Tiger - Jeff Stone [55]
Hidden inside the heavy terracotta barrel at the back of the practice hall, eleven-year-old Malao flinched with every BOOM, every CRACK! Thunder inside their compound could only come from one source. A dragon. A very angry dragon.
Malao shivered. According to legend, dragons controlled the wind and the rain, the lightning and the thunder. Stay in a dragons good graces, and your crops would receive enough rain for a bountiful harvest; anger a dragon, and your crops would be washed away—along with you, your house, and your entire family. Push a dragon too far, and it would deliver a special kind of storm, smashing everything it could with its powerful tail, igniting everything that remained with its fiery breath.
A dragon must be the reason Grandmaster had made Malao and his four “temple” brothers—Fu, Seh, Hok, and Long—squeeze into the barrel. Grandmaster had told them they were under attack by soldiers, but Malao knew men alone could never defeat the warrior monks of Cangzhen Temple. The attackers must have formed an alliance with a dragon. What could those thunderclaps be but the crack of a dragon snapping its enormous tail?
A dragon lashing its tail reminded Malao of his older brother Ying and his chain whip. Ying had left Cangzhen in a rage the year before, upset because he had been trained his entire life as an eagle but had always wanted to be an all-powerful dragon. Swinging his chain whip was the closest Ying had ever come to having a dragon tail of his own.
Malao shivered again. Ying had vowed to return to Cangzhen to punish Grandmaster for training him as an eagle, but Ying was no fool. He would never attack Cangzhen and its one hundred warrior monks unless he was guaranteed victory. And for that to happen, he would have to have had acquired power beyond that of mortal men—
“Oh, no!” Malao thought. “Maybe Ying has figured out a way to transform himself into a real dragon! Maybe he has grown scales and a tail and—”
KA-BOOM!
Jeff Stone lives in the Midwest with his wife and two children and practices the martial arts daily. He has worked as a photographer, an editor, a maintenance man, a technical writer, a ballroom dance instructor, a concert promoter, and a marketing director for companies that design schools, libraries, and skateboard parks. Like the Five Ancestors, Mr. Stone was adopted as an infant. He began searching for his birth mother when he was eighteen and found her fifteen years later. Tiger is his first novel.
Text copyright © 2005 by Jeffrey S. Stone
Cover illustration copyright © 2005 by Richard Cowdrey
All rights reserved.
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eISBN: 978-0-375-89179-3
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Dedication
The Legend …
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgment
Prologue
About the Author
Copyright