The Dragon Lords

by C. J. Hill

  Slayers: The Dragon Lords

  By CJ Hill

  Copyright © 2018

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.

  Other titles by CJ Hill (aka Janette Rallison)

  Adult romantic comedies

  My Fair Lacey & A Perfect Fit

  How I Met Your Brother

  Masquerade

  A Longtime (and at One Point Illegal) Crush

  What the Doctor Ordered (under pen name Sierra St. James)

  YA fiction

  Son of War, Daughter of Chaos

  The Girl Who Heard Demons

  Just One Wish

  My Double Life

  Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Free Throws

  Playing The Field

  The Wrong Side of Magic

  My Fair Godmother

  My Unfair Godmother

  My Fairly Dangerous Godmother

  All’s Fair in Love, War, and High School

  Blue Eyes and Other Teenage Hazards

  Revenge of the Cheerleaders

  Fame, Glory, and Other Things on my To Do List

  It’s a Mall World After All

  How to Take The Ex Out of Ex-boyfriend

  Slayers (under pen name CJ Hill)

  Slayers: Friends and Traitors (under pen name CJ Hill)

  Slayers: Playing With Fire (under pen name CJ Hill)

  Slayers: The Dragon Lords (under pen name CJ Hill)

  Slayers: The Making of a Mentor: A Tor.Com Original (under pen name CJ Hill)

  Erasing Time (under pen name CJ Hill)

  Echo in Time (under pen name CJ Hill)

  If you like audio books, try:

  Just One Wish audio book

  My Fairly Dangerous Godmother audio book

  How I Met Your Brother audio book

  Erasing Time audio book (under pen name CJ Hill)

  Echo in Time audio book (under pen name CJ Hill)

  To all of the people who have patiently waited for book four to come out. It’s here! Unfortunately, I must now inform you that you’ll have to wait for book five. I know, I know. I’m not happy about this turn of events either. Next time I write a book, I’ll choose characters who can tell their stories in fewer chapters.

  Click here to read a synopsis of the first three books

  Prologue

  You should never make promises you can’t keep.

  Fifteen years ago

  Alastair Bartholomew was about to make a deal with the devil, or at least a deal with his own father—which felt like the same thing. Alastair hadn’t even asked for the loan yet, but he knew there would be a price to pay, a little bit of his soul thrown in with the bargain.

  He glanced over the maps, brochures, and realtor flyers he’d spread over his kitchen table. Buying land was the first step to building the Slayer training ground. He’d been looking at properties for the last six months. A stack of construction bids for the facilities sat next to the brochures. He would also need money for research. He not only had to figure out what sort of electric pulse a dragon’s heart put out, he would need to build a machine to replicate it. There were so many expenses.

  Alastair turned his attention to the maps of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Was a secluded location more important in a campsite or accessibility to the DC area? The closer his camp was to DC, the more expensive the land would be.

  Shirley, his wife, had put their daughter, Bess, into her favorite pajamas and was now patiently waiting for the toddler to finish her bottle.

  Even though Bess was almost two, it was a battle of the wills.

  “Aren’t you done yet?” Shirley cooed. “It’s time for a story and then bed.”

  Bess regarded her mother while taking slow sips of her bottle. In her fuzzy white footie pajamas, she always reminded Alastair of a baby polar bear. Bess’s hair was a wild disarray of curls. Her blue eyes were much too alert for this time of night.

  Shirley bent lower to be on Bess’s level. “Don’t you think it’s time for your bottle to go bye-bye? You’re a big girl now. Big girls use sippy cups.”

  Bess popped the bottle out of her mouth. “No,” she said, “Ba-ba mine.” Then she inserted the bottle back in her mouth.

  Shirley sighed, checked the kitchen clock, and turned to her husband. “I’d better put her to B-E-D before you-know-who comes, or we’ll never get her to sleep.”

  Bess let the bottle drop from her mouth. Her eyes lit up with happiness. “Ice cweam twuck!” she exclaimed and toddled to the front door.

  Instead of going after her, Shirley narrowed her eyes at Alastair. “How come every time I use the term ’you-know-who’ Bess thinks I’m talking about an ice cream truck?”

  He kept his gaze firmly on the stack of septic tank bids in front of him. “I have no idea.”

  Shirley put one hand on her hip. “You shouldn’t feed Bess ice cream. She won’t eat healthy food if you give her junk.”

  The doorbell rang, saving him from further discussion of what he and Bess did while Shirley was gone.

  “That’s probably my father,” Alastair announced and went to the front room. Bess was already on her tippy-toes doing her utmost to get around the child-proof handle on the doorknob. She loved opening doors. Unfortunately, she also loved dashing outside and shedding her clothes on the sidewalk.

  Alastair opened the door. His father—Roderick Bartholomew to people who knew him in the States—had his hands thrust into his jacket pocket. Years of managing a ranch had given him a lean, muscled build that was only now giving way to the softness of middle age. He’d always had a stern expression and the lines in his face had grown increasingly deeper in the years since they’d fled St. Helena. Alastair never asked how often his father thought of Nathan. It was clear his father thought of him every day. The evidence was there in the grooves of his face.

  Now that Alastair had a child of his own, he better understood the force of that emotion. You didn’t forget it when someone killed your child.

  Bess saw her grandpa and lifted her small hands up in glee. “Bampa!”

  The sternness on Roderick’s face melted. He bent down and swooped Bess into his arms. “How’s my princess?”

  He snuggled his face into her neck, a move that always made Bess shriek with laughter. After he’d caused enough shrieks to ensure that Bess wouldn’t sleep any time in the near future, Roderick carried her into the living room and sat down on the couch with Bess on his lap. She immediately began rifling through his pockets to see if she could extract treasures such as keys, pens, or lint. Alastair and Shirley sat down on the adjoining loveseat.

  “So,” Roderick said, “You want a loan.” He always got right to the point.

  No one would have known by looking at Roderick’s plain clothes and worn jacket that he was a wealthy man. His businesses—some of which he discussed with Alastair, some of which he didn’t—were quite successful. Roderick had a talent for making money, perhaps because he didn’t let things like rules, laws, or ethics stand in his way.

  “I need a loan for the Slayer camp,” Alastair clarified. He stayed away from his father’s money for the most part. Any time his father paid for something—usually lavish gifts for Bess—Alastair felt vaguely like he was condoning insider trading. He had only decided to ask for his father’s help because there was
nowhere else to turn. He could get a bank loan that would cover the price of land and a few cabins, but he couldn’t very well explain to financial institutions that he also needed to build a second specialized camp that would serve as a secret training ground. Not many people wanted to bankroll superheroes.

  “It’s our best way to stop Overdrake,” Alastair told his father. “When he attacks DC, we’ll have a group of Slayers who are capable of killing his dragons.”

  Alastair had mentioned his idea of a training camp to his father before but he’d never asked for funding. The weight of the request felt like a yoke around his neck. The camps would require more than two million dollars to become functional, and who knew how long it would take for the regular camp to start returning the investment.

  Roderick didn’t speak for a moment. Alastair was used to his father’s silences. He waited.

  “You only know where one Slayer child is,” Roderick finally said. “One. And that’s Bess. How can you build an entire camp on the hope that more Slayer kids will somehow find their way to it?”

  “It’ll be a dragon-slayer-themed camp,” Alastair pointed out. “I’ll advertise with knights taking on fire-breathing beasts. The right children will be drawn to it.”

  Bess had pulled a penny from her grandfather’s pocket. He took it from her before she could see how it tasted. “They’ll be drawn to it? That’s a long shot, and you know it.”

  Shirley and Alastair exchanged a look. “I’ll show him,” Shirley said. She walked out of the room. A minute later she came back with a bag of stuffed animals.

  She sat down in front of Bess and took out a cat. “What’s this?”

  Bess dropped the pen she had just liberated from her grandpa’s jacket and glanced at the cat. “Ki-ki.”

  “That’s kitty,” Shirley interpreted for Roderick. She pulled a stuffed dog from the bag. “What’s this?”

  Instead of answering, Bess made barking noises, jumping up and down with each bark.

  “Right. A doggy.” Shirley reached into the bag again. “What’s this?” She slowly took out a stuffed dragon.

  Bess’s posture stiffened and she scowled. “Bad dwagon!” She slid from the couch, grabbed the toy and flung it on the floor. “No, no!” she yelled and stomped on the toy several times.

  Roderick watched, his mouth slightly ajar. “You taught her to do that.”

  “We didn’t,” Shirley said. “You should see what she did to the fairy tale picture books I checked out of the library. I didn’t realize they had dragon pictures in them until it was too late.” She shook her head at the thought. “I had to pay the library thirty-eight dollars to replace them.”

  Bess stepped off the toy and watched it, seemingly studying it for signs of life. She waved a scolding finger at the animal. “No, no, bad dwagon!”

  Alastair regarded his daughter with a sense of resignation. “I have to keep all my dragon research books on high shelves. Otherwise I’m afraid she’ll impale them.”

  Satisfied that the dragon toy would not be bothering the family again, Bess picked up the stuffed animal, trotted across the room to a garbage can, and dropped the toy inside. “All bedder!” she chimed and padded back over to the others. She tried unsuccessfully to climb onto the couch by herself until Roderick picked her up and put her on his lap. “Conquering dragons before you’re potty trained, eh princess?”

  “All bedder!” she said again.

  It wasn’t all better. Alastair couldn’t stand the thought of his daughter ever seeing, let alone fighting, a real dragon. And yet, that’s what he was planning. That’s what he was asking his father to give him a loan for.

  Alastair didn’t let himself dwell on the implications of what that meant for Bess’s future. He had time until the dragons attacked. Fifteen to twenty years. He would find and train so many Slayers, his daughter would only bear a small portion of the danger.

  “Slayers are natural dragon fighters,” Alastair reminded his father. “Any Slayer children in the area will want to come to camp. My goal is to have the regular facilities open in three years. That way when the Slayer children are old enough to go to camps, mine will already be well-established. I’ll offer scholarships for families who can’t afford the cost. We’ll find and train all of the Slayers.”

  Roderick turned his attention to Bess. She was busily shoving his car keys between the couch cushions. He didn’t give his disappearing keys any notice. Instead he ran a hand over Bess’s wispy curls. “She reminds me of Nathan.”

  “I know,” Alastair said. Bess was determined, mischievous, and exuberant. Just like Nathan had been.

  Roderick’s gaze swung back to Alastair, all his former sternness restored. “I don’t want her anywhere near a dragon. Brant Overdrake can’t even know she exists.”

  Alastair gave the answer he told himself every time he had the same thought. “All of the Slayers, including Bess, will be safer from both dragons and Overdrake if they’re trained.”

  His father couldn’t argue with that. If Nathan had known that he was a Slayer and that Overdrake was a dragon lord, his brother would probably still be alive.

  Roderick brushed one of Bess’s curls behind her ear. His hands looked rough and worn against the little girl’s smooth skin. “You can train Bess,” Roderick conceded. “But I don’t want her anywhere near a battle.”

  “None of us do,” Shirley said. She had been uncharacteristically quiet and somber during this conversation. But then, how could anyone talk about their child’s future battles lightly?

  “We’ll hope for the best,” Alastair added. “However, we have to prepare for the worst.”

  With the keys now swallowed by the couch, Bess sat down beside her grandfather and tried to pry his wedding ring from his finger.

  “Fine then,” Roderick said in a tone that indicated he’d made up his mind about the issue. “I won’t give you opinions or platitudes, I’ll just tell you my terms for funding your camp. You can train Bess, but when Overdrake attacks, she stays out of it.”

  “I don’t want her to fight,” Alastair reiterated. He glanced across the room at the garbage can and the dragon tail that stuck out. “But how am I going to keep her out of it?”

  “You’re the parent,” Roderick said. “You’ll figure something out. And speaking of parents, don’t tell your mother any of this. It will make her worry.”

  Over the years, Alastair and his father had kept a long list of things from his mother.

  Unable to pull off her grandpa’s ring, Bess bent down to bite it. Roderick gently moved his hand away. “No, no,” he told her.

  Bess laughed and tried to bite his finger again.

  Shirley stood up, walked over, and picked up their daughter. “No biting, sweetie.”

  Bess chomped her teeth together. “I a cwocodile.”

  Shirley made a tsking noise and carried Bess into the kitchen, most likely to have a talk with her about appropriate animal behavior.

  Alastair watched them go and inwardly sighed. “We can’t even keep her from biting people. What makes you think we’ll be able to control her when she’s a teenager?” He lifted one hand in frustration. “Has anyone figured out yet how to control them?”

  Roderick leaned back against the couch. “I’ll give you ten million to build your camp and buy equipment clear and free. It won’t be a loan. It’s a gift.”

  A gift, as long as Alastair went along with his father’s demands. Alastair didn’t answer right away. He knew his father wanted the Slayer children found and trained as much as Alastair wanted it, more maybe. Avenging Nathan’s death wouldn’t be complete until Overdrake was defeated.

  “I could go to the government for funding,” Alastair said, attempting to force himself into a better bargaining spot. “They might help me.”

  Roderick only shook his head. “You have no way to prove anything to the government. Dragons and dragon lords—they’ll think you’re crazy. Probably put you on one of those watch lists so you’re frisked ev
ery time you go to an airport.”

  A silence stretched out between them. Alastair looked at the ceiling then back at his father in aggravation. “It will take years to train the children. They’ll trust me. They’ll depend on me. How am I supposed to tell them I’m sending them into a fight that I won’t let my daughter go to?”

  “So don’t tell them,” Roderick said. “When the time comes, Bess can call in sick.”

  “And what will Bess think of me for making this sort of deal?”

  Roderick pulled his phone from his breast pocket. “I don’t care what she thinks as long as she’s alive.” He tapped his phone screen. “Give me your bank account number, and I’ll have the funds to you by Monday.”

  Ten million dollars. Alastair could buy the land within the week and start the zoning process. And would it really be such a bad thing to keep Bess out of the fight? Wasn’t a part of him already breathing a sigh of relief at the thought?

  “Well?” his father asked. “Do we have a deal?”

  Alastair thought of the stacks of bids and lists of expenses sitting on the table. What other choice did he have? If he depended on outside financing, maybe the camp would never get off the ground. Wasn’t it better to assure that the rest of the Slayers were trained to fight instead of standing on principle and having none be trained at all?

  Alastair nodded at his father. “All right.” A part of him felt like he had sold out, that he had compromised himself. Another part felt a reprieve had been granted. Bess wasn’t allowed to fight. He wouldn’t lose her the way he’d lost his brother.

  Alastair would just have to come up with a way to tell her about this stipulation before the battle began.

  Chapter 1

  Tori put a stack of Hampton Means Leadership flyers into a box, only half seeing them. She and her sister Aprilynne were at their house with a few people from their father’s office putting together campaign kits for volunteers. Aprilynne was the one running the show. Even at nineteen years old, she had no problem ordering staff members around. She was poised, beautiful, and blonde—a younger version of their mother.