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Her jaw nearly fell to the floor. “Are you—you’re joking. Madds, I swear I will smack you if you’re joking. And I’ll do it with my steel hand, I swear.”
All I could do was keep smiling.
“You’re not joking? Oh my… you have two of the Moriarty paintings! I can’t believe it! When? How? Where are they? Two of them?”
“Two of them.”
“Where are they?” She repeated.
“They’re in—” Before I could finish, we were interrupted by the door opening. A doctor came in, wearing the gold-trimmed white coat that denoted him as a Marvel. Being able to use the healing green threads of mana certainly wasn’t a requirement for going to medical school, but it clearly helped, and Marvels were set slightly apart because of it. There were human doctors, shifters, even some vampires that were all just as talented and driven to heal, and Marvels couldn’t do everything with their mana. But if someone needed urgent, life-saving attention, then it could be their magic that cinched an artery shut or pumped a heart to keep them alive long enough for a team of surgeons to intervene.
“Amelia, how are you feeling today?” She asked.
“No worse than yesterday, so that’s good. Right?”
“We want to hear you’re feeling better than yesterday,” the doctor said. She had a gentle face, her dark brown hair tied into a tight ponytail. “Are you in any pain?”
“A little,” Amelia said, which surprised me. She hid it so well. I hadn’t even seen her wince once, and she never picked up the trigger on her bedside table, the one that administered pain meds if she needed them.
“Where do you feel it?” the doctor asked. I took a few steps back, not wanting to impede on her turf.
“Everywhere,” Amelia admitted.
“Okay, lie still for just a moment, then.” The doctor proceeded to run a hand over the length of Amelia’s body, thick strands of emerald-green mana appearing in the air and floating down, wrapping around Amelia before disappearing. The doctor flicked two of her fingers and sent more threads of mana, these a pearlescent jade color, up around Amelia’s head, the threads curling around her, wrapping down toward her chest before those too disappeared. She took in a deep breath, and I could see color instantly return back to her cheeks. “That should help for a bit. Is it okay if I steal you away for some labs?”
“Yes, yeah, that’s fine,” Amelia said. “Also, steal? Really, doc?” She lifted her arm.
That got us all laughing. Her sense of humor was always one of the things I loved most about her.
I went to her bedside and took her tiny hand in mine. It was like holding her hand back when we were tiny kids running around the schoolyard together. Nothing between us was ever romantic, Amelia quickly declaring her dedication to being just friends the second I even joked about tiptoeing over that line, and we’d stuck to that ever since. She was a sister to me. Someone who I cared about more than myself at times. “We’ll talk later,” she said, a glint in her light brown eyes that wasn’t there before. I wasn’t sure whether that came from the doctor’s magic or my surprise news, but I didn’t care. Just liked seeing her this happy.
I promised I’d give her a call later and left the doctor to continue with whatever tests she needed to run. Unfortunately, Steel Skin was terminal and incurable, only manageable. At least until the point where the steel covered any of your vital orifices. No one knew what caused it either, with over a hundred different theories offered, all of them more wild than the last.
I had little hope that whatever tests the doctor was about to run would change much, but still, crazier things had happened in this world.
The flight back to the castle was a smooth one, my body and mind finding their equilibrium up in the sky. Every flap of my wings, every swish of my tail, every aerodynamic scale all worked together to give me an ability that not many others could experience. Yes, humans could book plane tickets, and avian shifters could take flight, but it was different when what flew threw the air was a powerful dragon.
I landed as gracefully as I could in the castle’s courtyard, knocking over a vase of lavender tulips my sister had recently planted.
Shit. I’d have to apologize to her later.
My family lived on the edge of a hillside in Malibu in a gothic castle that had been passed down through generations. It had undergone various changes since then and now housed me and my four other siblings, with my father coming in and out at his will. It didn’t look very cozy from the outside, but the inside served as a warm and spacious sanctuary fit for a pretty bad-ass dragon family.
