by Selena Scott
He couldn’t let himself think about what had happened last night. How she’d given herself to him. Fallen asleep with him. Slept like the dead and woken up with just the sweetest little sparkle in her eye. It was more than he could have possibly hoped for less than twelve hours after getting attacked by her piece of shit ex-boyfriend.
“We’re getting close!” O yelled from the front of the group, sniffing the air.
“He can sniff out the portals,” Mel, the redhead who was apparently paired up with O, said.
Her son, a nine- or ten-year-old named Ike, turned around. “He says they smell like pancakes, but he can’t be telling the truth. Right, Mom?”
Mel grinned at him. “Who the hell knows? In my experience, he only tells the truth about the important stuff. The rest is up for serious comedic interpretation.”
Idris listened stoically. He pretended like his heart wasn’t racing at the information. About his brother. Who was, apparently, real. And not a figment of his childish imagination.
He supposed that at some point he was probably going to be really pissed at his mother for lying to him all these years. But right now, he just had too much other shit on his list.
Like Isla’s ass, switching back and forth as she bounded up the path with the stamina of a real athlete.
“Damn, girl! Slow down. You’re making the rest of us look bad,” Lucy griped as Isla followed Ike’s path and hopped from one outlying boulder to the next. “How’d you get so fit?”
Isla grinned back over her shoulder, making Idris’s stomach flip. “Working the pole,” she said.
Mel and Lucy laughed while Amos gaped at her.
“I’ve heard that’s an amazing work out!” Mel exclaimed.
“It is,” Isla said. “But that’s not why I was doing it.”
“Why were you doing it?” Felice asked. And Idris tried to keep his head on straight. His mother was having a conversation with Isla, formerly Lala Royal, about stripping. That was fine. Everything was fine.
“Well,” Isla answered, bounding up that path. “I guess the cat’s out of the bag that I was on the run from a bad dude. So, honestly, any under the table work was what I was looking for. But also it is really validating in a lot of ways.”
“Sexually?” Mel asked and Ike groaned as he covered his eyes with one hand.
O turned around at the head of the group, cupping one hand ostentatiously to his ear. “What’s that, my dove? You’re talking about sexuality back there?”
Mel rolled her eyes at her man, a small, private smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Isla laughed. And it was like the first time Idris heard it all over again. Musical. Joyful. Rare.
“Yeah, sexually, I guess,” Isla replied. “But stripping is almost more about power than sex.”
“Is that right?” Idris asked, finally chiming in, with enough spice in his voice that his mother was turning around, raising an eyebrow at him.
Amos chuckled behind him. “I assume that’s where you two met? City Lights?”
On the path ahead of them, Lucy turned then, a baby, whose name Idris hadn’t learned yet, strapped to her stomach. “You just happened to know the name of our local strip club, dear?” There was more than a little steel in her voice.
Amos grinned. “I’m a noticer, babe.”
Lucy rolled her eyes to the heavens and turned back to face front. “Apparently.”
“I don’t know what you’re so bent out of shape about,” O chimed in from the front. “That strip club is obviously up your alley, Luce. They employ plus-sized women.”
Lucy and Isla turned to one another to make some very meaningful eye contact while every man in the group besides O visibly winced.
“Jesus,” Idris muttered under his breath, feeling for his brother in the fury that was definitely about to rain down on him.
“Steady as she goes, son,” Donovan muttered.
“Excuse me?” Mel demanded of O.
Immediately recognizing that he’d wandered into enemy territory, O floundered. “I just meant that - uh - Isla is a curvy lady. You know. Similar to Lucy. And - ahem - you. My love.”
Mel’s eyebrows were non-existent, they were so far up her forehead.
“Um. Compliment taken?” Isla broke the tension. “Seeing as your girl is as curvy as I am, I assume you meant ‘normal women’ as opposed to ‘plus-sized women’.”
“Amen, sister,” Lucy chimed in.
“What were you saying about power?” Felice, a curvy woman herself, asked Isla.
Idris had to admit, he was pretty interested in that himself.
“Well,” Isla thought as she reached out a hand to Ike, helped him over a stream they were all fording. “There’s definitely something to holding a room captive. Whether you’re doing it with your charisma, or your body, or your words.”
“But isn’t it objectifying?” Lucy asked.
Isla deeply considered that question, he could tell by the way she paused, cocked her head, lost a little ground to the group. She made it up fast, legged her way up the mountain to make up for what she had lost.
“Sure,” Isla allowed. “But in a way, that says more about the men who came and watched me than it did about me.”
“What do you mean?” Mel asked, and Idris could have kissed her, he was so glad that she’d asked the question.
“I guess,” Isla said, “I guess that I mean that the men who came were so willing to be enthralled by me that I barely had to be there. My body is there, doing whatever I needed to do to get tips. But my mind is elsewhere, riding some pleasurable, humanizing wave. So, in that way, I was never theirs to be objectified.” She thought for a second. “Except for once. There was one time that I was really in it. And that was risky. Because it put me up for auction in a way that I’d never been before. But I did it. And it turned out great.”
“I hate to keep assuming here,” Amos said. “But I assume that you’re talking about some time or another that you’ve stripped for Idris.”
Idris turned and couldn’t help but grin at Amos. He just liked the dude. Straight talker. The two men seemed to be on the same wavelength.
“Ooooooh,” Ike said, grinning bright pink. It wasn’t clear exactly how much of this conversation he was following, but he definitely understood the part where Isla stripped for Idris.
“Oooooooooooooh,” imitated Drake, Amos and Lucy’s toddler.
“OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH,” followed up O.
Now Isla was the one rolling her eyes. But she couldn’t help but flash a smile back at Idris.
And he grinned, too. That grin lasted about another half mile, until O turned off the path, following his nose more than anything else.
“You find it?” Donovan called to his son through the brush.
“Yeah!” O called back. “And it looks like it leads to some easy ground. We’re all gonna be able to get through. Kids included.”
“The other portal we used to use was about 200 feet off the ground,” Mel informed Idris. “You had to jump off a cliff. And then instantly transform into a dragon to be able to fly and survive the drop. So, we obviously had to find a new one. For the kids. And, you know, you. Because you’ve never shifted before.”
“Wait a second. What?” Lucy asked, coming to a full stop and turning around to stare at her husband. “You took our son through a portal that was 200 feet above ground?”
“What’s that, hon?” Amos called, slowing his pace and hanging back even farther from the group.
Again, Idris just had to grin at him.
The group cleared the brush that O had already bushwhacked through and Idris and the others found themselves in a grove of pine trees, each about three or four feet away from each other. O was nowhere to be seen.
“Cool!” Ike yelled as he sprinted forward, backpack bopping on his back.
“Hotshot!” Mel yelled before sighing and pinching the bridge of her nose.
Her son had taken a flying leap through a slightly s
himmery patch of air. And straight up disappeared.
Ike and O reappeared in the patch, just two floating heads, grinning winningly at Mel.
She didn’t wait on ceremony. She was through, following her men, immediately. And then all of them, except for Donovan, Idris, and Isla, were on the dragon realm side.
Donovan clapped a hand lightly on Idris’s shoulder. “We don’t know what it’ll feel like for you. The first time you go through.”
“You mean he might shift right away?” Isla asked, her eyes so big that Idris wanted to lean her back and kiss the breath out of her.
“Maybe,” Donovan shrugged. “Amos said that the first time Drake ever went through he shifted automatically. Like he couldn’t control it. Of course, shifters can be in human or dragon form when they’re in the dragon realm. But some of us infinitely prefer dragon form.”
“You do,” Idris guessed.
“Yeah. I stay in dragon form as much as possible.”
“So, you think there’s a good chance that I’ll just instantly transform the second that I’m through.”
Donovan just shrugged. “We’ll just have to see.” He stepped through the portal and Idris could see him waiting on the other side, still in his human form.
Idris turned to Isla. “You ready?”
She shrugged. “I guess. I’m ready to get the hell out of Ivan’s world.”
Idris took her hand and moved toward the portal but she was suddenly tugging him backwards. “Wait,” she said. “Before we go in, I have a question.”
He waited patiently. But when she didn’t say anything, he raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”
She was biting her lower lip, worrying it in such a way he was sure she barely knew she was doing it. “Well, it’s just that - why didn’t you fuck me last night?”
Idris kept the smile off his face. Not the moment for that. He didn’t want her to think he was mocking her. When he so deeply wasn’t. He took a deep internal breath and decided to answer the right way. Honestly. “It wasn’t the right time for that. You didn’t need to get fucked. You needed to feel good. A release.”
Her lip popped out of her mouth and she stared at him. Like he was a puzzle she was trying to assemble.
“I’m supposed to believe that you were just totally fine without getting yours?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “No motives? No questions asked?”
Not for the first time in the last 24 hours, he wanted to smash Ivan Ivanovich’s face into a hundred pieces. What a worthless piece of shit. “Yeah. You are.”
She blinked at him for a moment. “Just like that, huh?”
“No,” he said, his voice sharp and harsh. But not too much. Just enough to get her really listening. “Not just like that. You say it like it was easy for me. Like I didn’t stay up for an hour and a half after you fell asleep, just aching for you. You say it like the whole thing was some grand plan to take advantage of you or something. But it wasn’t. All I knew was that you were strung like a violin and about one second from bursting apart. I didn’t do that to fuck with your head, Isla. I did it to make you feel better.” He paced away from her one step. And then back. “Because when I fuck you, Isla, it’s gonna change your world. And your world had already been changed enough last night.”
It was more than he’d maybe ever said to her before. Maybe more than he’d ever said to anybody. And it had a flush growing in her cheeks. From anger or rage or adrenalin, he had no idea. But he didn’t care as long as she finally got the picture. He wasn’t trying to pull one over on her.
She didn’t say anything. Or shrug. Or nod. She simply turned and ducked into the shimmery space in the air, to join the others on the other side.
Idris sighed. He looked around at the woods. The human realm. He was going into another world. And what choice did he really have? His most important people had all just walked through the portal there like they were crossing the street.
Dragon or not, he needed to join his people over there. So, taking a deep breath, he stepped through. And pointedly tried to ignore all the stares.
They all stood in a similar grove of trees to the one they’d just stepped through, but the air was warmer, clearer somehow. The sky was a crisp blue. Not cloudy, the way it had been in the human realm.
They were alone, except for the chirping call of some lonely bird. The only one not staring at him was Isla, who was looking up at the sky, the trees, everywhere but him. Almost determinedly.
“You feel anything?” O asked, circling around the group to come closer to him.
Idris was uncomfortable with all the stares; they were like ants on his arm that he wanted to dust off. But other than that, the honest answer was not really.
“No.”
He tried to ignore the vaguely disappointed looks that rolled around the group. He knew they’d been expecting him to explode into a shift or something. But it just didn’t seem to be in him.
“Not surprising,” Donovan said, hitching his pack up onto his shoulder.
“Why?” Felice asked, reaching for his hand.
Idris tried to ignore the weird, metallic pang it gave him to see his mother reaching for the hand of a man. Even if he was his father.
“Well,” Donovan said, scratching at his five o clock shadow and eyeing something in the sky. “You gotta figure he’s been suppressing his dragon for years. His entire life. Pretending it wasn’t there because he didn’t believe that it could be there. That kind of training doesn’t just die because he’s back on home soil. We’re gonna have to teach the boy.”
With that, he turned and started hiking through the woods. The group followed behind him. And Idris felt the attention fade off of him.
His father’s words had soothed him a little. He checked himself head to toe. Did he feel any different in the dragon realm? Maybe. Tinglier?
But he was probably just imagining that.
The only choice he had left was just to follow the group.
That late afternoon, after an entire day of hiking, they finally made it to where they were going to stay for a while. And Idris had never seen his mother so excited. So giddy. Like a little girl.
“Donovan, you have GOT to be kidding me!” she squealed. His mother did not normally squeal. Yet here she was, literally clapping her hands with glee. “It looks just the same! Except for the extra floors of course.”
Idris stood looking at a sort of log cabin mansion. A little haphazard in design, perhaps. But sturdy enough. And sprawling. There had to be twenty rooms in that house.
“This is where I grew up,” O said, coming up behind Donovan. “Dad and I added on little by little. I think he’s still working on some rooms on the east end.”
“My mother. Our mother. Felice knows this place,” Idris stumbled. He wasn’t usually so off-kilter.
O glossed over it like he hadn’t even heard it. “Yeah, I think she and Dad lived here, in the original part when they first got together.” He pointed toward a tiny room at the entryway of the cabin.
It was funny. He could actually see his mother living there.
The group was let in to Donovan’s house and everyone was allowed to choose a few rooms to stay in.
Idris watched as Lucy and Amos and their three kids chose most of the rooms on the main floor. Mel and Ike and O chose some rooms toward the back of the house, where O’s old bedroom was.
Idris pointedly did not watch as his mother followed Donovan back to where Donovan’s room was.
And it left him and Isla in the rustic kitchen. He supposed there was running water, from the looks of the sink. And that looked like an icebox in the corner. And it was clean. But that was about it for amenities.
He wondered what Isla would think of that. He grabbed her hand and tugged her back to the stair case. He wanted a room with her. And he wanted it to be far away from everybody else.
They walked all the way up to the third floor. Skipping the second floor entirely. The bedroom they found was a peculiar shape. It had windo
ws on three sides, a slanted ceiling and an old four poster bed.
“I love it!” Isla exclaimed, tossing her bag on the ground and flopping back on the bed.
Both Isla and Idris had picked up some clothes and supplies for the trip from the Target in the next town over that morning. They’d been nervous to be out and about in public, but neither had wanted to take this journey with zero supplies.
Idris was just about to throw his bag on the floor as well and lay himself out over Isla when he heard Amos’s voice call up the stairs to him.
“Let’s go, bouncer! We’ve got dragon lessons!”
Isla raised her eyes at him from where she lay. “This I gotta see.”
“Now you’re the one who gets to watch,” he said to her, straight-faced.
She grinned at him. “Let’s see if you can put on half the show that I can.”
Twenty minutes later, the sun was about two inches above the horizon and Idris found himself standing in the field out in front of Donovan’s house while these men he barely knew started stripping naked.
“Uhhhhh,” he said, glancing around as O whipped his shirt over his head like a helicopter. Amos and Donovan, much more discreet, simply tossed their shirts to the side. “What the fuck is going on?”
“You shift with your clothes on, you shred your clothes,” Amos said, simply. “Dragons are pretty comfortable with nudity. It’s a part of our daily life.”
Just then, his wife gave a long, loud whistle from the front porch where the women watched with beers. The kids all played inside.
Amos grinned a little. “The humans get a kick out of it though.”
Idris shrugged, knowing he had nothing to hide. He kind of wished that Isla and his mother weren’t sitting dead next to each other while he stripped down. But still, nothing to hide.
He stripped down, too. The men all stood there, completely naked.
“You have a tattoo of a dragon,” Amos said.
“I know,” Idris said. “Ironic, right? I’m an underground fighter. Or was, I guess. And that’s what they started calling me. They say I fight like I lay waste to my opponent. Burn him to the ground. Like a dragon.”
