I Married A Dragon (Prime Mating Agency)
Regine Abel
Chapter 1
Kaida
Shouts, screams, and the thudding sound of countless feet stampeding out of the research facility greeted us the minute we entered the building. Panic and terror too often brought out the worst in people. My heart constricted at the sight of some employees getting blindly shoved, falling, and getting trampled by their colleagues attempting to flee whatever beasts emitted the dreadful roars and screeches further in. But once survival instincts kicked in, rational thoughts usually went on a hiatus.
I fought my natural urge to assist the fallen, since my colleagues would handle them. As part of the main strike team, it fell to my teammates and me to contain whatever mess awaited ahead. I’d taken part in countless hairy missions, but never with anything that sounded like those things.
Hot on the heels of Tedrick, our squad leader, I adjusted my blaster to the highest stun as we reached a first set of security doors. They gave access to the long corridor leading to what the facility’s map on the interface of my armband described as Engineering. As soon as they parted, all wandering thoughts of the panicked civilians vanished. I shuddered at the sight of the two abominations that had been trapped in the corridor when the security lockdown kicked in.
Their bodies vaguely reminded me of a nightmarish greyhound with twisted legs. Their heads had no visible eyes, only a flayed, long maw of dagger teeth. Thick spikes covered the area where their eyes and foreheads should have been, tapering off along the nape. Above what appeared to be an ethereal set of shadow wings, and extending off their shoulders, they had a pair of snake-like appendages that attempted to strike their target whenever within range. The long tail, covered in spikes, ended with a spiked-mace-like bulge with a sharp blade at the tip.
“Eliminate the aqrats,” Tedrick shouted. “Shoot to kill!”
He didn’t have to say it twice. My teammates and I switched our blasters’ setting to lethal and unloaded mercilessly on the two creatures that were charging us with rabid fury. To my utter relief, they were no challenge to our combined fire power. Still, it blew my mind that, instead of a gaping wound where the blaster shots hit the beasts, chunks of flesh tore up before dissolving into smoke. When they died, each creature simply evaporated, as if it had never existed. However, the deep claw marks on the walls made it clear they had been real.
“What the fuck are they doing in this place?” Oleg asked, echoing the thoughts each of us undoubtedly shared.
“Veladeem’s scientists didn’t create these horrors,” Tedrick said in a tense voice through our com. “They just messed with shit they shouldn’t have and let these bad things come in.”
I wanted to ask more questions, but knew better. Tedrick wouldn’t give more details than he was allowed or willing to. Anyway, now wasn’t the time. He gestured for us to follow as we ran up to the end of the corridor. A massive set of reinforced doors barred the access to Engineering.
“Overriding the security locks,” Maeve said through our com.
She hooked her hacking device to the biometric lock, then tapped a few keys. Seconds later, the massive vault doors were parting before us. As Enforcers—agents of the United Planets Organization’s peacekeeping force—we had the best of everything the galaxy had to offer. Our hackers also had backdoors in far more places than the public would be comfortable knowing.
We found more of those dreadful creatures swarming inside, flying around what looked like a giant power core.
The target? A ginormous gold and bluish-black dragon with a shadowy aura.
It only took a second to realize the smaller nightmarish creatures were attacking the magnificent—yet terrifying—dragon. Although he was wrecking them, a single well-placed swipe of his massive paw all but tearing one of the creatures in half, with so many of them attacking him from all sides, the fiends were still getting several hits in.
“Protect the dragon!” Tedrick shouted in our com.
Despite the billion questions firing off in my mind—and undoubtedly in my companions’ as well—we quietly complied. With his security clearance level, Tedrick knew a lot of classified information, little of which he could share with us. I’d never heard of an aqrat, let alone seen one before. What the fuck were they, and where did they come from? And a freaking dragon?
While his body had all the characteristics of a dragon, I absentmindedly noticed that he mostly appeared to stand upright—almost bipedal—instead of on all fours. He was fighting on the circular platform around the power core. The tall railings offered little safety for him should he get knocked over. There was at least a fifty-meter drop, not that he wouldn’t be able to fly back up.
To my shock, a shadowy portal—halfway down the shaft the power core was erected on—seemed to be the doorway through which these nightmarish creatures had entered the research facility.
My team and I spread along the outer walkway while shooting at the aqrats. Although it required multiple shots to the body to slay one, a single shot to the head had them shattering in an explosion of shadows before vanishing.
A handful of the aqrats we targeted redirected their attention towards us, but most remained focused on the dragon, making our job of thinning their numbers easier. The dragon dove from the platform, spraying a flock of aqrats below us with purplish shadow flames. Instead of burning them, it appeared to make them swell and bloat, as if they were absorbing the shadows. Their flight patterns became erratic, almost drunken. The dragon flew around, smashing a bunch with his tail and lacerating others with his claws. Either option had the same outcome of making them shatter, then dissolve into smoke.