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  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

  Powers

  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 a purr, surprising her again. Not even a cloud of oil smoke in the rear view mirrors. New engine, old habits. And the mirrors weren't cracked anymore, either. Kate shook her head.

  Alice Haskell. That girl knew what was good for you, and did it whether you wanted it done or not. "Hey, Charlie, could you hitch a ride out to Ayers Island and bring Kate's truck back on the ferry? Here's the keys. While you're at it, rebuild the bastard from winch to tow-hitch." Probably would have cost less to buy a new truck, but Kate had turned that down. Twice.

  So Alice went around to the back door, applying the magical touch of Haskell money. Stopping her was like trying to argue with a glacier.

  Kate called it "Haskell money" out of habit, less than a drop in the bucket of a considerable fortune. Alice seemed to think of it more like a trust fund for her tribe, and apparently Kate had become an honorary Naskeag Wabanaki when she moved in with Alice.

  Anyway, Alice had handed her back the keys when they both got out of the hospital, done deal. Take it or leave it, and a contractor needed a truck. One that could haul its rated load of a full to
n of lumber or Sheetrock for the first time in ten years was a real plus. It even started and stopped when she asked it.

  She eased the truck into gear, the clutch smooth and reliable and strange, and used the engine to brake her down the slope, four-wheel-drive and low range engaged. Only a fool explored roads like this faster than a walk. Washouts lurking under drifted leaves, high-centered rocks sitting in ambush, bog holes that looked like innocent puddles from a recent rain — the Maine woods had their ways of eating old roads and careless trucks. And she didn't feel up to limping the miles back to civilization for a tow.

  Down in the hollow, those cedars were old, old and tall and straight-grained and heavy with fragrance, and someone should have fed them to a shingle or clapboard mill a century ago. Headed up the far slope, the truck rumbled into a grove of thick-boled white pines that would have left a timber merchant drooling, three and four feet through and the trunks shooting up fifty feet clean to the first limbs.

  Hairs stood up on her forearms and the back of her neck. This road was a time-warp into another century. She pulled up to another crest, an opening with mossy old oaks to the south and blueberry barrens rising away to the north, and stopped. Blueberry land usually meant dry fields, sand and gravel and bare rock, should be a safe place to turn the truck. Her odometer and the phone message said there should be a driveway . . . .

  She sat and studied the sweep of low bushes red and purple with the touch of autumn, the stone outcrops scattered on the crest, the clear blue sky. Something still set her teeth on edge. There was a lot of commercial blueberry land tucked away in the wilds of Sunrise County, but those roads showed up on the map.

  Kate grimaced, shifted, winced again, shifted again — settling into a position that minimized the aches from her hip and shoulder. Wounds from her own gun, fired by her own daughter. Half of the ache was memory. She couldn't forget. Kate shook her head and fumbled for a cigarette.

  Jackie. She stood in the middle of the trail ahead, a faint and wavery ghost, tall and muscular with short blonde hair like her mother and grandmother, a teenage scowl glooming her face. Kate kept seeing her daughter around town, all the places she'd used to be, all the places Kate expected her to be. Memories of pain and failure, haunting Kate.

  The damnfool child had run away from home. Moved in with friends, Pratts, an old Stonefort family with mucho money from the import/export business. Drugs. Turned out Jackie had been involved in that for years. Not using, selling. Kate had been too busy keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads to see the signs.

  Alice had gone out to the old Pratt place on separate business of her own, and Kate ended up there because of a vision of fire and death right out of one of Alice's Wagnerian operas. End result, the brat shot Alice in the back, turned and shot her mother, then ran 'round a corner and got her own self killed in a shootout with a rival drug gang. Kate concentrated on lighting the cigarette, hands shaking the flame on her late ex-husband's battered Zippo.

  Let's hear it for the modern American family.

  The first cigarette in an hour or so, she drew deep and held the nicotine in her lungs like the kids held each toke of their demon Weed. She couldn't smoke in the House, Alice's house.

  Not that Alice told her she couldn't. She'd quit her nagging when Kate moved in, dropped her standard RN's coffin-nail rant about the threats of lung cancer and heart disease and yellow-stained teeth and smoker's breath in their kisses. Not that there'd been much of that, the condition both of them were in.

  And the House didn't seem to mind her smoking, either. Rather otherwise. That was the problem.

  The House, the Haskell House, ancient home of the Haskell Witches, much more aware than any pile of stone and wood ought to be and with some very strong opinions on the way the world should work, seemed to consider tobacco sacred. And anyone who crossed its worn oak threshold lived by the House's rules. It had unpleasant ways to enforce them.

  Sure, Kate could light up a cigarette any time she wanted. As long as she offered smoke to the four winds and to the spirits of earth and water and sky, that is, and muttered some phrases in Naskeag that she half understood. And then dealt with the spirits that the smoke and words woke out of their ancient sleep.

  Kate grimaced again, took a last long drag, and stubbed out the butt. Then she shut off the ignition, opening the truck door and climbing down, wincing as she stepped wrong and put all her weight on that hip.

  Kate felt that sense of watching again, something or someone this time, different, hostile. Before, it had just been . . . watching. Waiting. Neutral. But she couldn't see anything out of place, uphill or down, field or woods.

  She studied the woods. Glacial till, all right, boulders poking through the dead leaves to make humped lines and shadows and corners under the broad oaks.

  Right-angled corners. Kate blinked and shook her head until her brain reset. Glaciers didn't leave straight lines and right angles behind when they headed back to Canada for another load of rocks.

  She was staring at abandoned buildings, probably the reason for the old road. Abandoned buildings of thick stone masonry, worn down to waist-height or lower by centuries of Maine winters and by old-growth oaks splitting the walls. Small buildings, one- or two-room houses, maybe four rooms if they'd originally stood tall enough for an upper floor, and small sheds or barns likewise built of stone. Not like any Maine farm she'd ever seen.

  She stepped off the road and shuffled through dry leaves, nosy-poking, as much curious mason as cop. She knew Maine construction. The only thing like this she'd ever seen in these parts was Morgan's Castle back in Stonefort. And that heavy plain stone tower was older than any history book would admit. If you believed Alice, it dated back to Welsh refugees from Edward the First.

  The nearest wall felt cold and damp, mossy, flakes of lime plaster stucco and mortar crumbling at her touch and rattling down into the leaves. The stones slept. To Kate, they felt almost as if they had been left by the last ice age, no memory of the men that laid them. Alice said that stone and wood liked Kate, that they wanted to please her. More of her magical mystical bullshit. Kate just paid attention to grain and gravity. Knowing her materials didn't count as witchcraft.

  She moved along the wall to a corner, estimating distances with a practiced eye. Yes, two rooms, if it had been a house. Two small rooms. No sign of a chimney, so it might have been an outbuilding. Or maybe they just used a smoke hole in the roof.

  Her foot dropped out from under her and she jolted down to mid-calf depth, fire stabbing through hip and shoulder. Black dots swam through her sight. She leaned against the stone and panted, sweat cold on her forehead and tears stinging her eyes. Then she stood up, slowly, carefully, painfully. Fox or woodchuck hole, hidden by the fallen leaves. She rocked her weight from side to side, listening to her body and hating what she found.

  Step by limping step, she eased back out to the road, pausing halfway to lean on an oak. She didn't dare explore the rest of the ruins. Not by herself, not in her condition. If she fell into the old privy, odds were she wouldn't be able to climb out.

  She wasn't used to being careful, and it galled. She'd been hurt before, hurt bad and damn near killed, and it hadn't taken her this long to recover. She was getting old. Old like those stones, weathered, silver hairs scattered through the blonde.

  Then a picture flashed in her head, and she knew where she'd seen stonework and a farm like this before. In a book or magazine, Irish farmsteads abandoned since the Famine, a Scots crofter's cottage fallen to ruin, fishing villages on out-islands in the Hebrides, left open to the wind and winter when all the children moved to the mainland and the cities. Only difference was the trees. Those out-island photos showed bare heather and grass.

  Walking seemed to ease the pain in her hip, and she couldn't face cramming herself back into the truck. If she sat for an hour right now, most likely her body would seize up like a rusty winch. And something about the high field drew her, those stones on the crest of the bl
ueberry barren. The spacing looked regular, as if they related to the ancient farm.

  She climbed, slowly on the stiff incline and stiffer hip, and felt strength flow back into her from the land. She belonged to this place, belonged to all of Stonefort. Her body had grown from its land and sea. So her people had only lived here for a few hundred years, as opposed to maybe a thousand for the Morgans or ten thousand for Alice's Naskeag ancestors. That was still long enough that she could lay claim to the title "native" in Maine lingo. Long enough for the stone and dirt to know her blood.

  Something fluttered on the crest of the ridge, flashing white or silver in the breeze. Trash? Here? Then another thought shot across her mind, and she froze — nearly turned back to the truck to get her gun and badge. Dopers grew marijuana deep in the woods, scattered plants or whole fields of the demon Weed. That might explain occasional traffic on an abandoned road. And those fields usually had guards or booby traps protecting them . . .

  But they'd had frosts already, even a hard freeze. Bird season started next week, thousands of blaze orange snoops wandering through the Great North Woods looking to commune with nature through the barrels of their shotguns. Any dopers would have harvested their pot plantation long ago.

  Besides, she was more than halfway there. Her hip didn't want her to climb down and then back up again. And she couldn't see any tracks through the brown grass and mounded purple swathes of blueberry bushes. Not even a deer trail, or the swirled and matted beds they'd leave. Odd. She sniffed. That flinty tang was back, sharp through the mixed hay and earth and cinnamon of the barren.

  The stones sat there on the crest, rough glacial boulders, unshaped, showing about half her height above the ground, obviously moved and placed by men. And then forgotten — gray and yellow lichen blotched them and some bore a hairy thatch of grass and heather. As she climbed closer, they curved away from her and formed an arc, perhaps a circle.