Page 8 of Accidentally a Dragon Daddy

Now, we almost had it. If I was successful, a team would be dispatched to retrieve Vicek, and the war would be over. Probably. That wasn’t my concern, however. Getting his location was, and it was past time I was about it.

The office of my keycard holder was on the top floor. I started taking the stairs, moving at a relaxed pace. Like I belonged. The longer security waited to raise the alarm, thinking perhaps I wasn’t an intruder, the better.

I was halfway up the ten flights when the alarm bells began to ring.

“So much for that,” I growled, hurling myself upward three stairs at a time.

The door to the seventh floor banged open, and two men came through in a rush. They both had guns, and I cursed as the pistols were leveled at me.

“Freeze!” one shouted. “Stop right there, or we’ll sh—”

I cleared the final half-flight of stairs in a single bound, colliding with the guard on the right.

BANG!

The gun went off, but I was too busy to see what had happened. My fingers closed on the guard’s wrist, and I twisted violently. Bones crunched, and the man screamed, dropping his gun.

BANG!

The other guard fired. A sledgehammer smacked into my spine, flinging me forward as the bullet impacted. With an angry snarl, I spun, whipping a leg out wide and taking the other guard down. Both his ankles gave way, snapping as my dragon strength carved a path between the two guards.

“Stay down,” I grunted, crushing their radios barehanded.

The guard with the broken wrist wasn’t listening. Instead, he was trying to bring his gun to bear with his other hand.

“Damn you,” he spat.

I swatted the gun aside, grabbed the guard by his head, and snapped his neck. The body twitched once and then lay very, very still.

“Oh my god!” the other guard shouted in horror. “You killed him!”

I advanced. “You shot me in the back. You were trying to kill me.”

“I-I should have killed you!” he cried. “How are you alive?”

My face split into a grin utterly devoid of all joy. “Because I’m a monster.”

Crying out in terror, the guard pushed himself away, using his hands while his legs dragged uselessly behind him. Reaching the stairs, he flung himself down them, bouncing wildly. Shrieks of pain filled the stairwell as he hit hard against the concrete wall.

I contemplated going after him, but the hammering of bootsteps below changed my mind. Killing the humans was unnecessary. Even if I was good at it.

Leaping over the corpse, I hit the top level, searching for the office that matched the keycard. When I found it, I went in. The computer was off, and I had to wait for it to power up. Thankfully, it didn’t take too long. Soon, I was busy typing away, entering the login information I’d gotten from the owner before killing them.

“Come on, come on,” I muttered, searching through files. “It’s gotta be in here somewhere.”

My earlier … interrogation … hadn’t been as productive as I’d hoped when it came to getting information about Vicek and his location. Either the director of the office truly didn’t know where he was being held, or they’d been better trained to resist hostile questioning than I’d prepared for. Regardless, their heart had given out before I’d gotten my answer.

“Now, what do we have here?” I mumbled. “A lab in the heart of Chicago? And would you look at the budget numbers assigned to it. Now, I wonder what that could be about?”

It wasn’t concrete proof that Rutt-Tayo had Vicek and was holding him there, but it certainly screamed secret base. Given it wasn’t on the list of publicly known Rutt-Tayo facilities, it seemed like the best bet.

Sirens screamed outside, the strobe effect of flashing lights visible through the shuttered blinds. My time was up.

I left the office, long strides carrying me effortlessly to the stairwell. The remaining on-site guards had wisely retreated after finding their fellows, waiting instead for the more heavily armored police response teams to arrive. A glance out the last window before the door to the stairs showed they still weren’t there. Only regular patrol cars were visible. That late at night, it would take time for them to arrive.

Yanking open the door, I listened to the hushed whispers from the group of guards and police on the ground floor. The distortion after ten floors was too much for me to make out what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going that way.

Turning my back on them, I went for the roof. The locked door gave way easily, metal squealing as I shoved hard with a shoulder, popping it free.

---