Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,5

laughing as I write this. Thinking on it now, I realize such a thing is unheard-of, and if you know dragons then you probably don’t even believe me when I admit it. But it’s true. And I also realize now how even more special that made Annaleia. My precious, pure, and refreshingly new Raindrop.

We continued in this vein for a year and a half, she and I.

Then December of ’67 came, and Annaleia grew increasingly quiet. She was troubled, and she managed to hide it from everyone but me. I knew her too well to mistake the distance in her gaze for anything but worry and stress. Something was wrong. But when I questioned her, she insisted I was imagining things.

Right. Imagining things. That was her shtick, not mine. Dragons aren’t known for their imaginations, especially my kind. They’re known for burning villages and eating priests. I wasn’t imagining squat.

If I’d only been a vampire rather than a dragon, I could have read her thoughts. By the time Christmas rolled around, she was so distracted, I thought about using magic that was at the time considered forbidden. Warlock magic. I knew a few warlocks… they owed me favors. And that was the kind of magic it took to break into a person’s mind.

It was my fear of damaging our friendship that kept me from actually doing it.

Then late Christmas Eve, she came to me in a snowstorm. At first I was pissed as hell that she’d taken to the streets in that insane mess. There was actual lightning running through that blizzard. It was rare enough that I wondered if something supernatural was going on. There were a few rare breeds who could pull off weather like that.

But the moment she parked in my driveway and turned off her engine, I forgot about everything but her. I’d sensed her coming – maybe from miles away – and I was already standing on my front doorstep when she opened her car door and climbed out. Our eyes met.

My breath went completely still in my chest; my lungs were paralyzed. There was more storm going on inside that look of hers than there was in the tempest outside. It was a violet-colored supernova.

She broke into a run toward me, and I met her more than half-way. She put her hands on my chest and said, “I want you to be the one.”

I will never in my life – never – forget the way she said those words and what they meant. Fuck… fifty years later, I hear them every time it gets too quiet. Every time I’m too alone. One of the reasons I ride now is because a V-twin engine is loud enough to drown out the sound of that memory.

I didn’t ask her for clarification. No man would need it. I could see it in her eyes, I could hear it in the crazy beat of her heart, and I could scent it on the wind. For whatever reason, she wanted me. She even needed me.

Finally.

I wrapped my arms around her, crushed her to me, and my lips slammed down on hers with all the hunger I’d held in check for sixteen months. While my mind practically detonated, I bent and lifted her, cradling her against me to carry her into my home.

That night, I shut out the dragon in me entirely. It was the first time I’d ever done so in my life. A dragon can do this, if and when he wants. With a shit ton of effort, we can forsake ourselves, pushing our true natures so far back, those natures become temporarily inaccessible to us. We can do it for an hour or a decade, even a century. Like setting an alarm clock, we shove the beast away, and wait for the time to run out. Stories claim that some dragons have lost themselves permanently this way, that they wander the realms as humans or fae or shadows, in time completely forgetting that their forms are fake and borrowed and that their true nature is massive, scaled, and magnificent. We even have names for those lost souls.

But I wouldn’t be one. My “alarm” was set for only one night. I’m proud to be a dragon, but I refused to allow the monster in me to ruin this moment. I would not ask anything of Leia that she wasn’t willing or ready to give. She was too special and this night too precious, and the beast in me