Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,32
they would meet up with Anna’s other best friend, Carmen.
They would leave the land of Oz on the fourteen hour flight back to the states in a few days to spend the remainder of their two weeks with Carmen. Then the trio would hit the rather infamous Sixth Street, Austin for everything it was worth. That was the plan.
Bourbon Street, New Orleans had been the original suggestion by both of Anna’s friends. But… Anna happened to know a thing or two about the literally wolfish police force around those parts, and the truth was Anna wanted an honest to goodness vacation, and not a vacation filled with great big beautiful men with great big, sharp teeth. Especially werewolves who might sniff out Anna’s secret and make trouble for her.
She had enough trouble to deal with. Like these damn scars.
Anna was having second thoughts about heading back outside. She shouldn’t have taken the time to dry off and warm up in the sun the day before…. Her violet-colored eyes trailed over pale lines in her skin that were far more visible now on day four than they’d been when she’d first arrived in Torquay, white as paper. Her skin had tanned, but her scars of course hadn’t. And no amount of magic in the world could hide them. She knew; she’d tracked down a few mages after her initial transformation, and it didn’t matter what they cast on her. If she continued to use her gift, the scars continued to appear.
At first glance, there were too many of them to count, but she didn’t need to. She had a running tally in her head, and when another appeared, she just added it. Right now there were ninety-two scars in all, most of them small and thin but some not as much. This was the number of places on Annaleia’s skin that had paid the price for the use of her gift. It was the number of people she’d brought back from the dead with the power of resurrection that she’d acquired when she died… fifty years ago.
Her friend Piper padded up to her side and put a toned, golden-brown arm around her shoulders. Light brown eyes met Violet’s in the mirror. “Hey,” she said, “you always chicken out when you get the tan. You know that, right? It’s a cycle with you.”
“It’s been too long since I’ve had a tan for this to be a cycle.”
“One year or ten, doesn’t matter. You do it every time.”
Anna sighed. “For good reason, I think.”
“For a non-existent reason, though I sympathize. But you honestly have no idea how beautiful most guys and even some girls find you. The scars are not all you think they are. They’re not huge; for the most part they’re thin and straight. But when you see them, you remember things and you worry and you ponder and snowball – and that makes them seem worse to you.”
“You just told me that I look like a cutter to anyone who notices them.”
“Hey. First off, don’t judge. People who cut are at least attempting to deal with their issues however they can. And there are a hell of a lot more of them around than most people think there are. And second? Anyone who would judge you as harshly as you just did for those marks is better weeded out at the beginning anyway. You don’t have time or energy to deal with apathetic assholes. And you know it.”
Anna chewed on her lower lip and stayed quiet. There was a lot of truth packed into what Piper had just said. When she saw the scars, she always thought of her death and her resultant “gift.” She thought about people who treated her like someone psychologically unstable. She thought of people like the stalker she’d recently had to deal with; the man had literally been obsessed with Annaleia because of the scars.
“And third,” Piper added with a voice a touch more gentle. “Every single one of those scars is a fucking life saved. That’s… I don’t even have words to describe how amazing that is, how selfless. And awesome. You’re an angel on Earth, Anna. Only instead of wings, you got stripes.”
Anna laughed. That was actually pretty good; she liked it. Stripes. Like a fucking tiger.
“I had to tell Atlas that you were already taken yesterday,” Piper told her with a smirk. Atlas was a surfing buddy. “And then I kid you not, I had to tell his twin sister the same