Mike just got smacked by a young dragon and his pet dog.
He holstered his weapon. “You’re a child.”
The little dragon scurried out again. He blinked, then ran down a path behind the rock.
“Hey!” Mike shouted. Should he follow? Had Gavin Bower followed?
It could be a trap, but did he have any other choice? The path led down into a gully-like passage between two large, cliff-like ridges.
The gully’s corner opened into an amphitheater. Climbing walls and long, flat walkways circled around toward a massive screen. Or window. Stars moved on by like the viewing screens in science fiction movies.
“We’re on a ship, Officer Seaver.” Gavin Bower squatted on a bench just inside the entrance. He leaned against the stone wall, his hands hanging between his knees. “Do you see them?”
He waved at the amphitheater.
Mike looked back at the walls and the stone walkways. The colors were wrong—too red in most places, with displaced blues and greens scattered about. Something had worn paths into the walls, as if this place had as many vertical walkways as horizontal. But mostly, the air shimmered as if…
His brain picked out the first dragon no more than ten feet from his side. It twisted its big head and sniffed at his face. A second dragon stood directly in front of him, also mimicking the amphitheater’s structures.
The third sat on the pathway with a much smaller dragon held in its front limb. Two other small dragons clung to its neck and crest.
“They’re not the same dragons as the ones who attacked us,” Gavin Bower said. “They’re terrified of us.” He waved his hand again. “They have no idea at all who or what we are.”
Mike slowly backed toward Bower, so the other man could read his lips. “How do you know they’re terrified?”
Bower shook his head. “They’re mimicking, aren’t they?” He nodded toward the amphitheater. “There are at least thirty-five in here with us, not including the babies.”
“You see them?” Mike had good eyes, but he’d only picked out the closest ones.
“I understand them,” Bower said. “Though this group is speaking a completely different language than our dragons. I’m only picking out a few words.” He dropped down on his ass. “They’re starving, Officer Seaver. They need help.”
Mike sat, as well.
Terrified, starving dragons with dragon children. “They’re refugees, aren’t they?”
“Yes.” Bower nodded once. “Yes, they are.”
THE END
Return to the Fate – Fire – Shifter – Dragon universe
with two brand-new series:
Witch of the Midnight Blade
Join Del Parrish as she walks the razor-thin veil between magic and science…
and
Call of the Dragonslayer
War between humans and dragons rages. The ghost ship Intrepid may hold the key to saving what’s left of humanity—or destroying the universe….
Coming Soon!
Like Urban Fantasy?
MEET FRANK VICTORSSON…
MONSTER BORN
Elves, werewolves, witches, vampires, and the patchwork son of Victor Frankenstein….
I walked out of the Arctic and into Alfheim’s magic two centuries ago. The elves had no idea what to do with the giant, re-animated corpse in their midst other than to offer me what they had long offered all unloved and unwanted magicals—a home. Without elven magic, the Alfheim Werewolf Pack would descend into madness. Without the stability of the elves, the local vampires and witches would fall prey to their own evil natures. And without the elves, I would still be the rage-filled monster stitched together by my father’s genius and unholy hubris.
Now, I have a good life. I have family. Friends. A community that supports and protects me. But some ghosts from rage-filled pasts are more horrific than others. Some want to rip apart more than just my soul.
Some want my flesh. And now I must face a vampiric demon so powerful not even elven magic can stop it….
A little Penny Dreadful.
A tad bit Fargo.
All Northern Creatures.
Welcome to Alfheim, Minnesota.
Join Frank Victorsson and the magical people of Alfheim, Minnesota, in Monster Born, the first novel in the new Northern Creatures series.
MONSTER BORN
Chapter One
I am an unsettled soul. I lumber through the accumulation of my two-hundred-plus years and yet somehow, under my thick fingers, the delicate stones of a precious grave marker did not wobble.
Lizzy’s cairn held its shape.
The stones, each individually lifted from the pebbled lakeshore behind me, continued their duty. Each locked to the ones above and below, and each held steadfast.
Two centuries ago, I set the first stone, a flat, cracked wedge of granite I’d found up the hill. Cold soil had folded around my equally cold hands as I’d dug it out. Dark soil full of bits of life—beetles and ants and the parts of leaves rendered into grains—squished between my fingers. I carried the stone to the cairn’s site and pressed it into the moss under what had been, at the time, an oak sapling. Another two rocks—one a purplish-red, semi-smooth lake stone, and the other a gray, boxy, small boulder—set the cairn’s foundation.
To this day, I still tended the grave marker. I still visited.
“Lizzy,” I whispered. She had run the Arctic with me. She had kept me alive. If it hadn’t been for her and the other hounds of my sled team, I would have sunk below the ice long before we found new land.
My trek had started with one blazing moment of rage. One singular need to make my father pay for his trespasses against not only me, but life itself.
He escaped. I rode my fury into the midnight sun, a modern Prometheus on the back of a sled pulled by hounds with souls stronger than my own.
I hunted seal. The dogs ran until only Lizzy remained. And one day, she and I wandered into magic.
She died shortly after the elves found us. They thought me a jotunn—a giant. Many of them still do. I no longer argue.
The werewolves understood Lizzy’s soul. They helped me choose the sapling that marked her grave. The two loup-garou pack founders, Gerard and Remy Geroux, went so far as to declare the oak sacred to their kind. And slowly, over the years and decades, I slotted into Lizzy’s cairn a new quartz chip here, an open agate geode there. I fitted the smooth and the pockmarked. With the wolves’ help, I built for Lizzy a marker worthy of her bright light.
The sapling became one of the many grand oaks circling my lake. Above my head, a squirrel ran the branches chattering like Ratatoskr filling the eagle Vedrfolnir’s head with gossip. The lake lapped its shore. The sun warmed my skin and I wondered about my unsettled soul. I wondered how it was that a hound always knew with certainty the reality of her world.
I set a new stone, one with a rounded edge perfect for the tree-side of the cairn, and stepped back.
I am large by both mundane human and elf standards. I duck and twist my shoulders when crossing most thresholds, and stand a good nine inches taller than Arne Odinsson, the elf who oversees this land. My eyes, though dark, shimmer with a deep red fire. I wear my black hair in the Old Norse style the elves prefer—naked above my ears and twisted into a knot at the back of my head. But unlike the natural pattern of the elves, I must shave my scalp where my scars do not already inhibit my hair’s growth.
The scars have faded over my two centuries, and the slow rebuilding of my epidermis has replaced my original sallowness with a warm, if ashen, demi-health. I was built from parts of others, after all, and modeled out of clay polluted with death. My health is not my own.
I am the abandoned son of a mad scientist. I am a man who walked the Arctic into a new continent, and a monster adopted by Nordic New World elves. I am friend to werewolves, witches, and vampires.
I am Victorsson, son of Victor—son of the abandoning father who called himself Frankenstein. I am an unsettled soul.
The elves
call me Frank.
The story continues in Monster Born, the first novel in the new Northern Creatures series….
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The Worlds of
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Genre-bending Science Fiction about
love, family, and dragons:
Fate – Fire – Shifter – Dragon
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Bonds Broken & Silent
All But Human
Men and Beasts
The Burning World
Smart Urban Fantasy:
Northern Creatures
Monster Born
Vampire Cursed
Elf Raised (coming soon)
Hot Contemporary Romance:
The Quidell Brothers
Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Robert’s Soul
Thomas’s Need
Andrew’s Kiss (coming soon)
About the Author
As a child, Kris took down a pack of hungry wolves with only a hardcover copy of The Dragonriders of Pern and a sharpened toothbrush. That fateful day set her on a path traversing many storytelling worlds—dabbles in film and comic books, time as a talent agent and a textbook photo coordinator, and a foray into nonfiction. After co-authoring Mind Shapes: Understanding the Differences in Thinking and Communication, Kris returned to academia. But she craved narrative and a richly-textured world of Fates, Shifters, and Dragons—and unexpected, true love.
Kris lives in Minnesota with her husband, two daughters, Handsome Cat, and an entire menagerie of suburban wildlife bent on destroying her house. That battered-but-true copy of Dragonriders? She found it yesterday. It’s time to pay a visit to the woodpeckers.
Fore more information
www.krisaustenradcliffe.com
[email protected]
The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7) Page 43