RAWN

by Bonnie Burrows

  “Yes, belch your fire!” Sabian screamed. “As if it will save you now!” And with the same inhuman strength that had torn his chair from its mooring, he hoisted Rawn bodily from the deck and held him up in the air. Rawn’s tail thrashed madly, trying to beat at his opponent who stood just out of reach. His wings pounded to no avail. With a malevolent shriek, Sabian hurled Rawn across the bridge and sent him crashing hard against a far bulkhead of the ship. The

  dragon man clattered to the deck and lay there dazed and stunned.

  Sabian pressed his advantage, leaping across the space between himself and Rawn. Standing over the Knight, he sneered, “My mistake was not simply pounding you into

  submission before I took your worthless life! Let me correct myself…” And he raised a tentacle toward the bridge canopy above and brought it whooshing down onto Rawn’s head. It made a terrible, thumping smack and Rawn’s body lurched with the impact. Further stunned, the Knight looked up through eyes bleary with shock and pain at the oncoming blow of the other tentacle, which slammed him across the chest. Rawn flinched all over and made another fiery belch.

  The rain of blows of Sabian’s flailing tendrils continued without let up, one after another after another. Rawn raised an arm to deflect the blow of one only to catch the other across the chest or the snout, or atop his head in front of his horns. The blows kept coming, and Rawn felt his world turning red. Fearing it would soon go to black, he knew he had just one chance.

  His attacker was so intent on battering him senseless that he had left himself a vulnerable spot, and Rawn seized it at once. Slashing out with his tail as ferociously as Sabian with his arms, he wrapped his tail around one of Sabian’s ankles and gave a hard yank with all his dragon might. Shrieking, Sabian toppled onto his back and lay there prone with tentacles waving. One tendril caught Rawn around the waist and pulled him down, dragon face to mutant face.

  “Thought you’d caught me?” Sabian raged. “You’ve just given me the perfect chance to pierce that dragon head of yours!” And Rawn realized he was right; Sabian was even now

  lighting up his third eye to send a beam right into his skull at closer than point-blank range. There was only one thing to do. Rawn quickly grabbed Sabian by the head and twisted it hard to the left, right at the instant that the mutated man let fly with his killing beam. The energy bolt shot out and hit the bridge control panel, bringing forth a sparking geyser of shattered instrument parts. The ship shook again.

  Rawn hissed, and Sabian bellowed furiously as the two foes started to roll and thrash back and forth on the deck of the bridge. Rawn’s tail coiled about Sabian’s leg while Sabian’s tendrils did the same around Rawn’s neck and arm, and they kicked at each other, tossing and rolling from side to side, each one vying for the upper hand—or limb.

  Finally, fighting dirty again, Sabian turned his gaze down his own body to where Rawn’s tail enwrapped his leg, and fired from his eye. The beam seared onto Rawn’s tail with an awful scalding sound, and with a pained dragon roar, Rawn uncurled his tail from Sabian’s leg.

  Sabian came up to a crouch over Rawn. “Now…I finish you. Your life ends now, boy.”

  Rawn’s only answer was a last choking inhale with the mutation’s tendril crushing his neck—and an exhale of fire. A jet of flame shot from the dragon man’s jaws and expanded to a cloud of fire, right in Sabian’s face. Seared and shocked, Sabian released his grip on Rawn and staggered back, tentacles wiping at his face.

  Rawn’s reprieve lasted only long enough for the Knight to clamber back to his feet. Sabian took his tentacles from the reddened green flesh of his mutated face and spat, “All the fire of Catalan itself will not save you from me!” Rawn braced himself. Sabian charged forward…and in mid-stride, he stopped and went into a spasm, staring down at his torso, through which the glowing length of Rawn’s powerblade now jutted.

  Unable to speak, Sabian turned and looked behind him—at Joanna, who released the weapon with which she had impaled him and took a step back, fearing that Sabian would now turn the beam of his third eye on her.

  Instead, Sabian dropped shuddering to the floor and did not move.

  Rawn did move. He dashed and bounded nimbly around his fallen enemy, pausing just long enough to stoop down and pull his weapon from Sabian’s back and retract the blade, and bounded forward again to take Joanna into his dragon arms. “What are you doing here?” Rawn asked. “The escape pod was supposed to launch and take you to safety.”

  “It must have had other ideas,” Joanna replied. “It just let me out.”

  “The ship trying to overwrite the codes I sent it to release you must have worked

  differently than I expected,” said Rawn. He reached into the pouch on the leg of his armor and pulled out Epaulette. He handed the device to Joanna. “Your AI will help you find the docking port where my ship is. Go there now and do not look back.”

  “What about you?” Joanna asked. “I can’t go without you.”

  The ship quaked yet again, and this time it felt harder than the last time. And all around them were sounds of things crackling ominously in the walls, as if something were trying to tear itself loose—or tear itself to pieces.

  “Yes, you can and you must,” said Rawn. “I’ll catch up, and we’ll leave here. But I must do something first, and I don’t want you to see.”

  Joanna protested, “But Rawn…”

  In a voice harder and sharper than she had ever heard from him in either of his forms, Rawn demanded, “Do as I say, Joanna! Go NOW!”

  She took herself solemnly, grimly, from his embrace and headed for the hatch of the bridge. She took one last fearful look at him before leaving.

  Rawn spun around on his dragon heels and faced Sabian, lying on one side, his mutated body already starting to heal itself from Joanna’s attack. “Now, for you, monster,” the dragon said. “Now, I do as I should have done fifteen years ago.” He turned his powerblade on again, a gesture of warning that any shot from Sabian’s third eye would be instantly parried.

  “You wouldn’t and you know it,” Sabian grimaced. “You and your Knightly chivalry and mercy, you would never do it.”

  Rawn stepped closer to him. “I am a Knight of Lacerta,” he said. “Wherever there is evil, we strike it down. And one thing you should know, Sabian…” He stretched his dragon neck out closer to the fallen villain before he said:

  “We are not always merciful.”

  Rawn opened his dragon mouth all the way and breathed out hard. A massive, mighty torrent of flame came pouring out like a deluge, not of water but of fire. It cascaded blinding-hot onto Sewall Sabian where he lay, consuming every inch of his body, turning him to a blazing shape on the deck. Sabian’s form disappeared into the devouring glow of the dragon’s inferno. When the firelight partly subsided, he appeared as a melted heap in the flames. A terrible stench permeated the bridge, another thing that Rawn wanted to spare Joanna.

  Looking up and around the bridge, Rawn realized that the ship’s extinguishers had not engaged. That was one reason he had hesitated to use his breath against Sabian to begin with; the extinguishers would have rendered his attack useless. And if the extinguishers were offline, he suspected what else might be happening to the ship’s systems even now.

  Quickly, he went to the control panel through which he had made Sabian blast his beam. What he could make out from the displays told him that power surges were taking place all over the vessel because of that blast—surges that could end in only one way. He looked back at Sabian’s burning remains. Good, then; what was about to happen next would ensure that his job was complete. All that was left was to get himself and Joanna away in time. He broke into a run for the hatch off the bridge.

  _____________

  The docking that had secured the Justice Claw to Sabian’s ship had been jarred partly loose by the convulsions rocking the enemy’s craft, which was a fortunate break. It made it all the easier for the Justice Claw to pull its way free, pull back from Sabian’s v
essel, and veer off back into space in the direction from which it had come.

  At the cockpit, Rawn sat at the controls, then shifted back to human with Joanna at his side. “Display aft view,” he commanded, and the viewport imaging system changed the view from the stars ahead of them to the orbit of Catalan behind them, and the stricken craft quickly receding from sight. In a second, there was a flash, as if another smaller star had suddenly ignited in

  Catalan’s orbit. It quickly dimmed, and what felt like a lifetime of tension drained from both Rawn and Joanna.

  A moment of silence fell as the two of them processed what they had just been through and barely survived. Then, Rawn turned his beautifully masculine face to Joanna and asked, “Who taught you to use a powerblade?”

  “No one,” Joanna admitted. “I just picked it up and went with my instinct.”

  “You have very fine instincts,” he said. “Another thing that I love about you.”

  Rawn kissed her long and hard, and Joanna wrapped her arms around him, accepting his kiss, as the Justice Claw sped back to Catalan.

  *

  Dame Sienna had not been idle after Rawn had sped off for his fateful encounter with Sewall Sabian. She had immediately ordered a top-security sweep of every building, living space, and other facility throughout the Spires, using the most powerful sensing technology available to the Knighthood, the Corps, and the Fleet. Before dawn rose that night, Spires security personnel had made a startling discovery in the private quarters of one lower-ranking Knight.

  His small room was empty except for two piles of a melted, gelatinous protoplasmic substance, one of which showed chemical compounds of a Knight’s armor skin. The other was greenish and tested out as containing DNA markers similar to those of a grass dragon. Sabian’s operative in the Spires had apparently acted on orders to terminate himself and any other evidence of his

  activities in the event that Sabian exposed himself or was found out, and the authorities were closing in on the agent.

  For weeks to come, Knights of all ranks would express appalled dismay at the spy with suicide orders who had lurked in their midst. But at least the threat of another Chimerian incursion in Commonwealth space had been stopped before it started.

  Sir Rawn Ullery would eventually receive—once again—the highest commendations for his valor against Sabian’s shocking return and the threat that he posed. At the same time, he would receive a formal censure from the Mentors’ disciplinary committee for his unilateral

  actions, moving against a potential threat to the entire quadrant without official orders from the Spires.

  When Dame Sienna pleaded his case, and her own part in what Rawn did, no further punitive measures were taken against Rawn, and the censure ultimately stood as a virtual footnote on his illustrious record. Once the news of what had happened with Sabian and how Rawn had flown to the rescue of Joanna Way was released, in fact, the quadrant would love him more than ever.

  As for Joanna Way, when the time came to tell her story, she would be forthright and candid about all the circumstances surrounding her abduction by Sabian and rescue by Rawn, and her sharing a bed with the Knight whose story she had been assigned to cover became public knowledge.

  While Rawn received nothing more severe than a hearing and a minor citation for his actions, Joanna’s breach of professional conduct would cost her a bit more. To save face before all the media of known space, the Terran News Service formally suspended her from all reporting duties and put her on leave with pay.

  This would enable Joanna to extend her stay at the guest quarters near the Spires, which suited her perfectly well, as she had ample reason to remain on Lacerta—amply handsome, amply

  muscular of build and hairy of chest, amply hung below the waist, and most amply aroused many times throughout the day and night.

  Rawn’s commendation and censure and Joanna’s suspension, however, lay in the days ahead of them. Immediately upon their return to the Spires from their adventure in orbit of

  Catalan, after Rawn made his debriefing statement to Sienna, the two of them retired to Rawn’s suite and took themselves to his bed. They were physically and emotionally exhausted from

  everything that had happened to them, and for some time they simply lay in each other’s arms—Rawn lying naked in the custom of weredragon men—and plummeted quickly into sleep.

  When they awoke, their feelings and desires soon took over. They had heard of revenge sex, makeup sex, and even grief sex, but now, Joanna and Rawn discovered a new kind of coupling: relief sex. With the thrusting of Rawn’s maleness and the burst of his seed inside her, they

  released all the terror and pain of their battle with Rawn’s old foe, and lay relieved and temporarily spent on the sheets.

  After a while, they lay like spoons, and Joanna promised herself that after nearly being thrown into the Sun, she would never again take for granted the feeling of Rawn’s arms around her and his half-erection nestling in the cleft of her buttocks. Dreamily, she said, “You know, Rawn, before long, your counseling period will be over, especially since you just showed how well you can still handle yourself, and they’ll put you back on full duty.”

  “Yes, they will,” Rawn replied, kissing and licking her shoulder, making her tingle with the thought of what else he wanted to do to her.

  “And I’ll have to go back to work too, though I don’t know at what, since sleeping with you hasn’t done any favors for my reputation as a mediate. I was thinking maybe I’d settle down here on Lacerta, if not with the Terran News Service, then with some other media service. I should be able to get work somewhere, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, teasing her nipple and making her grow moist again down below.

  “We’ll want to stay on the same planet, after all,” Joanna pointed out.

  Rawn moved the hand that teased her nipple down her body and rustled his fingers in her muff, making her grow even wetter. “I absolutely want us on the same planet,” he replied. “And in the same bed.”

  Joanna moved onto her back, and her lips met his. Rawn put himself back on top of her and slipped his man-dragon deep into her treasure place. And Joanna rejoiced under him as the conquering hero claimed what would always be his.

  THANKS FOR READING!

  I really hope you enjoyed RAWN. Remember, the other books in the Dragons Of The Universe series are:

  Book 1 – THRAX

  Book 2 – RAWN

  Book 3 – CORAM

  Go check them out and collect the whole series!

  Otherwise, add your email to the simply shifters mailing list to be the first to know when it is released!

  Bonnie x x

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