Blurb:The unlikely duo who might just save the worldBen must be the hungriest cat ever…One moment, he was enjoying a breakfast of salmon trimmings in his home in South Wales. The next, he was teleported across time and space onto the cold stone floor of an evil warlock.Locked in the warlock’s tower through day and night, Ben may have to serve him for a while. He'll hate this, especially having to hunt those infernal demon rats when the warlock doesn’t feed him well at all.Meanwhile, in a distant academy, a dragon is bored out of her mind. Unable to wear a saddle, no human dares mount her. Is there anyone in this land who can ride her into battle against the forces of the evil warlocks? Somehow, she doubts she’ll ever find a suitable bond.Unless there is another creature with enough dexterity to fulfil that role. One, perhaps, who is currently sprinting right out of a warlock’s front door…
Excerpt
I’d seen crocodiles
on television, with their macabre grins and ability to lurch out at people from
the water. This beast was like a crocodile, except worse. She had sharp teeth
along the side of her mouth, eyes that glowed bright yellow like miniature
suns, huge front-loaded nostrils that didn’t just steam but smoked, a breath
that stank like rotting meat, and this strange fire burning at the back of her
throat whenever she opened her mouth.
Not to mention her sheer enormity. My first
thought upon seeing her was that she must have had enough of the deer and now
wanted to eat me for dinner. What I didn’t consider at the time was that she
would probably hate eating me for the same reason I hated eating mice.
I backed up all the way to the drop and
looked down at the landscape below. I was far too high up to jump down without
injuring myself – even with my ability to land on all fours.
“Oh,
come on, I can’t surely be that scary,” the creature said, again inside my
mind. “I’m only a Ruby, after all.”
But what was I meant to say back? I mean,
normally I shouldn’t understand another species’ language. Yet, here I was
hearing her in my head as if she was now part of my train of thought. I hissed
back at her, looking for a way to dart back out the door. But she had blocked
off any chance of escape.
“You
know, cats aren’t usually allowed outside their cattery,” she said, and she raised one of her
massive brows. She was hairless and had these harsh red scales that seemed to
converge towards her eyes. “Sometimes,
the humans let them out in the kitchens. But no one in their right mind would
enter a dragon’s chambers. So how, might I ask, did you end up here? Or is this
your first time visiting Dragonsbond academy? Perhaps you’re a stray from
outside.”
I arched my back even higher than I thought
possible, and hissed again at the creature, baring my teeth. In hindsight, I
don’t know how I was expecting to scare her. But then the fact I hadn’t eaten
for days meant I was a little grumpy and wasn’t thinking straight.
“I’ve
never known your kind to be so unfriendly. Don’t you speak at all? I’ve given
you the honour of having access to my mind, and I thought you’d at least say
something.”
Well, I’d never spoken to any creature that
wasn’t a cat before. But surely it was just the case of putting one word after
the other in my mind. I tried it.
“What
are you?” I asked. Really, given
the circumstances, she couldn’t expect me to be a creature of many words.
The massive lizard tossed her head forward
and let out a massive roar that almost sent me stumbling off the wall. “What am I? How dare you suggest you’ve never
heard of a dragon.”
“A
what?” Come to think of it, I
think they had called the Maine Coon ‘Dragon’ on television, funny as humans
were with names.
“A
dragon … you know, fearsome creatures who knights used to hunt down with lances
and swords. Or at least they did until the warlocks rose to power and became
both ours and the humans’ arch enemies.”
I opened my eyes wide at the creature. For
a moment, I didn’t feel threatened but rather utterly confused.
“Are
you really telling me you’ve never heard of a dragon? You don’t have nightmares
of us in the night? You don’t tremble when you see us, the fiercest of all the
creatures known to man?”
“I … Are
you like a hippopotamus?” Word
had it from the two Savannah cats in my old neighbourhood, that these were the
fiercest of all the creatures. The two cats had never seen a hippopotamus, of
course. Such creatures didn’t roam the wilds of South Wales. But their
ancestors had passed down the wisdom to fear the hippopotamus, monsters of the
mud with razor sharp buck teeth.
The dragon creature bellowed out again, and
this time a little heat came out with the roar, making me think it might
finally cook me as it had probably done the venison. “How dare you compare me to a hippo – a hippa – sorry, what was that
word, again?”
“A
hippopotamus,” I replied.
“How
dare you compare me to a hippopotamus.”
“Do
you even know what a hippopotamus is?”
She raised one of her massive eyebrows, and
steam puffed out of her nose. “No…
Enlighten me.”
- A Cat’s Guide to Meddling with Magic (Dragoncat #2)
- A Cat’s Guide to Saving the Kingdom (Dragoncat #3)
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