Chapter 30 Jackson
JACKSON
“Okay, son,” Dad said, clapping his hand on my back. “Let me have a look at you.”
We broke our embrace, and he held me at arm’s length. Again, I felt like a child. Standing there as my father checked me over.
“You look good,” he said, a sad smile playing on his lips.
“How are you here? How are any of you here?”
Now that my shock had dissipated, my other senses took over, and I could scent the others in the room.
They were all winged dragons. Upon second inspection, several were familiar.
Most others I’d never seen before. Where had they all come from?
Dad had succumbed to The Vanishing years before.
Where had he come from? I’d mourned him as if he was dead, yet now he was here, as real and solid as anything.
“We have a lot to talk about,” Dad said.
“No shit,” I said, and the entire room erupted in laughter. All save one man.
The man sitting on the couch, draped with a blanket, looked ancient. His dark skin was craggy with age, and his bushy white beard was somewhat unkempt. He looked a little familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Instead of joining in the revelry, he stared out into space.
Tiana and Carson returned, still crying but happy. Tiana’s daughters rushed to her, wrapping their arms around her.
“It’s been a long day,” Dad said, clapping my shoulder. He put an arm around my mother, and she sank into him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Maybe we should—”
A dragon screeched outside. Even from inside, I could tell it was above us. In the sky.
Christian bolted to the window and craned his neck to peer up at the night sky. “More! There are more dragons. They’re flying down toward the house!”
We all rushed out into the front yard. I kept a tight grip on Shyanne’s hand, not wanting her to get too far away. I also stayed beside my father, terrified that he might vanish in a wisp of smoke at any second.
Three more dragons swooped low and landed a dozen yards from our group. Before they’d even shifted into their human form, Tiana let out a heartrending scream of surprise.
At the center of the new arrivals, a handsome man stood, looking harried and confused, but happy. He scanned the crowd until his gaze fell on Tiana. He looked exactly like his daughters.
“Tiana?”
“Leo?” Tiana cried.
“Daddy!” Silvia and Savannah screamed in unison and rushed forward.
Leo Rosen fell to his knees, arms wide, sobbing as his daughters crashed into him, knocking him to the grass. He hugged them tightly as Tiana stumbled forward on shaking legs. When she reached them, she sank to her knees and ran her hands over Leo’s face as if to make sure he was real.
“Those bastard drakes.”
Pulling my eyes from the scene of reunion and love before me, I found the old man standing beside me, fury twisting his face.
“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
He turned his rheumy gaze on me. “Which one of you did it?”
“Did what?” Shyanne asked, though there was something in her voice that told me she might know what he meant.
“Who broke the moonstone?” he asked.
The reason I’d recognized the old man was because of the photos I’d used to find him earlier in the year.
He was Ayumundi. Once the reunions had run their course, Dad took me, Shyanne, Mom, and the historian into a quieter corner of the house, though the sounds of laughter and revelry still echoed through the halls.
I still hadn’t really recovered from the shock, but managed to clear my head enough to listen to the man as he sat across from us.
Dad reached over and patted the historian on the knee. “Mr. Ayumundi, can you—”
“Just Ayumundi,” he said, bristling and pulling his knee away. “No mister, damn it.”
Dad shot me a look, and I shrugged. In all my travels and research, the hunt for this man had revealed two things. One, he did not like being a part of regular society and chose to live far from others. Two, many people didn’t like him due to his abrasive nature.
“All right then, Ayumundi,” Dad said. “It sounds like you know more than I do about what happened. I know I was locked away somewhere. I was gone for a long time, but… I still don’t really know where.
I remember nothing but solid blue skies as far as the eye could see.
No ground, no clouds, not even the sun. Nothing. I was just gliding through the air.”
Ayumundi waved a dismissive hand at him. “Yes, yes. The reliquary. That’s where you were. Where we all were.”
Shyanne let out a short gasp, and we turned to look at her. She sat beside me, one hand on my thigh, the other over her mouth.
“I did this?” she whispered.
“Yes,” Ayumundi said. “You said you broke the moonstone. That was a magical reliquary holding us captive.”
“Wait,” I said, holding my hands up. “I thought The Vanishing was a sickness? One brought about by the elders who wanted to make us more powerful?”
“That was the initial thought,” Ayumundi explained.
“I’d been researching how to reverse it for years.
I even tried to find the initial spell the old dragons used.
It was during that hunt that I discovered the truth.
The winged dragons didn’t mess the spell up.
The drakes, a man named Francesco Anitoli, interfered at the last second, causing the spell to be miscast.”
“Oh my god,” I muttered. “That’s Joseph Anitoli’s father.”
“Correct,” Ayumundi said. “He conspired with many of the other criminal drake families to alter the spell to weaken us, and cause our souls to become untethered to the earthly world, and easily be pulled into the ethereal prison of the stones they’d created.
Unlike his mobster son, Francesco was a skilled magician and also a good secret keeper.
It wasn’t until his death that word began to trickle out. It’s why Joseph came for me.
“He came to my home with some of his men. Threatened me if I said anything. Those threats didn’t matter, though.
I was already sick when they got there. All they did was hang around for a few days to make sure I didn’t go anywhere, and then”—he snapped his fingers—“I went into the prison too. Bastards.”
Dad curled his hands into fists, mimicking my own reaction. Those monsters.
“Are all the drakes in on this?” Shyanne asked.
Ayumundi shook his head once. “No. Just the…er…most unscrupulous ones. The families with no moral compass, who only want to see the winged dragons eradicated. The Anitolis in America. A family named Hoover in Western Europe. Others all around. Six in total. If we want to free all the winged dragons who have vanished, all six reliquary orbs will need to be destroyed.”
“But the sickness will still happen,” I said. “How do we stop that? If the orbs are gone, will the people who get sick die? Will they be transported somewhere else? Somewhere even worse?”
“Give me a few weeks,” Ayumundi said. “Find me a few healers in the returned dragons, and we’ll have it sorted out.”
“Excuse me?” Mom said. “Sorted out? That fast?”
Ayumundi turned and gazed out the window at the night beyond, going silent. As we sat there, I wondered if he would even respond. When I was about to speak, he turned and looked at my mother.
“I’d nearly figured out the ingredients needed for the cure to the sickness itself. I’m not a healer, though. I need that expertise to finalize it. I need my books. I don’t suppose anyone has those.”
“We’ve got a few,” I said. “We tried reading them, but they’re in some sort of code.”
Ayumundi gave me what I could only describe as a predatory grin. “Good. My cipher held. Fantastic,” he said and rubbed his hands together.
“You’re saying there’s a cure to The Vanishing in those damn books?” I said, voice rising. “If you’d written them in plain English, we might have stopped this earlier.”
“Bah,” he said, waving a hand at me. “It would only have cured the sickness that weakens the dragon. It wouldn’t have broken the spell that pulls their soul into the orb. Calm down, boy, and get me some healers to help.”
My shoulders stiffened, but my father patted my back and nodded at me. I relaxed, though I was still pissed that this strange little man had decided to stay a hermit rather than come forward with what he’d known.
“I think we can find some healers,” Dad said, rising from his seat. “I’m fairly certain one of the dragons who returned with Leo Rosen is a healer. There may be more returning soon. Let’s give Mister—uh, I mean, let’s give Ayumundi some privacy to rest.”
“Yes,” Ayumundi grunted. “I like the quiet.”
We left the room and closed the door behind us.
“Well, he’s not very pleasant,” Mom said, crossing her arms and glaring at the door.
The next couple of weeks blew by in a storm of happy chaos.
More dragons returned—over fifty in total.
Tormynd returned the day after my father got back.
He’d only been imprisoned for a short time, but he still looked relieved to be back.
And we were ecstatic to have him home. Every day there seemed to be another reunion, and it had been years since I’d seen such happiness and excitement in the house.
“I home?” Tormynd asked when he arrived at the mansion the morning of his return.
“You are,” I said, hugging him and laughing. “You are home, my friend. Welcome back.”
He shook his head with wonder. “I was at weird place. All sky. No ground. I fly.”
“It’s okay,” I said, patting him on the chest. “You’re safe now. It’s all over.”
He smiled, then narrowed his eyes as he tried to focus on his words, speaking slowly to ensure that he got his point across. “I am glad I see you and others again, Jackson. I thought I never see again.”
“We’re glad too, buddy,” I said, embracing him again.