by Selena Scott
A tense silence passed between them before Zara burst out laughing.
“Hey!” Solar growled. “What are you laughing at?”
“You think it’s saying you’re gonna die?”
“Of course, how many ways are there to interpret that? I’m going to die when I’m thirty, which is pretty fucking close, I might add. And the symbol of my leadership in the Surgere will be my legacy.”
Zara wiped her eyes and reached out for her mate. “Or, ‘sunsets’ doesn’t mean that you’ll die, it means that a certain part of your life will be over. Perhaps the part where you don’t have a child? And then you’ll have one, your spitting image perhaps? One who will be your legacy?”
It was like a light came on in Solar’s soul. “You think?”
“Yes, mate,” Zara said and drew him in for another kiss. “I think.”
Solar fell into the bed beside her, a laugh bubbling up. It didn’t fix everything, but it certainly lightened his load. The prophecy wasn’t dooming him. It was lifting him up to a new life. One where there was family.
The night was long, but the sun came up the next morning. The Surgere who gathered around for breakfast were strong, bonded, together. Plus, Rafael burst into camp with good news.
“The Oracle is waking up! Little by little. But Keiko thinks he’s gonna make it.”
A weight lifted off of Zara and she could see it lift off of Solar as well. They’d make the journey in a day or two to visit him. They’d accompany him home. Help him recover.
And then they would turn their attention to their little one. Zara watched Solar talk with a young Surgere across the camp. Her mate clamped a hand onto the young boy’s shoulder, looked him right in the eye. Solar was the leader of the Surgere. But she was his true mate. For the first time in her life, Zara was a leader too.
EPILOGUE
O stood on one side of a sheet of cloudy glass. A man stood on the other side. They both leaned forward and tried to see one another through it. No dice. The glass was too murky. O didn’t know why it was so important to get to that man, but he was certain he had something to tell him. Something important. Life or death.
O turned away and gripped his forehead. It was right there. The truth, the answers. He just had to reach out and grab them.
He turned back to look at the glass. He could see the shadow of the man there. So close and so far. But to O’s horror another shadow came into the frame. A red shadow. A dragon, hulking, poisonous, deadly. He stalked the man behind the glass.
He’s going to die. The man is going to die and O will never have gotten to tell him… tell him what? He couldn’t remember.
O rushed forward to pound the glass. But it was too late. The blood red dragon had already opened his awful jaws, leaning forward, lunging.
“This is not that big of a deal,” a woman’s voice sounded over O’s shoulder and he flipped around to look behind him.
Behind O sat a woman with a messy bun of coppery red hair. She licked her finger to flip through a magazine. One of her feet bouncing up and down.
“What do you mean?” O asked.
“I mean that this is obviously a dream. A prophecy. Whatever.”
O sort of floated toward the woman and for the first time in days, he didn’t feel the excruciating pain of his injuries. Maybe the woman was right. Maybe this was a dream.
“So who are you?” O asked.
“Duh,” the woman said as she looked up at him. “The woman of your dreams.” She paused for a second before cracking a smile. “Get it?”
O cocked his head to one side. “Funny.” He was usually the one with all the jokes. He studied her brown eyes. Her freckles. Her hair like copper.
“So, then what are you doing here?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a stick of gum. O automatically held out his hand. Living in a jungle camp for a year pretty much meant that amenities like gum were few and far between. Even in dreams.
The woman rolled her eyes and tore the slice of gum in half, tossing it to him. “What am I doing here?” She popped the gum in her mouth. “I’m waiting for you to wake the fuck up and come fucking find me.”
The End
Dragon’s Desire
CHAPTER ONE
Mel pulled the thin nightgown away from her ribcage. The cotton stuck to her sweaty skin as she rolled to her side. On a hope and a prayer, she stuck her hand up against the screen of her bedside window. Not a breath of breeze out there. The air was as hot and heavy as an oven. And of course, today had been the day her box fan had decided to give up the good fight.
“You’re dead to me, fan.” She shot a dirty look at the worthless corpse of the box fan where she’d shoved it into the corner when she’d discovered it had gone kaput.
For a moment, she considered going to Ike’s bedroom to share his box fan with him, but the idea of sleeping so close to his sweaty little body was enough to keep her where she was. No point in making him any hotter than he already was. Besides, he ran hot anyways, he always had. Even as a baby, he’d been like a little furnace snuggled up to her.
Mel sighed and rolled over again, lifting her coppery red hair off the back of her neck. She let her mind wander to tomorrow. To the adventure that lay ahead of her and her son. She’d promised him that he would see the ocean. It was smack dab in the middle of summer break and so swelteringly hot in Vegas that Ike had literally fallen onto his over-dramatic eleven-year-old knees and begged his mother for a beach vacation.
Though they certainly didn’t have money laying around for whims like that, she had a little bit of dough in the rainy day fund and she wasn’t immune to the allure of the cool, salty breeze off the water. She loved the water, they both did. So Mel had called in a few of her vacation days, found a rather dubious-looking Airbnb, and had gone to the grocery store for plenty of PB&J and mac and cheese supplies. Pretty much all they could afford between gas and lodging.
It wasn’t the most glamorous vacation, and she wished she could give Ike something really memorable, like a cruise or a trip to Disneyland. But he wasn’t hard to please and had acted like she’d given him a trip to the moon when she tucked him in to bed that night and told him where they were going in the morning.
“Santa Barbara, baby!” he’d yelled, pumping one fist in the air and shaking his tiny hiney in his Ninja Turtle boxers. Melanie smiled into the dark as she remembered his reaction. Man, she loved her son. And she was so damn lucky that she got such a good boy.
Her eyes drifted closed and a wave of sleep dragged lazily over her. Not enough to put her under completely, but just enough to have her thoughts blurring together. Beach and swimming. Driving. Singing in the car. Seagulls fighting over a leftover sandwich on the beach. A kite dipping through the salty wind off the water. Mountains in the rearview mirror. A car with a flat tire, a man leaning over the hood of a car on the side of the road…
Melanie resurfaced from sleep for a second and shifted in her bed, her short nightie pulling tight against her thighs. She went back under with another drowsy tug and for a second she thought he might really be there, the man she was dreaming about. The man she always dreamed about. Lying next to her on the bed, no shirt, messy, dark blonde hair. A laugh ghosting across his mouth, but his eyes, so green, so serious. And burning as they raked over her body. On fire. For her.
CHAPTER TWO
The Oracle resisted the urge to toss and turn. His body ached from laying still for so long, but if he moved, he ran the risk of aggravating his injuries and he was sick to death of aggravating his injuries. It had been months since the battle. As far as he was concerned, he should be healed by now. But here he was, still limping around.
Typically, the Oracle wasn’t super hard to please, but so far, he wasn’t impressed with the human realm. He much preferred the dragon realm with its clean air and infinite stars. And all the, you know, dragon shifters. Not that he’d been able to do much shifting lately. In his human form, O had a very slight limp from his in
juries. In his dragon form, he was basically missing an entire, shredded wing. He found his dragon form completely demoralizing and painful. And he figured if he wasn’t going to be in his dragon form much anymore, then he might as well come to the human realm and be a human.
So here he was. He lay, sticky and hot, on scratchy motel sheets and watched an ancient ceiling fan weakly push dust around the room. Orange light from a street lamp lanced in between the shades and mixed with the dark motel room to create an eerie gray color. He was sick of motels. He was sick of food from vending machines. He was sick of being in pain. He was sick of being confused and one step behind.
He’d never once in his life had to work to activate his power. Visions, prophecies, information had all come to him as easy as a gentle stream. Sure, he’d had to work as a young man to hone and control his gift. But he’d never once tried to summon it up and been unsuccessful. But now. Well, now it was like his power slammed the door in his face every time he tried to walk into the room.
O pressed his eyes shut, blocking out the peeling wallpaper. He exhaled a frustrated breath. Warming his palms against one another, he laid them carefully over his eyes, blocking out the light. He drew in air, calmer now. He opened his eyes into the black of his palms and let his consciousness fall backward. Into color. Into time. Into the expansion and compression of space.
Into his power.
Where is he? The Oracle asked the question of the universe, of himself, of his power. Where is the man in my visions? The man who can challenge the king and end his cruel reign. Where is that man?
The scratchy sheets fell away. The heat of the summer fell away. O was weightless. Mountains flew past his mind’s eye. Snow. An evergreen tree. The Oracle saw an overlook. A cliff. Then he was standing on it. He was walking forward. The air was crisp and cool. An eagle dove through the air, but the Oracle lost sight of it in the bright sun. O felt someone at his shoulder. The man. The one he’d been hunting for. O turned to his left.
Pain shot up his side like a flame. O cried out in pain as he curled into himself on the motel bed. The vision was gone. Dried up like water on a hot frying pan. Cut short by his pain. O ran his hand over the knotted muscles and scarred skin on the left side of his body. He couldn’t see through the pain. He couldn’t use his power to lead him where he needed to go or answer his questions.
He knew that the man he was searching for was somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He’d gotten enough visual clues from his visions to narrow it down to there. But that was as far as he’d ever been able to get. So, that was why he was in a crappy motel off of I-15. He was headed west to the Rockies. Where he was going to… search for him. The good old fashioned way. With his eyes.
O let out a humorless chuckle and stretched out his leg.
He’d never felt so helpless in his life. He supposed this was how normal people felt every day of their lives. Completely unsure of what was going to happen next. Of course, his powers were working just fine in regards to everything else. It was just in this, the most important thing to the fate of the entire dragon realm, that he was powerless. Searching for the man in the visions without his powers made O feel utterly blind. Like he was constantly stepping into complete darkness.
He could feel his tension and aggravation rising. It wasn’t the way out of this. If he got worked up, he’d only get more tense and if he got tense, he’d be in pain. He needed to calm down.
A small, cockeyed grin worked its way over his face, making him look much more like the man he’d been before he’d gotten so injured. There was only one surefire way to calm himself down.
Her.
Call him a peeping tom, call him desperate, or pathetic. He didn’t give a flying fuck. O settled his hands behind his head and leaned back into his power.
This was the only thing his power let him fully do. For some reason, his pain never interrupted him when he was trying to see the redhead.
Out of the blue he’d had a dream about her a few months ago. Some human woman whom he’d never heard of or seen before. But she’d called to him. Called him out of a hard time in the dream. And ever since, he’d liked keeping tabs on her. He was discreet, he liked to think. He didn’t want to perv on her. If he checked in on her when she was changing or showering he skipped away immediately. Or almost immediately. He was a man, after all. But mostly he just liked watching her live her life. She had a way about her. Not bossy, exactly. But in charge. She was competent. Commanding. Sure of her next move at all times.
Colors flew past the Oracle in a familiar rushing tunnel until his mind’s eye landed on the redhead’s face. Her eyes were open. They were the clear, bottomless brown of a glass of good whiskey. And they shot through him the way they always did. She rustled, obviously aggravated, in her bed. A flush rose over her skin, glowing with a light sheen of sweat. She pressed her hand against the screen of her window and fell back, frustrated, on her bed. She threw her hands up in the air.
“You’re dead to me, fan,” she muttered and threw a dark look into the corner of her room.
O could feel himself grinning into the dark of his own room. There was something about the menacing look on her delicate little face that was just so dang cute. Though delicate wasn’t exactly the right word. She was more defined than delicate. Nothing on her face flowed into the other. Her eyes were big and lined with dark lashes, her coppery eyebrows sitting atop them like slashes. Her nose, just slightly tipped to one side, seemed almost to have been from someone else’s face altogether. Like she was just borrowing it for a while.
And her mouth. Good sweet holy baby god in a basket down the river, somebody save him from that mouth. It was abrupt and unruly. Smiling as often as it was snarling. But that wasn’t what caught the eye. It was the plump fullness, the natural god-given pout that had a man sweating. There was just so much mouth there to kiss. Or nip at.
In short, she was absolutely gorgeous. And unique. Completely unlike any woman the Oracle had ever seen. And she kinda captivated him. And calmed him down. And made him smile.
He watched as her eyes tracked around in the dark, lost in her own thoughts. Something brought a smile to her face. Then something darkened a worry line between her brows. But that, too, was smoothed away as sleep seemed to blanket over her.
O found himself growing calmer and calmer as he watched her drift away. His mind’s eye shifted so that he was looking at her from the side. Almost as if he were lying in bed next to her. He didn’t let his mind dwell on that for too long because he knew that it would never happen.
He came to the human realm to find the mysterious man who could potentially help them overthrow the king. His powers were running on empty and he didn’t have the time or the energy to go searching all over god knows where to find the redhead.
But he could pretend, just for a second, that he was a regular man. One who wasn’t in constant pain. One who never imagined something like an oracle could even exist. A man who just got to lay next to a beautiful, unique, copper-haired woman on a hot summer night.
A smile crept over his face as he watched her breathe. Her hair fanned out over her pillow and her clingy nightie left very little to the imagination.
There was nothing irregular about her body. She was quite simply stunning in that regard. She really put her clothes to work, in a manner of speaking. Her shirts always strained to accommodate the full, soft curves of her chest. And he didn’t even want to get started on her ass. Her ass was a work of art. A national monument. A love letter to a higher power. Her round peach of an ass was proof that life had meaning.
The sheet lightly obscured her form in the dim blue light of her bedroom and O was almost grateful for that. A man could really get lost in her if given half the chance.
The redhead shifted in her sleep, and gently, like a fawn blinking into the sunlight, her eyes came open. And she looked at him.
O froze. He lay in his motel room, completely alone, of course. But he was also looking directly into her eyes. And she
was looking back. Seeing him. The way he couldn’t remember ever being seen before.
CHAPTER THREE
“Hello from the other siiiiiiiiiiiide!” Mel belted out, punctuating her questionable vocal runs with hearty slaps on the steering wheel. She sang along with Adele because she loved it, because it was deeply cathartic, and because it made Ike smile. And let’s face it. Mel would do just about anything to make Ike smile. “I must have called a thousand tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimes!”
“Good lord, Mom!” Ike yelled over the din, plugging his ears. But he couldn’t stifle the grin that spread over his face. He was barreling through the desert with the windows down, a cold Coke, and his bare feet up on the dashboard. What could be better than that? Plus, his mom was happy. Really happy, not just pretend-for-the-kid happy. And there was nothing better than when Mom was happy.
They’d made it through some hard times together. Lean times. He was beginning to be old enough to realize that though he’d never gone without, his mom probably had just so he wouldn’t have to. They were a small family. Just the two of them. His grandparents had died when he was a baby and he didn’t have any aunts or uncles. His mom occasionally mentioned some distant cousins who lived out in Maine or Massachusetts or Minnesota or Michigan or someplace.
He didn’t have a dad. Which didn’t really bother him so much. It seemed like it bothered other kids though, who always seemed to feel like a kid was automatically supposed to have two parents, or be sad if he didn’t. But Ike didn’t feel sad about having just a mom. His mom. She was a really good mom.
He’d asked a few things about his dad before. And she’d been honest with him. Just like she always was.
“He’s someone I knew just long enough for him to give me you,” she’d said. Now, Ike wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but he knew that he could ask his mom for clarification if he ever really wanted to. And that was enough for now.
