by Dante King
Dragon Breeder 1
Dragon Mage Academy 1
Dante King
Copyright © 2021 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
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
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About the Author
Chapter One
I nudged open the door of the Remorseless MMA Fight Center and Gym in Mar Vista, Los Angeles, and stepped out to make my way to Venice Boulevard.
I paused for a moment to put on my sunglasses and re-tie my bootlace. As I did so, I noticed, for the first time, the grazes across the knuckles of my right hand. I had gone three rounds with Remorseless’s self-proclaimed top fighter, Kirk. The motherfucker had a head made of granite.
It had been a friendly exhibition—an amicable sparring session between gym buddies, you know—where the two of us were meant to pull our punches and take it easy.
That didn’t happen, of course.
Two athletic dudes who’d spent months practicing how to knock another person out get into an octagon together, and what do you expect? Well, the chances of them pulling their punches after the bell rings were about as close to zero as you could get.
“I just keep getting prettier and prettier,” I muttered to myself.
I ran my fingers over the lump forming on the back of my head. Kirk landed a doozy of a roundhouse to the back of my skull—a kick that would have probably laid out a lesser guy. He had thought me beat. He allowed himself to relax, allowed himself a smile, but hadn’t allowed for the fact that I had a streak of determination in me a mile wide.
The look on his face, just before I’d connected with my retaliatory spinning back-fist, had been about as priceless as they come. I grinned as I recalled the way Kirk had gone down like a sack of spuds.
Best fighter my ass, I thought.
“Yo, Michael!” a voice called from behind me.
I turned and saw that Rosco was standing in the doorway to the fight club.
“What’s up, man?” I asked.
Rosco was part owner of Remorseless and ran the mixed martial arts training.
“You left your phone in the locker room,” he said. He tossed me my cellphone, and I caught it with the hand that wasn’t holding my backpack.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You looked good up there today, Mike. Fit. Strong,” Rosco said.
“How’s Kirk?” I asked.
“You don’t like the guy much, do you?”
I shrugged. “He’s the sort of dude whose mind seems to be permanently on vacation while his mouth’s working overtime.”
Rosco gave me a small smile. “That’s about right. Anyway, he’s awake,” he said. “You busted him up pretty good with that spinning back-fist.”
“I’ve probably done him a favor.”
I ran a hand through my shoulder-length, shower-wet hair, which I had tied up in a quick bun.
I touched the lump on my head again. “If ever a son-of-a-bitch needed a helping of humble pie, it was that guy.”
Rosco snorted. “Hell, that’s going to be the only thing he’s eating for a while. I think you might’ve loosened up a few of his teeth. He says you had the weight advantage on him.”
I gave a disparaging little laugh. “Muscle weighs more than fat, you remind him of that. Besides, I can lose weight, but he’s always going to be ugly.”
Rosco laughed. “You don’t worry. You’re as lean a fighter as I’ve ever seen, but you hit as hard as someone with another twenty pounds on you. You come into the office next time you’re in. We need to talk about getting you some real fights.”
I nodded and waved the phone. “All right. Thanks for the phone. I need this thing. I’ve got a hot date in a little bit.”
Rosco raised a hand in farewell. “All right, man, well you take it easy. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“You know me, Rosco,” I said, grinning. “I’m a perfect fucking gentleman. Just ask old Kirk up there.”
I walked down Mountain View Avenue for a few blocks, then turned on to Victoria Avenue. It wasn’t the most direct route to Venice, where I was meeting this Tinder date that I had set up, but it meant that I wouldn’t have to walk along next to the 187, which was always busy as hell. Despite having been raised on concrete, I had always felt an affinity for the wide-open spaces—although the furthest I had ever traveled was Las Vegas.
I made my way through a couple of alleyways, crossed Beethoven Street, and turned down Lucille Avenue. As I walked along, I thumbed through my phone and re-read a few of the messages that I’d received recently.
For a man with no fixed address and only the possessions that I had in my backpack, I had certainly been doing pretty well when it came to socializing with the opposite sex. I hadn’t been so much dipping a toe in the dating pool as jumping off the high-dive board and cannonballing into it.
I tweaked down an alleyway that would point me in a more Venice-esque direction. Then, I came to a halt as a text came through on my WhatsApp.
It was from the Tinder chick that I was on my way to meet.
I had just messaged her and told her that I was still about half an hour away from the bar we had agreed to meet at, and she had just replied with a picture of herself.
Oh boy, I said, feeling my pulse pick up from the image on my cell.
In the picture, she was standing in front of a mirror. She was topless, showing off a pair of incredible, pert breasts and dressed only in a red g-string. Under the picture, the young woman had written:
“That’s all good. I only live 5 mins away. Having a bit of a fashion dilemma. What do you think of my outfit so far?”
I doubted she was going to get let into any bars dressed like that, but I couldn’t deny that she was off to a very good start. I was about to text her back, voicing my approval of her choice of attire, when there was a scuffle of feet from behind me. With only that brief warning, someone barged into my shoulder from behind and snatched my phone from out of my hand.
“What the fu—!” I said as the thief boosted off up the alleyway, moving fast as a scalded cat.
The image of the blonde that I was supposed to be meeting flashed back into my mind. Those exquisite tits, the blue eyes that were full of confidence and promise, the legs that went up to here…
“Not fucking likely, asshole,” I growled, and took off after the phone sna
tcher.
The guy was fast, there could be no denying that. He also had the advantage of having grabbed my phone at a run, while I had been stationary.
I, however, had the power of righteous anger on my side. I also had—if that photo had been anything to go by and we were being honest about it—a sure thing with a hot piece of ass riding on the line.
The thief made a sharp right and sprinted down Glydon Court. I followed, already running at full speed now.
The little shit who had stolen my phone might have been going like a particularly anxious bat out of hell, but I was in the best shape that I had ever been in. One-hundred and ninety pounds and six-foot-one of lean, hard muscle.
This guy, whoever he was, better hope that he could outrun me. If he didn’t, he’d spend the rest of his evening picking his teeth up out of the gutter.
The thief sprinted across Carlton Way, narrowly dodging an oncoming cab. The cabbie slammed on his brakes and leaned on the horn as he came within an inch of inadvertently parking his vehicle in the robber’s rectum.
Without slowing, I vaulted across the hood of the cab, using my hands to propel myself clear across the width of the vehicle. I heard a couple of pedestrians cry out as I leapt onto a bench, used a post box as a stepping stone, and carried on after the thief, without ever breaking stride.
The thief was in a hoodie, but the hood had come off as he ran. I caught a glimpse of his face as he sprinted on. He was white, with dark circles under his eyes and a mop of greasy blonde hair.
Junkie, most likely, I thought to myself.
Which meant that I’d have to be careful when I caught him—I didn’t fancy getting stuck with anything when I was using his face to sweep the sidewalk.
The thieving junkie swung a sharp left and gunned it down Vienna Way before he dodged and jinked his way through the traffic on Penmar Avenue and zoomed off down Superba Avenue.
I was, as the 5-0 might say, in hot pursuit. My teeth were gritted and the perfect funbags of my Tinder date bounced around in the forefront of my mind, like the mental equivalent of a dangling sugarcube in front of a racehorse. As I boosted through the traffic on Penmar—fulfilling a private dream of mine by sliding across the broad hood of a Cadillac El Dorado—I realized that I was really enjoying myself.
Once he was on Superba, the thief started trying to utilize the suburbs to his advantage. He was pretty fleet on his feet—I doubted he had expected me to give chase—and was leaping over the fences that divided the houses.
“Give it up, man!” I called.
The guy in the hoodie scrambled up onto a trashcan and knocked it over as he jumped the fence it stood against. The fencing looked cheap and sun-bleached so, without slowing down, I simply smashed through it. Splinters exploded outward, and somewhere off to my left a dog started yapping away. It probably looked quite cool, but it slowed me a little and allowed the thief to gain a few more yards on me.
By dodging and weaving and leaping around like a fucking tick on steroids, the thief managed to make his way from Superba to Nowita Place and across to Palms Boulevard. He tried his best to shake me, he really did. If my cardiovascular fitness hadn’t been so high, the sticky-fingered little a-hole would have gotten away. Unfortunately for him though, I was fit and stayed with him.
I ran up a kid’s slide and vaulted off it to avoid a bicycle that the thief threw behind him to try and trip me. He slipped through a chain-link gate in front of me and managed to lock it before I could reach him.
As he ran on, I used an adjacent garage wall to springboard up and onto the top of the gate and vaulted over the top of it. I dropped the eight feet, allowed my knees to absorb the impact, rolled onto my feet, and carried on running.
The blood was rushing in my ears and the breath burning in my chest as we turned into a deserted alleyway that ran between two blocks of houses. Dumpsters and trash cans lined the back alley, and dog turds littered the place like curled landmines.
I was about ten yards behind the thief, and closing, when a woman appeared out from behind a dumpster as he boosted past. She was tall, thin, and angular. Leggy as any supermodel (and I had seen my fair share of those in this town), she wore her red hair in a high ponytail, and her eyes were so green they cut through the dusk like emerald LEDs.
As the thief passed the hiding place that she had stepped out from, she whipped a long, gleaming, curved dagger from a sheath at her belt. In one smooth motion, she spun across the thief’s path and swept it upward.
By the time the thief screamed, the blade was already sheathed again.
Blood fountained into the air. The thief carried on for a stride or two, then dropped like he’d just run into an invisible clothesline. Guts—purple, gray, and deep pink—spilled out across the alleyway as he fell to the ground.
I skidded to a halt, almost falling as my boots fought to find purchase on the loose gravel of the alleyway.
A pale orangey-colored sack, which might have been his stomach, flopped out of the thief’s gaping wound. His leg twitched and kicked feebly a few times as his eyes glazed over.
Then he lay still.
Blood began to pool around him, soaking into his gray hoodie and the discarded Playboy magazine beneath him.
I had seen a lot of brutal shit in the MMA octagon. I had seen a lot of guys get knocked out, busted open, and had their bones broken.
But I had never seen someone eviscerated before. That sort of shit was generally frowned upon in gyms and properly scheduled fights. Yeah, I didn’t have to rack my brain long to know seeing that was definitely a first for me. I summed up my thoughts on the matter with an eloquence that would have done Terry Pratchett proud.
“Holy fucking fuckcakes! Are you nuts? Look what you just did to that junkie dumbass!”
For her part, the mystery woman only gave me a look of such ultimate coolness that you might have found it in the freezer aisle at Trader Joe’s next to the taquitos. She cocked her pretty head at me and said, “Your quarry has been neutralized.”
“Neutralized? I’d fucking say so! I doubt you get any more neutralized than having your goddamn spleen lying under an old copy of Playboy!” I shook my head in stunned amazement. “And my quarry?” I asked incredulously. “You don’t hear anyone talk like that outside of a Robert Jordan novel.”
Bizarrely, it was only now that I was taking the time to really look at her that I realized what she was dressed in. She wore what was unmistakably armor. A gleaming steel breastplate painted a verdant green, stitched into supple-looking leather, with buffed pauldrons protecting her shoulders. On these armored shoulder guards, which looked like what the terminator might wear when he went out rollerblading, I noticed that there was an etching of a reptile of some kind.
In any other town, this getup might have signaled someone who had left reality in their rearview mirror. In Los Angeles though, it wasn’t completely indicative of a total lunatic. This chick could have come from a day on set somewhere, working on some fantasy epic or HBO special. I mean, yeah, she’d just neatly disemboweled a running target, but maybe she’d just been in the area and done a good—but grisly—deed.
Despite the fact that the dumbass thief had kind of reaped what he’d sown, I knelt down and checked his pulse. I was already certain that he didn’t have one, but on the off-chance that this was some elaborate prank, I decided to anyway.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” the young woman said in the same uber-chilled and slightly melodic voice. “He is quite dead, I assure you.”
“Quite dead, huh?” I said evenly. I prised my phone out of the guy’s dead fingers and pocketed it. He was definitely dead. And this was definitely not a prank organized by some idiot on YouTube. “I would never have guessed by the way his intestines are tangled around his ankles.”
“Yes, there’ll be no need for you to finish him,” my armor-clad savior told me helpfully.
“Great news,” I said drily. My natural calm was beginning to reassert itself now. This w
as not the first body that I had seen in my transient L.A. life.
I looked the woman up and down then. Taking in every inch of her, from the heels of her travel-stained leather boots to the tips of her pointed ears.
Pointed ears…
“Uh,” I said, getting to my feet and subconsciously relaxing into a fighting stance, “I don’t suppose you mind telling me who you are, and what you were doing behind this dumpster?”
The woman’s eyes widened for a moment and put a hand to her mouth. “Of course,” she said. “How rude of me.”
I glanced down at the cooling corpse. I felt that had probably been the low point, as far as manners were concerned.
“My name,” the woman continued, “is Elenari, Hunter of Wyrmwood, Bearer of Gharmon, the Emerald Dragon.”
I nodded. “Right,” I said, “well, I’m Michael Gilmore.” Thinking that we might as well get the next bit over and done with, I added, “And you are a member of which species…?”
Elenari cocked her head to the side once again. Even though I had some poor bastard’s blood staining the toes of my Timberlands, I couldn’t help but find the gesture alluring. She regarded me solemnly from those deep jade eyes of hers.
“I’m an elf,” she said simply.
And there it is, I thought. Just as I expected; she’s one fry short of a happy meal.
Although my initial estimation of this woman was that she was as nutty as squirrel shit, there was a little nagging voice in the back of my head. It was my subconscious telling me that this chick, this Elenari as she called herself, was about as elvish a woman as I had ever read about.