Page 87 of Emerald Waves
“I bet the two of you will have fun with that.”
“We will, and hopefully, one day soon, Odem’s little one will be here to join in the fun.”
“Was he the brother you were closest to growing up?”
“Him and Mattias, yes, but it was Odem and I who got up to the most shenanigans together,” I said, chuckling at one of the memories that popped into my head. “We were always extremely curious and poking into everything and I do mean everything. This one time we found some porcupine quills on the ground and discovered that they were hollow. We could actually string them together with a needle and thread and make things out of them. The problem was collecting the quills.”
“Oh no. I’m almost too scared to hear where this story is going.”
Chuckling, I glanced over and grinned at him. "It's a doozy, are you sure you don’t want me to share it?”
“Doh! You would say that, wouldn’t you! Now you must share it, even if my heart starts racing a mile a minute at the thought of Cade getting up to something like that.”
“He will, and it will be okay, I promise. He’ll poke into things and get a few scrapes and bruises that we’ll kiss and fuss over, but his dragon is already strong and growing stronger every day. We gave that to him, Em. A gift that will protect him always, the same way we will.”
I felt him relax at hearing that and he leaned into me more, sighing contently.
“Okay, I think I can handle the rest of the story now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Go for it.”
“Well, we didn’t want to hurt them, so we studied them for a while, and finally figured out that they shot those quills at anything that scared them. So out we popped, in our dragonet forms scaring all the porcupines we could find, since their quills couldn’t pierce our scales. We wound up with a sack full of quills and a forest full of upset porcupines, until Odem forgot to close his eyes and caught a quill right in the corner of one. We were so lucky it wasn’t a direct hit and that the quill came right out whenhe tugged. We were shaking though, we were so scared when our mom and Ionus found us. Needless to say, we weren’t allowed to roam on our own for a while after that.”
“I’d have glued you two to my hip after that!”
I couldn’t help it, the moment he mentioned glue I recalled yet another sticky situation Odem and I had gotten into and started chuckling.
“How can you sit here and find that funny?”
“You said glue,” I said, feeling Cade giggle as my laughter bounced his egg. “And then I remembered the time Odem and I accidentally got stuck together by tree sap in our dragonet forms and had to figure out how to get back home, because there was sap all over our wings and they got stuck to us and each other when we tumbled snout over tail trying to figure out flying while each only having one wing to use.”
“Wait, you mean like a three-legged race?”
“Yup, only in this case, it ended up being a bouncing mess of sticky dragonets rolling down a grassy hill, getting all kinds of leaf bits and bugs stuck to us by the time we reached the bottom.”
“Oh, I’m sure your mother loved that.”
“She was not amused, especially when it came to trying to get the mess cleaned off our scales. Odem tried to help, I’ll give him that, and heating it did let her get us unstuck, but there was still a filthy, sticky, tacky residue all over us. Every time we touched something it wound up stuck to us, and no amount of scrubbing, which our mother tried a great deal of, was able to get it off.”
“How’d you get rid of it all?”
“Odem,” I replied, chuckling once again. “The bubbles tickled his nose, and he sneezed fire all over me. Between the steam from the water we were sitting in and the heat from the flames, because he couldn’t stop sneezing, he finally just charred it all. Our mother just pinched the bridge of her nose and mutteredabout how she should have tried flames in the first place. I can’t tell you how many times she asked the Goddess to give her strength after some of our antics, but it was a lot.”
“I bet. And yet it’s Ionus who has the firebug twins, how Ironic is that?”
“Right? I’m sure he’s wondered the same thing a time or two, while racing for a fire extinguisher.”
We both chuckled at that, as the sky began casting a red glow over the valley and Emerson let out a soft little oh.
“It’s showtime,” I murmured, caressing the tip of our egg while settling in with my mate to watch the stunning sunset nature treated us to.
The earth was truly amazing, and I needed to do better by it.
“Oh my god this is bliss,” Emerson moaned as he sunk into the bubbling hot tub and leaned back against the side.
“You look the picture of contentment, my love,” I said as I sat rocking on the metal bench swing beside the hot tub with Cade cradled in the carrier strapped to my chest.
