Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,153
the best first impressions.”
Katrielle regarded her warmly; she was frankly filled with both awe and deep compassion for the woman. After all she’d been through, it was a wonder she was functioning at all, much less at the capacity she exhibited. Many in her situation would have considered ending it. A long time ago. But Victoria was every bit deserving of her name. Some of that had to do with the Sirius warden leader who had helped her fifty years ago. But most of it was simply a very rare inherent strength.
“I never judge a woman based on a first impression,” Kat said softly.
Victoria looked up, her intelligent eyes filled with sharp interest.
Kat shrugged. “A man, yes. Men are simple, straightforward. There are exceptions. But for the most part, what you see is what you get.” Kat blew out the match she’d been using to light the candles on the table where the complicated spell had been prepared. “However with women…” She sighed and smiled.
She sat down on the stool beside the table and crossed her legs. Then she laced her fingers together and placed them on her knee, regarding Victoria. “There are eight billion people on the planet that mortals call home, and roughly half of them are women. Yet to be a woman is a lonely venture. One might say the loneliest.”
She looked at her very special guest and knew that Victoria understood this to a painful degree. Half a century ago, on a night that had become infamous in supernatural circles, the woman had lost everything in the world that mattered to her. She had been well and truly alone ever since.
Her story had been told time and again by generations of wardens, words of warning passed down from leaders to trainees so that history would not repeat itself. However, the story was told wrong, and this too was the Sirius leader’s doing. It had been necessary to fudge the truth. It had not been an ordinary Apex the wardens faced that disastrous night. It had been a different predator, one more bent on its prey than almost any other. It was a goldblood Apex, and not only a goldblood Apex, but half Aurum and half Dire werewolf.
No one would have accepted that a single woman could have defeated such a beast when twenty wardens had failed and paid with their lives. Yet, this was what the new Sirius clan leader had done. Hence, to forestall any suspicious questions, the story had to be changed. The Dire Aurum Apex, otherwise known as a Dire Aurum, became a simple Apex.
Still on the subject of women and first impressions, Kat said, “Out of sheer necessity, a woman takes on the personas expected of her by those around her – over and over again,” Kat continued, weaving magic into her words in the same way that she infused the items on the table as she worked with them. “As time passes, she drapes these personas carefully over herself until she becomes a many-layered thing, complex and by default, hidden. What you take from a first impression of her is the outer layer of a swathed and shrouded cocoon. And as anyone knows,” she said with a sharp glance at her beautiful companion, “the cocoon is not the butterfly.”
Victoria smiled, but Kat saw the weariness in it.
“You have to get to know a woman very well before you make it past those layers to the person underneath. And that’s the beauty of it really. Because by then no matter what you find, it makes little difference. You’ve already come to appreciate her. There’s a reason they say, ‘to know her is to love her.’”
Kat recognized that Victoria’s smile was no longer sad, per se. It was simply far too wise. She could sense that the woman’s more profound mourning had faded years ago, to be replaced with the dogged struggle of survival. It was a type of “going through the motions” that was much more intensive for her exceptionally rare breed than for others suffering the trauma of loss. Kat couldn’t help but wonder if in that single thing, she’d been blessed. Having to run and hide had given Victoria something else to focus on, something she had no choice but to focus on, if she wanted to survive.
“I’m told you were the one who found the young woman’s body in Philadelphia and notified the police of her whereabouts.”