Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,3

I would have said or done anything in that moment for an excuse to remain in her company. So I finally came-to, thanked her, and gave her my best killer smile.

I admit I felt immense relief when she blushed. For a second, I’d been afraid this girl was so different, so vastly out of my league, she wouldn’t fall for my normally foolproof charms. But it looked like I’d been afraid for nothing. She was falling for them after all.

That single meeting in those halls on that momentous Friday in 1966 was the most important few minutes of my life. But it wouldn’t be until a year and a half had passed and the snow was piling up in December of ‘67 that I’d realize she wasn’t the one falling hard in the school hallway that first day.

I was.

Leia and I became friends. It’s rare for a dragon my age to say that about a human. Human life is so fleeting, it barely registers for us sometimes. But the days I spent with Annaleia were worth more than centuries. We became the best of friends. The things she taught me about life, freedom, and what they were both worth… I thought I’d already known. But sometimes it takes a fresh perspective, and a beautiful new set of eyes.

She had this way of boiling down a situation to its fundamental roots, of stepping back from the picture and taking me with her. She would monologue like the best litigator, using the most imaginative analogies that somehow packed an un-pulled punch. I loved the sound of her voice, the reason in her mind, the way she saw the universe. It was different. She was so damn different.

I was the only one to call her Leia. Most called her Anna. But my teasing nickname for her of “White Rain” eventually truncated to “Raindrop,” and it was something she seemed to like very much. It also suited her. She was one human amongst billions, but as fresh as a spring storm, and just as new to me. I only used the name when she was around. When she was looking at me. Then it was like I could taste her, like catching a drop of storm on my tongue in May.

Annaleia Faith was what I think you’d get if you turned a dragon into a human permanently. She was strong and brave. By that I don’t mean she could bench press two-twenty. I mean she didn’t let anyone push her around. Like a dragon. Every guy in my class wanted to get under the sheets with her, but Leia had no interest in any of them. She didn’t let them bully or cow or shame her horizontal. She just smiled winsomely and shrugged off their taunting, carefree and confident. Just like a dragon.

And every now and then she would even effortlessly cut them to the quick with another of her analogies. Her talent for wit was as bottomless as her imagination. And whatever poor schmuck had tried to get under her skin would slink away, a little less sure of himself and a lot more desperate. I could smell it on them… that need for her.

Every time she stopped them cold, it only grew stronger.

I sometimes used that smell to track them down after the fact and kick them into the following week. Retribution felt good, and I’m no saint. But payback had to go down when Leia wouldn’t find out. She’d have given me hell if she’d known it was me who sometimes put those boys in the hospital. No matter what they’d done to her, she was just that kind of person. She hated seeing people suffer. She hated pain in any form.

That was maybe a little less like a dragon.

Leia was also strong in that she could take bad news with the fortitude of a soldier; something I learned very quickly. It turned out her father had died earlier the same year we met, near the end of the previous school term. She claimed that because he’d been sick for a while it made his death easier to take. But I knew she was holding something else back.

In mid-October of ‘66, when she started working every night at a diner near her house and I could tell she was getting tired, I found out what that was. “Raindrop,” I finally sighed, gently taking her elbow until she turned in the hall to face me. “You just got a C on your