“Or not.” How exciting would it be to find more skyborn? To know that my mom was protecting them this whole time? It both excited and scared me.
“Let’s go,” I told Logan and he slipped his hand into mine.
As we were making our way off the bus, Isaac stopped me.
“Forgetting something?” he asked, and eyed my empty hands.
It took me a second to realize he was talking about my staff.
I rolled my eyes. “I’m just going to meet these people.”
Isaac shook his head. “I’m afraid I must insist. If this is an ambush and you lash out again, you may not survive it.”
Geeze. Way to bring the heavy.
“I thought I couldn’t die unless Logan died too?” I think deep down I was afraid of that staff, afraid to train and learn with it.
Isaac crossed his arms. “Oh, you’ll survive just fine. You might be brain-dead for the rest of your life, but sure, you’ll be breathing.”
My eyes bulged. “Okay. Sorry,” I quipped, and ran back to get the staff. Fear or no fear, I needed to trust Isaac.
Once my fingers wrapped around the cool wood, I felt a calmness settle over my frazzled energy, but there was also power there; it licked across my skin, sending small surges through me.
When I exited the bus and met Logan on the lawn, I became suddenly nervous. What if these people were skyborn … and what if they did know my mother? What would I say?
Logan took my hand. “We got this,” he assured me.
A voice next to me made me jump, startled. “I’m going too, but I’ll camouflage myself. I want to smell them out for any intricate spell work,” Eva said, in the space of air next to me.
“You can go invisible!” I whisper-screamed.
“Just for a short while when circumstances permit. So hurry up.”
There was an invisible witch standing next to me. My life was officially weird. I had come to terms with that.
Without another word, I started up the paved walkway to the chipped yellow door, leaving Sophie, Danny, and the crew back on the sidewalk looking like a bunch of vigilantes about to rob an old folks’ home bus.
I should have done this when my mom died. She put so much importance on that stupid address book and I ignored it. But I was only sixteen and grieving the loss of my mother, having to worry about proving to a judge that I could take care of myself and didn’t need a court-appointed guardian. Filing for emancipation from the state was no small feat. If my mom hadn’t left me the small life insurance policy, I wouldn’t have made it. In the end, the court agreed I could live on my own, provided I had weekly check-ins from a state-appointed guardian, and my grades stayed the same. I’d had to hold down a part-time job, finish high school, and get into college all on my own. So this address book had been the last thing on my mind. But I couldn’t help but feel guilty now.
Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t realize I’d been standing at the door for too long until Logan reached out and knocked, no longer waiting for me to get my shit together. This was just as big for him. He’d lived a long time thinking he was alone. If we found more dragon shifters today, I knew that would fill some void inside of him.
I heard a kid’s laugh and I froze. Logan’s hand clenched in mine. Three, the number had said in my mom’s book. Three skyborn? A mother, father, and kid? Or just three friends to send her yearly Christmas card to?
A shadow passed over the peephole and a man spoke through the door.
“Can I help you?” he asked, with a hint of nervousness in his voice.
Why wasn’t he opening the door? Normal people weren’t this suspicious, were they? Logan was a little scary looking, I had to admit. I decided honesty was the best way to go here.
“Umm, my mother … Lily Murphy … gave me an address book and—” Before I finished my sentence the door ripped open and a man stood there with his mouth gaping open. He was shorter for a male, with dusty brown hair and bright green eyes. Kind and shocked eyes. Relieved eyes.
“Sloane,” he breathed, and surprise ran through me at his knowledge of my name. “You look just like Lily.” His eyes fell to my staff, but he didn’t seem fazed by the magical weapon.
It felt like time slowed down then. We were ushered into the house, and asked to sit on the couch. I was just sitting there in complete astonishment as he called for his wife to come down.
Green eyes. He knew my mother’s name. My name. I didn’t know what it all meant. A young teenage boy about thirteen or fourteen years old peeked his head around the corner and smiled at me.
“It’s safe, Geoff. You can come meet them,” the father told the kid, and footsteps sounded on the staircase. Logan sat eerily still next to me, clutching my hand. Neither of us said a word, not even mentally.
“They’re like us?” the son asked.
The father looked at Logan, unsure.
They’re like us.
Logan nodded, and the father then nodded to the son. I was about to just blurt it out, ask if he was skyborn, when the woman came down the stairs. She was waddling, one hand around her heavily swollen belly. Pregnant.
Oh. My. God. A baby. A baby dragon?
“Sloane!” she gasped and waddled faster to get closer to me.
I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just had my mouth hang open as weird sounds came out.
“You look confused…” she surmised correctly. “You know what you are, right? Your mother told you?”
You know what you are… I couldn’t deny it any longer. They were skyborn. They had to be.
“No, she didn’t.” I answered, once I finally found my voice. “I found out … after an accident.”
“Oh, honey.” Her face fell, she picked up a photo album off a shelf, and came to sit next to me. Her long, curly blond hair cascaded around her petite shoulders.
“You came just in time. The baby is due in two weeks and we weren’t sure what we were going to do when she had her first shift,” she explained.
Whoa. That thought hadn’t even crossed my mind when I’d seen her pregnant.
I put a hand out. “I’m sorry. Can we back up? How do you know my name?” I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.
She smiled and patted my hand. “Yes of course! I’m so sorry.” She opened the photo album and pulled out a photo. It was of my mother and I right before she got sick. I was thirteen and had weird boobs and acne. Logan tried to hide a smile and failed.
“Your mother kept in touch with us—with all of us—to make sure we were still doing okay. Still concealed. She sent us pictures and letters,” she told me.
Okay.
“My mom was a druid. Why would she want to help conceal skyborn?” There, I said it. Both words. Druid and skyborn.
She didn’t look alarmed, just smiled. “Lily was nothing like those monsters. She helped the queen create us. Took an oath to protect us until death. Don’t you know that?”
Confirmation. Right there, in that one sentence everything became clear. My mother did help create them; I’d seen that through the Eye. Or at least the beginning of that journey. My mother had spent her life protecting Logan’s kind. My kind. My throat tightened, as I tried to keep the emotion from spilling over.