by Selena Scott
“Well, I want to know all that other crap, too, I just really want to know what color you are. So quit stalling and spill the beans.” She poked his leg. “You’re lagging on the whole speed part of speed questions.”
He looped another section of her hair into the braid. “Okay. I guess I’m kind of a turquoisey, blue-ish, green-ish color.
She gave a nod. “When are you a dragon?”
“Anytime I want to be, as long as I’m in the dragon realm.”
“There’s another realm?”
“Yup, it’s kind of a parallel universe. Same as earth in a lot of ways. Except for all the dragons.”
“How do you get there?”
“Through portals. They’re kind of like wormholes. Most people think there’s only one, and it’s in the King’s fortress. But, being the Oracle, I happen to know there are a lot more. I’m good at finding them.”
“Okay. Wow. Okay.” She paused, but not for long. “So you can be either a human or a dragon?”
“Yeah. I’m a shifter.”
“Are other shifters oracles, too?”
“Nope. I’m the only one I ever met.”
Again, she paused. “Lonely.”
He didn’t hesitate, although her words sliced through his formerly lonesome heart like butter. “It’s not lonely by nature, I don’t think. For a long time I think that was just because of who I am. I never knew what was a prophecy and what was reality. I used to accidentally tell people their fates all the time. Or I’d see their biggest secrets and not realize they were secrets.”
“Oh my god, that’s amazing,” she crowed. “What was the worst one you ever did?”
“I once tried to be nice and console a female dragon shifter through her breakup with her girlfriend. She hadn’t even realized she was gay yet. The girlfriend was about five years out, it turned out.”
“Wow. WOW. That’s terrible!”
“Yeah, but one upside is that once you know your future, sometimes you can still change it. The two of them are still together, actually.”
“All thanks to your big mouth.”
He grinned behind her and looped the last section of her hair into the braid, his tongue poking out the side of his mouth in concentration. “Next question.”
“Why did you leave the dragon realm?”
“There’s an evil tyrant whose family stole the throne from the proper royal line about 500 years ago. The tyrant, whose name is King Dalyer, has been on a rampage, killing, pillaging, the works.” O’s voice fell away. He ignored the deeply bitter taste in his mouth, and the answering sting of pain in his side when he thought of Dalyer.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Oh! Right.” He scanned his head for how to answer her. “Nothing we’ve tried to stop him has worked. He’s too powerful. Not even the Surgere, a pretty badass group of rebels that I’m a part of, has been able to stop him. But then I started getting these dreams. Visions. Of a man in the human realm. He’s the key. He can stop Dalyer. Somehow. If I could just find him.”
“So that’s why you’re here in the human realm. You’re looking for him.”
“Yeah. I know he’s in the Rocky Mountains somewhere.”
“But then you met us…”
“And I got a little sidetracked.” He tied off the bottom of the braid and ran his hands smoothly over his creation. “Meeting your destiny will do that.”
She tipped her head back to look at him. “So when you find him, you’ll go back to the dragon realm?”
O nodded, keeping a loose smile on his face, although his heart clenched at the thought of leaving Mel and Ike.
She sat back up and turned around so that she was facing him on all fours, her naked body a deep blue in the light of the rising moon. “And then you’re gonna come back and live here with me and Ike,” she said. It wasn’t a question or a demand. It was a fact. She was stating it.
O tipped his head to one side and studied her hair. “I messed up the braid right at the beginning,” he said, running one hand over it. “I didn’t section your hair right. Oh well. Next time I’ll get it right.”
“O…”
“I don’t know, Mel. I really try not to look into my own future. It’s suicide. If there are good things waiting, then knowing my future might mess them up. If there are bad things, then I just prematurely dread them.”
She nodded. “I get that.” Leaning forward, she stole a quick kiss. “But I already know how it’s gonna work out. You’re gonna spend your life with me. Because, just, feel it?”
Mel placed her cheek firmly on his, and O did feel it. The surge between them. Their souls were a living thing between them. Each one drawing the other out of its hiding place. They called to one another. And answered. There was no going back from this.
“I think you’re smarter than I am,” O said.
“I think I’m smarter than everybody,” Mel grinned, pulling back from him, her off-center nose making him smile. “Last speed question, okay?”
He nodded.
“What’s your real name? Because nobody just up and named you Oracle.”
O laughed again. “You know? Not enough people question that.” He laced his fingers behind his head. “Owen. My real name is Owen.”
“So ‘O’ is actually really apt.”
“When other people call me that, it’s short for ‘Oracle’. But when you call me that, it can be short for ‘Owen’.”
“Deal,” she said and rolled out of bed. “I’m hungry. Gonna order a pizza.”
O flopped back onto the bed and watched her walk out of the room. It felt good, this whole telling somebody absolutely everything thing. He’d been deeply censoring himself since he was a kid. And honestly, even the people who loved him rarely ever asked him questions about himself. Being an oracle meant that he talked about other people a whole lot.
Mel popped her head back into the room. “Oh, and O?”
He rolled his head to one side to look at her.
“Ike and I are gonna help you find this guy.”
“I know,” he said.
“I thought you didn’t read your own future?”
“I didn’t have to read my future to know that you weren’t gonna let me do this on my own.”
CHAPTER NINE
There were weirder ways to fall in love, Mel supposed. She couldn’t really think of any offhand, but she was certain they existed. The world was ancient and people had been falling in love for tens of thousands of years. Weirder shit was bound to have happened. And come to think of it, she didn’t even know how old the dragon realm was. Maybe it was a million years old.
As a single mom, raising a baby by herself at age 18, Mel had come to learn one hard but true rule. Don’t question happiness. There’s no time for that. By the time you’ve put it through the ringer, interrogated whatever it was that was making you happy, it was usually on its way out the side door.
So, she didn’t question this moment. With her barreling down the highway, windows down. She peeked up in the rearview mirror to see O leaning toward Ike in the back seat.
“Okay, now this string goes under that one. See, like this,” said Ike.
“Oh my god, this is brilliant. You’re a genius,” O muttered, following directions.
Ike was teaching O how to make a certain kind of friendship bracelet that he’d learned at camp last summer. Mel had no idea why learning a new stitch with some embroidery floss would give a grown man so much pleasure, but like she’d said before: she wasn’t going to question it.
Ike had been a little bummed at first, when she’d picked him up from the Marriott and told him that their beach vacation was over. But that disappointment had been pretty short-lived when she’d explained about their quest.
“A dragon?” Ike had looked back and forth between the two of them. “A real dragon?”
Mel had nodded solemnly.
“No. Mom. I mean a REAL dragon. Not some Santa Claus bullshit.”
�
�Ike!”
“Come on, it’s hard to know what to believe when you’re a kid!” Ike threw his hands up in the air. “People always lie to you and then you’re a dummy when you don’t figure it out on your own!”
Mel had bent and grabbed her son by the shoulders. “I’m not lying to you, hotshot. O is from a different realm. When he’s there, he can turn into a dragon.”
“Prove it,” Ike had said to O.
“Ike,” Mel had started but Ike had cut her off.
“No. Listen here, if you’re gonna stick with me and my mom then you better be able to prove this to me. She’s all soft for you, I can see that. But I look out for her, okay?”
At that moment, O wasn’t the only man she was all soft for. Her son often stood up for her. But never quite in such a tough guy way. She was proud of him.
“Alright,” O shrugged. “I can show you my dragon if we can get to a portal. We can hop over to the dragon realm and I’ll prove it.”
Mel’s eyes had gone wide. “Just like that.”
O flipped his hair off his forehead. “No biggie.”
He turned and sniffed at the air like a dog. “There’s one west of here, I think. If we drive in that direction, I think I’ll be able to find it.”
So that’s exactly what they were doing.
Driving west. With two men she loved in the back seat making friendship bracelets.
“Hey, pass those pretzels up, please!” Mel called to the back seat. She expected the bag to land in her lap, but instead felt a hand reach past her cheek and jam some pretzels straight into her mouth. “Hey!” she sputtered, laughing and spraying crumbs over the steering wheel. She wasn’t sure if it had been Ike or O who’d done it. Neither would have surprised her.
“So, being an oracle means that you can see the future and stuff?” Ike asked.
“Yeah, dude.”
“Can you also see the present, though? Like what somebody is doing right now?”
“Yeah, dude.”
“A specific somebody?” Ike asked. Mel crunched her pretzels and wondered where her son was going with this.
“Sure, if I wanted to. Crap, I got this all tangled again. Show me how to do that last part of the knot again.”
Mel glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw Ike bent over O’s bracelet as O watched intensely. His rumpled blonde hair tumbled out of the sides of a peach pink Santa Barbara baseball cap he’d bought on their way out of town. Her stomach flipped. She was such a goner.
Ike sat up, having fixed O’s bracelet and started fidgeting with his own. “Would you find my dad if I asked you to?” the boy asked.
To her credit, Mel didn’t swerve the car. “Damn, hotshot, warn a girl before you spring something like that on the group!”
Ike flashed a distracted smile her way, but his focus was on his bracelet and on O.
“I don’t know if I would,” O said, his eyes on the twist of the string in his own hands.
“Why?” This time Ike looked up and studied the man beside him.
“Because sometimes people ask for dumb crap that ends up really hurting them.” O looked up, too, and rolled his head on the back of the seat, floppily gazing down at Ike. “And you’re a kid and I know a lot because I’m an oracle, so if I felt like you might get really hurt because I did what you asked, I might not do it.”
Mel watched in the mirror as the two gazed at each other for a second.
“Makes sense. Kids ask for dumb crap all the time.” Ike shrugged and the two smiled at each other. “Mom, remember when Will Jensen was so convinced that he wanted that unicycle and his mom got it for him and he busted all his front teeth out in like two seconds?”
Mel shook her head at the memory. “Oh yeah. That was terrible. He looked like a jack-o-lantern.”
“One that got its face kicked in.” Mel and Ike grinned at each other in the mirror. Ike turned and looked out the window but Mel kept watching him for a second. She wondered why he’d asked about that.
He’d long ago accepted that his dad wasn’t gonna be a part of his life. Outwardly at least. She’d have to talk to him about it again soon. She’d told him a little bit about his dad. About as much as she knew. How do you explain a one-night stand to a kid?
She sighed and propped her elbow out the open window. She’d figure out a way to tell him. She’d answer his questions as best as she could. They’d get through it with honesty. The way they always did.
“There! There! Mel, pull over!” O screamed from the back seat, rolling down his window and leaning halfway out.
“Jesus Christ on a cracker!” Mel screamed back at him. “Give me a heart attack, why don’t you!”
They’d gone a little north as well as west from Santa Barbara and they were currently skirting the southern edge of the Sequoia National Forest. The desert had given way to the austere grandeur of the redwoods. Even the smaller ones that dotted the land before you got to the forest were breathtaking.
Mel pulled the car over where O indicated and they ended up in the silver green shade of a grove of the trees. Three car doors slammed and for a moment, it was all they could do to just crank their heads back and stare up at the little winking thatches of periwinkle sky through the leaves.
“Why did we stop?” Ike asked the grownups once his neck got tired and he got bored of appreciating all the nature. That was one thing about his mom that he never really got on the same page with. She could sit around and appreciate nature like it was a TV show. Seriously. She could binge-watch the ocean. He got bored after about two minutes.
“Oh! Right.” O shook his head and turned to walk about twenty feet into the forest. “Come check out this portal!”
Mel and Ike turned and looked at each other, both of them checking to see if the other one believed what they were hearing. They paused for a full beat before they took off running at the same second, elbowing one another out of the way in their rush to follow O.
Standing a little ways back from the road in between two redwoods, he held his hands out to the two of them. Both mother and son grabbed his hands at the same time. Without preamble, O tugged them toward him and brought them all tumbling backwards in a heap.
Mel whipped her arm out to grab her son closer to her, and she felt O do the same. They should have hit the ground by now, but somehow they kept falling. Not from a great distance. It was more like a controlled, compressed twirl. An uncomfortable feeling, but not terrible. The next second, they lay in a patch of gray green moss, with a different kind of tree stretching out above them.
“Jesus.” Ike sat up and shook his head like he was shaking cobwebs out of his ears. “That was like getting squeezed through a tube of toothpaste.”
Mel sat up, too, her coppery swing of hair reflecting the dapples of sun through the leaves. “Holy crap, O. Is this it? Is this the dragon realm?”
O nodded, but didn’t get up, or look around, or even open his eyes. He just settled back into the moss and crossed his legs at the ankles. “Home sweet home. It even smells better in the dragon realm.”
“Smells the same to me,” Ike said, dusting off his shorts. “Looks the same too.” He turned a circle and took in the landscape around him. Sure, it was pretty. Lots of green trees and a prairie rolling away from the tree line. And he was pretty sure he could make out mountains in the distance.
“Yeah,” Mel said, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “It really does look just like earth.”
“Well,” O piped up from where he lay on the ground. “Except for the dragon.”
“Dragon!” Ike squeaked, hopping in a hundred directions at once as his eyes scanned the horizon. “Where?!”
“Right here!” O roared and sprang to his feet growling and clawing at the air like a man possessed. Mel held her breath for a second, but it quickly chuffed out in a puff of laughter as nothing happened. O just stood there. A man pretending to be a dragon.
Ike bit back his own laughter and rolled his eyes. “Jeez, you’re corny. M
om, how’d you get so sweet on such a cornball?”
“I don’t know,” Mel shrugged as she turned her liquid brown eyes on O, still clowning for her son. “Destiny, I guess.”
O finally broke character and clapped his hands together. “Okay. Well. We came here to see a dragon, huh?”
Ike nodded solemnly. “We came here to see you turn into a dragon.”
“Alright then, sailor. You asked for it.” O stripped off his shirt and reached for the button on his pants. “Turn around kid, I don’t wanna scandalize you.”
“Why do you have to get naked?”
“Because if I don’t, then all my clothes will be ripped to shreds and I’ll have to ride naked in the back seat when we go back to the human realm.”
“Gross,” Ike shook his head and turned around, but Mel could see that he was vibrating with curiosity, nerves, excitement.
O stripped off his shorts and underwear and stood there, stark naked for a second. Mel felt her pulse heat instantly at the sight of him. He really was beautiful, all long golden lines. His chest was shadowed along each dip and rise of his muscles. And all of it, every graceful line of his taut body, drew the eye right down to his cock. Mel felt her breath catch for a second. Not in front of her kid. She had to pull herself together.
Luckily, O took that moment to strike a muscle man pose, pointing one toe and flexing his back muscles for her, an idiotic look on his face. The next pose involved a good deal of strutting and aggressive pointing to show off his pecs.
“Good god,” Mel sighed through a laugh.
“What’s he doing back there?” Ike asked, still facing safely in the other direction.
“Trust me, kid. You don’t wanna know.”
“Alright you two. Ike, you can turn around in five seconds. But no touchy the scales, okay? They’ll skin you like a cat.”
Mel didn’t expect it to be such a graceful act. The act of shifting into a dragon. She’d been expecting a roaring, snapping, werewolf kind of a thing. But it made sense to her when O merely stretched, like a lazy jungle cat might, and just kept on stretching. He wasn’t really a roaring, snapping kind of a guy. He was more like a leopard. He would recline, flicking his proverbial tail, but in a flash he could transform into a killing machine. Which is just what O did. In seconds, he’d expanded to the size of a school bus, turquoise scales erupting all over his body.