Dragon Warrior

by Shéa MacLeod

  Dragon Warror

  Dragon Wars – Book One

  By Shéa MacLeod

  Dragon Warrior

  COPYRIGHT © 2011 by Shéa MacLeod

  Published 2011 by Sunwalker Press

  The right of Shéa MacLeod to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons either living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Art: Amanda Kelsey

  Edited by: Tamra Westberry and M. Edward McNally

  Also by Shéa MacLeod

  Cupcake Goddess

  Be Careful What You Wish For

  Nothing Tastes As Good

  Soulfully Sweet

  A Stitch In Time (A Cupcake Goddess Novelette)

  Dragon Wars

  Dragon Warrior

  Dragon Lord

  Dragon Goddess

  Green Witch

  Dragon Corps

  Dragon Mage

  Dragon's Angel

  Dragon Wars Boxed Sets

  Dragon Wars - Three Complete Novels Boxed Set

  Dragon Wars 2: Three Complete Novels Boxed Set

  Intergalactic Investigations

  Infinite Justice

  A Rage of Angels

  Lady Rample Mysteries

  Lady Rample Steps Out

  Lady Rample Spies A Clue

  Lady Rample and the Silver Screen

  Lady Rample Sits In

  Lady Rample and the Ghost of Christmas Past

  Lady Rample and Cupid's Kiss

  Lady Rample and the Mysterious Mr. Singh

  Lady Rample and the Haunted Manor

  Lady Rample Box Set One

  Notting Hill Diaries

  To Kiss A Prince

  Kissing Frogs

  Kiss Me, Chloe

  Kiss Me, Stupid

  Kissing Mr. Darcy

  Sunwalker Saga

  Kissed by Blood

  Kissed by Moonlight

  Kissed by Ice

  Kissed by Eternity

  Kissed by Destiny

  Sunwalker Saga: Soulshifter Trilogy

  Haunted

  Soulshifter

  Fearless

  Sunwalker Saga: Witchblood

  Mistwalker

  Viola Roberts Cozy Mysteries

  The Corpse in the Cabana

  The Stiff in the Study

  The Poison in the Pudding

  The Body in the Bathtub

  The Venom in the Valentine

  The Remains in the Rectory

  Write Novels Fast

  Write Novels Fast: Writing Faster With Art Journaling

  Write Novels Fast: Down and Dirty Draft

  Standalone

  Ride the Dragon: A Paranormal/Science Fiction Boxed Set

  Angel's Fall

  Watch for more at Shéa MacLeod’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dragon Warrior (Dragon Wars, #1)

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Note from the Author

  About Shéa MacLeod

  Other books by Shéa MacLeod

  They say it takes a village to raise a child.

  Apparently the same is true for writers.

  This one’s for my village.

  Your support and friendship mean the world to me.

  One

  “IT’S COMING AROUND for another pass!”

  Lieutenant Micah Caine’s voice bellowed through the bunker. Even with his dark hair covered in dust, fatigues bloodied and torn, eyes bloodshot and circled with exhaustion, his charisma was undiminished. It gave them hope, and they needed all the hope they could get. This was the fourth pass and out of sixteen people, there were only three of them left.

  The Lieutenant stood in front of the narrow window of the bunker, peering through his night vision binoculars. “All right, ready now.” He raised his arm for a moment then dropped it. “Give ‘em hell Harriet!”

  Audrey Harrison had been a civilian back when things were normal. Her only experience with guns had been target shooting with her dad’s hunting rifles. Now she sat behind an enormous rail gun that shot bullets the size of thermos bottles, her pale blonde hair scraped back in a tail, her fingernails chewed to stubs from the stress.

  Nothing was normal anymore. Not since the day all hell had broken loose.

  Audrey focused through the night scope, trying to ignore the zing of happy hormones thrumming through her system every time Micah got within five feet of her. It just wasn’t going to happen. Not unless they won this war. Maybe not even then. She was pretty sure the attraction was completely one-sided.

  The monster came into view. It was a big one. Its wingspan, barely visible against the night sky, must have been thirty-five feet, at least. Fire shot from its mouth, strafing the walls of the bunker. Concrete cracked under the intense heat.

  Audrey swiped damp palms against her jeans before wrapping her hands carefully around the grips of the rail gun and squinting through the sights. Her blood ran cold as the creature hovered into view: Dragon. It was a horror beyond belief, a living nightmare. Ever so gently she squeezed the trigger.

  Her shot ripped through the air, slamming into the winged creature. The thing screamed as it dipped slightly in the sky, but it was a scream of rage, not pain. The shell hadn’t done a damn thing. She swore slightly and fired again.

  Shell after shell tore through the night and shell after shell pulverized to dust against the monster’s impenetrable hide. The lieutenant waved at her to stop.

  “Foster! Grenade.”

  Foster scrambled toward the lieutenant, grenade launcher cradled against his chest. Audrey wasn’t sure what Foster’s first name was. Like the lieutenant, he was army. Unlike the Lieutenant, Foster had never seen action until the day the monsters got loose. He’d never even graduated from boot camp and now he was fighting for his life against creatures that shouldn’t exist outside a horror film. Audrey would have felt sorry for him, but she had no time to feel sorry for anyone, not even herself.

  Foster stumbled over fallen rubble, face pale under streaks of dust and soot. When he nearly dropped the launcher, Micah grabbed it out of his hands and hefted it onto his own shoulder. For just a minute he paused, silhouetted against the night. Then he fired.

  The world exploded.

  A chunk of concrete slammed into Audrey’s shoulder, knocking her out of her seat. She hit the floor so hard it knocked the breath out of her. When she could breathe again, she almost wished she couldn’t. Her entire body throbbed with pain. She touched her right temple and her hand came away covered in blood.

  She turned her head carefully. Foster was gone, buried under a pile of rubble, a single pale hand poking from the debris, clutching at nothing. The ceiling above where he’d stood was now a gaping hole.

  “Audrey?”

  She barely recognized the hoarse whisper. “I’m here Micah. I can’t ... I c
an’t move.”

  “Sorry, Audrey.” His voice was slurred. “I thought ... safe. Got the bastard. Got him ... dead ...” Micah’s voice trailed to a whisper.

  “Micah?”

  She could hear his breathing, a harsh rattle in the stillness. “Micah? Micah, can you hear me?” She managed to pull herself up, arm clamped tightly to her side, pain screaming through every nerve. There was no way she could stand so she pulled herself along the floor ignoring the thick blood trail she left behind her.

  Panting, dizzy with blood loss, she peered around the wreckage.

  “No,” it came out a breathy moan. “Oh, no.”

  They’d won. The dragon was, indeed, dead. Its smoking hulk lying on the ground outside the bunker blocked out most of the skyline, but it was missing one critical body part: its head. Not even those creatures could come back from that. But at what cost?

  Audrey blinked. The room was getting darker. Breath wheezed through her lungs, each inhalation becoming more labored. Her eyes latched on to the unmoving form of Lieutenant Micah Caine lying in the shadow of the dead beast.

  The monster was dead, but so was the lieutenant. So were they all. She didn’t have enough strength left to cry.

  The last thing Audrey Harrison ever saw was the beautiful face of the man she had secretly loved, his blue eyes staring blindly at a sky just beginning to light with dawn.

  “THIS IS IT.” RAIN MAURI squatted at the top of the escarpment, faded map held in front of her. The pastel colors denoting long-vanished borders meant nothing to her, but there were other landmarks to follow. Most of them handwritten decades after the map had left the printer.

  Sutter scanned the valley below. “Ain’t nothing much here but dust.”

  Rain stood, letting her eyes, hidden behind a beat-up pair of dark glasses, roam over the barren landscape. He was right. The entire valley was one big dust bowl. Not a tree in sight, not even a bush. “There.” She pointed to a heap of gray stones in the distance. “That’s it.”

  “Still don’t see it.” Sutter lifted his grimy baseball cap and scratched his scalp. He’d shaved his head before they left the compound and it was starting to grow back, a black shadow against coffee skin.

  “Seriously? You don’t see that giant pile of rocks?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course, I see the giant pile of rocks, Rain. Just don’t see what’s so special about that particular pile of rocks. Lots of rock piles closer to Sanctuary if you’re desperate for rocks.”

  Rain shrugged and started down the hillside. The path was treacherous with loose stones and crumbling earth and her boots were just this side of worn out, but she didn’t hesitate. Sutter sighed and followed.

  When they reached the bottom, Rain realized the valley wasn’t quite as barren as it looked from above. Here and there fragile shoots of grass bravely raised their heads above the ravaged soil. Nature was making a comeback. Or at least trying.

  She headed toward the rock pile which began to look less like rocks and more like rubble the closer they got.

  “That’s a concrete building.” Sutter’s voice held a hint of surprise. “Or what’s left of it anyway.”

  Rain nodded and hitched her rifle a little higher over her shoulder. They were safe enough during daytime, but it never hurt to be prepared. “Old U.S. Army bunker. It was abandoned before the War.”

  He shot her a look. “There are scorch marks on some of that rubble. Those beasts don’t attack abandoned buildings.”

  Rain smiled. “Ever heard of Caine’s Last Stand?”

  “No way! This is it?”

  “Yep. This is it.” Her smile widened, flashing dimples.

  Caine’s Last Stand was legendary. A tale told around countless campfires, whispered on dark nights. It had grown and changed until it resembled a tale from one of those ancient comic books Sutter thought no one knew about. Most people thought it was just a story made up by the Army during the War to keep up the spirits of the soldiers fighting a losing battle.

  Rain knew different. Maybe the details had changed over time, but the story was real. Lieutenant Micah Caine had been real. And so had his sacrifice. She’d discovered the files that proved it and now she’d finally found the place where it had happened.

  “Come on.” She led the way across the scattered rubble to what remained of a set of concrete stairs, worn and broken by time and battle. Sutter followed her down into the ruined military bunker.

  “Wow, that’s a hell of a gun.” Sutter’s eyes grew wide at the sight of the enormous rail gun, barrel pointed skyward. After decades of exposure to the elements it was impressive, but useless. Not to mention the thing wouldn’t work without electricity. Rain was far more interested in the remains huddled at the foot of the giant gun.

  Time and vermin had scattered the bones and rotted the clothing, but she knew who it was. “Audrey Harrison. She was a librarian before the war. By all accounts a pacifist.” Rain had done her homework. Caine’s Last Stand had been an obsession since childhood.

  Sutter’s brown eyes widened as he scratched at the three-day growth of beard on his chin. No time to shave and no safe place to do it out here. “What the hell was a pacifist doing handling a weapon like this?”

  “It was war, Sutter. They were fighting dragons. If you were human, you fought. Or you died. Just like now.”

  Nothing much had changed since then, in Rain’s opinion. Except that the humans had gone underground and kept to the daylight while the monsters had multiplied despite their best efforts. Pacifism was no longer an option.

  Fury rode her as she stared down at Audrey Harrison’s remains. Even in this shelled-out ruin of a world, the dead were respected. Yet these dead, these heroes, had been left to rot. The excuse, of course, had been that it was wartime. Typical bureaucratic nonsense, as Padre Pedro would say.

  She stepped to what had once been a window but was now a gaping hole along one side of the bunker. Her boots left deep impressions in decades of dust and grime. Crumbled pieces of concrete and stone rattled underfoot, but her attention was on the view outside.

  The pile of bones hadn’t been scattered, but loomed against the sky, bleached white by the sun. Most of the fragile wing bones were missing and the head was shattered to nothing, but the rest was intact, the ribcage reaching higher than the bunker roof. Or what was left of it.

  Sutter let out a low whistle. “Big mother, huh? Wonder what happened to the head.”

  Rain nodded. The stories hadn’t exaggerated the size of the monster. Lieutenant Caine had fought one of the biggest dragons on record. He’d fought and he’d won, he and Audrey Harrison and a young solider known only as Foster. But the cost had been high. They’d died along with the thirteen others who’d fled to the abandoned bunker after the nearby military base had fallen, razed by dragon fire.

  Rain turned from the window. “Let’s do what we came to do and get out of here.” The place gave her chills with its fire-scarred walls and the hulking ruins of the mighty beast outside.

  Sutter gave the rusted hulk of the big gun a frown. “I can’t imagine we’ll find much left, Rain. After all these years ...”

  “The Lieutenant was rumored to have brought an arsenal with him from the Base. I doubt he left them lying about to rust.” Every Marine she’d met had been meticulous about his guns and armor. It was unlikely the military back then had been any different.

  “Unless he used them,” Sutter pointed out.

  Which was always a possibility, of course, especially given the state of the dragon’s skull, or lack of skull. Dragon skulls didn’t have a habit of spontaneously combusting. It was highly likely Micah had used some sort of ordinance to cause the damage, which meant there might not be any left. Rain was holding out hope, however. These days there wasn’t much left to the human race but hope.

  She and Sutter began shifting through the rubble, no easy task since neither one of them was exactly muscle-bound. Rain herself was of medium height, just over five foot five, but s
lightly built while Sutter was short and wiry, like most civilian men. Any man that showed promise of being big and muscular was taken by the Marines to fill out their ranks which were constantly decimated by skirmishes with the dragons.

  By the time they uncovered the second skeleton, they were both sweaty and covered in dust, a few new rips added to their well-patched clothes. The uniform was nearly rotted away, but the dog tags still circled the cervical spine. Rain carefully lifted one. “Foster.”

  Sutter frowned. “Can’t be. He’s not big enough.”

  True, the skeletal remains weren’t those of a large man, but of someone well under six feet. And while Rain was no judge, the bones appeared slight. “I guess a man’s size didn’t matter to the Army. After all, things were different back then. They had machines and guns. No dragons, either.” At least, not until the end.

  Sutter gave her a wry look. “Brains were more important than muscles?”

  She grinned back, “Maybe. Stranger things have happened.”

  It was hard to imagine a world where intelligence ruled over brute strength. It was hard to believe. After all, the old military with their guns and bombs had done nearly as much damage to the planet as the enemy they fought. Not exactly a sign of intellect.

  “Over here,” Sutter beckoned. In the corner behind more rubble were two green metal boxes. “I think this is it.”

  After a bit more digging, they had the boxes out. Each of them was big enough to hold a man Sutter’s size and each of them was locked. “Dammit,” Rain snarled.

  Sutter grinned. “Not to worry, Rain. I’ve got skills.”

  She laughed as he fished a small hand-stitched leather wallet out of the inner pocket of his worn overcoat and began pulling out tools. Within minutes he had the boxes open and they were both staring in awe at the contents.

  Rows of gleaming black automatic rifles shone in the sunlight streaming through the broken bunker wall. At either end of the trunk were egg-shaped grenades carefully tucked into foam cradles, and under it all were boxes ammunition sheathed in shining brass.