioned Dr. Harkins, Gabrielle knew that her guess about the physician was correct. Her purpose there was not only to administer the mutagenic accelerator that would make Skinner morph more rapidly. She was also there to monitor him for the onset of mutation psychosis, one of the most dire things about which humans attempting the Transition were warned.
In a state of mutation psychosis, a human’s mind and body both reacted violently to the shock of transformation, the changes in hormones and body chemistry and brain functions that accompanied suddenly having another, alien body. A human changed into a weredragon and rendered psychotic could be incredibly dangerous to himself and others.
That would be all they needed, a man whose entire life was about crime, power, and violence suddenly becoming a powerful, reptilian maniac. Was this Samantha Harkins’s fascination and curiosity about Lacertans so great that she would actually be a party to a thing like this? What kind of woman was she?
Skinner took the carafe from the woman, and Gabrielle and Brogan both felt their hearts sink to watch him drink down the entire contents of the vessel with a series of long, deep swallows, as if he had been crawling through a desert and it had left him desperately parched. He took gulp after gulp without stopping until he had drained the entire carafe. Only when he was completely finished and had imbibed it all did he hand the carafe back to the woman. Then, Skinner undid the sash of the robe, opened it up and shrugged himself out of it, and exposed himself fully naked, as uninhibited in his nudity as if he were a born Lacertan. He handed off the robe to the woman and she took the robe and carafe back to the table.
With an almost beatific look, Drakkar Skinner, in the great hush that now fell upon the room, strode to one side of the pool where there were steps leading down into it. One step at a time, he went down into the stolen water. He waded out until he was waist-deep. Then, with arms outstretched, he launched himself forward and down, parting the surface and sending waves up where he penetrated, and dove down into the deep end of the pool.
The hush remained upon the room as Dr. Harkins, Holman, Goss, and a few others stepped forward to the edge of the pool to watch Skinner lying in the water at the deep end. He would not be able to remain down there for long, being only a human at the moment. But the time that he could stay at the bottom would be long enough to create the greatest menace in all of known space.
Gabrielle and Brogan found themselves instinctively holding their breath along with him.
CHAPTER TEN
The wa
ters of Lacerta rolled from Skinner’s body as he broke the surface of the pool from below. Treading water, he rubbed his face to clear his eyes. He blinked, focused, and scanned the roomful of anxious faces.
Then he called out in a booming, whooping voice: “It’s done!”
A sick feeling came over Gabrielle and Brogan at the sight and sound of people actually applauding this dangerous, deranged man now on the very cusp of dragonhood. At the same time Gabrielle noted that Dr. Samantha Harkins was among those not applauding. She was simply standing calmly by with an unreadable expression, watching Skinner swim back across the pool to the steps and climbing up onto the deck again.
Brogan and Gabrielle looked on as the naked and wet gangster strode back to the doctor and let her touch her monitor device to his arm, chest, and skull. Little holograms that they could not read from across the pool danced in the air around the doctor and her patient. Attentively, they watched Skinner himself for any signs of an adverse reaction to his immersion in mutagenic water. If he should change and lose control of himself, neither the Squire nor the Agent would be in an immediate position to do anything about it, shackled and leashed as they were. All that would stand between a maddened Skinner in a dragon body and a fit of mayhem and carnage would be a roomful of thugs. Neither Brogan nor Gabrielle liked the way that scene looked as they played it out mentally.
They began to worry when the gangster’s bare flesh started to flush with redness, and he began to clench and unclench his fists, breathing more heavily, shifting and fidgeting under Harkins’s attentions. His whole face seemed to clench into a frown. He bent his arms and flexed his biceps, pecs, and abs as if straining against something inside that was preparing to come bursting out—which, in a very real sense, was exactly what was happening.
“Well, Dr. Harkins?” asked Skinner, his voice turning to an impatient grunt. “I’m not exhibiting any outward signs of mutation psychosis. Are you reading anything adverse?”
Dr. Harkins replied, “Only the usual increased endocrine, exocrine, neurological, and cardiopulmonary functions associated with the onset of mutation. Your vital signs are all accelerated, as I’d expect. At the cellular level I see new codes writing themselves in your DNA. You’re not turning psychotic—but your body is definitely reacting.”
Brogan himself frowned at their foe. Well, of course he’s not psychotic. He was a psycho and a megalomaniac already. You think a thing like this is going to drive the bastard crazy? Being a psychopath is his natural state.
Skinner said to Harkins, “Then let’s proceed to my first transformation.”
Putting her examining device back in her kit, Dr. Harkins advised, “I’d like to wait just a short time on that, at least until your heartbeat and respiration are closer to normal. Changing now could affect your blood pressure, your…”
The gangster glowered at the physician as if he were a dragon already and could take off her head with a snap of his jaws. “NOW, Doctor. I’m as ready as I’m going to get. I have been ready my entire life. NOW.”
Harkins took a calming breath and reached back into her kit. “Very well, then,” she said. She withdrew an injector from the kit and checked an indicator on it, ascertaining that she had the right dosage. “I’m now going to administer the mutagenic accelerator.” She touched the end of the injector to Skinner’s arm. A tiny hiss that only Harkins could hear clearly issued from the device. In a second it was done. She took one step away and called out to everyone on that side of the pool, “Everyone keep back. Give him some room.”
The people gathered near the crime lord stepped away to the rear of the deck, leaving Skinner, his body now a frighteningly ruddy shade, by himself at the edge of the pool. All eyes were upon him as he clenched his fists, held out his bent arms, and bent his legs, and his face contorted into a deathly and crazed rigor.
His mouth opened wide and a sound wrenched and tore itself from his throat; a strange and awful sound of agony and ecstasy at once. It bellowed and boomed out of him. Arms and legs still clenched, he threw back his head and gave his deathly, howling noise to the ceiling. His body shook convulsively, rocked so hard that it threw him down to his knees. And when he fell to his knees, it began in earnest.
Head, neck, torso, and limbs all morphed at the same time, and Gabrielle and Brogan could only imagine what was happening to his internal organs that turned his bellowing noise to a screeching roar that nothing human ever made. A massive tail erupted from his hindquarters. Spines grew like sudden weeds down the elongated neck and along the back, all the way to the tail. Horns pushed themselves up from the head like saplings from the ground.
Hands and feet turned from human to reptilian, with frightful claws. Human skin became scales over muscle, in deep green with bands of violet and magenta. Then came the wings, unfurling like the sails of a pirate ship from his back, in a lighter shade of the green than the rest of his body. Chest and abdominals turned to armored plates of the same hue as the wings.
In just a couple of minutes, the human form of Drakkar Skinner was gone. At the side of the pool sat a dragon, a full and complete reptilian beast on all-fours, extending his wings, thrashing his tail, screaming out his first dragon cry that resounded harshly on the walls of the pool room.
Damnit, that’s it, then, thought Gabrielle. The fool’s gone and done it. Damn.
Brogan’s stomach churned, as did Gabrielle’s, at the sight of Skinner, his wings flexing, his claws making sharp scraping sounds on the stone tiles of the deck, turning around and displaying himself to his followers, and the sounds of awe and admiration that he drew from them. The wrongness of it all, the perversity of it all, was almost too much to bear. Skinner roared, exulting in this moment of his greatest victory, relishing the prospect of more victories yet to come. And, Brogan knew, paying no heed at all to the turmoil and violence that he was about to unleash.
Skinner folded his wings and reared up on his dragon hind legs. Flexing his neck, he commanded his ill-gotten new body to morph once again. In a heartbeat, his next transformation started. His new form melted and shifted, taking on shoulders and an upright posture, the reptile legs taking a man-like shape. He quickly became bipedal, a two-legged, humanoid dragon. Standing tall, he unfurled his wings to their full spread, making some of his followers back up further to give him room. He lifted his horned head and blunt, scaly snout to the ceiling of the pool room and gave forth a cry with what was both Skinner’s voice and the rasping, rumbling voice of nothing human:
“Today…I AM A DRAGON!”
And again came the applause—the sickening, noisome applause for a creature that had no right to exist and meant nothing but harm to the galaxy around him.
When the cheers and clapping ebbed, the semi-dragon Skinner addressed the gathering. “My friends and loyal soldiers, we’ll now adjourn to the tournament area of the resort, where I’ve planned a special celebration to entertain you before we begin to make our march to further victory. We have with us two very special guests. They were sent by the authorities of Lacerta, Earth, and the Commonwealth to spy on us and undermine our work, to leave us ripe for an attempt to undo everything we’ve accomplished or obstruct our goals. But they were found out and they’re with us now as a captive audience.”
He gestured across the pool to the ones he meant. “I present to you Squire Brogan Holt of the Dragon Corps of Lacerta, and Agent Gabrielle Long of the Interplanetary Bureau of Investigation. In the tournament area, Squire Brogan and I will be facing off in a challenge of skill and strength, a challenge whose outcome will be most final and most lasting—for one of us.
I’m sure you all know the reputation of the Dragon Corps, some of the most formidable fighters in all of space. I’m sure their renown is well deserved. Today will be Squire Brogan’s chance to demonstrate his valor to all of us—in a battle with someone who has been preparing to be a dragon for longer than the Squire has been alive. It promises to be a battle that none of us will forget. We’ll drink to the good Squire�
��s memory when it’s done. And now, we’re adjourned.”
A final round of applause rang through the room and people began to file out. Skinner stayed where he was and gazed across the pool, his transformed dragon eyes resting with a malevolent gleam on Brogan until the thugs holding Brogan’s and Gabrielle’s cables tugged on the lines to lead them away.
Brogan made no expression back at Skinner. He would not give the madman the satisfaction of seeing him react. Gabrielle only looked from Brogan to Skinner and back again before she had to start walking, and seriously wondered how they were going to get out of this one. In all her years in the Bureau she had never faced a moment so dire, and it seemed as though it would only get worse.
_______________
Brogan, under heavily armed guard, was taken to a locker room off the pool room. He was released from his manacles and his lead and ordered to strip down to nothing but a thong. The guards then shackled him with manacles and lead once again and escorted him from the locker room down a corridor into a much larger space. It was cavernous, three stories high, with stadium seating on one side. The spectators occupying the seats were all the ones who had been at the pool. At one end sat Gabrielle, still manacled, with her guard seated beside her, holding her leash. Near her sat Dr. Harkins.
Gabrielle looked over at Brogan and her heart sank. As much as his dragon form was a thing to be admired, the only other thing she had ever seen as beautiful as the human Brogan nearly naked was the human Brogan fully naked. She had no doubt that he was the most exquisite piece of maleness that she had ever enjoyed in bed.
BROGAN_A Steamy WereDragon Romance Page 14