Page 214 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

Still, my chest felt tight.

My mother’s hand found mine.

Her fingers were cool, fine-boned, familiar. The hand that had held mine when I was small, guiding my first clumsy attempts at writing Japanese characters I had later neglected out of frustration and shame. The same hand that had once shown me how to cup smoke in my palms, laughing when I burned the edge of my sleeve.

“You must light it,” she said.

“No.” My grip tightened. “Together.”

I closed my eyes. For a long time, I had treated my dragon blood as evidence in an argument I could never win.

Too mixed for those who wanted purity. Too foreign in one room, not foreign enough in another. A wolf’s son without a wolf form. A dragon’s heir raised among pack politics, speaking too little of his mother’s language, knowing too much about transport contracts and not enough about the songs she had been taught as a girl.

I had thought reclaiming the relics would give me certainty.

They hadn’t. But they had given me something better and less simple.

A mirror didn’t become less sacred because it was broken. A comb didn’t become less beautiful because one silver tooth had been repaired. My mother didn’t become less dragon because the Fog had taken her fire. I didn’t become less anything because my blood had chosen more than one inheritance.

My father had tried to tell me that for years. Quinn, with no patience for categories that denied people dignity, had somehow made me believe it.

My mother was clear-eyed and smiling, though I could see the Fog waiting at the edges. A tide held back for now, not gone. Never gone.

“You’re still a dragon,” I said.

Her smile trembled. “So are you,” she whispered.

I brought our clasped hands toward the incense burner. My mother leaned with me, her shoulder brushing mine. She couldn’t summon fire anymore. Her dragon form was lost to her, not by choice, but because time and illness had taken what they could.

Still, when I drew breath, she drew breath too.

I let the fire rise slowly.

Not the hard, consuming blaze I had thrown at Luke Gildstein and his constructs. This was a mere flame made precise by reverence, which I could summon even in my dragon form.

It gathered at the back of my throat, then moved through my mouth in a thin gold line.

My mother exhaled beside me.

No fire came from her, but it didn’t matter. We breathed together. The flame touched the incense burner. For a heartbeat, the room held still.

Then the carved scales along the lid began to glow.

Gold light ran through the old bronze, following lines I hadn’t seen until fire found them. The wave-and-claw pattern brightened around the rim. From inside the burner rose a curl of smoke, pale and fragrant, carrying the scent of cedar, clove, and something mineral and clean, like rain on stone.

My mother made a sound, wounded and joyful at the same time. Tears tracked silently down her face. “It remembers,” she said.

I knew exactly what she meant.

My father covered his hand with his mouth, his eyes shining.

The relics weren’t all repaired. The sword bore scars. The mirror was still partly broken. The comb bore its repaired tooth openly. The necklace was burned at the edge. None of it was whole in the way people pretended mattered.

All of it was home.

My mother squeezed my hand. “Do you remember the song?”

She began before I could answer, her voice soft and thin at first, then steadier as the melody found her. A dragon song carried through exile, through human marriages, through lost language and changed names and a boy who had once been too angry at himself to sing it properly.