Dragon Breeder 3 by Dante King (e novels to read online .TXT) 📕

“Holy hells, what is going on in there?” Elenari cried, springing to her feet at the same time that I registered the smoke.

“Wayne!” I said, running to the entrance of the tent.

I ripped open the flap. More smoke, lung-blackening and impassable, billowed out. The tent was thick with it. So full that the smoke was almost like a solid thing pressing outward. Despite this, Elenari and I attempted to take a few steps into the suffocating murk, but almost at once found ourselves driven back by the fumes. Cursing and spitting, Elenari and I staggered back outside.

When she had regained the power of speech, Elenari croaked, “It did not work!” She attempted to walk back into the roiling clouds, but Saya grabbed her by the shoulders and stopped her.

“Wayne! Our son!” she croaked, tears from the smoke and from a gut-wrenching sadness tracking down her face. “He is gone!”

As Elenari’s lip quivered and she looked on the point of collapsing into grief, the tent suddenly exploded outward, flung away as if it had been ripped up by the pegs by some giant hand.

Out of the swirling, billowing gray smoke stalked a dragon.

“Holy shit,” I said, my voice cracked from the smoke. “That’s Wayne!”

The dragonling was the broken, white, black, and gray of wood ash. His scales were as rough and uneven looking as tree bark, so that if he had laid down in the ruin of a burned down house, he would have blended in and been invisible to spot. That was saying something, really, as Wayne was now four feet tall and twenty feet long. A pair of stubby black horns protruded from his head. Wings as black as the space between stars were folded behind his back. Set in a ridged and scaled head were orange eyes that glowed like the heart of a slumbering volcano.

Wayne exited from the dissipating fog that had been contained within the tent, but then he burst suddenly apart into black smoke before solidifying again.

“Damn, that was a neat trick,” Saya said, her eyebrows raised.

Wayne gurgled happily at our amazement, his growl seeming to emanate out of the earth itself it was so deep. With no hesitation, he hunched low and then bounded into the air.

Elenari, Saya, and I watched Wayne flying through the air above our heads; doing circles, flipping around like an otter in water, changing from solid to smoke and then back to solid. Bursting apart into a gray haze and then turning solid once more.

“A Smog Dragon,” said a matter-of-fact voice from behind us, and Penelope came to stand next to Saya, Elenari, and me. “What a truly incredible sight!”

“You did it,” Saya said softly to me. Her mouth hung slightly ajar, as we all watched Wayne gamboling through the air above.

Elenari managed to drag her eyes from the fantastic sight of our offspring and embraced me hard, so hard that I thought she was going to squeeze out the little breath I had managed to regain.

“You did it,” she said, echoing Saya’s words, her red hair tickling my cheeks, her voice muffled due to her face being pressed into my chest.

“We did it.” I pushed her gently away so that I could stare into the depths of jade eyes. “We did it. All of us.”

Then, I pulled the pinkish-white crystal on its chain from the depths of my shirt and summoned Garth.

The Pearl Dragon burst into physical being and leapt instantly into the air. He could tell through the sharing of the mental pathways of my brain what had happened. What was more, I could also feel the presence of another mind within the consciousness that I already shared with Noctis and Garth.

It was Wayne.

Almost I reached out to the newest addition to my strange dragon family, but restrained myself at the last minute. Watching him, shooting through the sky with his brother as they roared and snapped good-naturedly at one another, I thought it more prudent to let them play and get acquainted.

“Well, well, you made it I see!”

I turned and saw Ashrin grinning at me, her dark eyes sparkling. Behind her marched Jazmyn, Renji, Tamsin, and the bearmancer. Renji had a firm hold on the bearmancer’s upper arm and was pushing her ahead of her.

“In the fuckin’ nick of time I wager,” Jazmyn said.

I winked at her, then turned my attention back to the bearmancer.

The mysterious woman was still cloaked, with her shawl wrapped firmly around her head, obscuring her features. All of the women were gazing up at the cavorting dragons.

Leaving my two sons to continue with their aerial banter, I strode over to the bearmancer and pulled the shawl off her face.

Due to her being able to summon a bear the size of a tank, I had expected the woman to have a face like a smashed crab. I could not have been further from the reality if I had tried.

The bearmancer had small, neat features, a squarish jaw, and a shaved head. Her eyes were large and the deep, dark color of good red wine. I saw that she wore a series of silver rings around the edges of both her ears, as well as a stud through each nostril.

I looked her over carefully, but those red eyes of hers stayed glued to the ground.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

The bearmancer’s lips remained clammed up.

I sighed. “Okay,” I said, “but I imagine that my colleagues here are going to be taking your ass straight to the General. I don’t know her very well, but she strikes me as a fair woman—albeit one that does not suffer fools. You might want to consider how much your name, and the information that you say you have, is really worth before you get there.”

“We are taking her to see