Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Slightly off, he thought as he stepped through the door. Discordant. James was beginning to feel he might be in over his head. He was starting to feel like who and what he was might not have been as secret as he’d hoped. Like maybe that god of chaos guy was on to him. And James was being set up.

  He began to step out of the room and into the hall of the otherwise abandoned building, trying with all his might to keep his breathing even. But before he could breach the threshold, the man calling himself “Mr. VanGogh” was addressing him again.

  “The photograph, Mr. James,” he said.

  James almost startled at the man’s voice because VanGogh had somehow made it silently across the room to stand directly behind him in what felt like the blink of an eye. It was impossible.

  James kept his back straight. Breathe, just breathe. He remained outwardly calm as he turned and met VanGogh’s eyes – a vivid green behind wire-rimmed glasses. Actually… now that he looked closely, they were different shades of green. One was a little darker than the other.

  “I believe you neglected to return it to me.” VanGogh held out his hand and gave him an expectant, patient smile.

  They were the same height, but James suddenly felt as if he were in the company of someone taller. It was a sensation he was familiar with, given the kinds of men he worked with amongst the sovereigns. But he knew it was also part of the fight or flight reflex, this feeling of disproportionate minuteness that practically cried out, “Danger! Danger! For the love of all that is holy, run!”

  “I would very much like it back,” VanGogh prompted softly.

  James tore his eyes from the other man’s and looked back down at the photograph. He was somehow speaking before checking his words. “I’m sure you’ve heard, Mr. VanGogh…” he began, even though he knew damn well it was stupid. He was too experienced to make this kind of messy mistake, yet he found himself making it anyway. “The authorities are searching for a serial killer.” He looked back up. “One who preys on women, not that it isn’t the norm for cowards to prey on those who are smaller and weaker than they are; that’s customary and isn’t any real news. It’s just that this particular killer… likens his victims to artwork.”

  Oh that did it, he thought helplessly. Idiot.

  VanGogh didn’t react. There was no hint of anger or guilt or fear whatsoever in his unevenly green eyes, and there was no change in his expression. He didn’t look away either, but held James’ gaze steadily. Unnervingly.

  “The photograph, Mr. James,” he simply repeated with as much calm as before. Then he added a touch more quietly, the way the wind before a hurricane is a whisper, “I won’t ask you again.”

  James had indeed been doing this job a long time. But even so, there was a first time for everything. As he stared back into those soulless eyes and mechanically returned the photograph, for the first time in his supernatural life, James the undercover-werewolf-superhero experienced chills of fear.

  “Thank you.” VanGogh took the photo, lowered his arm, and turned his attention to someone or something in the shadows of the deep dark room behind him. “If you’re satisfied, I believe I’m finished here.”

  James narrowed his gaze, focusing his inhuman vision. But he still couldn’t see anything more than absolute darkness in those disproportionate shadows.

  It must be a spell, he thought, one of distortion. Or maybe it was simply an identity shield. One thing he did notice however was that VanGogh was looking upward into those shadows.

  Tall, James thought. Whoever or whatever the probable serial killer was talking to was very tall.

  Maybe it’s the chaos god himself, he suddenly thought. And his body went cold.

  “Understood,” said VanGogh suddenly, as if the figure in the darkness had spoken to him. He glanced back at James, smiled a strange and eerie smile, and said, “Thank you for your time, Detective James.”

  James felt his heart tumble over itself in warning. He’d never told the man he was a detective. He knew that now for sure.

  “I have a message for you to deliver to Lady Katrielle from a devoted admirer,” VanGogh continued. “Please advise her against any travel by rail in the next few days. The tracks are just not what they used to be.”

  VanGogh stepped back from James, moving further into the shadows behind him. “Have a good night.”

  Two more steps and just like that, James knew VanGogh was gone. The detective-werewolf-superhero had been left alone in the warehouse and the darkness, and the strangely ambivalent feeling that he’d just failed at catching death.

  Chapter Seven - Australia

  Annaleia had no idea how long she’d been staring at the scar in the mirror when she heard her friend’s voice from down the hall of her apartment. The front door slammed shut before the rubber soles of beach shoes were squeaking along a polished hardwood floor, coming in her direction.

  “Anna! I got your mail for you on the way up! You are ready, right? No chickening out!”

  Anna looked at the scar a few slow seconds longer. It was one of the few scars she’d already possessed before her accident, the accident. And it was the only scar that if given the choice, she would keep. She would keep it because of how she’d gotten it and what it reminded her of. Or rather, who it reminded her of.

  For the briefest moment, she saw eyes like the cosmos staring back at her in the mirror. They were deep, mesmerizing, and as endless as light-years. But she blinked, and they were gone.

  She’d been doing that a lot lately, remembering his galactic gaze. Anna rolled back her shoulders and straightened. She needed to stop doing that, though. She couldn’t turn back time. What was done was done. Wherever Antares was, he was either dead or he was an old man now. Well, older anyway. Probably long since married with ten kids and twenty grandkids.

  No, it was me who wanted the kids, she thought waywardly. Antares was a lone wolf.

  She smiled at the thought. She would sometimes tease him about the way kids were drawn to him despite his distaste for them. It reminded her of the way cats seemed to be drawn to people who were allergic to them. At the diner where they’d worked together, kids would often come in with their families. It never failed to make Annaleia laugh behind her hand or shake her head in wonder when some random child would attach itself to his leg and ask for a ride or tag him and then run, expecting him to take chase and tag them back. There he was, tall, imposing, and dressed all in black with hair and eyes to match – and a three-year-old girl in pink and pigtails wrapped tightly around his calf, grinning unabashedly up at him.

  His bemused expression was always priceless.

  Anna dropped her hand as a wave of wistful nostalgia filled her with a very real ache. It was deep inside her, in some unreachable hollow that hadn’t managed to fill with anything in more than fifty years.

  She closed her eyes, focused fiercely on the present, and re-opened them to look down at the rest of her body. “Yeah,” she replied to her friend half-heartedly, taking a step back from the standing mirror to give herself a thorough once-over. She tried not to wince at what she saw. But the truth was, she wasn’t pleased. And she suddenly didn’t feel like doing this.

  “Hey, you in here?”

  “Yeah,” she responded again glumly. “Sorta, anyway.” Then under her breath so only she could hear she added, “Most of me is.” The rest had been carved out of her over the course of half a century.

  But her friend came around the corner and gave a low wolf whistle, and Anna had to admit it sounded real.

  “Wow. Looking hot, babe. That color is amazing on you.”

  Anna smiled. This was the first day she’d broken out her new suit, which she admittedly really liked. It was shimmery, and it shifted in the light between a charcoal gray and purple, setting off the violet fire in her eyes. It seemed to fit perfectly too, making her chest look just a bit bigger and her much more curvaceous ass look just a touch smaller. At least it’s all muscle, she thought morosely, her eyes focused masochistically o
n her butt. There wasn’t much she could do about the genetics of her musculature, but at least she didn’t have a lot of cellulite. Just scars.

  “And you’re ready just in time too,” said Piper a little breathlessly, “‘cuz we’re already going to be dangling in the back of the lineup at this hour.”

  It was seven a.m. Anna rolled her eyes.

  Annaleia Faith was not now and never had been a morning person. When she was a kid, she arrived late or exhausted to school. Every time she’d attended university, she’d scheduled all afternoon courses. And even at work, she didn’t normally arrive at the agency office until nearly noon. She made up for it staying late and closing deals, but regardless – mornings were bad.

  She’d been late due to oversleeping when she’d met Antares that fateful high school registration day, in fact…. She’d been there at that time to fix her classes because the ones she’d wanted had booked up while she was busy struggling wholeheartedly against the warm, firm death grip of sleep. It was hard enough to worm her way into classes that were full; the ones she really wanted to take at the time were unfortunately thought of by the chauvinist status quo as male-oriented subjects. Like advanced physics, math, and chemistry. Because apparently female brain matter was just built less capable. Which was why Albert Einstein’s IQ was 162 – and Marilyn Monroe’s was 163.

  Anna blinked and shook herself out of her thoughts yet again.

  “You need coffee.”

  Anna blew out a sigh and shook her head. “I made a point to just stay up all night instead of try to wake up early. You know I can’t do that. But I’m coming home right after the beach and crashing. So unless I hit some kind of superhuman second wind or start doing meth, you’d better not have anything else planned for us.”

  Piper shook her head. “Nope. I’ve got a date. You’re not invited.”

  Anna laughed. Thank the Storyteller.

  It was the fourth day in her long awaited vacation. She’d finally made it.

  The plane crash mess was cleaned up, the area bulldozed, and life in all the surrounding buildings had returned to normal, or at least a relative facsimile of normal. In the end, the cosmetics company Anna had pitched her ad to still wanted to go with her creation, and her boss kept his promise that she’d have time off. It was a few weeks later than originally planned due to the crash, but she’d managed to get tickets and reservations moved despite the holidays, and now here she was – in sunny Victoria, Australia.

  It was a serious contrast to the weather she’d left behind in December’s Philadelphia. She’d gone halvesies with one of her two best friends on the trip and they’d planned everything together. Anna and Piper split the vacation into two weeks, one week where each of them had final say. Anna chose Australia as their first location, and Piper chose their second. Austin, Texas was next on the map, where they would meet up with Anna’s other best friend, Carmen.

  They would leave the land of Oz on the fourteen hour flight back to the states in a few days to spend the remainder of their two weeks with Carmen. Then the trio would hit the rather infamous Sixth Street, Austin for everything it was worth. That was the plan.

  Bourbon Street, New Orleans had been the original suggestion by both of Anna’s friends. But… Anna happened to know a thing or two about the literally wolfish police force around those parts, and the truth was Anna wanted an honest to goodness vacation, and not a vacation filled with great big beautiful men with great big, sharp teeth. Especially werewolves who might sniff out Anna’s secret and make trouble for her.

  She had enough trouble to deal with. Like these damn scars.

  Anna was having second thoughts about heading back outside. She shouldn’t have taken the time to dry off and warm up in the sun the day before…. Her violet-colored eyes trailed over pale lines in her skin that were far more visible now on day four than they’d been when she’d first arrived in Torquay, white as paper. Her skin had tanned, but her scars of course hadn’t. And no amount of magic in the world could hide them. She knew; she’d tracked down a few mages after her initial transformation, and it didn’t matter what they cast on her. If she continued to use her gift, the scars continued to appear.

  At first glance, there were too many of them to count, but she didn’t need to. She had a running tally in her head, and when another appeared, she just added it. Right now there were ninety-two scars in all, most of them small and thin but some not as much. This was the number of places on Annaleia’s skin that had paid the price for the use of her gift. It was the number of people she’d brought back from the dead with the power of resurrection that she’d acquired when she died… fifty years ago.

  Her friend Piper padded up to her side and put a toned, golden-brown arm around her shoulders. Light brown eyes met Violet’s in the mirror. “Hey,” she said, “you always chicken out when you get the tan. You know that, right? It’s a cycle with you.”

  “It’s been too long since I’ve had a tan for this to be a cycle.”

  “One year or ten, doesn’t matter. You do it every time.”

  Anna sighed. “For good reason, I think.”

  “For a non-existent reason, though I sympathize. But you honestly have no idea how beautiful most guys and even some girls find you. The scars are not all you think they are. They’re not huge; for the most part they’re thin and straight. But when you see them, you remember things and you worry and you ponder and snowball – and that makes them seem worse to you.”

  “You just told me that I look like a cutter to anyone who notices them.”

  “Hey. First off, don’t judge. People who cut are at least attempting to deal with their issues however they can. And there are a hell of a lot more of them around than most people think there are. And second? Anyone who would judge you as harshly as you just did for those marks is better weeded out at the beginning anyway. You don’t have time or energy to deal with apathetic assholes. And you know it.”

  Anna chewed on her lower lip and stayed quiet. There was a lot of truth packed into what Piper had just said. When she saw the scars, she always thought of her death and her resultant “gift.” She thought about people who treated her like someone psychologically unstable. She thought of people like the stalker she’d recently had to deal with; the man had literally been obsessed with Annaleia because of the scars.

  “And third,” Piper added with a voice a touch more gentle. “Every single one of those scars is a fucking life saved. That’s… I don’t even have words to describe how amazing that is, how selfless. And awesome. You’re an angel on Earth, Anna. Only instead of wings, you got stripes.”

  Anna laughed. That was actually pretty good; she liked it. Stripes. Like a fucking tiger.

  “I had to tell Atlas that you were already taken yesterday,” Piper told her with a smirk. Atlas was a surfing buddy. “And then I kid you not, I had to tell his twin sister the same thing.”

  Anna almost smiled at that too, except that if Piper was telling Anna the truth, then that meant she had lied to their friends. She wasn’t actually technically taken. She had no significant other in that respect, just a very busy life. And she was a warden. It put the kibosh on dating for Anna. She would never consciously bring someone innocent into the cluster fuck of peril that was her warden existence.

  But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Piper Maddox was a true friend.

  Anna took a deep breath and sighed, turning to take her friend’s hands in her own. “Thanks, Pipe,” she said. “For being you.”

  Piper met her gaze and held it. She understood that Anna was thanking her for the attempt at support and not everything else. So she smiled back and gave her hands a warm squeeze. “I’ve got your back, Annaleia Faith. And as to the scars,” she turned and gestured to the mirror. “If anyone ever notices them enough to ask, you can always tell them you tousled with a man in a gray suit.” Piper gave her a very white grin.

  Men in gray suits were sharks. It was surfer slang.

  “If any dude o
ut there hadn’t already wanted you with that toned midriff and the way you shred those waves,” Piper shrugged as she left her side to grab Anna’s board and bag, “they sure as hell will once you tell them that.” She turned and faced Annaleia on her way to the bedroom door, still grinning. Then she added, “Besides, you’ll be wearing your own suit before you hit the water.”

  Now Piper was referring to Anna’s wetsuit, not swimsuit. The water could get cold after a while, and a bikini could leave you with a nasty rash on your chest from the board. Plus, it was extra protection against jellyfish, which were way more plentiful and way more scary than sharks.

  At the thought of donning the wetsuit, Anna cheered up. Piper was right. In a few short minutes, all of this mess in the mirror would be covered up and she would be riding waves. That was how it always went, and that was what she’d come here to do. Focus on the barrels, or at least the swells, and forget about everything else. She’d had to come half way around the globe to gain that thoughtless freedom, but what the hell. It just meant she also got to see the world.

  She smiled and joined Piper at the door, taking her board and bag from her. The two left Annaleia’s home, locked it behind them, then made their way to the parking lot and Anna’s Jeep Wrangler, utterly unaware that powerful, hungry eyes followed them every step of the way.

  Chapter Eight – Australia, coastal highway

  One of the neat things about visiting Australia was that the driving was reversed, the way it was in Britain. This tended to surprise many Americans when they visited, and often it wasn’t necessarily a pleasant surprise. But Annaleia had owned her home in Torquay for so many decades, she was well accustomed to the switch by now. And the “neat” part of it was that when she didn’t feel like driving – like today – she got to look out the left window instead of the right.

  That was a particularly nice set of circumstances when making your way along the Great Ocean Road region from Torquay to Bells Beach because it was on the left side of the vehicle that you would see the shoreline. Piper was stuck looking at the road. Anna was the one with the fantastic view.