Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,34

right. All her friend wanted to do was drive and walk and surf and drive and walk and snorkel and surf. There were even a plethora of second-hand surf and water sports gear shops all around that the girls could utilize to restock or replace broken or used items.

Given the amount of solar romance Piper had been partaking in, Annaleia wasn’t sure good genetics and SPF 30 were going to cut it in protecting her from permanent skin damage and possible melanoma. She was just lucky her traveling companion happened to know a few good warding spells that protected their wearer from harm – even from the burning rays of the sun.

The sun was strong here. It wasn’t to be taken lightly. She wished she’d started the wards a day sooner; that would have kept her scars from being so visible. Though admittedly, she had placed the wards over them not as sunblock, but to protect them from wipeouts. Not that she would admit as much to Piper. Or anyone for that matter. A surfer concerned about wipeouts? It might make her fodder of a different kind.

Anna took a full deep breath, sucking in the clean air coming off the ocean as they rounded a bend. She let it out in a happy sigh. Sunlight glinted like a line of diamonds across the top of the water, contrasting yellow to the clean, deep blue. Pristine gold beaches, secluded and small peeked out every now and then below the cliffs. There were no suicides here… on these beaches. Not deliberate ones, anyway.

She couldn’t wait to hit the water. These days she spent more time neck-deep in other people’s problems than in the sea, and in Philadelphia she didn’t live anywhere near the coast. It had been ages since she’d had a chance to break out her board.

These two precious weeks had been a long time coming for her. It almost felt surreal that it was actually happening. She was there, it was real, she wasn’t going to just wake up and find it was a dream.

She’d held her position at the advertising agency for what she considered a long run. She didn’t age, so staying anywhere much longer than five to ten years was dangerous, and she was fast approaching the decade mark. But she really liked the job. She was good at it.

This was her first vacation with the company. And though she’d tried hard to be centrally essential to the company, she knew deep down she’d have to quit soon. That sucked.

It wasn’t her only job, and because her second job happened remotely, it didn’t inadvertently require her to grow old like all the other humans working there. Afternoons, some nights, and almost every weekend, Anna worked the emergency suicide hotline. It was only a “job” in the sense that it required she work hard. There was no pay of course; she was a volunteer. But it was important to her, and far more important to those who called in. They were sufferers of an invisible pain, and that compounded anguish was something of which Anna knew first hand.

She could provide for the callers what far too many others could not: empathy.

And then there was Anna’s third occupation, the one that stayed off the books in every possible way. “In the shadows” so to speak, or at least away from mortal prying eyes, she was a warden. Rather, she was considered an honorary member of a warden clan. The clan was Draco and its wardens protected much of the upper mid-west United States and sometimes lower middle Canada, when our friendly neighbors called out for supernatural help.

In essence, wardens were the protectors of the supernatural world, and every continent had them. They guarded the unknowing mortal from the hunger, fury, lust, greed, and all-out madness of things that mortals chose not to believe in. Were it not for wardens, survival of the fittest would have become survival of the inhuman long ago. And humans would most likely now be extinct or living in “human farms” or working as slaves in some of the more dangerous and unsavory of the supernatural realms.

Not that these kinds of things didn’t sometimes happen anyway. Nothing was perfect and the clans couldn’t ensure that no evil deed ever took place. But because of wardens, they took place far less often.

Annaleia had become a token member of Draco when she’d been in the right time and place to resurrect one of their wardens. She hadn’t