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“No,” we said in unison.
The last time I’d been here, it’d been post-Christmas and snowy and mucky. Now it was full-fledged North Carolina early summer, complete with blazing sunlight and everything fuckinggreenand the sky bright, retina-searing blue withwhiteclouds, and everything was saturated and intense. And bugs. Plenty of bugs. And humidity.
My family was totally going to notice that despite the fact I lived my best island lifestyle, I was not, at all, tanned.
I pulled down the visor and studied my unnatural lilac eyes in the mirror. My hair’s purple tint and highlights could be explained by suspiciously high quality hair maintenance, but my lilac eyes were too distinctive. I’d always had brown eyes. Now they were lilac speared with deep, deep shards of purple and flecks of a cosmic-like black.
Even Keon looked more human than I did. Only Keon’s eyes betrayed he was a dragon. His hair was black and properly reflected the light. The purple was a reflection of my magic. And a tell as to how powerful I was: the manifestation of my scales in human form.
“You’re anxious,” Auryn said.
“I am.”
Auryn put his hand on the back of the seat. “Is it just seeing your family?”
I fiddled with some stray strands of hair and looked at my wrist. No magic coming up. If I made myself pause, I felt something, like when I felt something against my scales, or when I felt the ripples around the dead bodies in the ship. Or the dead bodies in Atlantis. It was impossible to explain in human words.
“Pull over,” I told Keon.
Without questioning, he pulled over to the side of the not-busy highway. I got out and got some of that hot, humid, asphalt-smelling North Carolina in June air. Keon got out with me while Auryn and Akoni slid the door open but didn’t say anything.
“What is it?” Keon asked. “Do we need to not go?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” I ran a hand through my hair again and looked down the road.
“Is it your father?”
“No.” I was sure of that. I squinted in the sunlight. The weight of the stars feltamazing. “Do you think they’re going to do it?”
“Like we get back and they press the button?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, hugging myself.
“Clairvoyance isn’t in a Chaos dragon’s purview,” Keon said. “Clairvoyance is the purview of order and is just a form of extrapolation. You sense things thatdidhappen and disrupted the cosmos.”
“Andactivedisruptions in the cosmos.” The sensation was vague and irritating, like not being able to remember the name of that movie you saw a few years ago while drunk.
“You’re getting more sensitive and this is the first you’ve been topside sincefullymolting.” Keon offered. “Don’t get upset by new sensations that are probably just background noise.”
“Maybe that’s it. It feels like anticipation.” Not the most satisfying answer, and I couldn’t shake the feeling something was… moving.
Keon gave me a gentle smile. “The stars and cosmos perhaps?”
“Maybe, but—”
“Shh.”
“Okay, okay. Back in the van.”
But if what I was sensing was the vague sense of civilization’s impending doom, that was a level of experience I didn’t want nor need.
“It’s sogreen,”Akoni said as we drove down the narrow country road that led to my parents’ sprawling spread. Green trees overhead, the road in a profusion of well...green. Light, bright spring green. A color that Lemurian plants didn’t do. At least not in the same over-the-top all-day-every-day way that topside trees in June could do.
“This way?” Keon pointed to a road with no street sign.
