Dream Walker✔️

3.3

I pounced on the dufflar, letting my instincts take over. The meat was still warm despite its snowy bed. It must've been a recent kill. Claw and tooth marks told me Aster had had first choice of the meat, as was his right as the one who'd killed it.

A muffled gag drew my attention back to Aster, who seemed to be watching me in morbid fascination. I looked away as my stomach turned with embarrassment. I'd forgotten how squeamish he could be. Back home, it didn't come up a lot. I'd only seen him get really sick when one of the horses broke a leg and the bone went through the skin, but he'd never been keen on seeing any type of injury at the stables. He'd always kind of lived up to the "city boy" nickname invented by his fellow stablehands.

He'd never been around horses or any other livestock animals before coming to work at the estate. I always thought working at the estate stables was an odd choice for him, and now knowing he was half dragon, it seemed even odder. What were the chances that possibly the only one-and-a-half dragons on Earth ended up living in the same house?

Wanting to distract Aster from his queasiness, I asked, "I can't remember, why'd you start working at the estate in the first place?" Curling my wings around my meal, I finished up every edible part of the dufflar—including the bones, which had a nice crunch—while waiting for Aster's answer. It wasn't until I'd buried the scarce remains and cleaned my hands and mouth in the snow that he actually said anything.

"I had a dream about working on the estate." Brows furrowed, he seemed more pensive than I would've expected for such a simple question.

"What, like when you were a kid, you dreamed about working on the Ortiz estate? I thought you lived in a pretty big city miles away."

"I did." His frown deepened. "It wasn't that kind of dream. A few years back, when I was looking for a summer job, I had this dream about-" He chuckled, still looking perplexed. "It's weird, I dreamed about Kaelon, my birth dad. I didn't know much about him at the time, but the guy in the dream told me I'd learn more about him if I came to the estate. Stupid reason, I know, but the estate job paid well, so..."

I blinked, feeling a weird sense of familiarity at his dad's name. "Your dad is Kaelon?"

"Yeah. Have you met him or something?"

"No, but I think Shade—that's the scorpion guy who told you to keep me away from the portal—well, he told me about a Kaelon. Yeah, Kaelon was his teacher. Shade was going to be the next guardian of the interdimensional portal because Kaelon wanted to retire. To Earth. To be with his human wife and kid." His story had never really interested me when I thought it was just a dream tale. But now I knew it was real, it explained so much. It made perfect sense Shade would take his teacher's son under his wing and convince him to come to the estate. It also explained why Shade had called Aster 'halfling.' He'd known all along what Aster was, and he'd never told me. That sneaky bastard.

Aster gaped at me. "Why didn't you say anything about him?"

I shrugged. "I forgot. Shade's literally been teaching me since I was a little kid. There's a lot of stuff I've forgotten about Mystica and its history."

"What happened to him?" His voice was softer now, tentative, vulnerable.

He'd told me once about his dad. They'd never met, but Aster had spent his whole life thinking that his dad abandoned him before he was ever born. He'd never had a good opinion of Kaelon, but I knew he secretly wished he could've met his birth dad, if only to give him hell for abandoning his family.

I tried to remember what happened to Kaelon, but it took me a minute to remember. "Merlin got to him. Kaelon was one of the first victims of his experiments. As the guardian of the Great Portal who was about to retire to Earth, I guess he was an easy target. No one would miss him on Mystica for a while."