CHAPTER 12

Elliot

It was a good thing Jenna’s uncle couldn’t see us while she talked with him on her mirror.What would he have said to the sight of the four of us sitting around stark naked in Byron’s basking room after the guys and I had just screwed her?

The way Jenna was stroking one hand through her hair and keeping her legs crossed while she and her Uncle Neal talked, and her beautiful, smooth skin had turned an uncomfortable shade of pink, I could tell she was feeling something a lot like the way I felt, and probably even more awkward.Her uncle knew the way it was with us.We’d met him during that whole craziness in the dragon city of Reptos and we’d talked—a little.Neal Callaway knew enough about us to know that Jenna trusted us with her life and that we’d never do anything to hurt her and never let anything happen to her.But knowing all that and accepting that his niece, who’d left Earth as a virgin, was regularly having the dicks of all three of us were two different things.The subject had never come up directly, probably to spare Jenna’s feelings, but we all knew it would be on us to prove to Mr. Callaway that we were worthy of his trust as well as his niece’s.

Jenna set her mirror to record her conversation with her uncle, and the three of us sat at attention as she mostly listened to whatever he was saying.When he was done, she calmly said, “Thank you, Uncle.Yes, I’ll see you soon.Tell Daddy…,” she hesitated a second, then finished, “Tell Daddy I’m on my way and I have a lot to tell him.”Her uncle said one last thing and Jenna ended the call with, “I know.Okay, ‘bye.”

She lowered the mirror onto her bare lap, let out a sigh, and slumped her shoulders a little.I voiced the anxious question that all three of us guys had.“What did your uncle say to that last thing, the thing about you having a lot to tell your father?”

Sighing again and shrugging her shoulders, Jenna replied, “He said Daddy knows.He must know about Nidaag and what happened in Reptos and Uncle Neal must have told him…”

”About us,” I finished for her.

“Part of me should be mad because that should be my thing to tell,” Jenna said.“But Daddy is Uncle Neal’s brother; he wouldn’t keep something like that from him.I wish he were hearing it first from me, but he’s vanished from the face of two worlds all this time.There was no perfect way for him to hear it.”She lowered her head and rubbed her brow.“My God, I’ve never felt so naked in all my life.”

”So what was the rest of what he said?” I asked.“The part you recorded.”

Jenna looked up and replied, “Directions.Uncle Neal gave me directions for where to go to meet him.He’ll take me to see my father.I’m supposed to go there tomorrow; it’s about a half day’s ride from here.”She looked very resolved, which was the way she should look right now, after all this time wondering about the missing Marshall Callaway.“I’m going, first thing in the morning.I’ll need some help getting there.”

”So then we’re going, first thing in the morning,” I said.“Where you go, we go.Especially with Nidaag and his people out there where you don’t know where they could be lurking and watching.”

”Absolutely,” said Byron.“You’re safest with us.”

”We’ll get you to your Dad,” said Cade confidently, speaking for us all.

A soft smile came over Jenna’s face.“You guys.You really are my Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, aren’t you?”

Byron and Cade swapped a blinking, bewildered look.“Huh?” said Cade.“What about a Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion?What are you talking about?Where’s that coming from?”

Despite her anxiety, Jenna laughed a little.“It’s something from Earth that I was explaining to Elliot earlier.An old story about a lost girl…”

I suggested, ”Let’s just put something on for now and get something to eat.I’ll explain about that.See, there was this girl who lived on a farm, and there was this tornado, and…”

We gathered up enough clothes just for the kitchen and the dining room while I told them the story that Jenna told me before the last time the two of us went to bed.My friends found it as strange as I did.

_______________

The memory of it blew up in my brain as if it were happening right now.

We were in a hallway in a townhouse in Reptos, the underground dragon city.Jenna was carrying a metal hanging rod that she’d pried out of a closet for protection.I had an energy rifle given to me by the Intercross, the fringe group from Tellus who’d made contact with Earth and charging and bearing down on us from down the hall was Nidaag—big, black-scaled, purple-winged, hissing, evil-as-fuck Nidaag.

The leader of the Gorgonites, a monster of a dragon, lunged at me faster than I could react and swatted the rifle clean out of my hand, unarming me.Jenna shrank away while I took on Nidaag claw-to-claw.I heard her choking back her screams as the monster dragon man and I snapped at each other, going right for the throat.Nidaag was bigger than I was and ready to kill me on the spot.But I had something better to fight for than all his hatred and power over his followers.I had Jenna.Nothing was going to happen to her while there was breath in my dragon body.

Nidaag and I slammed at each other like two of Earth’s “Komodo Dragons” fighting for dominance.Scales hit hard against scales.Bodies collided with each other with full dragon fury.Roars and shrieks bounced off the walls; the sounds of two reptiles determined to knock each other down.The floor shook under our feet.Jenna sat against the wall, too scared to move, too frozen to run—and not wanting to leave me.I wanted to tell her to get out of there, to go down the stairs and find someplace safe.But Nidaag slamming against me put me on the defensive, knowing the only protection she had was me.

I slammed Nidaag against a wall, cracking it up and down.Nidaag grabbed me and slammed me against the other wall.I slashed him across his snout, hissing for blood.He let me go and reared back with maddened screeching, and slammed his tail against my side.I hit the floor and the black dragon started battering me and flailing all over me with his tail.

And just then came the thing I least expected.I heard another scream, not of a dragon, but the scream of something from another world and that’s just what it was:Jenna, charging at Nidaag and bashing at him with that metal rod.I’d never seen anything like it, this little human girl pounding and smashing this huge black Scaler all over his horns and neck, and up and down his shoulders and chest.She was incredible.It was like a dragon lived somewhere inside her, waiting just for this moment to come out.But Nidaag was too strong for Jenna.He finally got a swing in between her blows, and grabbed her and tossed her away like some human’s toy doll.She hit the floor and dropped her makeshift weapon.Nidaag towered over her.Jenna was dead for sure…

Except that was when I made my move.Jenna’s attack gave me time to dive and grab for the energy rifle that I came in with.I shot Nidaag through the wing, through the shoulder, under his ribs.He dropped hard to the floor in front of me and didn’t move, his body starting to marshal the energy he would need to morph back to his human shape—whatever he looked like, which no one knew.His changing would knit his wounds and save his life from the way I’d brought him down.But Jenna and I wouldn’t stay there to watch him change.Her uncle and other members of the Intercross came up the townhouse stairs and found us.She ran to him and threw her arms around him, and the two of us and the others that Mr. Callaway came with got Jenna out of there before anything else could happen.By the time Nidaag got up, we were long gone.

And that was when I heard a voice calling, “Elliot!Hey, Elliot!”

I snapped back from that remembered danger into the here and now and looked across Byron’s dining room table to where I was getting the funniest looks from Byron and Cade.From one side of me came the gentle touch of Jenna on my arm.She was eyeing me in a curious sort of way.

”Hey, buddy,” said Cade, “are you with us, here?”

”And if you weren’t here just now, where were you?” Byron wondered.

Shaking the memory from my head, I said, embarrassed, “Nowhere.Just remembering something, that’s all.I’m okay.”

”Must have been some memory,” said Byron.

”I’ll bet I know what he was remembering,” said Cade with a smirk and he pointed at Jenna, then at me, and made a gesture with the finger of one hand through a circle made with the thumb and index finger of his other hand—the understood sign for what we’d been doing to Jenna before her uncle called.

“Smooth as always, Cade,” said Byron with a smirk of his own.

“Huh!” Cade said, scoffing.“Like you weren’t thinking about getting back to it, now we’re finished with lunch.I’m all fueled up and ready again.How about you, Jenna?”

Jenna started to say something when Byron, the gentleman as usual, cut in, talking to her, “We never give you much of a rest, do we?”

She smiled in that bashful way that she had when the three of us first met her, when we only knew her as a shy, inexperienced college girl.Even now, after all the sex that we’d shared with her, there were still little moments when I saw flashes of the girl she used to be.They made me wish I could take her virginity all over again.“Well,” Jenna said, “around the three of you, rest isn’t the foremost thing on my mind.”And she laughed a little, showing us how we had distracted her for the time being from her concerns about her father.

“See?” said Cade.“She’s as ready to get back to it as we are.”

”If that’s so,” said Byron, “then I suggest we adjourn back to the basking room.”And to Jenna, he suggested, “Unless of course you’d rather have it in the bedroom now.”

”Whatever’s fine with me,” said Cade.“Elliot?”

I touched her on the hand that she had on my arm.“Anytime, anyplace with you, babe.”I kissed her on the head and she made that bashful look again, which made me want to swipe everything from the table, spread her across it, and bang her right there.

“The bedroom’s fine,” she said, and kissed my upper arm.

“We’ll leave the cleanup for later,” said Byron.“Come along, everyone.”

Byron and Cade got up first and walked around the table, headed for the threshold of the dining room, already unfastening their trousers as they went.Jenna and I got up after them and she started to follow them, but she stopped when I touched her on the shoulder.

”What is it?” Jenna asked.

I put my hands on both of her shoulders and looked down at her, feeling the love pouring out of me and seeing a sparkle in her eyes as if she could feel it.“You know, don’t you,” I said, “there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to stop anyone or anything ever taking you from me.”

Jenna touched my face and replied sweetly, “I know.”

”You belong to me,” I said.“I share you with my friends because they’re the most important people to me—after you.But you’re mine, Jenna.Mine.”

She let me pull her into a fierce, hot kiss, with our mouths moving together and our arms sliding up and down each other’s body; a kiss that left no doubt of the truth of what I’d just told her.

I was a wrestler.I had been physical and aggressive with other Scalers for sport and competition.In my sport I had never actually had to harm anyone.But to protect Jenna, I was capable of doing what I did, and more, to Nidaag or to anyone who ever threatened her and Jenna knew it.

From another room came Cade’s voice calling, “Hey, Elliot!You two joining us or are you gonna do it to her right there?”

As I’d thought earlier, I could have “done it to her right there.”But our friends were waiting.Arm in arm, Jenna and I walked to Byron’s bedroom.