CHAPTER 1

Elliot

The three of us—Byron, Cade and I—were alone with Jenna in her dorm room.All kinds of things could have happened and something very personal and very private did happen.Jenna showed us something very intimate.

It was a metallic ring, about the size of what she called a “basketball hoop,” whatever that was.It was this ring that had brought her to this world—and into our lives.

We all studied this thing, this “domain ring,” as she called it, and I said, “So this is the magic ring that let you walk through the hole in space from your Earth to here?”

Jenna Callaway rolled her eyes, considering.“‘Hole in space’.I’ve never heard it put that way, but I guess that’s what it is.”Her brown hair fell loosely over her shoulders.Her face, which was not a loud, “come and get me” sort of beautiful, but a quieter, gentler sort of pretty, wasn’t the kind of face that I ever thought I’d be attracted to.I think that was part of what first attracted me to her.Jenna wasn’t an “obvious” beauty, which made her the sexiest girl I’d ever seen—especially when she was thinking.There was something magnetic about Jenna’s intelligence.I’d never responded to anyone the way I did to her.Pursuing the idea of my question, she said, “The domain ring uses the energy of the Ambience to create a space-time aperture, which becomes a portal between worlds.That’s how my father and my uncle got here, and how I followed them.”

The second most intelligent person in the room was probably my friend Byron Ledger, who was part of one of the richest and most prominent families on our world of Tellus— a political family with its hands in government and all kinds of other things.He’d had the best education and been exposed to the best culture.I was just an athlete, a competitor in dragon wrestling and dragon air racing.Our other buddy, Cade Taisce, belonged to a family of tavern owners who dabbled in gambling and some other unsavory things that they mostly kept out of the eyes of the law.Cade was trying to distance himself from all that lately.The rest of us were encouraging him.

It was Byron, being the smartest of us three guys, who said, “You never explained to us exactly how this thing works, except it uses the Ambience.But I’m guessing it has something to do with what I’ve heard about how our two worlds are, I don’t know how you’d describe it, ‘buffered’ against each other.”

”That’s a good description,” said Jenna.“There is a kind of ‘buffer,’ which is a difference in quantum-vibration frequencies between Earth and Tellus.The different frequencies are their own ‘domains,’ you see?Actually, the way it works is that it creates an irregularity, which you could think of as a kind of synchronization, in the frequencies.There are natural synchronization points that happen all over both worlds, but they wink out as fast as they happen; they’re never stable.When my father was looking for a way to draw energy out of fluctuations in space-time, he discovered the Ambience; which for some reason exists on Tellus but not on Earth.That was how he found out about Tellus, another world parallel to ours.

“Daddy found the way to reproduce his original experiment and from there he learned how to use the Ambience to create an artificial sync point.When he was able to create a sync point at will, he found he could step back and forth between this world and our world.Then, all he wanted was to find a way to bring the Ambience and its unlimited, clean energy to Earth and help solve our world’s problems.That’s where everything started—how he came here and my uncle followed him, and how Daddy disappeared somewhere in this world.”

Just hearing all that made my head spin a little.It was clear that Jenna took after her father and her uncle, and she’d inherited the same kind of mind as theirs; she could follow these super-science ideas just about effortlessly.I was just an athlete; hearing her talk about these things made me feel a couple of jumps behind her.There were people who would say that Jenna, who was nicely built but not in that “lay me down” kind of way, was not in my league.Jenna wasn’t big-busted and curvy; her form was as gentle as her face.But at times like this, I seriously wondered what a brilliant girl like this was doing with my friends and me.We were the ones out of her league.That was true, even though I was the one who had the privilege of taking her virginity and Cade and Byron had joined us in the relationship.As much as we enjoyed her and she enjoyed us, there was always a feeling that Jenna was something special that had been trusted to my friends and me, maybe something too special for any men in any world.

”I want to see this thing in action,” said Cade, echoing thoughts that had crossed my mind and Byron’s.“I’ve never seen a hole open up in space, leading to another world.I want to see that.”

“That’s not a good idea here,” said Jenna.“I’ve been doing everything to keep a low profile and not call a lot of attention to myself since I’ve been here looking for Daddy.It wouldn’t help me at all if people found out I was a traveler between universes.The whole thing about being kidnapped and held for ransom by that monster, Nidaag, was as public as I want to get.”

Just hearing that name made me fit to break out into scales and horns, and I could pretty well guess that Byron and especially Cade felt the same way.Nidaag, who didn’t go by any other name that anyone knew; he only used the name of some warrior-king out of the old mytho-historical religion of our world.He was the leader of a cult of dragon supremacists who believed people who could morph into dragons were the “chosen favorites” of their ancient god and should rule over everything, including single-bodied humans.

Nidaag and his people had hired Cade’s family to steal plans for some arcane technology that could turn the Ambience into a weapon.His family had twisted Cade’s tail to make him pull off the heist, and the supremacists had kidnapped Jenna as insurance for the delivery.Jenna’s uncle and I were in on rescuing her, and I ended up in claw-to-claw combat with Nidaag to get her away from him.Meanwhile, Nidaag had claimed “religious persecution” in order to sweep the whole damn thing under the rug, and poor Cade wound up encaged on theft charges because of it, which put a bad taste in his snout about his family.What a bloody mess the whole thing was.But at least we saved Jenna.

“Please,” I said, shaking my head, “let’s not talk about that bastard Nidaag.He said he’d give you back unharmed, but I didn’t trust him.We both know he could have found a way to have you meet with some kind of ‘accident’ before the swap happened.He probably had it all planned with his people, and if your uncle and I hadn’t found you…”

”I know,” Jenna said, touching me on the shoulder.“And I still think Nidaag knows more about me than he’s saying.When I talked to him, I had this awful feeling that he knows where I’m from and he knows about my father, maybe even knows where Daddy is.”She hung her head, staring at the domain ring in her hand.“I keep thinking, the fact that I haven’t heard anything from Daddy must be good news in some way.It must mean that Nidaag doesn’t have him, that their plan wasn’t to use me to force Daddy to cooperate with them, maybe tell them how the domain ring works or even try to force him to build their weapon.But if they don’t have him, where is he?”She looked back up at me, and where I expected to see fear and despair in her eyes, I saw determination instead, which made me proud of her.“I have to find him.”

”We’ll make sure you find him,” Byron said.

”Damn sure,” said Cade.

”That’s right,” I agreed, taking her in my arms.“It’s the four of us in this, right to the end.”

Jenna pressed herself against my chest, and Byron and Cade came in close and folded their arms around the two of us in a group hug.Together, we shared our strength.

“Oh, you guys,” said Jenna.“I love you guys.”

We stayed like that, the four of us all folded up together, for a good long moment, feeling not only our shared strength but our commitment to Jenna—Byron’s, Cade’s, and mine—passing between us, linking us all in bonds that nothing would break.

When we came out of the hug, there was a strange smile on Jenna’s face that made us all curious.“What are you thinking?” I asked.

Jenna said, “I was just remembering the history of ancient days on Earth, before we had airplanes—you know, those flying vehicles I told you about—that could take us anywhere in the world in less than a day.There was a time when men went out in sailing ships on the ocean to explore the world.There were maps of the world the way they knew it then.At the edges of those maps, where no one had been yet, was everything unknown, which scared them.Not enough to make them stop exploring, but it was still scary and there was something they wrote on the edges of those maps.”She actually laughed a little, which was even more curious.“You won’t believe what the edges of the maps said.”

”What?” I asked.

Giggling almost like a little girl, Jenna answered, “‘Here be dragons’!”

I reared back my head and traded blinking looks of surprise with Byron and Cade.“‘Here be dragons’?” I repeated, disbelieving.

”Don’t you love that?” Jenna said, giggling a little more.“Dragons don’t exist on Earth the way they do here, where some people turn into them.But people believed in them anyway and dragons were like the symbol of everything powerful and magical, but mysterious and unknown and scary and fascinating, because it was the unknown and what scares us also fascinates us.Dragons!Oh, if only those ancient humans knew…”

“Well, you know what?” I said, holding her chin gently in my fingers.“Here, right here be dragons for real.”

”And we’re not going anywhere,” said Byron.

”We’re for keeps,” Cade agreed.

“I know,” said Jenna, smiling at each of us.“We are for keeps.”

”And we will find your Dad,” said Cade confidently.“Wherever he is.”

”He’s out there somewhere,” Byron said.“And one way or another, we’ll find him.Your uncle and his friends won’t stop looking, and we won’t, either.”

”You guys are the best,” said Jenna.

”The best for you,” I said, kissing her on the head.“Come on, guys, we’ve got her packed up; let’s get her moved out.”

On the floor were Jenna’s bags and her backpack, ready to go except for the domain ring, her most precious possession.The guys and I got the bags while Jenna slipped the ring into a leatherette sleeve and slipped that carefully into a pocket of her backpack, then slung that over her back.

“Well,” she said, gazing at the empty room around us—the stripped bed, the empty shelves, the bare walls—“that wraps it up for my first year at Pendrake Tech University.It’s sure been eventful—especially since that day at the beginning of Reconciliation Week when I met three handsome guys,” and she gave the three of us that smile again.

Byron said, “And your summer might turn out to be just as eventful.”

Taking Jenna’s hand, I said, “Next stop, my place.”

We all left the room and walked downstairs to exit the building.Jenna would be spending this summer at my apartment, and I was anxiously looking forward to it.We were all anxiously looking forward to it.Byron and Cade would be there with us a lot.It would be the best summer that any of us ever had.

In the front yard of the dorm, the guys and I quickly morphed to dragon form.Our necks turned serpentine; our heads became reptilian and horned.Our skin turned to scales, our hands to scaly claws.We grew mighty wings and powerful tails.I handed the bag I was carrying to Byron and scooped up Jenna, the most precious cargo of all, in my arms.With a proud, excited hiss, I beat my wings and thrashed my tail, and Jenna held on tight as I lifted us from the ground and into the air over the campus, with Byron and Cade flying right behind us.

We quickly claimed the sky, the campus buildings now looking like toys spread on a tabletop below us, the wind rustling against our scales and through Jenna’s hair.Veering off, we flew to the northeast part of Pendrake City, where my apartment was.Jenna was right.Her first year at the University, her first months in our world, had been very eventful, for her and for all of us.

And who knew what the warm summer ahead of us might have in store?