Dragons & Dwarves Read Online Free PDF Page A

whine and the subliminal muttering. This time, a voice made itself heard over the babble.
    “Is this a dagger I see before me?” The voice’s tone and pitch warbled like an old cassette tape that kept sticking.
    “What?” I whispered at it.
    “The handle toward my hand?” The keening background noise increased, and the voice itself stretched toward breaking. “Come, let me clutch thee—”
    The voice, and the other noises abruptly cut off. A few seconds of clicking, then a dial tone. The caller ID on my phone was no help, the anonymous thespian had his number blocked.
    Great, someone with an unlisted number is phoning in Shakespearean quotes to me.
    This time I turned the phone off.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    T HE dragon Aloeus, first of his kind to reside here, has also been the first of his kind to die here. Shortly before four this morning, Aloeus plunged to his death on the shore of the Cuyahoga River. This afternoon his body was towed out to the open water and burned.”
     
    “The Cuyahoga County coroner issued a statement ruling Aloeus’ death accidental, ‘death by misadventure.’ A victim of the ‘Icarus Effect.’ Dr. Newman Shafran of Case Western Reserve University, the person who first described it, explains the effect as follows . . .”
    I liked this better.
    With a first draft safely wired to the Press server, I was the last to leave the Justice Center. Most of my colleagues were off, some on what would be fruitless attempts to get comments from other dragons, others to comb the West Side of Cleveland in search of a witness or a dozen, others to pull the chains of whatever personal contacts they had in the city government.
    I didn’t mind being the last out. I had been doing this for way too long to engage in a panicked rush to be the “first” to get something. Instead, I had written out a first draft of the feature once I’d gotten enough material to write one. Without the deadline pressure looming as large, I was free to ponder how I was going to attack this story.
    I left the Justice Center by the Lakeside exit. Across the street, beyond the park flanking City Hall and past the twenty-foot wall surrounding the old Browns Stadium, I could see the lake. In the distance, I could make out a pillar of oily black smoke on the horizon.
    We sent a dragon to Valhalla today . . .
    I watched the smoke for a moment. I knew I wanted to write about Aloeus. Not just the carnage in the Flats. Everyone would rehash that. I wanted to get a sense of who it was that died this morning.
    I caught a whiff of ozone and heard thunder rumbling from the permanent cloud formations above the stadium. I looked up at the swirling vortex, and saw a pillar of black clouds stacked above the site of the Portal. I could see lightning flashes break across the slowly rotating mass. Except for the smoke on the horizon, the sky was otherwise a cloudless blue.
    The strange weather here was not actually due to some magical aura cast by the Portal. It was plain old meteorology. The Portal didn’t just let in dragons and elves and magic and such, it also let in—and out—very large volumes of air. The difference in air pressure, temperature, and humidity between the two sides of the Portal had created a standing weather front on both sides. There was always some sort of atmospheric effect marking the site of the Portal.
    A few drops of moisture hit my face as the clouds above the stadium began a downpour. I was far enough away to avoid getting drenched, but it was disconcerting to watch the gray sheet of rain sluice off the stadium not half a mile from me.
    Rainbows unfolded over the lake as the sun shone through the localized storm.
    I looked at the stadium, really looked at it for the first time in a while. Where Aloeus had come from, the Portal, and the world beyond it.
    I had been one of a select group who were able to see the Portal without either paying to reach it or being paid to guard it. A friend at WKYC—yes, I was a local