"Fools, don't you ever call me Dragon lady," Lily Zhang said sharply, glaring at the armored and helmeted Guardsmen, and the three men exchanged a look, then raised their rifles, ready to fire. Sighing in resignation, Lily willed the transformation to begin, and at once her body began to twist and change. Huge, bat-like wings unfurled from her back, and she braced herself for battle. Immediately the Guardsmen opened fire, and Lily roared fiercely as the bullets struck her.
Mortals always chose the hard way, Lily thought even as she engaged her assailants. The armored Guardsmen were in the employ of her enemies, which made them fair game as far as she was concerned. After all, back when she was growing up in a crèche-school for genetically engineered inhuman creatures, men like these treated her and her siblings like animals instead of human beings. Lily had absolutely no qualms about killing them...
"Why won't you die, you reptilian freak?" cried the lead Guardsman, and Lily lashed out at him with a huge, leathery, bat-like wing. The wing struck the Guardsman's chest, penetrating his lightweight, flexible Titanium armor like a knife cutting through butter. As the fatally wounded warrior fell to his knees, his acolytes concentrated their fire on Lily, and she cried out as a bullet slammed into her shoulder.
"It's not my time," Lily retorted, and with that, she jumped out the window of the Shanghai World Financial Center. Flexing her wings, she ascended into the nighttime sky, far above the streets of Pudong District in the City of Shanghai, China. In her badly wounded right hand, Lily held the disk containing the identities of her fellow genetic wonders. Wincing in pain, Lily flapped her wings and made her way to the rendezvous point.
"At last," Kelvin Mutambara said to himself, smiling as a familiar silhouette appeared in the distance. Standing atop the JW Marriott Hotel at Tomorrow Square, he took off his binoculars, and tucked them away. Standing six feet two inches tall, with dark brown skin and dark hair braided into neat cornrows, clad in a stylish gunmetal gray Brooks Brothers suit and tie, he looked like a man with a plan. One which he was delighted to see come to fruition...
Lily Zhang headed straight for the roof, and landed as noiselessly as she could, given the circumstances. Kelvin immediately went to her, scooping her into his arms. The tall, green-skinned, yellow-eyed, bat-winged, fanged and clawed, distinctly feminine yet clearly inhuman monster he beheld would scared most men, but Kelvin wasn't most men. Concern furrowed his handsome brow as he realized that his precious Lily was wounded...
"Kelvin, I'm hurt," Lily whispered, her reptilian features twisted in pain. Nodding, Kelvin carried her back inside. One in his room, he reached for the medical kit he always carried. Gently he dabbed a handkerchief on her wounded shoulder, and a ferocious hiss escaped Lily's maw. Taking care not to hurt her, he began disinfecting the wound, and put a bandage on it. Being inhuman granted Lily excellent recuperative powers, and she'd be fine within a day or two. Still, it hurt Kelvin to see her like this...
"What happened up there, my love?" Kelvin asked, once Lily had calmed down enough to resume human form. Before his very eyes, the reptilian humanoid morphed into a tall, slender young Asian woman with long black hair, light brown eyes and sharp, gorgeous features that a supermodel would envy. Lily flashed Kelvin a brave smile, the kind she usually displayed after trying something exceptionally dangerous, foolish, or both.
"I got past Zane Qiang's henchmen, and got the disk," Lily said proudly, and she dangled it in front of Kelvin, who rolled his eyes. Ever since he'd met Lily, she'd brought him nothing but trouble. Still, nowadays, Kelvin couldn't imagine his life without her. Who would have thought that, five days after his graduation from Northeastern University's MBA program in Boston, Kelvin would uncover an international conspiracy and meet the woman of his dreams?
Born in the suburb of Milton, Massachusetts, to Zimbabwe immigrant parents, Kelvin grew up privileged. Not once did he suspect that his Harvard-educated parents, Cassandra and Rupert Mutambara, weren't just scientists working at a fancy lab in Boston's south end. After miraculously surviving a mugging during which he was shot five times at point-blank range by a skinhead one night in Boston's theater district, Kelvin went on a search for answers...
Kelvin's search led him to the discovery that his parents used technology to genetically engineer him, granting him above average intelligence, keen reflexes, sharp senses, and an accelerated healing ability. The entire time, Kelvin thought his athletic prowess and native intelligence, which won him scholarships to Northeastern University, were simply the result of pure luck, till he learnt better. There was a whole world he knew nothing about...
