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Prologue

The Gathering Storm

~~The Peace of being without war~~

~~Evenness of mind, temper, and composure~~

~~Create by imagination, invention, and design~~

Storm walked around the little store listening to the gossip about one of the biggest disasters ever recorded—at least how these people were now witnessing it. She shook her head in amazement. How could humans be so insensitive? Not to mention stupid. That was one of the million and one reasons that she didn’t hang out with humans for too long. They not only were, for the most part, clueless, but they seemed to have rose-colored glasses on all the time. The rumor mill was running full blast, it seemed today.

“They say that thousands of those bastards are dead. The whole place just split the roads and ate’em right up. Can’t you just imagine what they were thinking when they were being swallowed up like that? I can’t, I tell you what.” The man behind the counter had himself a great audience, and he was taking full advantage of it today.

“Heard tell that them there houses just toppled over like the kids’ blocks. Smashing people while they slept in their beds.” The man speaking shook his head. “Mercy sakes alive. It sure did a nasty bit of business over there on that street.”

“God is taking some sort of vengeance on them there foreigners. Sure as I’m a ‘sitting here, it’s God doing them people in.” She actually had to physically close her own mouth when the person made that statement. “They should have stayed in their own place not here where we people are.” Storm wondered if a one of the people standing at the counter knew that they were all foreigners to this land.

She also wondered what they’d say about her and her sister if they knew what they really were made her smile. She wasn’t going to speculate on it too much, but they’d have plenty to say. There was no doubt about that. They couldn’t have gotten more foreigners than they were.

Storm and her twin sister, Ember, were time adjusters for the world. They, like a great many other beings, moved throughout time and made slight adjustments in the fabric of reality when and where it was needed, smoothing out the lines so that it looked untouched, perfect. They’d been doing it longer than any of the beings in this room had been alive. And they would continue to do so long after they were nothing more than dust in their graves. Humans and shifters alike had no idea how many times they’d been recused from their own stupidity.

To do their jobs, they would travel back and forth, sliding into whatever persona was needed to blend into the world they were in. It took great strength and lots of practice to even attempt what they did for the world. Sometimes, they were the only ones standing between the extinction of mankind and the world being populated at any given time. Storm caught a reflection of her face as she walked around the little odds and ends store.

Tall, at just over six-foot, Storm was well-proportioned and athletic. Of course, no one would see that under her long dress and equally long sleeves. Her long dark hair, when not pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head as it was now, hung nearly to her waist in springy corkscrew ringlets. Her wings, too, pressed tightly against her back and legs only gave a small hint of what she really was.

Her skin, like her sisters, was alabaster and smooth as velvet. The only mark that marred their skin was the tattoo of their kind. It was a dragon that wore the wings that curled around their back clawed hands seemingly holding onto their shoulders while the tail trailed down their ribs and wrapped around their legs. Storms on her left leg, Embers to her right.

When their wings were spread and covering their arms from shoulders to their wrists, it would be, she supposed, frightening to anyone who would see her without any knowledge of what she was. Smiling at the men when they tipped their hats at her, she put her purchases on the counter and waited her turn to be waited on.

At the moment, Storm was in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-three in the body of a school teacher about to start “schooling” the area children in their reading, writing, and arithmetic. It was the closest body that fit her size when she popped into the time zone. The teacher would have no memories of her being Storm for a bit. There would be a slight accident, a small tumble that would alter her memories. Not that she’d remember Storm and what she had done, but the teacher would recover easily and never be the wiser of what she’d done for her world.

This time, working in this area, it had been a small fix. A mountain had come down on a family that was digging for clay and killed the youngest child. Storm had been tasked to save the child. Her future and that of a great many generations beyond her wouldn’t be born if she’d been killed. Saving the family, simply making them later than they had planned to the mountain side, had done the trick. The mom, always so organized, would forget to bring the cold water she’d stored in the creek that ran by their home to keep it nice and chilled for them all. Storm loved it when it was something like this had been.

There were times when whole realities had to be altered. Generations needed to be moved ahead to save someone. Sometimes, it was to save a being or one of the descendants of a human who was needed in the future. Other times, it was to erase a horrific time in the lives of humans—mostly, it was natural disasters where many deaths occurred. Humans, for the most part, would change up their entire lives, nothing to do with the ones that had been killed because they were witnesses to something so horrific that they had seen. It was all in the timing, she knew.

Other times it was the consequences of the disaster that were too large and affected too many things when they rippled down through the ages and had to be removed. Something as simple as a house being crushed with their things inside. It could have been the witnessing of a family pet being killed. Any and all things that would alter everything, and it was up to them to repair the damage that had been done.

As Time Displacement Officers, they were there to insure that the shifts were smooth, with no overlapping lines after the time frame was removed or fixed. Storm would watch an event, something that she’d fixed a thousand times to make sure that things were normal. However, gifted humans or small children saw the flaws. It was easily explained as déjà vu. Or a dream, too. Small children would complain to their mothers or fathers about how they’d done this before, only to be told that they were wrong. Poor little tykes. She would believe her children, should she ever find one, she knew that.

Storm was also there to capture another of their kind and bring him to justice. It was he who had moved the family to the mountain for the one to be killed. And he would have profited off of the disaster had she not been there when it unfolded. That neither was something that they could let happen. Everything you did, even from pulling a leaf off of a tree, would affect generations of families, she’d come to learn. And that was the very thing that the other being was doing.

His name was Grail. He had been altering reality to suit his own personal gain and to profit for a while now, but no one could catch him. She was determined to find and make him pay before he could cause any more trouble. Altering a time line too often would lead to sloppy work and time twitches that people would notice. And that was something that she was afraid of more than anything that she’d encountered in the human world. Too many glitches would wake the residents of the world to question what was going on, and it would—nearly all the time make them question their sanity.

Profit and notoriety from their jobs, both of which were laws that carried the sentence of death if broken, was what he had been doing today. Storm shuddered at the thought of the death he would endure when they took him back to Chilast, their magical realm. Death would not come easily or quickly for one like Grail. He had to know that. So why was he doing this when he knew it was only a matter of time before he was caught?

They didn’t have the people to chase after him and keep the world and its people safe. As it was now, they were stretched to the limit. Working from sun up to sun down and all the between time too, it had been so long since she’d had a day off that she wanted to just lie down, pull some leaves over her, and go to sleep. For about a thousand years.

Storm’s twin sister, Ember, had gone to Tokyo to study and gather names of their kind for the continuation of their race. So far, all she’d been able to find was the list of dead. All of the dragons that had come after her and a few others who had been killed were on that list. That wasn’t doing any of them a bit of good, and they all knew it. They were aging out, the lot of them and there wasn’t anything that they could do about it.

It didn’t bother their kind when they would wind time backward. It was the moving of time forward that would harm them. Time, it would add, even if it was only a click of a second to their age. And having to look at something over and over, forward and back, it might well add as many as ten minutes onto their long lives. After a while and all those adding up, a dragon would age quicker, worn down by time and effort, because without rest and some time off, they’d just fade away like all the other creatures in the world.

Storm had been sent to the Americas for her assignment to find and collect Grail before he could act on his plan. If they didn’t find him, and soon, all the work they’d kept up with would be useless. They’d all be dead, and there wasn’t anything that could be done about it after that.

But she had a feeling this time was different. They knew his plan, what he had needed and who to make himself in a new body to get away. It was what they had needed, what they were counting on to bring him to heel and to make all their lives safer without him in their worlds.

There was supposed to be a natural disaster, a large-scale shift in the earth’s interior make up that would cause the entire state of California to drift into the deep ocean and sink, killing all the inhabits there. There were people there that he needed to complete the next phase of his power play against his own kind. She had been sent there to make sure that it didn’t happen and to bring Grail to the Laws of the Realm.

Those people, men, and women alike, were the pioneers of the future that Grail was manipulating. Their collective knowledge would be passed down to their children and then on to the next generation. They were brilliant and would revolutionize the world with Grail’s backing and help. And not in a good way that would only benefit themselves and no one else.

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