2
Marc
The first time it happened, I thought I was dying.
I was sixteen. It was a Tuesday evening in October, the kind of night where the cold was just starting to mean business, and I was in my bedroom doing calculus homework with the window cracked because I ran hot—always had, though I didn’t understand why until later. My mother was downstairs making dinner. My father was in his study, grading papers. The house smelled like soup and old books, and everything was normal, everything was fine, and then my skin caught fire.
Not metaphorically. Not the way people say I felt like I was burning when they mean they were embarrassed or angry or afraid. I mean my skin lit up from the inside, a heat so intense and so wrong that I fell off my desk chair and hit the floor with my hands pressed against my head, trying to hold myself together, because it felt like something underneath was trying to get out.
I screamed. I know I screamed because my mother was in the doorway within seconds, and the look on her face—I will never forget that look as long as I live. It wasn’t confusion. It wasn’t the panic of a parent who doesn’t understand what’s happening to their child.
It was recognition.
She dropped to her knees beside me and grabbed my face in both hands, and she said, in a voice that was terrifyingly calm, “Marc. écoute-moi. You need to breathe. Breathe through it. Don’t fight it.”
Don’t fight it. As if I had any choice. As if the thing happening to me was something I could negotiate with.
My spine cracked. Not broke—cracked, the way a knuckle cracks, except it was every vertebra at once, a cascading series of pops that traveled from the base of my skull to my tailbone, and my vision went white, then gold, then split into something prismatic that showed me the world in colors I didn’t have names for. I could see the heat signature of my mother’s hands on my face. I could see the electrical current running through the wires in the walls. I could smell the iron in her blood, the calcium in her bones, the adrenaline flooding her system in a sour, bright wave that tasted like copper on my tongue.
My hands weren’t hands anymore.
I looked down and saw—scales. Dark, iridescent, catching the light from my desk lamp in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. My fingers had lengthened, thickened, the nails curving into something that tore through the carpet when I flexed them involuntarily. The heat was still building, a pressure behind my sternum that felt like it would split me open if I didn’t—
“Henri!“
My mother’s voice, sharp now, cutting through the roar in my ears. “Henri, it’s happening. Come now.”
My father appeared in the doorway. He was a quiet man, my father—a history professor who wore corduroy and spoke softly and had never, in my sixteen years of life, given me any indication that he was anything other than exactly what he appeared to be. But when he saw me on the floor, half-transformed, my bedroom furniture starting to crack under the expansion of a body that was rapidly outgrowing its human dimensions, he didn’t flinch. He knelt beside my mother, put his hand on the back of my neck—the scales parting for him like they knew his touch—and said, “Let it come, son. You’re safe. Let it come.”
I shifted fully for the first time in my childhood bedroom, and I destroyed everything in it. The desk splintered. The bed frame buckled. The window shattered outward, glass spraying into the backyard, and the cold October air rushed in and met the heat pouring off my body in waves, and for thirty seconds I existed as something ancient and enormous crammed into a space built for a teenage boy, and I was so terrified I couldn’t breathe.
Then it receded. Slowly, agonizingly, like a tide pulling back from a shore it had reshaped. I shrank. The scales retreated under skin that felt too thin, too fragile, too human. I was on the floor in the wreckage of my room, naked—my clothes hadn’t survived—shaking so hard my teeth were chattering, and my mother wrapped a blanket around me while my father was already on the phone.
He spoke in rapid French, too fast for me to follow in my state, but I caught fragments. Il s’est transformé. Oui, complètement. Non, personne ne l’a vu. Nous partons ce soir.
We’re leaving tonight.
I didn’t understand. I was sixteen, and I’d just turned into something impossible, and my parents were acting like they’d been waiting for it. Like they had a plan. Like there was a phone number to call and a protocol to follow, and all of it had been sitting in a drawer somewhere, ready, for years.
“Maman,“
I managed, through teeth that wouldn’t stop clicking together. “What—what am I?”
She looked at me with eyes that were wet but steady, and she said, “You are what your grandfather was, and his mother before him. You are a dragon, Marc. And we need to leave this house before anyone questions what happened to your window.”
They weren’t dragons themselves. Neither of them could shift, had never shifted, carried the gene the way some people carry the gene for red hair without ever being redheads. But they knew. They’d always known it was possible—that the heritage running through my father’s bloodline could surface, could manifest, could turn their son into something that the world wasn’t built to accommodate, and because they didn’t know they were unable to warn me. They’d hoped it would skip me the way it had skipped my father, his brother, his cousins. It hadn’t.
My father hung up the phone and looked at my mother, and something passed between them—a conversation conducted entirely in the shorthand of a marriage that had weathered the anticipation of this exact crisis. In that look was everything they’d prepared for and everything they couldn’t have.
“We have an hour before they repair the house,“
my father said. “The community in Lethbridge has a place for us. It’ll be fine.”
An hour. That was all the time between my life as it was and my life as it would become. One hour to pack what mattered into the back of our station wagon, to leave behind the house where I’d grown up, the neighborhood I knew by heart, the school where my books were still in my locker and my lab partner was expecting me tomorrow morning for a chemistry exam.
Felix was expecting me tomorrow morning.
The thought hit me like a second transformation—not physical this time, but something just as violent, just as total. Felix, who would walk to my house at seven forty-five the way he did every morning, breath fogging in the October cold, backpack slung over one shoulder, already talking before I’d even closed the front door because he was always mid-thought, always mid-sentence, always mid-everything. Felix, who would knock and wait and knock again, and eventually the door would open and it wouldn’t be me.
“I need to tell Felix,“
I said. My voice came out raw, scraped, barely human. “I need to—let me call him. Let me just—“
“No.“
My father’s voice was gentle but absolute. The way he said it—not cruel, not dismissive, but final—told me this wasn’t a negotiation. “Marc, you cannot. You understand what happened tonight. You understand what you are. This is not something we can share. Not with anyone outside—“
“He’s my best friend.“
The words cracked in half on the way out. “Papa, he’s my—“
I couldn’t finish that sentence. Not in front of my parents. Not when the thing Felix was to me didn’t have a name I’d ever spoken aloud—the way my chest went tight when he laughed, the way I’d memorized the exact shade of his eyes in different lights, the way I dreamed about him with a specificity that left me breathless and guilty and aching every morning. He was my best friend, yes. But he was also the first person I’d ever loved with the full, devastating weight of a heart that didn’t know how to do anything by halves, and I was about to disappear from his life without a word.
“Marc.“
My mother’s hands were on my face again, thumbing away tears I hadn’t realized were falling. “Mon c?ur. I know. I know what he means to you.”
She knew. Of course she knew. Mothers always know.
“But this is about your safety,“
she continued. “And his. The community will explain everything when we get there. But tonight, we leave. And we leave cleanly. No contact. No trail.”
“He’ll think I didn’t care,“
I whispered. “He’ll think I didn’t—that he wasn’t—“
My mother pulled me against her, and I broke. Sixteen years old, wrapped in a blanket on the floor of my destroyed bedroom, sobbing into my mother’s shoulder while my father packed suitcases with quiet efficiency in the next room. I cried for the impossibility of what my body had just done, and for the calculus homework I’d never finish, and for the boy down the street who was probably asleep right now, unaware that the world was rearranging itself into a shape that wouldn’t include me anymore.
I cried because I knew Felix. I knew him better than I knew myself. And I knew, with the sickening certainty of someone who understood the map of another person’s wounds, exactly what my disappearance would do to him. Felix, who’d already lost his father because the man simply decided one day that his family wasn’t worth staying for. Felix, who measured love by presence—by showing up, by consistency, by the accumulated evidence of someone choosing you again and again and again. I was about to become the second person to vanish from his life without explanation, and I knew it would confirm every terrible thing he secretly believed about himself.
That knowledge was worse than the transformation. The shift had been pain, but it was honest pain—the body doing what it was built to do. This was something else. This was choosing to wound someone I loved because the alternative was a danger I didn’t yet fully understand, and being sixteen and terrified and having no power to choose differently.
We were in the car by midnight. I sat in the backseat surrounded by hastily packed boxes, wearing my father’s sweatpants and a coat that was already too small across my shoulders, because I’d changed back into something too big for my once skinny body to fit my clothes, and I watched the streetlights of our neighborhood slide past the window like a countdown. I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and thought about Felix finding the empty house in the morning. I thought about the look that would cross his face—the confusion first, then the slow, dawning understanding that something was wrong, then the phone calls, the searching, the gradual erosion of hope into something harder and more permanent.
I thought about it for the entire eight-hour drive to Lethbridge, and for every day after that for fifteen years.
They told me I couldn’t contact him. The dragon community in Lethbridge was clear about this—painfully, inflexibly clear. You do not reach out to humans from your previous life. You do not write letters. You do not make phone calls. You do not send emails that could be traced, screenshotted, forwarded. The secrecy wasn’t cruelty—it was survival. Centuries of survival, bought with the discipline of every dragon who’d ever wanted to reach back toward the life they’d left behind and hadn’t.
I understood the reasoning. I even, eventually, accepted it intellectually. Dragons could never be exposed. The ancient history was a litany of horrors that made my personal heartbreak seem small by comparison—and that was exactly what they told me, in those early months, when I’d sit in the communal kitchen of the Lethbridge sanctuary at three in the morning, unable to sleep, turning my new phone over in my hands like a rosary.
“You are not the first to leave someone behind,“
said éloise, the elder who oversaw new arrivals. She was four hundred years old and looked sixty, and her eyes held the particular patience of someone who had watched centuries of young dragons grieve. “And the pain you feel is real. But one letter, one phone call—it is a thread. And threads can be followed. Not just to you, Marc. To all of us. To every dragon in this community.”
She was right. I knew she was right. And I hated her for it with a fury that I later recognized as misdirected grief.
So I didn’t call. I didn’t write. I didn’t drive back in the middle of the night the way I fantasized about doing—pulling up to Felix’s house, climbing through his window the way I had a dozen times before, sitting on the edge of his bed and saying I’m here, I’m sorry, I’m something impossible and I couldn’t tell you but I’m here. I didn’t do any of it, because the rules existed for reasons bigger than me, and because I was sixteen and then seventeen and then eighteen, and each year that passed made the silence harder to break. What would I even say? How do you explain a year of absence? Two years? Five?
At some point, the silence became its own prison. It had walls and a roof and I lived inside it, and reaching out stopped being something I chose not to do and became something I didn’t know how to do anymore. The gap between us had calcified into something that felt permanent—remove it and everything I’d built in its place would collapse.
I built a lot. I’ll give myself that. I learned to control the shift, to call it and release it, to exist in the space between human and dragon without tearing myself apart. I played hockey—the one thing from my old life I was allowed to keep, because the ice was the only place where the fire inside me made sense, where the speed and the aggression and the impossible reflexes were assets instead of liabilities. I was good. Good enough to play junior, but not good enough to get looks from scouts, and I eventually became satisfied I had enough hockey knowledge crammed into my skull to pivot into coaching.
I moved through the world. I dated—briefly, unsuccessfully, with a pattern my therapist in Lethbridge identified as “preemptive emotional withdrawal.“
I made friends who didn’t know why I sometimes went quiet in October, or why I couldn’t hear a particular song without leaving the room. I earned my coaching certifications. I worked my way up from pee-wee to junior to the AHL, and when the Colorado Dragons—a franchise quietly stacked with dragons in key positions, because Ignatius Steel understood the value of placing his people where they could protect each other—offered me an assistant coaching role, I took it.
I took it knowing that it was the NHL. That it was public. That my name would be on a website, on a staff page, searchable, findable.
Part of me—the part I didn’t examine too closely—took it because of that.
And then Felix walked into my life with a camera and a lanyard and eyes that were exactly the same shade of brown I’d memorized, and the fifteen years of walls I’d built inside the silence came down like they were made of paper.
I knew he’d have shot the morning skate with the focused intensity that I recognized from every group project, every study session, every afternoon we’d spent in his mother’s basement where he’d edit short films with the same obsessive precision he was now applying to hockey content. He’d grown into himself—taller, leaner, the sharp features that had been slightly too angular on a teenager now settling into something striking. He looked like a man who’d figured out how to exist in the world on his own terms, and the realization that he’d had to figure that out without me was a knife I deserved.
I wanted to tell him everything. Standing in that break room, watching him hold his coffee cup like a weapon and his composure like a shield, I wanted to say: I didn’t choose to leave you. I was sixteen and terrified and my body turned into something out of a myth, and the people who were supposed to keep me safe said the only way to do that was to cut you out completely, and I have regretted it every single day since. I have carried you like a phantom limb—the absence of you so present it has its own gravitational pull that has warped every relationship I’ve tried to build since.
But he looked at me with that precise, professional smile—the one that didn’t reach his eyes, the one that was designed to communicate I see you and you are nothing to me—and I understood something that the fifteen years of silence had obscured.
Felix had built a life without me. A whole, functioning, successful life. He’d survived my disappearance the way he’d survived his father’s—by turning the wound into a brick and the bricks into a wall. He’d gotten a degree, built a career, moved across the country to take a job that was clearly a significant step up, and none of it had required me. None of it had included me. I was a chapter he’d closed, a scar he’d learned to live around, and showing up now with explanations I couldn’t fully give—because the dragon secret was still the dragon secret, still not mine alone to share—would be nothing more than tearing open something he’d spent years healing. So I stood there in the break room and let him walk away. I watched the door close behind him, and I didn’t follow, and the sound of his footsteps fading down the corridor was the most familiar pain I’d ever felt.
I stood there for a long time. Long enough for the fluorescent lights to start buzzing at a frequency only I could hear—one of the many small, inhuman gifts that fifteen years of training had taught me to ignore in public. Long enough for the water bottle in my hand to warm to body temperature, which for me was about four degrees higher than it should have been.
We’re colleagues. That’s the extent of what we need to be to each other.
He was right. He was absolutely right, and the responsible thing—the safe thing—was to accept that boundary with the same discipline I’d applied to every other impossible want in my life. I was good at discipline. I’d built a career on it. I could channel this the way I channeled everything else: into the work, into the ice, into the controlled burn of a life lived carefully within its prescribed lines. but every feeling I had didn’t feel right. I was sick of feeling right when right meant compromise and acceptance.
I threw the water bottle into the recycling bin with more force than necessary and went back to my office.