Dragon's Dialogue by Anthony Jerome Brown

In Dragon's Dialogue, a Fantasy novella, a most unlikely heroine, Elatria Golden, a young girl and vegetarian in New York City, seems destined to meet Zardor, a benign philosophical dragon--or is he really a product of her father's imagination? Elatria encounters animals with unusual capabilities, a boa constrictor and a bird, and becomes acquainted with a handsome mutant--or is he really an elf? And Elatria is bound to another world, Ibinissia, where she confronts a powerful malevolent force rooted in the intersection of two planes of existence, and shockingly discovers what it means to become more than human.