Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,77

counter and opened the door to step out into the hall. Once there, she stood still and listened.

You know dragons can hear you breathe, right? Her mind wasn’t going easy on her today. They can hear a person’s heartbeat a block away, Anna.

Shut up.

As far as she was concerned however, she couldn’t hear anything at all. No noise coming from the living room. No sounds coming from anywhere in the villa, in fact.

She chewed on her bottom lip and weighed her options. On impulse, she turned right and rather than return to the living room, she continued further down the hall.

The third opening to the right from the main room was another closed door. She tried the handle half-expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t. When she opened the door inward, motion-detecting lights switched on, revealing something that sent electric zaps of happiness throughout Anna’s body.

“Holy….” Her voice trailed off in absolute wonder before returning, cracked with barely-contained glee. “The boy has a candy store… in his closet….”

The room was probably about the size of her own current living room. That wasn’t to say it was enormous, but by no means was it small. And the only thing in it was layer upon layer of shelves. Four walls of them, all carved of wood, painted pristine white, and all of them virtually overflowing with candy.

It was the most beautiful thing Anna had ever seen in her entire life. From one side of the room to the other, Anna’s eyes roved over neatly organized rainbows of every kind of sweet treat ever created. Surely, it must have been. There were brands here that she knew had been out of production for decades, but they looked brand new. She noticed three of her favorite candies right off the bat. There were chocolates in every size, shape, and color of box or foil wrapping, bars of dark and light and white and nut-filled and toffee-filled and nut-butter-filled, chocolates in shapes of animals and fruits and chocolates filled with every kind of alcohol man had ever brewed or pulled from the vine. And that was only the chocolates.

Shelf after shelf of fruit flavored hard candies, chewies, tart candies, jawbreakers, gum-filled candies, lollipops, licorices, taffies, jelly beans, pastilles, and candies that started as one type of sweet and turned into another – all measured in the thousands.

There seemed to be a million different kinds of candy in that room.

It was a while before Annaleia realized that she’d not only entered the room fully but was slowly turning in place in an attempt to take it all in. How had he managed this? How did it all fit? It seemed impossible – but the room stretched to strange dimensions and rose so high she was sure she’d have to climb to reach most of the shelves. And yet everything seemed right there within reach, too. It was definitely magic.

And it was definitely dragon.

“I’ve never wanted to be a dragon so badly in my life,” she muttered to herself.

This is more proof, she realized. That man out there really is a dragon.

Which means… he really could be Ares.

Chapter Twenty-four – Santorini, Greece

Ares could feel them out there, all stirred up, all trying to get in. Well, not all of them could be trying to get in. Because if Cain had tried to get in, the Monsters clan leader would be sitting on Mace’s couch right now with his boots propped up on the coffee table as he sucked back Ares’ stronger liquor. And he wasn’t. Which meant he hadn’t tried.

So things couldn’t have been that bad yet.

Yet.

That made Ares feel a little bit better about the reinforcements he added to the wards over and around the villa. He walked the line of his property, staying just on the inside, and peered out over Santorini’s Vylchadia beach. This particular beach had some of the tallest cliffs. It also had its fair share of tourists, and Ares would have had a ruined view if not for the fact that his home here in Santorini connected to his home in the Dragon Realm, allowing the beach to extend protected and unpopulated through a number of ancient magics. All of his homes were connected to the Dragon Realm. That way he could enter any of them, anywhere in the realms, from his anchor den.

Here in this realm, he’d chosen Santorini as one of his homes because he loved the water, and this water was warm. Most dragons loved water. Red