Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,36

a supernatural clan of anything whatsoever. “Conall,” she began.

“Call me Con. Please.”

She nodded, returning the smile, but she was still nervous. “I can’t quit my jobs.” What he was asking for sounded like a full-time job in and of itself.

“And I would never ask you to. In fact, join us and I will only ask two things of you, Annaleia. One, if a member of my team is killed on a mission, please consider using your gift to make things right the way you did for Elijah. I understand it won’t always be possible, and I accept that. Our job is dangerous.” He’d taken her hands in his then and placed them together with his over them. “And two – agree to let us protect you. You are the only person I have met who has the power you possess. You’re also the first female Withered I’ve come across... assuming that is indeed what you are. You have a birthmark on your temple that tells me I’m right.”

Anna frowned slightly and touched the mark.

“It’s light, but it’s shaped like a moon, or as some would say, a ‘scythe,’” he told her. “Withered tend to have that mark, but so far they’ve all been male. The males also have fangs and you obviously don’t.” He paused, giving her a calculating look. “You’re special, Faith. Very, very special. And you have no idea how many monsters out there would give just about anything to get their hands on you. Sooner or later, your secret’s gonna get out. Like it did tonight. You’re just lucky it was the good guys who caught up to you and not the other way around.” He’d let her go gently and straightened, more business. “So. Do we have a deal?”

She’d thought about it for all of ten more seconds before she finally agreed. And just like that, she was a member of clan Draco. Fifteen of the scars decorating her skin were the cost she had since paid. More marks, more pain.

And… she had a sentinel.

Chapter Nine – Australia, coastal highway

“You can read her mind, can’t you?”

Victor Maze didn’t bother looking over at the human male beside him in the back seat of the car. He kept his gaze trained on his target, who rode in the passenger seat of a white Jeep Wrangler several vehicles ahead. But the human was right. Victor was listening in on her thoughts with impunity.

“I can.”

“What is she thinking about?”

“I believe you might not appreciate the turn her thoughts have taken, Mr. Price. Be grateful you are not privy to them.”

The human fell silent beside him, and Maze sent a stronger tendril of his power out along the highway to brush against the mind of the young Withered female. Of course, she didn’t feel she was young. But to him? Her existence had not yet carved out enough space on the cosmic calendar to be noticed beneath a microscope.

Victor breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of fresh fallen rain. She smells like a storm, he thought with a small smile. He did so love storms. He was Entropy after all, and storms were organized chaos in every respect of their nature.

He closed his eyes and settled into the theater of her thoughts.

“Is she thinking about another man?”

Victor felt a muscle in his jaw tick. Interesting, he thought. The physical form he’d had to take once he’d escaped Bantariax was so much weaker than the form he had been accustomed to before his lengthy incarceration. As an incorporeal form, he never would have been bothered by such things. Interruptions were just another form of chaos, after all.

But humans were weak.

Still, he was growing stronger. A shattered coffee mug here, a train wreck there, and little by little he was regaining some of the influence he’d at one time enjoyed. His constant feeding off Price’s slow burning fury and need was helping as well. Before long, he would be strong enough to enact the rest of his design.

He’d had a very long time to scheme, sketch, plot, organize, and devise. He highly doubted the so-called Kings and Queens of the Thirteen Realms, or their precious warden clans could fathom a defense worthy of opposing him in the time they now had allotted.

The once mighty Legendaries, the three great dragons who had at one time ruled over and guarded humanity, were not going to be an issue. One was dead, one had been made idle and dull with matrimonial bliss and the business of the