Author Archives: dragons4me3

Excerpt from Tales of the Lunatics

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For #LineByLineTime : Inexperienced or Naive?

Striker pointed her tail at the shackled male and scowled. “Show some respect for the Den Mother!”

The male tipped his head sideways. “Den Mother? What’s a Den Mother?” His repetition of her intonation showed he understood it was a title.

Everybody in the den stared at him. He looked around and shrugged. “What? We had no mothers in the prison mines. No one was allowed to mate.”

Striker sat back on her haunches and curled her tail into a question. “Didn’t you have a pack before you were placed in the mines? Where did you live before you were sentenced?”

Loper and Shadowstalker came close to him. Their tails curled as well. “How long have you been in the mines? What was your crime, anyway?” Loper asked.

The male shrugged again. Without a tail, he could not communicate easily. “I don’t remember anything before prison. I did ask why I was there. They said I murdered a female.”

Moonsinger sucked in a breath. “You murdered a female? Who?”

“No idea. Like I said, I don’t remember anything before the prison. I know I was a lot smaller when I first woke. It’s been a while, I think.”

Moonsinger rubbed her chin with the tip of her claw. “Children are not to be placed in prison. Not even youths. Do you remember how many moltings you went through?”

The male laughed. “Too many to remember.”

Striker rocked back and forth on her tail. “You know nothing of pack life then. Nothing of a den mother, a pack leader, alphas, betas, omegas?”

The male waved a front limb, still bloody from the fight with the rogue. “I had a work team of males and females. I told them what to do and they did it. I made sure they were fed and watered, and protected them from the guards. We worked the mine, ate, drank, and slept. That’s been all I’ve known – that I can remember. Then I was taken away from my team, shackled, and told I had to go with these two. If you want me to show respect, you’ll have to explain what you want.”

Moonsinger stared at the older female. “He’s a blank slate. We’ll have to teach him EVERYTHING!”

Excerpt from “Project Promised Land”

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For #LineByLineTime : “Get Out of Bed!”

“Nita! You awake? Wake up, already!”

Nita groaned loudly, and waved her hand feebly. “Lemme alone, Chico! I feel like I been beat up again. Oh, my head! Ask Luthor for some aspirin or something. Ow!” She wrapped her arms around her head and rolled to her back, because the front of her head ached almost enough to make her cry, and she never cried.

“You weren’t beat up, but you hit your forehead. Do you remember everything?”

“Enough, already! Don’t ask me questions unless you’re holding a cup of strong coffee! Has anybody invented it yet on this timeline? Or did a miracle happen and we got back home? Please say we got back home.”

“Uh, no. Sorry.”

She groaned again and touched her forehead with a wary finger and winced. “Man, I’ve got the headache from hell!” Her head moved from side to side as she blinked. Then she sighed in deep annoyance.

“Look, Lizard Boy, you’d better have a really good excuse for waking me up before dawn. Can’t you at least turn on a flashlight or light a candle, for Pete’s sake? Are we having to hide? Where is everybody else? Is Tweetie okay? Did she have the baby?” She sat up abruptly and grabbed Harper’s shoulder. “Why are we in the dark? Are we hiding in the caves?”

Harper’s mouth moved but no sound emerged. He stared around at the others standing around Nita’s bed. They stared back, as helpless as he to find words. A breeze sighed through the open window, stirring the dust motes into dancing in the sunbeams illuminating the room.

Excerpt from “The Warlord’s Heart”

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For #LineByLineTime: Survivor

Marissa came awake slowly. She quickly wished she were still unconscious. Her body sent an urgent message and she rolled over as fast as she could to get her mouth over the edge of the bed. Strong hands caught her before she rolled off the bed and held her in place. She opened her eyes just in time to see a bucket shoved under her face.

Her stomach heaved again and again. Finally, she had nothing left to spew and rolled back again with the help of the unknown owner of the hands. A damp cloth wiped her sweating face and a strong arm went around her back to lift her to a sitting position.

“Here,” a familiar deep voice said softly in her ear. “Take a sip of this and wash your mouth out. I know that poison left a terrible taste in it.”

She forced heavy eyelids up and gasped at the sight of Benedict’s face so close to her.

“Poison?” she managed to whisper.

“Sip, then we’ll talk,” he ordered gruffly, and pressed a cup to her lips. Head whirling, she sipped automatically and obediently swished it in her mouth and spit it into the bucket. Benedict held her securely. She found herself wondering if her jumpy stomach was due to the poison he spoke of or his presence. Why was he caring for her? Where was everybody else? Where was Betsy? What had happened?

Excerpt from “Tales of the Lunatics”

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For #LineByLineTime “Rain”

Skyshaker dragged the mukat’s body into the cave and tossed it onto the pile of his other kills. “That’s the last. Think we’ll eat good tonight?”

Shadowstalker laughed. “I think we’ll be eating well for awhile! I haven’t seen that much meat at one time since the last Festival of Moons, and that was contributed by four clans!”

Striker stumped over to the outer entrance and stared out. She pointed her staff at the horizon. “Just in time, too. See the clouds? They tell of a storm that can last days. Could be we’ll need every bit of that meat, and all the plants we’ve gathered. Do we have enough of the fire rocks to last a while? Gathering more from the lower caverns will give us something to do when we can’t go outside.”

Skyshaker laughed. “Are you afraid you’ll melt in the rain?”

He blinked as all the others stared at him, their jaws dropped. “What? Did I say something?”

Loper shook his head. “If nothing else, that remark reminds us you have spent most of your life underground in the mines.”

“What do you mean?”

Moonsinger sighed. “The storm Striker speaks of is one well known to us. It does not come often, but when it does, everyone hides from it. It is not just rain, it is wind, and sometimes balls of ice bigger than rocks. Trees fall under its fury. Because our opening to the outside is large here, we must take our belongings and food down to a lower cave, where the storm’s power is muted. How long do we have, Striker?”

“Not as much as we need.” Striker spat out the opening. “We must hurry. Make sure the firestarters are safe from the wet first. Skyshaker, how weary are you? The rest of us will struggle to move that meat, but we must get it down below. Now!”

Skyshaker shrugged. “I’ll be fine. I won’t take it all the way down, just partway and then toss it. Just keep the bottom of the ramp clear.”

“Move, you laggards!” Striker shouted. Everyone in the cavern leaped into action.

Striker was correct. Just hours later, Skyshaker collapsed after tossing the last body down the ramp to the lower cavern. After catching his breath, he sat up and stretched aching muscles. The silence caught his attention. Usually the caverns were alive with the sound of the diggers chittering to each other or their claws scraping through the rock walls of the mountain. He looked around. They had all vanished. He ventured down the ramp and looked around. The other den members were huddled around a big fire. Striker had her biggest pot sitting over it, steam rising off the top. None of them were making a noise either.

His mouth opened to question the silence when the sound came from above him. As he jerked his head around, he saw the others flinch and huddle tighter. He raced back up the ramp. The wind met him with a face full of water and a rising scream in his ears. Holding his tail over his eyes, he managed to block the wind and rain enough to see the outside opening lit with a sky full of fire as lightning flashed nonstop.

Excerpt from “Sweet Talking Man”

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For #LineByLineTime: Meet Cute

This is an excerpt from a short romance.

After that night he refused any more offers of introductions to women. He was lonely, but it was better than listening to remarks like that.  Unfortunately, she had only been the latest in a long line of disappointing dates. His friends had even tried setting him up with a deaf woman, but he didn’t know sign language and she couldn’t read his lips if he rarely said anything. No, it was better to suffer in silence.

“Look! Over here!”  An excited squeal almost in his ear made him jerk his head around. A young woman with short blonde hair, dressed in a light teeshirt covered with cartoon flowers and snug jeans beneath leaped onto the fence beside him. She waved wildly with one arm and whooped loudly. “Marian! Marian! Go get ’em, Marian! Woo hoo!”  Several of the passing riders laughed and waved back.

“For heaven’s sake, Cathy! They’re only exercising before the show starts. There’s no need to make a spectacle of yourself like that. Now calm down and stop embarrassing me!”

Nick raised his eyebrows. This guy was a real charmer.

(SKIP)

Nick watched the man step back and throw his hands in the air. “That’s it! I’ve had enough!” He glared at the woman. “They warned me you were called ‘Chatty Cathy’, but they didn’t tell me you enjoyed making a fool of yourself – and me – in public! I don’t have to put up with this!”  He stomped off, muttering.

Nick looked back at the woman beside him. Please don’t cry, please don’t cry, he thought desperately. Instead, she peered after the angry man from around Nick’s sheltering bulk. When the man vanished in the moving crowd, she blew out her breath and wiped nonexistent sweat from her forehead.

“I thought I would NEVER get rid of him! Honestly, what were my friends thinking, trying to fix me up with that drip?”  She shook her head, exasperated. “Do you have friends like that? The ones with their pictures as the illustration for the saying about ‘the road to hell’ business?”

Nick was startled into a laugh. He felt a warm sense of relief that such a cheerful person was not connected in any way with such an unpleasant man. He wished he could tell her that, but he settled for nodding, and managing to utter “Rude!” He tilted his head in the direction of the stranger, hoping she would understand he meant him.

She nodded. “He was like that from the moment he met me here this morning. Thank goodness I drove myself. I’ve learned my lesson about that! The first thing he said to me after ‘hello’ was ‘Don’t you watch the weather? You’re dressed all wrong!’  Can you imagine? Would you say that to a stranger?”

Nick shook his head quickly. Searching for a response, he decided on “Raised better.”

“Yes! Exactly! Why, my momma would bust my butt if I ever talked like that!”

Nick grinned again. What a firecracker! He hadn’t been this amused in years. Feeling the wind shove against his back, he braced his hands on the fence. Glancing at her, he saw her shiver and rub her arms. She caught his raised eyebrows.

“Chip the Drip was right, though,” she admitted ruefully. “I did forget to watch the weather, so I didn’t bring my coat.”  She leaned back and looked him up and down. “That wind is coming from behind you. Would you be terribly offended if I used you as a windbreak? I want to watch the show, but I’m really getting cold!”

Nick stepped back and waved a hand at the spot in front of him. He was cautiously cheered that she hadn’t seemed to find his silence awkward and took off herself. Instead she tucked herself between him and the fence and hugged herself.  “Oh, that’s much better!” she exclaimed. She looked over her shoulder with a sudden grin and offered a hand.  “Since I’m using you, I should introduce myself, I guess. Cathy Thompson.”

He took her hand and shook it gently. “Nick. Williams.”  There. He’d managed to introduce himself without problems, at least. He hoped she wouldn’t suddenly start trying to get to know him, and discover his conversational skills were hopeless, like all the other women he’d met. But she didn’t. She turned back around and chattered on about the horse show just beginning, her niece, and anything else that seemed to dart across her mind.

He noticed she still shivered as the wind gusted, though. He considered offering her his coat, but she was so much smaller than him the coat might be too heavy for her. Finally deciding on action, he unbuttoned it and held the sides out around her. He only meant to provide a windbreak on her sides, but she surprised him again.

“You don’t mind sharing? This is wonderful! Oh, wow, it’s lined with sheepskin and already so warm!”  She wrapped the lapels of the coat around her and leaned back against him. “This is great! You’re like an electric blanket!”

Nick blinked. She sure was a trusting little lady. He could be a pervert for all she knew. But mentally shrugging, he decided to make both more comfortable. Taking the lapels from her hands he rebuttoned his coat until only her face peeked out. Instead of tensing and acting trapped, she giggled like a little girl. He could feel her tucking her hands up in her armpits and risked a word again.

Excerpt from WIP Project Burning Bush

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For #LineByLineTime : Tropes (The Wise Old Man)

Nita chuckled. “He said his name was Dark Moon Rising, but I call him Moonie.”

“That is very rude!” Minji snapped.

“He doesn’t seem to mind.” Nita shrugged.

“Probably because he’s still scared of you,” Harper suggested, shaking his finger at her with a teasing grin. “Shame on you. Show some respect for your elders.”

Nita blew a raspberry at him. “Why start now?”

Minji threw her hands up in the air. “Perhaps because we may need their help getting back home?”

“Hey, they’re not Munchkins, okay? I haven’t seen any yellow brick road around here yet, and I doubt if Glinda the Good Witch is going to show up looking for snazzy red shoes.”

(Skip)

Moonie interrupted Luthor’s retort as he stumped up to Minji and patted her shoulder with his four-fingered hand. “Be at peace, young one,” he whispered. “I have also known the betrayal of family and watched my family members die because of my decisions and words.”

Minji sniffed and looked around at him. “Did you choose the losing side and someone in your family did not?”

“What, you haven’t figured out who he is?” Harper sounded a little surprised.

Nita stared at him. “What are you talking about, Chico? He’s a toothless bald old man with some missing parts and lots of scars. What’s to figure out? What, is he somebody famous or something? And how did you find out?”

Harper shook his head. “I just observed, made a few guesses, and then asked. Famous? More infamous, I guess, to the folks around here. Tell them your story, Moonie. It will help them understand what we’re up against.”

Moonie shivered. Minji sniffed again, grabbed one of the shemaughs out of her pack, and draped it around him. He offered her a weak smile and eased himself down beside Tweety.

“So many mistakes,” he muttered. “So much pain and death. My fault, all my fault.”

“Stop that,” Harper ordered. “This is all on him, not you. You didn’t put a gun – or a knife – to his throat to force him to make the choices he did.”

“Harper is correct,” the Voice said. “To claim all fault is arrogance and pride.”

Moonie blinked and sat a little straighter. “I cannot argue with the Great Spirit. This is my tale, then.”

Excerpt from Project Burning Bush

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For #LineByLineTime “Flattery”: A scene based on another movie or book

“Obviously, he was also experiencing an adrenaline rush,” Minji said, flicking her hand. “It can give unnatural strength for a short time. Personally, I wished to hit you over the head with a rock. You were very foolish to challenge an unknown entity after it demonstrated what it was capable of.”

            “Yeah, okay, okay. It was dumb.” Nita gave her hair a couple of frustrated tugs, then started pacing back and forth. “Now you know what I look like when I’m freaked out. I tend to react before I start thinking.” She spun to face the other teens. “You think that really could be an alien or something?”

             “I read a lot of science fiction, but I don’t know.”   Harper shrugged and rubbed his chin.  “Why would an alien care about a bunch of primitive natives? Maybe we’re all asleep and hooked up to some weird experiment like a virtual reality game and that was this game’s version of a dungeon master or something.”

            “Hey, maybe it really was God,” he said and chuckled. “You know what some games call their version of a dungeon master, to avoid trademark infringement on the Dungeons and Dragons game that came up with the term?” He grinned at the two girls’ frowning faces. “Game Operations Director. GOD, get it?”

            “I will be very angry if we are asleep and forced to play a stupid game. Why would we be made to do that?”

            “If that’s what’s going on, whoever the jokers are that did it better keep me asleep. They won’t like what I’ll do once I’m awake.” Nita rubbed her eyes. “We gotta get some shut-eye. Get Superman up before he goes all the way out so he can get to his bed. Why couldn’t we end up somewhere with a hot shower and comfortable beds?” She muttered under her breath as she trudged toward the separate shelter they had decided to make for themselves.

Excerpt from “Angels With Attitude”

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For #LineByLineTime : Lines to be proud of.

The angel smiled wryly. “All mortals want to live forever. But what do they spend their lives doing? Worrying about the future, regretting the past, wasting the present. They find so many other things to concentrate on instead of the important ones.”

David couldn’t resist. “Important ones? Like what? What does an angel – a grim reaper, even – know about what’s important to a human?”

“Hah! If you had my job, kid, you’d know. Life looks a whole lot different on this side. All the people I’ve escorted, listening to all their regrets, and complaints, and begging to be allowed to come back to do all the things they put off all their lives, yeesh! Makes me want to molt my wing feathers.”

“We don’t just escort people to the Pearly Gates and drop them off, you know. We have to take them to the Seat of Judgement, and listen to the Creator pointing out everything they neglected during their time on earth. Always makes me glad I’m not mortal.”

He eyed David. “The number one regret and omission? Love. So many people worry about making a living, feeling like they’ve accomplished something, sometimes just surviving. But those things don’t matter. Careers will end. Finances, education, earthly pleasures, they all end. It’s not bad to want to do well, but spending all your time on them is wasting it. Five minutes, fifty years, a hundred even; the length of life doesn’t matter.”

“I can’t tell you how long you have, David. Only the Creator knows, and He doesn’t tell anybody else. All I can tell you is make the most of what you have – every minute, every hour, and every day. Living a century won’t make a difference is you regret wasting it at the end.”

Excerpt from Project Burning Bush

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For #LineByLineTime: Mean lines

Harper snorted. “The only thing my parents ever did to help me was paying Luthor to be my bodyguard. Not having to watch for bullies gave me more time to do computer stuff.”

Luthor jerked upright from where he had leaned against the window. “You knew? How?  They told me not talking about it was a condition of the job.”

His small seatmate shrugged. “Like I said, I think half the time they forget I’m there. They talked about it over the dinner table the night they hired you. I didn’t know you then, but I kept my eyes open for a really big kid named Luthor, and you showed up the next day at school wanting to be my friend. I’ve been enjoying the lack of hassling ever since.”

Nita leaned over toward Luthor, her eyebrows raised. “So, the friend bit was an act all this time? You don’t really like Chico, here?” She wiggled her shoulders as if eagerly anticipating a fireworks display.

Luthor just curled his lip at her. “Didn’t Mrs. Williams say no trying to start something? As it happens I do like Harper. You, I can live without ever seeing again.”

“Oooh! I just want to die! He doesn’t like me!” Nita flung herself back in her seat with a dramatic fake sob and put her forearm across her face. 

The seat hissed with the sudden pressure, or perhaps it was Minji expressing her disgust. “Must you be so dramatic? Why do you not take drama class if you insist on overacting?”

Nita dropped her arm to her lap while she rolled her eyes. “If I want to be a drama queen, what’s it to you? I think it makes life more interesting!  Otherwise, I’d be screaming with boredom right now.”

Excerpt from WIP Project Burning Bush

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For #LineByLineTime : Difficult Scenes

“They get to make choices, but we don’t?” Nita snarled. “We just get to be pawns in whatever weird little game you’re playing, huh?”

“This is no little game.”

The hair on the teens’ arms stood up and they stiffened as they felt power flow around them again.

“This is no game at all. This world balances on a tipping point. Rising Sun and Adoracion are battling to push it into chaos and darkness, where evil is a way of life and the innocent suffer endlessly. You are hardly pawns. Only you four have the talents, skills, and most importantly, the determination to win so that peace and order can prevail. The future of this world lies in your hands. The choices you have made before now brought you here. The choices you have made since are proof you are the best chance this world has to survive.”

There was silence as the teens digested this. Their faces showed their doubts, disbelief, and in Nita’s, anger still.