And here it is! The first chapter of the second book in the Defender Trilogy. This story is one of my pride and joys. I hope you enjoy it. All haters may jump off the bridge.

Dear Chris,

I didn't get the chance to ask you at the end of last year, but I wanted to write you over the summer. I hope Lion can find you without an address. Where do you spend your summers? Have you started the summer work yet? I hate Binn's homework, it's so boring, but Mum keeps after me to do it, so I have to. Please write soon. Miss you heaps.

Sincerely,
James

Chris read it, pausing from her run as the owl hooted impatiently. "I don't have ink or anything out here." She informed him. At another hoot she glared. "Alright. I'm not responding, so get going. Take it back.' She reattached the letter and settled back into her run, trailing it back around to the house, as Lion flew away. Her strides were long and even, expressing none of the turmoil that was spinning around her mind.

Christina Fornus was a tall, unassuming girl, dressed in Muggle clothes, with fresh scars and nicks that went up her arms and several cuts on her face. To most it would resemble losing a fight with a bramble bush. But a more careful person would also see the feathers and down caught in her hair and the long tears up the sides of her jeans that couldn't have come from a bush.

In truth she was coming back home from another mission. As a member of the minister's secret protection, Chris tended to get sliced up a few times a week. Now, not so many people wre out to kill the Minister of Magic these days as in past, (a former Minister Fudge was lucky he didn't die the second he took office) This one was from a mind-controlled hippogriff, who had been prowling around the Shacklebolt's house for a few days now. The fight that happened in the backyard had ended with a dead hippogriff and she'd spend the past hour gathering up the parts left and destroying them. The house had an anti apparition charm on it and as such, she had to run the last half-mile into the house.

Her feet hit the ground in a steady rhythm and she breathed evenly. But the letter disturbed her, a little more then she cared to admit.

She had half-hoped, half-despaired of if he would remember her. James had been one of the first teenagers Chris had come to know outside of the Defenders. Him and so many others at Hogwarts had befriended her. She wanted so much to hear from them, but knew in her gut that that would be impossible. Defenders never went back on a job done. It was better this way. Let them forget her over the summer.

She headed through the door and saw the bird swoop into the owl loft. She'd have to go answer later, or at least send the owl back. Her walk slowed and she stopped finally, at a window that looked out to the sea, where far in the distance, waves crashed against the rocks.

That hadn't been the first letter Chris had gotten. Jenny and Emily had invited her to come with them to France. Vanessa had sent a box of cookies, with a note that she was trying to learn to cook without magic for her Muggle boyfriend, and would she please tell her what she thought?

Teddy too had sent a brief note, to tell her that the Chocolate Frog Card she had given him last year let him win a competition for Card collectors, and asked if she was interested in trying out for the Quidditch team, as a Chaser had graduated and Mitchell was pestering him to write down that he said hello as well.

It was so strange, to be cared about by someone beyond her own family. Nice, but strange.