Free Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) by D.W. Moneypenny

girl’s open mouth, teasing her. “Whattaya say?”
    “I promise not to bite?” she said.
    “No.”
    “Please?”
    “There you go.” He dropped a shiny green pellet into her mouth.
    She chewed and then pondered for a second. “That was a green jelly bean.”
    He tickled her and said, “You’re a green jelly bean.”
    “I’m sweet like a green jelly bean.” She laughed.
    Sam stood up. “Come on, bean. We can get one more, before I leave for school.”
    They ran into the kitchen, where Mara could hear them rummaging in the closet for something. She gave her mother a questioning look.
    “Halloween candy. He’s in charge of making sure she doesn’t gorge herself and start bouncing off the walls,” Diana said.
    “Who’s going to stop him from eating it all himself?”
    Diana laughed. “Sam’s going to be a great dad—you can just see it in the way he interacts with her. He’s a natural.”
    “Sure seems like it.” Mara nodded.
    Her mother glanced back toward the kitchen. “I am a little concerned though. Obviously he’s not ready for this, and, while she seems well-adjusted, she needs to be with her family, her actual family, not a bunch of relatives from the past.”
    “What’s your point, Mom?”
    “Well, how long is she going to be here? Should we be thinking of a way to send her back? Is that even possible?”
    Mara leaned toward her mother and lowered her voice. “I don’t know. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense to me. It just doesn’t seem like something I would do, sending a child back in time just to save my own skin and to deliver a book with a few cryptic words in it. There has to be something else going on, some other reason for all this.”
    Sam and Hannah returned from the kitchen. While she sat in the armchair, he walked over to the end table next to the couch and picked up the television remote to activate the sound. “You guys are missing the weather,” he said, pointing toward the screen.
    The weather girl stood next to a map of Oregon dotted with little rain clouds. “So expect heavy winds and rain through this evening, clearing overnight, before the next front comes in tomorrow afternoon. Now back to you, Jim. I hear you’ve got a report of a UFO over at Mount Hood.” She mugged and wiggled her eyebrows for the camera, and walked to the end of the anchor desk.
    As she came into the frame, the anchorman grinned and pointed at the camera, a slight joust with his finger. “Not only do we have a report, we have some video as well. Take a look at this!”
    A gray grainy image of Mount Hood, its summit hidden in low-hanging clouds, popped up on the screen. At first Mara thought the picture was a still, but then the clouds near the mountain on the left side appeared to ripple, as if stirred from above.
    “Watch closely at the left of your screen,” Jim, the anchor, said. “Here it comes.”
    Something large and rounded pushed from the clouds, and the video rapidly zoomed in on the object, turning it into a blur, as the camera struggled to focus. Once the camera adjusted, pixels solidified into what appeared to be two taloned feet and a tail, hanging below the cloud line. The feet kicked in the air, and a wing flapped down from the roiling clouds. It soared upward and disappeared.
    “See it? See it, Janey?” he said.
    The weather girl rolled her eyes. “Oh, I thought you meant like a flying saucer. That looked like it could have been a flock of birds or something. UFO! You almost had me there, Jim.”
    They had a good chuckle and went to commercial.
    Diana turned to Mara. “Tell me that was a flock of birds.”
    With as straight a face as she could muster, she said, “That was a flock of birds.”
    But she didn’t believe it.

CHAPTER 12
     
     
    Ping’s contractors had replaced the front window of Mason Fix-It in less than two hours after Mara had gotten to work. By the time they were finished, she had dusted off and assessed the damage done to several of the