by Jeff Hale
So Aerick left, and with him went our relationship. He had no idea how long he would be gone, although he told me it would be measured in months, and he thought it would be unfair of him to make me wait around for him for an unknown length of time. So we agreed to split, and if we were both still interested in resuming where we had left off when he returned, then we would do so at that point. But I missed him terribly.
Kris finally got her go ahead to attend UNLV and I found us an apartment a couple weeks after Aerick left. I flew back to Washington so we could get our things and drive back in my car. So we packed up our stuff and made arrangements for the bigger things to be shipped. I knew my mom would have preferred if we moved to Oregon with her, but who wouldn’t choose Las Vegas over a dismal corner of Washington State, or even Oregon? Yeah, I know, but we were young and the big city beckoned like a playground.
Before we left, Kris and I retrieved the contents of her safety deposit box. In it had been five thousand dollars, an antique necklace, and her birth certificate. There had been a great deal of shock on both our parts to find out that the people who had raised her weren’t really her parents, that her father had been the brother of the woman she had called mom all her life, and that her birth mother had been some name neither of us recognized. There was a small slip of paper that claimed the necklace had belonged to her real mother.
Nina made up with Dave, again, but he had become very suspicious and jealous of anyone he thought she was attracted to, and that included me, so I hadn’t seen Dave since before Aerick left; Nina visited Kris and me without him and I wasn’t even sure he knew we were living in Vegas.
A postcard showed up from Greece near the end of August. It was from Alex. The picture on the front showed the Parthenon at sunrise, rays of golden light spilling over the columns. There was short message on the back:
Katie,
It’s beautiful here, but lonely. I’m doing as you asked and he’s okay. Hope this card finds you happy. If you need anything, call me, please. Miss you terribly.
Love, Alex
He’d scrawled a cell phone number on the bottom of the card, underlining it as well. I debated about contacting him just for the hell of it, but decided a break from that part of my life might do me some good.
Sayuri and Takeo showed up not long after Kris and I moved into the apartment. At first I had been worried that they were there to exact vengeance against what had happened with Henry, but instead they wanted to talk to me about the possibility of renouncing their ties to Henry. It seemed my little transformation into a dragon like creature had been a sign to them that they had strayed far from their own principles. As a token of their sincerity, they offered to teach me how to use the gifts that came along with being a shifter, and a cat shifter in particular.
As the next year passed, I was still no closer to discovering how I had turned into a drake, nor had I been able to repeat it… but I noticed that I began to give off little discharges of what seemed like static electricity whenever I got agitated and I had some minor control over the air around me. And when the winds blew strong, I found myself drawn outside, to bathe in the currents and eddies.
Things were going well, despite my separation from Aerick, but with my new affinity for electricity and air, I should have known that things couldn’t stay calm for long.
About the Authors
Jeff Hale and Lezlee Cheek Hale live in southeast Washington State. The Wild Within is the second book in their Aetheric Elements series. For more information, visit:
www.jeffandlezleehale.com