Page 50 of The Baby Hex
A potato flew across the room and I had to duck to keep from getting smacked in the face. Yep. That was Mori.
“Where are you, man?” I asked, staying low in case he wanted to toss another potato.
“Oh, my fucking gods!”Daliah chimed into my thoughts and my brain almost exploded at my sister actually listening to what was happening on the family link.“Track his phone and stop yelling! You woke me up from a dead sleep with that baby crying like that! Stop torturing my niece and track his phone!”
“On it!”Ni said without missing a beat.
“Dude? Mori?” I kept calling out as if his ghost could hear me.
“Ghost? If Mori’s a ghost he’s dead!”my dragon said, sitting up on his haunches.
“No, if he’s a ghost he’s over there with Dern,”I rolled my eyes.“We’d have heard all the spirits eat his murderer if he was dead.”
“Shit! Teddy! TEDDY!”Ni yowled inside my head.“HE’S AT SHARON CLAUDIS’S HOUSE!”
Shit! Shit! Shit! Leave it to fucking Mori!
I tossed the half-eaten granola bar into the trash and sprinted out the back door barely remembering to shut it behind me. Ni rambled into my head, demanding that I save his best friend right this second. It took me a few tries to calm him down but eventually I got him to text me the address and turned on my location.
“Thank Frost for Feral Moonscale!” I whispered under my breath as I brought out my wings and flew up to the top of the nearest apartment building to shift fully into my dragon form. Feral ensured every building in the GGB could hold up to the weight of a shifting dragon.
Ni’s panic threatened to overtake me but once I was in the sky my dragon knew what to do. There was no room for panic today. There wasn’t even room to be pissed off at Mori for not at least letting me know he entered Sharon’s house. He should’ve known that we weren’t the only ones using the Other World Gateway Network to travel. Houses didn’t stay empty and shebears were some of the most territorial folks I ever met.
I landed where her street made a T with the crossing street and shifted back to my human form. I laid there in the crosswalk for a long moment waiting for the heaviness of having scales to pass. Shifting back and forth quickly always messed with my head a bit but now wasn’t the time to ponder the big mysteries of the universe like why I had ‘phantom’ scales for hours after I shifted back if I didn’t remain in dragon form for long.
I didn’t bother to knock on Sharon Claudis’s front door and she hadn’t bothered to lock it behind her. She must’ve arrived home and found Mori inside her house. The living room looked like a disaster area with all the furniture moved this way and that. A trapdoor in the middle of the room stood open and a tall, broad shebear lorded over it. She snarled when she met my gaze and somewhere below two people yelled for help. One was Mori but I didn’t have a damn clue who he’d met up with before he broke into her house.
“What are you doing?” I sighed, already exasperated with this woman.
“What am I doing?” she laughed. “Do Moonscales often just wander into the homes of strangers and ask such questions? That’s not how we do things in the GGB!”
“Well, in Moonscale London we don’t knock out windows because we think we own the splooge that comes from our son’s junk,” I rolled my eyes.
“So crude,” she laughed. “Your mum would’ve knocked you upside the head. Lotus didn’t put up with such dirty talk.”
“You clearly never heard my mum burn the Sunday roast, huh?” I laughed too as tension mounted in the air of Sharon’s living room. “Did you actually know her? You look a little young to have gone to school with her.”
You couldn’t really tell the age of a shifter by looking at them but sometimes you could flatter people into not being assholes or at least flirt and catch them off guard enough to knock their lights out.
“I met her a few times,” she nodded. “My grandcarrier was in the support group for all those poor omegas Grady Moore tried to make babies with.”
“Do you descend from him?” I asked.
“No,” she shook her head. “He was never successful with my family lineage.”
“That’s fortunate,” I nodded.
“Did you ask me that because you think I’m crazy?” she asked.
I took a good long look at her. She was tall and broad with dark hair and eyes that were more pupil than iris.
“Is she on drugs?”my dragon chimed into my thoughts.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I shrugged.
“I know the punchline to that one,” she laughed.
“You know you could just let Mori out and we’ll get out of your hair,” I lied.
