The Oracle resisted the urge to toss and turn. His body ached from laying still for so long, but if he moved, he ran the risk of aggravating his injuries and he was sick to death of aggravating his injuries. It had been months since the battle. As far as he was concerned, he should be healed by now. But here he was, still limping around.

Typically, the Oracle wasn’t super hard to please, but so far, he wasn’t impressed with the human realm. He much preferred the dragon realm with its clean air and infinite stars. And all the, you know, dragon shifters. Not that he’d been able to do much shifting lately. In his human form, O had a very slight limp from his injuries. In his dragon form, he was basically missing an entire, shredded wing. He found his dragon form completely demoralizing and painful. And he figured if he wasn’t going to be in his dragon form much anymore, then he might as well come to the human realm and be a human.

So here he was. He lay, sticky and hot, on scratchy motel sheets and watched an ancient ceiling fan weakly push dust around the room. Orange light from a street lamp lanced in between the shades and mixed with the dark motel room to create an eerie gray color. He was sick of motels. He was sick of food from vending machines. He was sick of being in pain. He was sick of being confused and one step behind.

He’d never once in his life had to work to activate his power. Visions, prophecies, information had all come to him as easy as a gentle stream. Sure, he’d had to work as a young man to hone and control his gift. But he’d never once tried to summon it up and been unsuccessful. But now. Well, now it was like his power slammed the door in his face every time he tried to walk into the room.

O pressed his eyes shut, blocking out the peeling wallpaper. He exhaled a frustrated breath. Warming his palms against one another, he laid them carefully over his eyes, blocking out the light. He drew in air, calmer now. He opened his eyes into the black of his palms and let his consciousness fall backward. Into color. Into time. Into the expansion and compression of space.

Into his power.

Where is he? The Oracle asked the question of the universe, of himself, of his power. Where is the man in my visions? The man who can challenge the king and end his cruel reign. Where is that man?

The scratchy sheets fell away. The heat of the summer fell away. O was weightless. Mountains flew past his mind’s eye. Snow. An evergreen tree. The Oracle saw an overlook. A cliff. Then he was standing on it. He was walking forward. The air was crisp and cool. An eagle dove through the air, but the Oracle lost sight of it in the bright sun. O felt someone at his shoulder. The man. The one he’d been hunting for. O turned to his left.

Pain shot up his side like a flame. O cried out in pain as he curled into himself on the motel bed. The vision was gone. Dried up like water on a hot frying pan. Cut short by his pain. O ran his hand over the knotted muscles and scarred skin on the left side of his body. He couldn’t see through the pain. He couldn’t use his power to lead him where he needed to go or answer his questions.

He knew that the man he was searching for was somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He’d gotten enough visual clues from his visions to narrow it down to there. But that was as far as he’d ever been able to get. So, that was why he was in a crappy motel off of I-15. He was headed west to the Rockies. Where he was going to… search for him. The good old fashioned way. With his eyes.

O let out a humorless chuckle and stretched out his leg.

He’d never felt so helpless in his life. He supposed this was how normal people felt every day of their lives. Completely unsure of what was going to happen next. Of course, his powers were working just fine in regards to everything else. It was just in this, the most important thing to the fate of the entire dragon realm, that he was powerless. Searching for the man in the visions without his powers made O feel utterly blind. Like he was constantly stepping into complete darkness.

He could feel his tension and aggravation rising. It wasn’t the way out of this. If he got worked up, he’d only get more tense and if he got tense, he’d be in pain. He needed to calm down.

A small, cockeyed grin worked its way over his face, making him look much more like the man he’d been before he’d gotten so injured. There was only one surefire way to calm himself down.

Her.

Call him a peeping tom, call him desperate, or pathetic. He didn’t give a flying fuck. O settled his hands behind his head and leaned back into his power.

This was the only thing his power let him fully do. For some reason, his pain never interrupted him when he was trying to see the redhead.

Out of the blue he’d had a dream about her a few months ago. Some human woman whom he’d never heard of or seen before. But she’d called to him. Called him out of a hard time in the dream. And ever since, he’d liked keeping tabs on her. He was discreet, he liked to think. He didn’t want to perv on her. If he checked in on her when she was changing or showering he skipped away immediately. Or almost immediately. He was a man, after all. But mostly he just liked watching her live her life. She had a way about her. Not bossy, exactly. But in charge. She was competent. Commanding. Sure of her next move at all times.

Colors flew past the Oracle in a familiar rushing tunnel until his mind’s eye landed on the redhead’s face. Her eyes were open. They were the clear, bottomless brown of a glass of good whiskey. And they shot through him the way they always did. She rustled, obviously aggravated, in her bed. A flush rose over her skin, glowing with a light sheen of sweat. She pressed her hand against the screen of her window and fell back, frustrated, on her bed. She threw her hands up in the air.

“You’re dead to me, fan,” she muttered and threw a dark look into the corner of her room.

O could feel himself grinning into the dark of his own room. There was something about the menacing look on her delicate little face that was just so dang cute. Though delicate wasn’t exactly the right word. She was more defined than delicate. Nothing on her face flowed into the other. Her eyes were big and lined with dark lashes, her coppery eyebrows sitting atop them like slashes. Her nose, just slightly tipped to one side, seemed almost to have been from someone else’s face altogether. Like she was just borrowing it for a while.

And her mouth. Good sweet holy baby god in a basket down the river, somebody save him from that mouth. It was abrupt and unruly. Smiling as often as it was snarling. But that wasn’t what caught the eye. It was the plump fullness, the natural god-given pout that had a man sweating. There was just so much mouth there to kiss. Or nip at.

In short, she was absolutely gorgeous. And unique. Completely unlike any woman the Oracle had ever seen. And she kinda captivated him. And calmed him down. And made him smile.

He watched as her eyes tracked around in the dark, lost in her own thoughts. Something brought a smile to her face. Then something darkened a worry line between her brows. But that, too, was smoothed away as sleep seemed to blanket over her.

O found himself growing calmer and calmer as he watched her drift away. His mind’s eye shifted so that he was looking at her from the side. Almost as if he were lying in bed next to her. He didn’t let his mind dwell on that for too long because he knew that it would never happen.

He came to the human realm to find the mysterious man who could potentially help them overthrow the king. His powers were running on empty and he didn’t have the time or the energy to go searching all over god knows where to find the redhead.

But he could pretend, just for a second, that he was a regular man. One who wasn’t in constant pain. One who never imagined something like an oracle could even exist. A man who just got to lay next to a beautiful, unique, copper-haired woman on a hot summer night.

A smile crept over his face as he watched her breathe. Her hair fanned out over her pillow and her clingy nightie left very little to the imagination.

There was nothing irregular about her body. She was quite simply stunning in that regard. She really put her clothes to work, in a manner of speaking. Her shirts always strained to accommodate the full, soft curves of her chest. And he didn’t even want to get started on her ass. Her ass was a work of art. A national monument. A love letter to a higher power. Her round peach of an ass was proof that life had meaning.

The sheet lightly obscured her form in the dim blue light of her bedroom and O was almost grateful for that. A man could really get lost in her if given half the chance.

The redhead shifted in her sleep, and gently, like a fawn blinking into the sunlight, her eyes came open. And she looked at him.

O froze. He lay in his motel room, completely alone, of course. But he was also looking directly into her eyes. And she was looking back. Seeing him. The way he couldn’t remember ever being seen before.