by JD Monroe
WINGS OF STONE Copyright 2017 by JD Monroe.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Mighty Fine Books, LLC
PO Box 956
Evans, GA 30809
Editing by Tera Cuskaden and Gayla Leath
Cover Design by Celtic Ruins Designs
Book Design and Ebook Formatting by JD Monroe
ISBN: 978-1-944142-12-4
First Edition: January 2017
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Also by JD Monroe
The Hell's Belles Series
Dirty Laundry (Prequel Short)
Sweet Cherry Pie
The Dragons of Ascavar
Midnight Flight (Prequel Novella) - READ FREE
Wings of Stone
Indulgences
Summer in Paradise
SPEAK THE LANGUAGE
In the Dragons of Ascavar series, you will meet the Kadirai, the dragon shape-shifters. If you would like a reference to the terms and language used in the book, please feel free to open this link on your device!
Language Reference
CHAPTER ONE
As the sun sank over the Nevada desert, the young dragon was troubled. By Tarek’s watch, it had been nearly seven hours since the princess and her trio of guards had passed through the great portal below. Her royal entourage should have been back through the Gate and on their way home to Adamantine Rise long before now. Despite her guardians’ assurances that their trip would be short and uneventful—as if they could control such things by mere willpower—there had been no sign of them.
Tarek twitched his powerful shoulders, itching to climb into the skies in search of the princess. But he could imagine the queen’s reaction.
“Your duty is to protect the Gate, Tarek-ahn,” she would say, strangely affectionate even with her icy, imperious demeanor. “Just as it is Surik’s duty to protect my daughter. He and his men are capable.”
And you are not, he added mentally. Not anymore. That was, of course, the implication. Wasn’t that why he was here, in the parched orange desert of the human world, watching over a Gate that hadn’t been breached in decades? His assignment was an insult gift-wrapped in pity from his queen, who likely felt some kind of moral obligation to keep him around without giving him any real responsibility. After all, look what had happened when he’d had a real duty.
Still, the princess was in the human realm now, which made her his responsibility, at least by proxy. And any of the Adamant Guard would be concerned if Princess Ashariah had been out of contact for this long.
Tarek turned from his vantage point atop the empty motel, boots scraping on the dry gravel scattered across the rooftop. After a moment’s consideration, he tucked the long spyglass into his leather satchel and stepped onto the roof’s ledge. Drawing on the ambient magic crackling in the air around him, he leaped from the third story and pulled the air in a dense cushion around his feet to protect his joints. He landed gracefully on the cracked asphalt below, then walked to the empty front office of the motel.
After entering the key code on the electronic lock, Tarek let himself into the glass-walled front office. At first glance, the Drakemont Inn looked like a normal human establishment, though quite rundown. The posters on the walls were sun-faded to indistinct pastels, advertising discounts that had ended a decade earlier. Sitting askance on the dusty reception counter was a hand-written sign that matched the intentionally misspelled marquee outside: Under Rennovations: Open for Bizness This Winter.
A few months ago, the signs had promised to be open by summer, and before that, in the spring. Needless to say, the Drakemont Inn had not been in business since the Stoneflight had it built nearly four decades ago, and it would continue to be under renovations for quite some time. The poor conditions and questionable grammar had their desired effect of turning away potential customers.
Behind the counter was a heavy wooden door carved with Kadirai runes. A round metal panel was mounted on the door, glowing faint purple as Tarek approached. When he pressed his palm to it, a warm current washed over his fingers and up his arm. As the spell recognized him, the panel flashed bright, and the door opened on its own.
Beyond this door was a short hallway. Straight ahead were a handful of small, austere rooms for the Gatekeepers who lived here in the human realm. A few steps past the door on the left side of the hallway was an open archway which led to a staircase that stopped abruptly at another warded door. Tarek unlocked the wards and entered the Gate chamber.
The Gate chamber was a huge room built from the silver-veined stone of Ascavar. A shimmering portal hung suspended within a tall stone arch in the center of the room. The portal reminded Tarek of water pouring over rock, with brilliant blue light shining through the translucent veil. The stone arch was engraved with glowing runes in the familiar angular script of the Kadirai.
Several long racks of wickedly sharp weapons hung on the wall on either side of the door. The adjacent wall held a carved stone shrine to the Skymother. A number of blue candles and curled paper strips with inscribed prayers were scattered across its surface. The far corner of the chamber was sectioned off with dark blue curtains mounted from the ceiling and held back by a golden cord. To call it a bedroom would have been a gross overstatement; beyond the curtains were two stiff cots where the Gatekeepers took turns getting a few hours’ sleep while on watch.
Shazakh was technically on watch at the moment, standing in front of the Gate. But the younger dragon was more interested in whatever was on his smartphone than in watching the Gate. Human technology, at its distracting best. Tarek might have scolded him, if not for the fact that the princess and her guards were the first to pass through their Gate in months. Theoretically, it was ideal for their job to be slow and uneventful, but a dragon could only stay cooped up in the stone chamber for so long before getting stir-crazy. And worse, he’d called Shazakh back from leave after only a few hours off duty. When the princess wanted a break from her luxurious palace life, there was no asking the Gatekeepers if it was a convenient time to visit the human realm.
“Shazakh,” Tarek said sharply. “I’m going to the skies.”
The younger man looked up from the screen, his eyebrows raised. “For what?”
“The princess,” he said. “She’s been gone a long time.”
“She’s got guards,” Shazakh said, wrinkling his nose.
Tarek narrowed his eyes. Shazakh had never served in Adamantine Rise. He’d been barely more than a fledgling when he was first posted on the home side of the Gate, fetching supplies from the city on a weekly basis for the Gatekeepers. After several years of cargo duty, he was promoted to guarding the Gate, but he had no sense of duty to the queen, who was an unseen face in another realm. As far as Tarek knew, Shazakh had never even drawn a sword against anyone other than a sparring partner.
“I fear something has happened,” Tarek said. “I’m going to check on them.” He crossed the room and snatched the phone from Shazakh’s hand. The younger man scowled at him and reached for it. “Go through and tell Kaliyah you’ll need backup until I return.”
He sighed. “Can Kaz go? I’m exhausted.”
“From what? You’ve been sitting down here all day,” Tarek said.
Shazakh scowled at him. “Yes, because I have not slept since you called me back from my leave, after I was on duty for four days,” he said. “Forgive my failings.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.
Tarek narrowed his eyes and pulled his arm back as if to lob the phone through the portal.
“Vazredakh! I’ll do it!”
“Watch your language,” Tarek said. He tossed the phone high into the air. Perhaps it was childish, but he rather enjoyed the fright in Shazak’s whiskey-colored eyes as he watched the phone fall. As the younger dragon fumbled for it, Tarek twisted the air around the phone to slow its fall, letting it land right in the younger man’s palm. “I’ll call if I see anything.”
“Can’t wait,” Shazakh muttered.
Tarek ignored his churlish tone and left the chamber. As he walked, he peeled his shirt over his head, then knelt to tuck it into his satchel. After checking for his phone and the spyglass, he slung the bag over his shoulder and murmured, “Barathi.” At the magical command, the strap tightened across his chest, fitting snugly.
With preparations completed, Tarek walked out into the dying light of the evening sun. Raising his head to the sky, he felt for the subtle shift of air currents and the electric hum of magic in the air.
The hunt was on.
CHAPTER TWO
The woman in the bed looked nothing like her sister, but that was all Gabrielle Rojas could think of as she examined the unfortunate Jane Doe in room seven. Gabby’s little sister, Anna, was thin with red hair, while her mystery patient was voluptuous with dark hair. Maybe it was all the times that Gabby had stood at the foot of Anna’s bed, wondering what the hell was going to happen next. She’d seen her sister in almost every patient she’d ever cared for, from her first day of clinical rotations to her first day as a resident here at Reno General. Being in the hospital brought a certain helplessness and vulnerability, so she worked for each patient with the same ferocity she would have if it was Anna. Some people, like Jane Doe, didn’t have anyone to fight for them, which left it up to Gabby.
Even under the bruising and cuts that marred her face, it was clear that the unidentified woman was beautiful. And while the nurses had placed her height at nearly five feet and eleven inches, her weight at nearly one eighty, she looked frail and tiny beneath the coiled mess of tubes and wires that lay across her.
The Jane Doe had been brought in that afternoon from just outside the city limits. No matter how much Gabby had used her signature ‘Dr. Death Stare’, as the night nurses called it, no one could give an explanation for her condition.
A few hours earlier, Gabby had committed the cardinal sin of ER work. While sipping her lukewarm coffee and enjoying a rare opportunity to sit down for longer than twelve seconds to complete paperwork, she’d remarked, “It sure is quiet today.”
The intake nurse, Claire, had rolled her eyes, looked up from charting, and said dramatically, “Dr. Rojaaaaas,” in her fake whine. “You just went and cursed us.”
Nurses’ superstitions had a whole bucket of truth in them. Barely ten minutes after Gabby had invoked the curse of the Q-word, they’d received the call to mobilize the trauma team. Ten minutes after that, the ambulance had arrived with her dark-haired mystery patient, and it had been a whirlwind of activity since then.
The young woman was naked as the day she was born, with deep lacerations and purple-black bruises covering most of her body. There were massive raw red patches on her back, her knees, and her palms. If she’d been found under different circumstances, Gabby would have suspected a motorcycle accident, judging by the road rash. But the EMTs swore up and down there’d been no vehicle nearby, and nothing to indicate there ever had been, like broken glass or skid marks.
Whatever it was, someone or something had seriously hurt the dark-haired beauty in room seven. The trauma team had conducted a CT scan, determined the extent of her internal injuries, and gotten the worst of her wounds cleaned and dressed to prevent infection.
Once Jane Doe was stable, Gabby and a female police officer had the grim job of an intimate exam. She collected the required evidence for a rape kit, cleaned under the woman’s fingernails, collected samples of suspicious dark material around several cuts, and sent it with Officer Timmons. If someone, rather than a freak accident, was responsible for Jane Doe’s condition, Gabby Rojas would see them strung up by their nuts. Both she and Officer Timmons had breathed a sigh of relief upon finding that there was no indication of sexual assault, which would have added a whole other level of nightmare to Jane Doe’s situation.
Judging by the extent of her injuries, Gabby figured their Jane Doe had a good few weeks in the hospital. Though it wasn’t life-threatening, she had broken several vertebrae that would eventually need stabilizing with metal pins. Once they found her family, they’d have to talk about transferring her to the wound and burn center in Las Vegas, because her skin had been ground away almost to the bone in places. Jane Doe was looking at grafts and eventually plastic surgery to minimize the scarring. She had a long road to recovery, and none of it pleasant. Once Gabby got confirmation that the team upstairs was ready, Jane Doe was headed for a room in the shock trauma unit.
“What happened to you?” Gabby murmured as she watched the young woman’s chest rise and fall. The ventilator let out a rhythmic, mechanical hiss as it forced air into her lungs. The steady rhythm of the machine and the beeping monitors were strangely reassuring to Gabby. When alarms went off, throwing everything into chaos, that was a sign that things were unraveling. Steady rhythms meant everything was under control.
The only other blessing Gabby had noted was that despite her other significant injuries, Jane Doe hadn’t suffered major head trauma. There was a small dark spot on the initial CT scans that she’d be keeping an eye on, but so far there were no signs of brain injury.
As if to punctuate her question, the woman gasped sharply. The heart monitor emitted a shrill alarm. The waveforms on the ventilator’s monitor were all over the place. “Nurse!” Gabby called sharply, her own heart rate spiking in response. Gabby hurried to the young woman’s side, pressed her fingers to the side of her throat and tilted her chin up to clear the airway. Reaching for the penlight hanging from her lanyard, Gabby pried open one of the woman’s eyelids to check her responses. One eye was nearly swollen shut, with a deep cut through her eyebrow. Beneath the swollen, bruised lid was a brilliant blue eye.
Something jolted Gabby physically, as if someone grabbed her shoulders and shook her violently. Jane Doe’s gaze locked on hers, pupils dilating almost to the edge of her pale blue irises. That didn’t make sense. She was unconscious, with enough Fentanyl in her veins to keep her in a dreamy haze for hours.
Gabrielle froze, pinned like a butterfly in her penetrating stare. The shrill alarms faded to a distant hum. Suddenly the world went white, and she was falling, plummeting from on high like an angel falling from paradise. The sky was below her, then above her, then below her again, rotating around her in a mad whirl.
Her body pinwheeled through the air, freefalling toward the orange desert below. As she spun again, she saw a huge shadow hanging above her like a thunder cloud. But it was no cloud; the shadow was cast by a monstrous body with a serpentine neck ending in a horned head, a long lashing tail, and arched wings that spread wide to blot out the sun. Its body was silvery-white, and its eyes burned like dying stars. She felt the eyes on her, burning into her, like insects crawling into her veins and into her brain.
Then she was spinning again, and her foot caught on a rocky outcropping, sending an excruciating wrenching sensation from her ankle all the way up her spine. She stared down in horror at her twisted limb, but the shock of seeing a lavender-scaled, taloned foot instead of her familiar foot with pink toenails nearly drowned out the pain of the break.
As she fell, she crashed into rocks, claws scraping uselessly across outcroppings as momentum and gravity conspired to do the most damage possible. Her body scraped painfully across the uneven surface until s
he finally came to a halt.
Awareness came in explosive bursts. First a stretch of black and gray, then a flash into her body again. Everything hurt. She couldn’t even lift a limb. Her eyes went to the sky, where the dragon’s shadow still hung, its burning eyes on her. Something whispered in her ear, but the thundering sound of her own heart drowned it out. Then black. Then white. The unmistakable feeling of changing, of shrinking back in on herself. Then black. Deafening noise as a squalling horn brought her back. A kindly old face screaming “oh my God John, oh my God.”
“Dr. Rojas!”
Something shook her. Gabrielle snapped back to reality, her head spinning as she turned to see Suzanne, one of the trauma nurses holding her arm. “I, uh…”
“You took a little trip there,” Suzanne said warily. “You okay?”
“I was checking her… I was…” Gabby said. She looked back to the Jane Doe, pried up her eyelid again, but her pupil had contracted to normal size. As her heart slowed from its adrenaline-fueled sprint, she examined her own hand. Familiar golden skin, too-short nails. No scales. “I’m fine.”
She was fine, but what about Jane Doe? Under the harsh glow of her penlight, something was strange. Gabby turned the light away to make sure it wasn’t an illusion. The split in Jane Doe’s eyebrow was closed, with puckered pink at its tapered edge on her forehead.
What the hell was going on?
There was a perfectly good explanation. Maybe she’d just seen all the blood and thought it was worse than it was.
Nope.
This was impossible. That cut had been all the way to the bone. Gabby had even made a note to the trauma team to get a plastic surgeon in to look at her face and get it stitched cleanly because of how bad it was.
But there had to be an explanation. There was always a medical explanation, even if she didn’t know what it was yet. Gabby gestured to Suzanne. “I need those tests. Blood samples. Call the lab and tell them I need my blood typing now.”