Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,1

a bad situation even worse. Got a few human wars under our belts to prove as much.

Then again, we do step in from time to time. Dragons live so long, it can be decades before one or more exist in the mortal realm. There’ve been times in history when we lost touch for centuries, only to come back and find some form of unnatural abomination taking place, and no deity in sight to stop the slaughter. The Spanish Inquisition… that was one.

We put an end to it. Would have done so sooner had we known.

But for the most part, we let humans make their mistakes without any help from us.

Despite being able to morph into just about anything, dragons are limited in a few key ways with their altered appearances. Black dragons for instance will always have black hair and black eyes, with varying degrees of luminosity and sometimes strange deviations. Sometimes my eyes literally sparkle like someone dumped a bunch of fucking diamond dust into my irises. Makes me feel like a goddamn fairy. It comes and goes with my mood, and I can’t do anything about it. These anomalies are impossible to undo, and they’re like that for dragons.

We have to retain our original sex, too. Some things are set in stone for dragons.

But I can be a ten year-old or an octogenarian, depending on what the situation calls for. Age is something a dragon can change.

And so, in 1966, after studying the realms again for about a year, I became a six-foot-three eighteen-year-old with black hair and black(ish) eyes. It was the easiest thing in the damn world for me.

What happened after that was probably the hardest.

In the fall of that same year, I found myself at Mayhill High in Philadelphia, registering as a seventeen-year-old new student in his junior year. I kept my name. Why bother changing it? Magic flows through my veins and one of my three hearts. I’m powerful enough that I never have to worry about hiccups in history where someone by the name of Antares Mace lives a little too long or looks a little too young for it to be normal. Dragons figured that shit out a long time ago.

I know a few werewolves who have to worry about it though. One is a cop of all things, the chief of police. No lies. In all honesty, he looks a lot like a black dragon… same hair as mine, in fact. And in some respects, Daniel Kane is a fellow biker I would readily call brother. But he’s in the public eye, and werewolves live two or three times as long as humans. Alphas even more so, and Kane’s as alpha as they come. Sooner rather than later, things will start getting dicey for him and that pack of weres he keeps around him in the House. I’d rather not add to my own troubles by association.

But I digress.

August 26th, 1966 was a Friday. I walked through the front doors wanting to get the registration over quick so I could get to the motorcycle shop before they closed. If I had to be human, I needed a human mode of transportation.

Hardly anyone was at the school that afternoon. Friday was late registration day. Most kids had gone in earlier in the week and now that the weekend was here, they had better things to do.

But she was there.

The first thing I noticed about her was the way she smelled. She smelled clean.

You might think it goes without saying that most people are generally clean, but you’d be damn wrong. It’s the twenty-first century, and all you have to do is try to board public transportation during rush hour and you learn fast that humans still haven’t mastered the art of personal hygiene. As bad as it is now, it was so much worse back then. It was the sixties. It was the age of musk perfume and “innovative” cleaning methods. Like crystals as deodorant. I’m here to tell you that unless that crystal has been bespelled by a powerful witch, it isn’t going to do shit for that mess under your arms.

So many people were rubbing patchouli on their wrists and washing their hair with lavender oil instead of shampoo, the scent of soap actually stood out like a candle in the dark. And Annaleia, well, she smelled like the cheapest, strongest soap on the market. You know – that stuff that pretty much dries the skin to sandpaper if you