Alien Dragon's Spawn (Dragons of Arcturus Book 1) Read online

  Alien Dragon’s Spawn

  Lizzy Bequin

  Alien Dragon’s Spawn

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events reside solely in the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters are eighteen years of age or older.

  © 2020, Lizzy Bequin. No portion of this work can be reproduced in any way without prior written consent from the author with the exception for a fair use excerpt for review and editorial purposes.

  This title is for adults only. It contains explicit sex acts, adult themes, and material that some folks might find offensive. Please keep out of reach of children.

  lizzybequin.com

  Table of Contents

  Newsletter

  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

  Epilogue 1

  Epilogue 2

  Also by Lizzy B.

  About the Author.

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  CHAPTER 1

  The nesting chamber was a spacious domed cavern at the very heart of the mountain. On one side, within an enormous fireplace carved directly into the solid stone, a fire crackled and muttered sleepily, bathing the chamber in a warm glow and throwing shuddering shadows across the walls. In the center of the room, woven from incongruous materials—wicker and rushes and silken pillows—lay the nest.

  The nesting chamber was warm, peaceful, and comfortable.

  Outside was a different matter. There was a storm raging around the peak of the mountain tonight, swirling and crashing like dark thoughts around a troubled head. However, as the sound of the wind and thunder filtered through the twisting labyrinth of ancient corridors carved into the living rock, its volume diminished, and by the time it finally reached the nesting chamber at the warm heart of the mountain, the noise was little more than a sigh.

  For Katrine, lying in her nest, the muffled storm sounds were barely audible over the deep, steady breathing coming from her mate behind her.

  No, it had not been the storm that had woken Katrine.

  It had been the egg.

  The egg had moved.

  Katrine shifted her weight against the soft, comfortable rushes and cushions of the nest and pulled the egg closer. It was not big; Katrine could easily hold it with two hands. Its surface was smooth, but not quite as hard as the chickens’ eggs she used to buy from the supermarket. Instead, this egg had just a hint of leatheriness to it, and a dimpled texture like she had once seen on an ostrich’s egg.

  Katrine held the egg against her belly. She brought her legs up and circled her arms around it, completely enclosing it in her body, protecting it and willing every drop of her body heat to radiate into the precious oval.

  “How are you doing in there, little one?” Katrine whispered.

  Adding to the warmth of Katrine’s body were the rhythmic gusts of breath that washed over her from behind, stirring her curly hair lightly and settling over the nest like an invisible blanket of air. That breath was warm but dry. Its heat was not at all like the breath of a warm-blooded mammal, but more like the radiance of a blazing hearth in winter. It even carried with it a faint scent not unlike the earthy, spicy aroma of woodsmoke.

  Outside, the storm grew louder. Katrine was reminded of a similar stormy night that she had endured within this mountain fastness. That had been a little over three months ago, but it seemed a lifetime.

  The egg moved again.

  Slowly and silently, Katrine slid the egg up her body until she could tilt her head down and place one ear against its surface. She had done this often over the past two months, and each time she was astonished by the way that the tiny heartbeat inside kept growing stronger and stronger every day, every hour.

  But now there were other sounds too. The sound of shifting weight, of a little body moving restlessly inside. Katrine’s eyes were open wide now. Her own heart was thumping against her breast bone with increased excitement. She held her breath as she listened. And then…

  Thump.

  It was a small sound, but with her ear pressed to the shell, the sound was amplified. Katrine pulled back with a soft gasp, then pressed her cheek to the egg once more to listen and feel…

  Thump. Thump… Tchk.

  Katrine pulled back again, this time smoothing her hand over the surface of the egg. It was a struggle to contain the welter of emotions rising up in her breast, swirling and churning like the storm outside. Excitement, nervousness, fear, and anticipation. But most of all, joy. The time had finally arrived. The small but very distinct crack at the end of the egg made that clear.

  “Skal!” She whispered excitedly

  “Mm?”

  The voice that hummed behind her was deep and rumbling, like the sounds of the planet itself that sometimes vibrated up from the roots of the mountain. With that sound, more hot breath poured over Katrine’s body, but her skin remained goosebumped with excitement.

  The egg shifted in her hands again, this time even more forcefully. The tiny crack grew.

  “Skal!” Katrine said more loudly this time. “Skal, wake up!”

  Her dragon grunted behind her. Warm, smooth scales shifted against her soft naked back. Powerful arms squeezed her firmly, protectively, the same way that she hugged the precious egg. There was a smoke tinted yawn. A growl. A sleepy nuzzle against the nape of her neck.

  “Grmph…Kat? What is the matter, my atma?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Katrine answered hurriedly, uncertain why she was still whispering. “Skal, it’s the egg…”

  She felt those enormous, scaly muscles go rigid behind her. Hot breath was held in. A gigantic heart drummed against her back with an even faster tempo. When her dragon spoke again, his voice was fully alert and brimful of emotion—a cocktail of excitement and happiness with just a dash of fatherly concern.

  “The egg?”

  “Yes,” Katrine said, not bothering to whisper anymore. “It’s hatching…”

  CHAPTER 2

  Three months earlier, or several eons, depending on how you look at it…

  Katrine Collins stood at the edge of the precipice in the night, sipping a cup of terrible coffee and smoking a cigarette.

  Behind her lay the Blue Mesa research facility, a collection of squat, unadorned, single story structures that one would never suspect housed the control system of the most expensive and sophisticated device ever built on Earth.

  In front of her, on the other side of a ten-foot chain-link fence, sprawled the far more impressive vista of the Blue Mesa canyon. It was a landscape fashioned by forces of nature far more powerful and abiding than humankind, older than life itself.

  It was well past midnight now, nearly two in the morning in fact, and the moon had already disappeared behind the distant horizon. But the sky tonight was clear, totally de
void of clouds, and the angled splash of the Milky Way provided just enough light to see the striations on the walls of the canyon below. In the daytime, under the glare of the vicious Nevada sun, those sedimentary stripes would form a stony rainbow—mustard yellow, brick red, and that deep, dusty indigo that gave Blue Mesa its name.

  At this hour, however, beneath the pale glow of the distant stars, the whole canyon appeared in a melancholy monochrome—a perfect match for Katrine’s colorless mood. The chain-link fence topped with concertina wire added to the effect. Though the fence was there to keep trespassers out, tonight it gave Katrine the impression of being in a prison.

  She should have been in high spirits. In just a few minutes, she would take part in one of the greatest scientific events in the history of the world—perhaps the greatest. So why did she feel so…so dead inside?

  Katrine took a drag from her cigarette. The tip crackled and glowed brighter, an orange ember in the dark. The menthol tinged smoke singed her throat ever so slightly. That was part of the appeal. Part of the reason she smoked cigarettes and drank her coffee scalding hot. She liked things that burned a little on the way down. Things that she could feel.

  Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled. It was a lonesome, mournful sound that plucked at Katrine’s heart.

  The sound faded. Silence gathered.

  Katrine raised the white paper cup to her lips, took a sip, winced. Jesus, the stuff was exquisitely bad. The government had spent nearly fifty billion dollars on the Blue Mesa project. One would think they could shell out a few extra bucks for a decent espresso machine.

  She took another sip and silently wondered why she kept drinking this mud anyway.

  Because she needed the caffeine to keep her mind alert, that was why. They were only able to perform their tests during the wee hours, when public power usage was at its lowest ebb. When it was up and running, the Blue Mesa supercollider pulled almost fifty percent of the wattage produced by the Hoover Dam and dimmed the neon lights in Las Vegas ever so slightly.

  And during the day, even with the blackout curtains in her quarters, Katrine had difficulty sleeping. Whenever she did find her sleep, it was always restless, troubled.

  Her recurring dream had become more frequent.

  The dream of the dragon.

  It sounded childish, but the beast that invaded her dreams was not some fairytale creature. It was horrible and huge. Crimson scales glinting dirty sunlight. Leathery wings beating with powerful strokes. Mouth bristling with rows of white fangs.

  In the dream it flew toward her out of a wall of dark smoke. It seemed to speak to her as it approached, uttering one meaningless word over and over.

  Atma.

  And always, just before the red, winged beast reached her and devoured her alive, Katrine would jolt awake, her sheets and hair soaked with fear.

  A slight breeze had come up now, ruffling her dirty blond curls, tugging at the lapels of her white lab coat, and stirring the pale skim of steam rising from her coffee. Katrine inhaled deeply, feeling the cool oxygen stream into her lungs.

  Aside from her cigarette, she smelled nothing.

  Absolutely nothing at all.

  After a big rain, the air atop Blue Mesa would fill with the deep, rich mineral smells rising from the moistened sandstone. But during these summer days and nights when the land was dry as a bone, the desert was completely odorless. It was unnerving.

  The whole landscape smelled…empty, blank, nonexistent…

  Barren.

  That word echoed in her mind, just as it had every day for the past six months. Ever since she had received the last set of test results from the fertility specialist. This had been the third doctor she had seen about the matter. After the first doctor gave her the answer she didn’t want to hear, Katrine had opted to get a second opinion, and then, perhaps in denial, a third.

  Each time, the results had come back exactly the same.

  Katrine Collins could not have children.

  That had been the cause of the recent dissolution of her marriage. Tom had tried to pretend that wasn’t the case, but Katrine knew, behind all of the tense moments, the exhausting arguments, and the unforgivable things they had said to each other lay the root cause of it all—her inability to bear children.

  It was also the reason, indirectly, for her being here at Blue Mesa.

  Even if she could have children, Katrine would not have ended her career. Her passion was mathematics—it had been for as long as she could remember—and she intended to pursue it in one form or another for the rest of her life.

  However, if Katrine had children, a family, she never would have joined the Blue Mesa research project which required her to live out here in the middle of the Nevada desert, away from civilization for months on end.

  She tried to convince herself that was a good thing. Having a family at this point in her career would be a hindrance. Without kids, she was free—free to participate in the ground-breaking experiment that would take place tonight.

  Free.

  Her eyes drifted up to the concertina wire glinting in the starlight.

  A sudden sound startled her out of her thoughts.

  “Yo, Kat? You out here, girl?”

  Katrine turned around to face the voice that had called to her from the complex of buildings. The windows were yellow rectangles of light in the darkness. At the top of a short set of steps, a door was cracked open and a woman’s head was poking out.

  “Hey, Nora,” Katrine replied.

  “It’s almost time to begin.”

  “Coming.”

  Katrine took one last drag, then bent and stubbed out the remainder of her cigarette in the sand-filled coffee can that served as the outdoor ashtray. With her cigarette extinguished, she walked toward the buildings, white paper cup still clasped in one hand.

  “How’s the coffee?” Nora asked with a joking grin.

  Nora was the same age as Katrine, twenty-five, but she looked a great deal younger. Her short, straight black hair was messy from her habit of running her fingers through it while working on her calculations. Although it was night, her eyes were covered with a pair of circular, black sunglasses.

  Kat paused at the top step and took a slow sip of her coffee, thought for a moment before replying.

  “This one is a rare vintage, Nora. It’s got a nice gritty sediment with notes of dirt and dry-erase marker ink. And something else I can’t quite place…” She took another sip, swished it in her mouth, pretending to savor it. “Ah yes, dog poop.”

  Nora giggled. “Girl, I don’t know how you drink that stuff.”

  “I don’t know how you stay so energetic without it.”

  “Two words: power naps.”

  Katrine smiled, dumped the rest of her steaming coffee over the railing, tossed the cup into the waste receptacle by the wall, and stepped through the door that Nora was holding open for her. Inside, the white-walled corridor of the facility was illuminated with buzzing fluorescent light. Katrine blinked, letting her eyes adjust to the stinging brightness after the blue darkness of the outer night.

  Beside her, Nora folded her white cane, tucked it under her arm, and placed her free hand on Katrine’s shoulder.

  “Shall we?”

  Even though Nora was blind, she could get around the facility just as well as if she were sighted. But whenever they were together, which was often, she liked to let Katrine lead the way. Now, as they walked down the narrow corridor to the elevator at the end, Nora’s nostrils twitched slightly. She was sniffing the air.

  “Kat, those cigarettes are gonna kill you, you know?”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Katrine said sarcastically.

  A smile tipped the corners of Nora’s mouth.

  “It’s not you I’m looking out for, Kat,” she said. “I mean, if you croak, then who will I have to confide in? Blair? Oh, Kat, I don’t think I could manage.”

  Katrine chuckled under her breath. Dr. Blair Swanson was the team psychiatrist. She
had been assigned to Blue Mesa to provide counseling for the small team of scientists who would be living round the clock at this remote desert facility. The idea, presumably, was that a shrink would be able to ease any tensions that arose among the team members. However, some of the scientists resented having a psychiatrist around. Nora was among this group, and she was not afraid to be vocal about it.

  As they neared the elevator, Nora gave Katrine’s shoulder a soft squeeze.

  “Seriously though, I’m really glad you’re here Kat. I’m pretty sure I would have gone crazy weeks ago without a friend to talk to.”

  Katrine smiled, pushed the button for the elevator, and gave Nora a friendly butt bump.

  “Thanks, friend,” she said with a smile. “I feel the same way.”

  A warm feeling of gratitude glowed in Katrine’s chest. Just a few moments ago she had felt so alone, lost in her dark, depressing thoughts. But now, after just a few words with her friend, she felt much better.

  The elevator chimed, and the heavy steel doors slid open with a whisper of metal. In that moment, something in Katrine’s mood changed. The brief happiness brought on by her interaction with her friend Nora was washed away on a wave of foreboding as she stared into the empty space of the yawning elevator. Though she had taken that elevator a thousand times, now there was something oddly discomforting about the way it invited her inside.

  “Kat?” Nora asked. “Something wrong?”

  Katrine shook her head. Even though she knew that Nora couldn’t see that movement, she also knew that her friend had an uncanny ability to pick up on all sorts of gestures. Sometimes she even wondered if Nora’s eyes really were sightless behind those dark lenses.

  “Just nervous, I guess,” Kat murmured.

  “Come on,” Nora said with an optimistic smile in her voice. “Everything will be fine.”

  Kat nodded. Nora was right. They had planned everything to the last detail, covered every contingency. Katrine’s own mathematical calculations formed the foundation for the supercollider project. There was nothing that could go wrong.

  Still, as they stepped into the waiting elevator together, something uncomfortable turned in her belly.