The Dragon’s Mark Read Free Page A

said, “It’s the old man’s birthday.”
    Annja knew there was only one individual Garin could legitimately refer to that way.
    Roux.
    Old was right, she thought. More than five hundred years old, if the truth were told. Garin himself wasn’t that far behind, for only a few decades separated the two men. The same mystical force that had preserved the sword of Joan of Arc, the sword that Annja now carried as her own, had also given the two of them an extended lifetime. One measured in centuries, rather than decades.
    “It’s Roux’s birthday?”
    “I just said that, didn’t I?”
    Yes, yes, he had. Despite Roux’s long life, Annja knew that he wasn’t the type to celebrate birthdays, so that only increased rather than eased her suspicions.
    “You’re going to throw Roux a birthday party?” She couldn’t mask the incredulity in her voice.
    Garin had apparently lost his patience with her for he let loose a stream of curses that could have burned the hair off a pirate’s chest.
    Annja waited him out and then said, “Okay. I’m in. When is it?”
    Still grumbling, he named a date only three days away.
    “Nothing like giving a girl time to think it over,” she said.
    “What? Like you’ve got something else on your social calendar?” Garin shot back and from his tone Annja knew he was rather pleased with himself for that one. Before she could think of a retort, he went on. “I have tickets reserved in your name on the 9:00 p.m. flight out of Kennedy on the twelfth. My driver will pick you at DeGaulle, take you to Roux’s for the party and drive you back to your hotel afterward.”
    And with that, he hung up.
    “Garin? Garin!”
    Hanging up the phone, she went back to putting away the groceries. While doing so she glanced at her calendar. The bare white spaces stared back at her. Well, what did you expect? she asked herself. Given your lifestyle, it is amazing you have any friends at all.
    She had to admit, she’d never been one to stay in one place for long before she’d taken up Joan’s sword, never mind afterward. If she wasn’t headed off to some remote spot to film a new episode of Chasing History’s Monsters, the cable television show she cohosted, then she was off volunteering at some dig site in the back end of nowhere just to satisfy her love of history and her need to feel the thrill of discovery. That didn’t leave much time for friendships, never mind romantic entanglements longer than a few days in length.
    While she occasionally wondered what it would be like to have a normal life, when she really got down to it, she found that she didn’t mind all the craziness. After all, boring was the last thing you could call her life.
    The party was on the thirteenth. On the sixteenth she was due in studio to shoot some green-screen work for her next episode and to wade through the piles of footage she’d brought back from her last trip. Both would be necessary to cut the raw material into a show worth watching, and while she knew the guys in the editing room could do it without her, she preferred to keep an eye on them to help tone down the inevitable “suggestions” her producer, Doug Morrell, was constantly trying to fill their ears with. Doug was a good guy, but he’d be just as happy to have a show revolving around blood-sucking alien chupacabras as he would some ancient civilization most people had never heard of. He’d once gone so far as to produce and distribute a memorial video of her final moments when she’d lost touch with him during a tsunami in India. That fact that she’d called in shortly thereafter, clearly alive and well, had only added fuel to his marketing efforts and had him envisioning a second volume highlighting her “miraculous” survival. If she’d been closer at the time she might have strangled him herself.
    So she’d make the party, but had to be sure to be back in New York by the sixteenth, come hell or high water.
     

    A NNJA WAS FIVE FEET TEN inches tall