Chapter Sixteen Abel
Frighten your children, if you must. Teach them how susceptible they are. Deter them from a path of crime at all costs, for one act of greed endangers us all!
—Lament of the first dragon’s mother
Translated from The Tale of Stars (L’Histoire des étoiles), Part III: The Age of Mortality
Chapter Sixteen
Abel
On the day of Micah’s first Ignition, before he turned, I’d been protecting him from our parents.
They wanted him on slayer standby in the foyer with the rest of us, but I physically blocked them from going upstairs.
Our parents, clad head to toe in their own equipment, glared at me with folded arms. Micah’s sobs echoed from the second floor.
“Let him go to the fire cellar,” I argued. “He isn’t even in training yet.”
“I’m training him right now,” my mother snapped. “Micah, we paid a lot of money for a custom uniform. Put it on!”
“He’s not meant for slaying! Even The Tale of Stars doesn’t require slayer children to inherit the role. We imposed it on ourselves.”
“He will not lower our family to cowardice,” my father retorted. “Exposure will toughen him up.”
“He’s seven.”
“You weren’t scared at his age.”
“He’s not me! Do you want your son to die?”
“Where is this greed coming from?” my father snapped. “He has a duty to the slayer industry!”
“Madame Afi offered to apprentice him!”
My mother’s gaze narrowed. My father’s nostrils flared like a dragon’s.
Before this moment, I was the perfect, obedient Estellio son.
With six solo slayings and two assists under my belt a year out of official training, I was one kill tally behind Hanna.
To be frank, I wanted the city bells to toll in the dragon-alert pattern so I’d have a chance to boost my tally.
But the night before, when I told Micah about Madame Afi’s offer, he’d hugged me fiercely.
Gods, I nearly cried at how easy it was to return the hug, and how many I’d missed out on.
Now Micah clung to the banister with two desperate hands, still wearing his nightshirt, and watched us argue over his life.
Outside, the twin suns broke the dawn. The edges touched and flared. Micah’s grip on the banister weakened. Face flushed, his glassy eyes fell half lidded and feverish.
“I don’t feel good,” he mumbled.
It happened in heartbeats.
The eyes changed first. Pupils round, then slitted, from one blink to the next.
Then the talons burst from his shaking fingertips.
Then the pain. Gods, his screams. Steam poured from his blistering skin.
His spine bulged and tore through the back of his shirt, head snapping down as if bowing to unspoken orders.
Mouth elongated, fangs gnashed, skull expanded.
He shook his head like a disoriented hunting hound.
Crimson scales flooded from his wounds and overtook his human skin.
Elbows jutted wide, expanding into membraned wings flared for flight.
A whiplike tail lashed out of nowhere and swept the banister aside, reminiscent of my father when he smashed through his empty liquor bottles at the first notion of Micah’s disobedience.
In his final dragon form, my little brother had grown to twice the size of a horse—muscular, lethal, and indistinguishable from the rest of Diu’s greedy spawn.
The transformation completed with a burst of hot air.
Splintered wood hit the walls. The front windows blew out.
Micah curled his talons over the broken landing and roared at us.
The few pieces of furniture we hadn’t brought to the fire cellar exploded under the force of his first fiery breath.
It swept right to left, as if to wipe us out at once.
My parents dodged first. They lunged at him, weapons drawn.
My mother shot a bolt at his wing, pinning it against a faded square on the wall above the staircase where a family portrait had hung.
Micah’s roar became a screech. My father grasped a horn and hauled himself onto Micah’s neck.
Micah reared back. My father somersaulted down his spine and slashed his left flank, hard and deep, with his long sword.
Micah slipped on the steps. His weight dragged him down.
The pinned wing forced his body to twist and expose his soft underbelly.
My father lifted his sword, angled for the gut, but Micah’s wing ripped free.
Steam rose from the wound in his flank, the beginnings of Diu’s healing power.
My mother’s eyes barely flickered. My father merely snarled.
Do you want your son to die?
“Abel!” my mother shouted, loading a fresh bolt into her crossbow. “Aim for its eyes!”
It?
I stared at her. Her order was garbled in my ears.
Another blast of fire swept through the foyer. I ducked and dodged left. The familiarity of the movement compelled me to throw the moondagger—with aim so sloppy, I couldn’t tell if I’d missed intentionally. It grazed Micah’s eye instead of sinking into it for a kill shot to the brain.
Micah had been standing right there just moments prior.
Dragon or human?
I can’t see the difference.
I crouched dumbly in the corner as Micah roared in pain.
Hands shaking. Eyes unblinking. Searching for a sliver of recognition in my little brother’s gold eyes.
I shouted for Duc, my tinderfox, praying he would eat the flames that tore my family’s home apart and buy me time, precious seconds, a fraction of a moment that might convince me that I was hallucinating.
That maybe I was still asleep in my bed under the cold light of a full moon, sweating through a nightmare.
Instead, when Duc came yipping into the foyer, Micah tumbled down the stairs, wing half torn.
The heavy dragon tail knocked our father down with him.
In one sickening crunch, Micah crushed my father and my tinderfox.
He whipped his head toward my mother next. Those blade-sharp fangs punctured her midsection and scattered her organs across the floor.
That confirmed it.
Micah wasn’t doing this.
Micah would never harm a soul.
The way I saw it, this dragon wasn’t my brother. Micah was not a greedy heretic for preferring crafts over weapons. He was an innocent child who would apprentice with Madame Afi and undoubtedly excel. This dragon was a separate, evil entity—and I had to gouge it out.
“Get out,” I snarled at the entity. “Get out of my brother!”
I moved. Slammed a dagger into the center of his spine.
It lodged between two vertebrae. His back legs gave out, but he didn’t stop.
Pupils dilated, hind legs dragging, steam pouring from the hole in his back, he slashed at me with his talons.
They caught me in the forearm and shredded the scales of my armor.
Blood poured from my arm as he twisted his neck toward me.
Fire glowed in the back of his open maw.
But it was his limp hind legs that kept my attention.
I can induce paralysis, I realized.
I don’t know what compelled me to step outside my world view as a dragon killer.
Call it instinct. Observation skills. A need to experiment.
Desperation to find answers within a scenario that made no sense.
Maybe I simply wanted to prove to my parents’ ghosts that Micah wasn’t greedy.
I dodged his stream of fire and lodged more daggers between his vertebrae, closer and closer to his neck.
By the time he lay limply on the ash-and-blood-streaked floor, he panted just as hard as I did.
My hands shook as our gazes met. Only his eyes could follow me.
“Micah,” I said.
No reaction. Just eye contact. Maybe I was biased, looking for my brother in the savage beast I knew too well, but based on the way the pupils flared, Diu’s rage looked a lot like fear.
Only time would tell for sure.
Patiently, methodically, I stepped over him.
I coughed against the thick mix of steam and smoke as I gathered our stock of moonmetal chains from the nearest weapons closet, then used them to bind his body and secure the daggers.
That way, the healing magic couldn’t push them out. He’d stay paralyzed.
Coughing, eyes stinging, I left the chateau and sat outside in the grass to watch it burn.
The suns remained high. In that time, the roof caved in.
The vines on the stones caught fire. My forearm bled profusely, so I tore strips of cloth from my undershirt to bandage it.
Somewhere in Loussil town proper, the church bells tolled the end of the Ignition.
As far as they knew, the area was free of dragons.
I rose, finally. Crossed the estate grounds to the stable, where we kept our horses, and tacked them up to pull a flatbed cart. Minutes passed. Hours. By some force of the Gods, I managed to rig rope pulleys to lift Micah’s paralyzed dragon body onto the cart.
Just as I was about to mount the driver’s seat, a tinderfox whimpered. Lucy slunk out from beneath the ruins and waddled toward me. I took her as gently as possible. I couldn’t tell which one of us was shaking more.
The smoke thickened. The Gendarmerie would notice it soon.
Fire rescue, too. If they found me keeping a live dragon, they’d report me to the Slayers Guild.
I cracked the whip at the horses and trotted off through the back gardens of the Estellio estate, into the undeveloped forest. Once fire rescue and their tinderfoxes secured the chateau enough to search it, they would find my parents dead.
They would presume either Micah or I had turned and eaten the other, only to fly away.
They would not search for us any further.
I moved Micah to where I hoped no one would find him: the cavern we used to play in as children. Witnesses would have to trespass quite deeply into private land to find him.
I’d bought Micah time.
For what?
To return to human form? To cry? Bleed? Feel guilty? Beyond that, I didn’t know what he could do with the rest of his life. I didn’t know.
Not until I cured him.