Page 14 of Claimed for Eternity

“Napping is the best part of eating,” Xenos chuckled as I stretched out with him. “Well, besides the eating part.”

“Get some rest mate. VILLAGE will still be here when you wake up.”

“It better be,” he mumbled.

Chapter Nine

Xenos

My first dream at SLEEP in VILLAGE was strange but not the strangest one I ever had. In the dream, I stood in a library surrounded by books. The shelves went up as far as I was able to see and further yet. Plush red carpet squished under my feet as I stepped around and over open books. All the words in the books were capital letters in the fashion elves wrote the names of places. SLEEP. BAKE. VILLAGE. It was how they separated regular words from names when they so often overlapped.

Somewhere beyond the towering, never-ending bookshelves someone cooked. The sizzling aroma of frying bacon filled the library as I wound my way through what seemed to be an endless labyrinth of books. I wished that our Sigmore Memorial Library back home had this many books inside of it. I wished it could house this many books. On and on I walked, searching for someone to show me where the door was. My awareness of the dream floated in and out. Sometimes I knew very well that this was some absurd hallucinations my brain conducted to parse out details of my waking life but I forgot that fact over and over as I tiptoed around as the open books on the floor grew closer and closer together with each step I took.

“Xenos,”someone whispered.

“Barry?” I asked. “Is this one of those sex dreams? Are you here? For real?”

“Xenos,”the voice called out again.

“Alpha?! I don’t think it’s you. Brain, if this is one of those dreams where you insert some random man and say he’s my mate I swear I will eat you. I will be an auto-zombie. We are not playing this game!”

“Dad?”The voice tried again.

“Which of you is it?” I called out. “Mori? Are you in trouble? Preston? Eben?”

“Dad!”The voice said again, sounding younger this time.“I think I’m lost. It’s dark in here and sort of wet. I don’t know why we came back here. Watch out! Clarence is---”

“Mate,” Barry’s voice penetrated the dream from the very solid world. He kissed my temple and I blinked my eyes until the last of the books faded from my inner eye. I grabbed my phone from the tiny nightstand next to the bed and typed out whatever details of the dream I could remember. Barry waited patiently as my fingers danced over my phone screen. He read over my shoulder and chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know what Clarence is but I think you’re dreaming about the baby,” Barry flashed me a sleepy grin. “Dark and wet?”

I blinked. Had my subconscious mind conjured up my unborn baby? What did Clarence have to do with my child? He wasn’t even a wolf. He was… Well, I wasn’t sure what he was besides a dragon and a pain in the ass.

“Do you think it’s the dead?” I asked him.

If I had asked the question of anyone else, they might’ve told me it was my job to figure it out. I was the seer and the shaman after all, but Barry was my mate and spiritual guardian. He lay back down and motioned for me to put my head on his chest. I loved curling into my alpha and resting my head over his heart. In a world where death surrounded me more often than not the beating of his heart – the heart that loved me before all others – was what often kept me on this side of sanity.

“Maybe,” he said after a long moment of only our in sync heartbeats filling the B&B room. “Maybe not direction though,” he added a second later. “How much time did you spend researching the history of VILLAGE online before we left?”

“A lot,” I admitted. “They had a lot of fights with Clarence and other dragons.” I crinkled my nose as I said it. That old dragon had spent more of his life fighting than doing anything else. He deserved all the hell that his grandkids were raising now.

“Perhaps that knowledge led to the dream,” Barry mused. “Or at least the mention of Clarence.”

“You don’t think Clarence killed our baby in a past life, do you?” I asked, raising my head to look at him.

“If he did, I don’t want to know. It’s hard enough to keep track of the current lives of our children and I really don’t want Cade’s mate coming to beat me up because Cade has to be the leader of the flight after I descale his sire and Medwin might kill me. I could totally take Clarence, no questions asked, but Medwin is a different story.”

I sniffed his chest.

“You smell very serious right now, alpha.”

“I am. Medwin would be trickier to beat. Omega dragons are. They have more belly scales too. So they have less soft places to….” His words trailed off when I put my hand over his mouth.

“I know elves are expert dragon killers and all but maybe don’t talk about descaling and killing two leaders in their own territory.”

“VILLAGE might be inside what they consider their territory, but the elves here wouldn’t take kindly to that opinion. VILLAGE is theirs.”

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