THRAX Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THRAX

  DRAGONS OF THE UNIVERSE

  BONNIE BURROWS

  Copyright ©2018 by Bonnie Burrows

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  He's sexy. He's a dragon. And he is out of this world!!

  Introducing....

  THRAX.

  Dragon Knight Sir Thrax was one of the finest males on the planet of Lacerta.

  In fact he was PERFECT.

  So perfect that demand to be his mate was so high that entering into a lottery was the only way to decide which lucky woman would bear his babies.

  That lucky woman was Agena Morrow.

  However, Agena was set to get more than she bargained for.

  Especially when it became apparent that whilst Thrax was happy to participate in the act of making a baby, he had no true intention of ever producing one....

  “THRAX” is Book 1 from the “Dragons Of The Universe” series. Each book features a new handsome dragon's quest to find his perfect mate on a planet far, far away. If you love steamy dragon romance, hot adventures and fiery thrills then you will love this!

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  If only they would not make such a spectacle of the thing.

  That was Agena Morrow’s only exception to what had brought her to the planet Lacerta. Why must the Courting Lottery be such a spectacle?

  Truth be told, Agena was well accustomed to loud, raucous, and clamorous public displays. She was a professional athlete, an interstellar champion of the game of Sphereball. She was accustomed to roaring, cheering, hooting, howling, screeching, and sometimes even rioting crowds of humans and many other species friendly to Earth-kind. She was accustomed to millions of eyes being upon her on whatever planet she happened to be competing and across the transmitted media of thousands of planets. It was a routine part of her life.

  But that was the nature of competition and of the fans and culture that surrounded athletes and sporting events. And in the context of her sport and her champion status, she welcomed it.

  But for the purpose that had brought her to the planet Lacerta, it felt like an intrusion, an invasion, an imposition, a nuisance—even an annoyance. She wished that in this of all endeavors, it could be kept personal because it was the most personal thing in the world.

  This was not about competition. It was not about winning, not about claiming a prize, and not about the acclaim of the masses of the galaxy. This was about her future, and it was a much more intimate thing. Or, to her mind, it should be.

  It happened that the Governing Aerie of Lacerta felt otherwise, and it was all done according to their laws and their customs or not at all. Agena could live with it, or she could go seeking what she wanted somewhere else. And she had no desire to look elsewhere. If she were to find what she was seeking, she would find it here, on this planet, with these people. So, she would do it their way.

  Agena stood on the stone balcony of the Courting Chateau, leaned on the railing, and looked out across the cityscape of Silverwing, the capital of the planet. Fittingly for a planet whose inhabitants could all fly, Silverwing was a city designed to grow upward. It was a place of gleaming towers and turrets, with arches and bridges built between them, interspersed with high domes.

  Entrances and exits were not all at ground level. Many were high on building facades and on rooftops. If one did not happen to be one of the locals, one got around from place to place via air sled, and Agena could see a number of these vehicles zipping about over the streets and between the buildings, occupied by terrestrial humans like herself and by off-worlders of various species. The natives did not require air sleds unless they were in an off-world company. The natives had their own means of transportation.

  She saw hundreds of them swooping and soaring amid the architecture spread out before her. The natives of Lacerta, those she could see from her present vantage, had wings—mighty, leathern wings that stretched out like living sails, beating at the air and buoying themselves up in it. They had massive tails with scales and stripes, beating and undulating behind them as they went.

  Their limbs were muscular, sinewy things, adorned with scales as well, and their hands were fearsomely taloned claws. Their necks were long and serpentine, scaled and striped to match the tails, and adorned with rows of spines. And their heads were the heads of great, fantastic reptiles, etched with scalation and crowned with regal horns. The men and women who built the proud, elegant civilization of the planet Lacerta had arrived as human colonists—and had become a race who were both human and dragon.

  Peering down to the street below, Agena could make out some Lacertans in their human form who might morph to humanoid dragons and claim the air at any moment or any whim. Lacertans customarily wore garments that looked not so much woven from fabric as forged or spun from shining metal. The backs of their clothing were always open, exposing the skin and permitting the wings to unfurl from the upper back and the tail to extend from the lower back when they transformed.

  The planetary climate control lent itself to this custom; everywhere on Lacerta, the average temperature ranged from twenty-four to twenty-nine degrees Centigrade, which was one of the things that made Lacerta a popular destination for travelers. Another thing, of course, was the Lacertans themselves.

  Something about their long-ago mutation into dragon metamorphs had made the Lacertans a race of beautiful-looking beings, whether in their human form or their semi-reptile shape. It was almost enough to recall ancient superstitions from Earth and make one suspect they had been deliberately designed that way. Humans had long ago used genetic engineering and molecular and cellular surgery to select certain qualities out of their gene pool and perfect their bodies.

  Somehow, being both human and dragon had naturally refined for the Lacertans the process that people on Earth had accomplished artificially. Lacertans were never homely, never bald, and never obese. They were perfect: lean, toned, muscular and sinewy, and hypnotically beautiful of face and features, every last one of them, and they needed no modification of their genes or other procedures to make them so. Physically, they were the envy of human c
ivilization—which was part of what had brought Agena to this planet.

  Agena looked carefully among the figures walking about below her and those flying so effortlessly beyond her; she looked for a particular kind of figure. At one moment, three of them came soaring by her, clad in silver garments decorated with dragon-claw symbols. These she recognized as the color and symbols reserved for a specific group among the Lacertans. Only the Dragon Corps wore silver from shoulders to feet and were adorned with those symbols. These, then, were the planetary peacekeepers, trained to patrol Lacerta and maintain internal law and order on the planet.

  Except for the Ruling Aerie, only one body of Lacertans held a higher authority than the Corps. Agena could see none of them at the moment, but she knew that their global headquarters lay at the place they called the Spires, nearer the center of Silverwing than where her Chateau stood. It made her skin tingle to think of them, the dragon men and women who ranked higher than the Corps and were the enforcers of justice not only on this planet but everywhere in the galaxy that Lacertans lived and traveled. She knew that somewhere nearby, the capital was under the vigilant watch of the Knights of Lacerta.

  The Knights of Lacerta: even the mention of their name commanded respect across known space. Like the Corps, they dressed in metallic foil and armor uniforms, but their symbols were dragon heads, and the hilt of each knight’s formidable weapon was wrought in that shape. The Knights wore an array of colors in combinations and patterns reserved especially for them. The lowest-ranking Knights wore single-color suits.

  The higher one’s rank, the more of four different colors—black, red, silver, and gold—they wore. The highest ranking of the Knights were decked in all four colors. Whatever their rank, the Knights of Lacerta were known as the fiercest, strongest, most powerful and indomitable warriors in or out of human space.

  Their legendary prowess in battle, coupled with their shocking physical beauty, made them figures of the greatest renown. They were synonymous not only with justice, but with valor, honor, pride, and victory. Reputation had it that only their foes ever tasted defeat, and very few in the galaxy doubted it.

  It was no wonder, then, that Lacertans in general, and the Corps and the Knights in particular, were the most sought-after, coveted, and prized lovers in known space. For many humans, to share the bed of a Lacertan was the ultimate fantasy or the ultimate symbol of their own desirability as a mate. Those who actually married Lacertans were among the most envied people in the galaxy. But to sleep with one of the Corps, or especially with a Knight, or to marry such a partner, was the rarest prize of all, virtually a Holy Grail.

  Agena stepped off the balcony and back into her suite, a place designed for maximum comfort. Every piece of furniture was all organic lines with no hard edges or sharp corners. Every piece of fabric was the softest and most luxurious thing to be found anywhere in space. Every color was selected either for its warm, gentle, or relaxing hue.

  Every part of the spacious room was designed as a place where a coupling could take place, from the bed that could as easily accommodate four people as two, to the plush chairs and sofas, to the rugs, to the nooks in the windows that could double as sleeping (or not sleeping) spaces, to the pillows and cushions surrounding the sunken fireplace. It was a room designed for sex.

  A full-length mirror was set into one wall. Agena studied herself in it. She was dressed in a form-fitting body suit of solid colors with patterns that showed off her curves. Her hair was auburn-colored and pulled back into a single thick braid down her back. Her face was soft lines except for a strong jaw. Like all Sphereball players, Agena’s most impressive bodily feature was her legs. She was tall, and her legs were perfectly sculpted things of feminine muscle, honed by the months that it had taken her to train for a game played in a circular room wearing magnetic boots designed and engineered specifically for her sport. Agena was trained to run up and across walls and play while suspended upside-down. She had an Amazon’s legs, and the rest of her, including her balance, her reflexes, and her hand-to-eye coordination, were conditioned to match.

  She had come to this planet to find one of the most desirable partners in the galaxy, and her superb physical condition and Sphereball championship status had put her in the running to claim exactly that. Only the best possible partners were chosen as candidates for the most superb, the most magnificent possible mates.

  Inspecting herself in the glass, Agena was confident that her journey to Lacerta would not be in vain. There was nothing random about her, not a flaw, not a departure from excellence in any way. The only thing random would be in the method of the choosing. That was the only thing that was out of her hands. But since she had taken everything else about herself and her life into her own hands and made it the best it could possibly be, she assured herself that this one last thing would soon fall into place.

  She turned from the mirror to inspect her accommodations again. Agena smiled softly, fully expecting to put this suite to good use.

  _______________

  The life of a Knight of Lacerta was not a life of leisure. The dragon men and women who kept the known galaxy under their watch took their rest when they could, when they could.

  For Thrax Helmer, at this moment, that meant lying quietly in his sleeping tube aboard the cruiser bound for home.

  The streaks of bent light outside the window port that ran half the length of the tube were his only reminder, in the relaxing stillness and quiet, they were the only thing to tell him that the cruiser, bearing hundreds of passengers besides himself to his home planet, was moving through warp space. That was all to the good. His passage had started out smoothly and was staying that way, as interstellar journeys almost invariably did.

  Statistically, warp travel from one star system to another was held to be safer than a weredragon flying under his own power in a planet’s atmosphere. However, one did not become a Knight to play things safe. Thrax appreciated calm times as much as he did those times when duty called.

  Thrax had cast off the top portion of his red, black, and silver armor skin and laid his powerblade and badge on the bed by his side. He rested now, bare from the waist up, contemplating what he would do when he reached Lacerta. His mind was not in the here and now; in his thoughts, he was already at his destination.

  Absently stroking the sculpted and honed pecs and triceps of his human frame, he thought of how good it would be to see home again, if only for the short time he’d be spending there. Even by the standards of dragon Knights, Thrax Helmer was a head-turner. He was a tall and imposing tower of pure muscle, seemingly wrought from iron and marble and turned to hard, hot flesh. When he moved with those incredible muscles --, not too massive and not too lean but absolutely perfect -- anyone who saw him might almost swear the sinews under his man-flesh were singing with every gesture.

  His pecs were fantastic slabs bristling with hair; his abs like the underbelly scutes of a mighty dragon, even when he was human. His arms looked fit to pulverize stone with a shrug. Topping it all off was an absolutely arresting face, crowned with a sweeping wave of almost black hair. His brows were perfectly horizontal, his eyes narrow and dark and smoldering as if filled with the fire of a mythical dragon’s breath.

  His jawline was perfectly cut at an angle, not too broad and not too sharp, and it and his upper lip was shadowed with the stubble of a beard that he never allowed to grow out fully. Thrax always looked as if he were just getting out of bed—or ready to invite someone to join him there.

  At the moment, however, what he loved to do in bed—at every opportunity—was not the uppermost thing on Thrax Helmer’s mind. For now, there were other priorities, and he hoped to dispatch them as quickly, albeit thoroughly, as possible.

  The condition of his body in its present state depended on what had brought him on this trip home. It was time for his life swim, the fateful swim in the lakes of Lacerta on which all of his kind depended for their health. Much of the regular traffic to and from the planet consisted o
f dragon-shifter men and women in need of a swim in the waters that were the source of their metamorphic powers.

  Generations ago, colonizing ships of human settlers had left Earth and were lost in the sudden and violent outrush of hydrogen clouds from the nova burst of a white dwarf. Their ships’ propulsion and communication systems damaged, they could not call for help and were immensely lucky to find and land upon an Earthlike planet other than the one for which they were headed. And that was where an unexpected new life had begun.

  The planet that would one day be called Lacerta had once had an age of reptiles, much like what prehistoric Earth was believed to have gone through before it was determined that dinosaurs were more birdlike than reptilian. The ancient beasts of this planet truly were mighty reptiles, and some ecological disaster had rendered them extinct. But their DNA remained in the soil and the water, and another factor had come into play when the colonists had taken possession of the planet.

  Lacerta abounded with a mildly radioactive mineral compound, which the colonists would name Draconite. Exposure to this compound, which was dissolved in lakes and streams, caused a reaction between the reptilian fossil DNA present in the planet’s waters and the human genome. Draconite had thus mutated the lost Earth colony into the first generation of Lacertan weredragons.