The Dragons of the Cuyahoga

Book excerpt: It all started about a decade ago, when the Portal suddenly opened up over the stadium right in the middle of a game. Cleveland just hadn’t been the same since, what with electronic devices pretty much useless—unless you were willing to spend a fortune in digital protection and redundancy equipment—and all the dragons, elves, gnomes, dwarves, gargoyles, etc. who’d come through the Portal to take up residence within the areas covered by the Portal’s magical field. For Kline Maxwell, City Hall reporter for the Cleveland Press, magic-based Cleveland had long since become the status quo. At least until a fellow reporter named Morgan came down with a case of eyeballs growing all over his body. The diagnosis: stay out of Portal territory and he’d be just fine. But that meant Maxwell and all the other reporters were going to have to take up the slack. And Maxwell hated the thought of doing “fuzzy gnome” stories. Still, he took his job seriously, and when he was assigned to cover a dragon’s death by crash-landing into the Cuyahog, he headed over to the accident site with only a modest number of curses. But what should have been a simple accident report soon led Maxwell in search of a much bigger story—one that would see him kidnapped by elves, framed for murder, holding secret meetings with dragons, and fleeing not only from the cops but from pretty much everyone…