Page 30 of Bitten in the Wild

I might not have let him go if I knew what was about to happen. He’d been so invested in every stage of our egg’s development that I felt guilty that he missed the five boring minutes it took me to lay our egg while he faced the shower head mounted on the wall. Still, egg laying wasn’t exactly something I wanted to turn into a spectator sport.I was still waiting for it to harden up when he came back into the nest, wrapped in a towel with water droplets still clinging to his chest.

“Careful,” I said before he ever caught sight of it.

“Oh!” Izora said, his eyes growing to saucers inside his head. “Can I come in?”

“It’s your egg too,” I laughed but still cradled my hands around it while he climbed inside.

“Red like your mom,” he pointed out.

“It’s starting to harden up,” I said, not looking away from the egg. “Then we can polish it.”

“It’s so tiny. I’ve seen them before at this point of development, but it’s still amazing that they start out so tiny.”

“Nature is the real miracle,” I nodded. “After we polish the egg up and get it settled will you take another picture? Just to double-check that there isn’t another one in there?”

“I will,” Izora nodded, a smirk pulling at the corners of his lips.

And he did, but it seemed the red egg that matched my mom’s scales was the only one in our clutch this time.

“This just means we can give all our attention to him or her,” Izora pointed out and I grinned because he was right.

Our little family was officially started, and that meant Castor felt the need to get everyone together and have a baby shower. If I knew they planned on surprising me with such an event, I’d have asked them to do it before I laid my egg. Casimir took over playing ‘bodyguard’ for the nest and not letting any of the guests too close to it or us. His egg still hadn’t hatched, but by day three when they came for the baby shower our egg was already up to my hip and shinier than any wild dragon egg I’d ever laid eyes on.

With Casimir handling the logistics of how to get the guests and the gifts into the nesting room, I kept my focus on Izora and our egg. Now that it was larger, we had to polish it a lot more often and stay close to it so that it didn’t get cold. Izora wanted to place a sticker temperature tracker on it, but I wouldn’t hear of it. There were plenty of things to decorate with stickers. Our egg wasn’t one of them. He gave in without much of a fight and used the one that you aimed at the person or object to keep track of our egg’s temperature.

Castor and Axlin’s wolf pup, Caxlin, howled every time someone brought in another present. He was just big enough to waddle around in his furry form. I’d seen wild wolves before, but never met a wolf shifter. The little guy didn’t seem all that different from dragon hatchlings except for the obvious fact he was a wolf pup. He tried to find things to put in his mouth that he shouldn’t and barked at Waj before hiding behind his daddies.

After opening the presents – a nice bassinet, a chest carrier, bottles, binkies, clothes, and other things that one would expect to gift to new parents, we ate red velvet cake and the conversation turned to the nameless woman in Izora’s vision. They hadn’t found any leads yet but some of the dragons who worked at the Star Room were looking into old manuscripts. Marsin had even added a page to the tips website he made previously to ask if anyone knew anything about such an event. So far it seemed we were chasing a ghost. Well, we were sort of chasing a ghost. Apparently, she was dead and nameless and all that was a bit sad. Almost too sad to talk about at a baby shower, but I didn’t point that out.

“I bet her name was something like door in some old language or sounded like it and that’s why they call them that now,” Sunny said.

I arched a brow. His theory made sense but coming from him it was out of the blue. Maybe he wasn’t all insults and huffing and puffing after all.

“Dora?” Fred offered up helpfully.

“I bet it wouldn’t be that simple,” Elio, Fred’s mate, laughed.

“Who knows? It’s not like dragons get all that creative with names.”

“But elves do,” Sunny reminded him. “My dad fought enough of them that I’d know. Most of them we can’t even wrap our tongues around.”

Sunny’s dads led the Moonscale Dragon Flight on Earthside.

“Earthside, though?” I arched a brow. “Side of what?”

“On the earth’s side of the door,” Izora winked at me.

“You’re trying to make that funny, but that’s why a lot of old shifters called it that,” Teddy said. “They came from the Other World. Which probably had another name at some point.”

I leaned back on the heels of my hands and tried to imagine a world that connected all worlds in some way oranother. Starscale 1 was sort of like that. You could take a shuttle to Starscale 2 or 3. They ran every hour on the hour all day and night in most towns. Only the Other World and the now nameless dead lady didn’t use shuttles. They used doors. Magical doors. Portals of sorts.

“Maybe her name was Portal,” I mused.

“Did houses have doors before her?” Sunny tossed into the conversation.

“The real question is do they look like doors to everyone?” Casimir chimed in from his watchful spot in the corner. “I mean they look like doors to me and to you guys too, but what if that’s just how our brains made sense of one place connecting to another? If I walk out of my bedroom, I pass through a doorway. Maybe Nycto is onto something. Maybe they are portals.”

“The Starscales stopped on lots of worlds on the way here to build our own,” I said. “I wonder if anyone made a record of someone calling them something else? Maybe we should ask the dragons at the Star Room to look into that too.”

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