Dragon's Teeth
Stonefort Series: Book Two
by James A. Hetley
Copyright Information
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2006 by James A. Hetley
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
eISBN: 978-1-937776-51-0
Also by James A. Hetley
The Stonefort Series:
Dragon's Eye
Dragon's Teeth
"Dragon's Bones"(novelette)
The Wildwood Series:
The Summer Country
The Winter Oak
Writing as James A. Burton
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Visit James online at www.JamesHetley.com.
Follow him on Twitter @JHetley.
Table of Contents
Dragon's Teeth
Copyright Information
Also by James A. Hetley
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Excerpt from Dragon's Eye
Author Bio
Chapter One
Something smelled wrong. Kate Rowley wrinkled her nose, sorting through truck-cab air for the difference. Flinty, the sharp dusty semi-ozone tang she got when her mason's hammer struck sparks from a piece of granite she was shaping for a wall. That smell didn't belong in the autumn woods. Nobody had been striking sparks from stone in this forest for at least a hundred years. But that's what she smelled, strong enough to reach her inside her old truck, like she was standing downwind from a quarry drill.
Kate slowed and then stopped on the narrow woods road, consciously setting the nose of her green Dodge stakebed at the head of a slope. She switched the ignition off and set the brake and listened to the snaps and ticks and groans of cooling machinery, the only sound. No jays, no crows, no chickadees — not even the rustling of dry leaves in the wind. The trees, the dirt, even the stone seemed to be watching, listening, waiting.
She sniffed again, window down, nose sorting through stale cigarette smoke and oil and hot metal and cold morning coffee for whatever troubled her. It had vanished. She heaved the door open and climbed down, the old springs and shocks sighing with relief to be rid of her bulk. She tended to think of her weight in tons — an eighth of a ton sounded heavier than two hundred and fifty pounds.
And that estimate was being kind, assuming she'd lost weight in the hospital. Kate had quit stepping on scales a couple of decades back. Not that she was fat, just big. She stretched the kinks out of her spine and straightened to her full six-foot-six height.
And then winced. Week in the hospital, two months in bed and then gimping around with a cane. Bullet wounds, shoulder and hip, mostly healed now but they still bothered her when the weather changed or she spent too long in one position. Like sitting in the truck. Still, the physical pain hurt less than her memories.
A raven croaked omens down at her from above the sun-dappled tunnel through ancient fat birches and maples yellow with the bloom of Maine autumn, a single lane leading down into a hollow dark with cedar. Dry brittle weeds stood tall between the ruts, broken off where her truck had passed. Nobody had driven this road for days, maybe weeks, and she was supposed to meet a man about an addition to his house?
Kate shook her head. The last pavement was two miles back, the last power and phone a mile beyond that. She'd lived in Stonefort for forty years, most years never even been out of Sunrise County, and she'd never driven on this road before.
She reached in behind the truck seat and pulled out her tattered Maine atlas, thumbing through to the local page. She measured distances by the scars on her finger and compared them to the scale. Even the dotted line of a jeep trail stopped a half-mile in from the Haystack Road. She'd assumed her map was out of date, a new road, developers selling off back land. Wrong.
She checked her notes again, scribbled from the phone call. Followed the turns on the map, winding inland from Stonefort Village and its harbor nestled between curved points of land. No, she wasn't lost, rare though that would have been. The notes sent her on another half mile into blank white space, then said turn left into a driveway. The only "driveway" she'd seen in the last fifteen minutes had been the front porch of a fox den.
No money to be made here. That voice on the phone had been playing a prank. But Kate wore two hats. The hardhat of carpenter-and-stonemason-turned-contractor said to find a space between the trees, turn around, and write the morning off as a nice drive in the September woods. The part-time cop hat with the tarnished shield said "bullshit."
She was still in Stonefort Township, still in her territory as town constable and general all-around nosy fishwife, paid by the selectmen to follow gossip and know about anything odd or illegal that happened over several hundred square miles of moose and antisocial people who'd barely heard of government and didn't much care for the concept, mister man. She ought to find out what was at the end of a road that didn't show up on her map.
A road that somebody used, often enough to keep the scrub cherries and alders from taking over, and that looked like it had been here for decades if not centuries. She knelt and dug at the roadbed, finding cool coarse washed gravel of a made road, not the scraped dirt of loggers swamping out a clear run at their prey. Something definitely smelled fishy.
She climbed back in and cranked the truck, crossing fingers on both hands, and the engine roared to smooth life and then settled into
