Page 82 of Sealed By Fire (The Nature Hunters Academy 2)

“This is New York City. The year is 4042 AD,” he said.

The buildings were tall—taller than anything she’d ever seen. Some were oddly shaped,and some didn’t even touch the ground. they were somehow suspended in the air. “Two thousand and twenty-two years in the future,” she said in awe. So wars hadn’t brought the world to a massive fall in technology, the zombie apocalypse hadn’t come to pass, and global warming hadn’t caused the polar ice caps to flood all of the continents. Go figure. “So everyone was wrong?” she asked, not knowing if he would understand her question.

“There will always be war,” Osiris said, obviously having picked up on her line of thought. “The earth is always changing, and it is not for man to understand but to simply move along with it.”

“That was sort of profound,” she said as she looked at the marvelous inventions before her.

“I am ageless with incredible knowledge,” he said dryly. “I can say more than ‘burn baby burn’.”

Shelly couldn’t help but laugh. “Did you seriously just make a joke about your job?”

“All work and no play makes the devil a cranky demon,” he said with a smile that showed his pointy teeth.

Shelly shivered. Those weren’t sexy. Not. At. All. “What else is new in this millennium?”

Osiris motioned for her to follow, and they walked into a building with “Lowry’s” written in script across the front window. Inside, she saw walls lined with mirrors. Within the mirrors were images of clothing in various styles and colors. Shelly watched as a woman walked in front of one of the mirrors and stood there staring at the outfit pictured. Suddenly, the reflection showed the woman fully dressed in the outfit, even though the woman still wore her original clothing. “How the…” Shelly mumbled as she watched the woman turn this way and that, looking at herself from different angles. “Man, that seriously speeds up the shopping process,” Shelly said.

Then the woman took a card from her purse and touched it to the glass, which responded by sliding open. The same outfit hung on a metal arm, which extended on its own accord. She took the outfit, and the arm retracted as the glass slid closed. Shelly stared, her mouth hanging open again, as the woman walked off with the clothes draped across her arm. “That is freaking awesome.”

Osiris chuckled. “As they say, ‘convenience is the mother of invention’.”

“I think it’s ‘necessityis the mother of invention’,” said Shelly.

“No, humans achieved far more than they actually needed long ago. Now, people only innovate to obtain the things they want quicker. It’s as if they think they will somehow add time to their lives if they can consume faster. As if waiting on things somehow shortens their lifespan.”

“It sort of feels that way,” Shelly said. “When you wait in line for something, you feel like you could be doing something more important. When you’re sitting in a car to get somewhere and it’s taking forever, all you can think about is how if you could just get there faster, you’d have more time to experience whatever it was you were trying to get to. Sometimes, even sleep feels like it’s robbing years of your life. It’s just so fleeting.”

Osiris stared at her in awe and want. It was weird. She wanted him to stop, like, yesterday. “What?” she finally snapped, growing uncomfortable.

“You are so, so young to have that kind of insight. Again, you make me see why you’d be the perfect consort for me.”

Shelly scrunched her nose up. “Consort? Isn’t that a term for a glorified hoe?”

“A glorified garden tool?” he asked slowly as if he were reconsidering her supposed insight.

Shelly pinched the bridge of her nose. “Hoe. It’s a derogatory term for what you probably call a concubine.”

“Oh, you mean a woman who exists solely for a man’s pleasure.” He said it so matter-of-factly, as if some women were simply destined for that fate, as if it were simply their lot in life.

“No woman should ever be designated as someone who is simply the purpose for a man’s pleasure,” she bit out through her teeth.

He looked bored as he responded. “But that’s what a woman is, pleasurable. Her body was literally designed to give a man pleasure, both visually and physically. Why is that a bad thing?”

Did he seriously just say that?Shelly once again found herself folding her arms in front of her chest as she tapped her toe. “Because a woman is a human being, the same as a man. She has just as much worth in this world as he does. She has just as much to offer. They are different and have different strengths, but that doesn’t make one more valuable than the other.”

“I didn’t say it did. The same could be said of a man,” Osiris challenged. “A man was built to perfectly pleasure a woman.”

Shelly held up a hand. “Not visually. Their junk is just weird.”

Osiris frowned. “You’ve been with a man?”

“WHAT? NO!”

“Then how would you know what one looks like?”

“Health class, dude. They teach us the basics so we don’t go around making babies like rabbits,” Shelly said and realized just how weird the conversation was. “The point is, that a man and a woman weren’t created for the sole purpose of bringing the other pleasure, and can we quit talking about this? It’s just not right. Like freaking havingthe talkwith my parents.”

“I’m not your sire,” he said with so much vehemence she thought he might vomit.

---