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“Impossible.”
It has to be.
“Robby.” Damien said my name in a gentle way. So gentle it made me crack. I started to blink away tears. My thoughts careened in a thousand different directions. I couldn’t pull one out of the tangle, couldn’t form a sentence. A twin? A brother? I had a twin brother out there. I wasn’t as alone as I thought I was. If Ben wasn’t lying about this, wasn’t confused, then it would change my life in ways I couldn’t even begin to fathom.
I somehow managed to put together a slightly coherent sentence. “How—how do we save him? How, if this is real, how do we get him back?”
That’s when the other axe dropped.
“We can’t,” Ben said with the cold delivery of a surgeon explaining to the family that their loved one didn’t make it. “His death was what started the dragon fall.”
“No… oh no.” The dam shattered. The tears flowed as the world reeled around me, my entire reality being altered in a matter of minutes. Damien pulled me against his chest as I repeatedly asked ‘how, how, how’, unable to understand how I could feel such a visceral pain for someone I hadn’t even known existed until moments earlier.
But the pain was sharp and deep. A knife twisting through my ribs, slicing cartilage, puncturing muscle.
I had a twin, and I’d never meet him.
All I could do was cry.
Chapter 12
Truths and Prophecies
Damien
I felt powerless as Robby crumbled in my arms. In one fell swoop, his entire view on life shattered. To learn that he had a twin brother, one who he’d never get the chance to meet, it was enough to make even the strongest among us turn to dust. I couldn’t begin to imagine it. How the very foundation of his world had just been rocked.
“How?” he repeated into my chest. My family stayed gathered in complete silence, except for Warrick’s heavy breathing. Dawn came back from the kitchen with a glass of ice-cold water. She went over to Robby and rubbed the small of his back. He turned to face her, cheeks streaked with tears.
“Here, drink some.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking the glass in shaky hands and bringing it up to his lips. My shirt had the imprint of his face, my chest wet underneath. “How?” he asked again. “My mom… she never said anything. And why was my brother’s death what triggered the dragon fall?”
“All very good questions,” Dawn said, her voice soft. She adjusted her gold necklace, moving the single pearl back over her T-shirt. Snow white scales glittered on her wrists. “I think the prophecy might have some of those answers.”
“What was it again?” Xavier asked. He had the memory of a goldfish.
Dawn, without skipping a beat, recited the entire thing:
“When the dragons’ roars fall silent, and the curse burns through their veins,
To ash they turn, their life’s fire to wane.
Yet a glimmer of hope in the human remains,
The one who was sacrificed, yet now again regained.
Death’s icy grip shall lay claim, to undo what has been done,
One of two souls, under the waning dragon moon and sun.
The lifeblood of the one who invoked it first,
May be the lifeblood that quenches the curse’s thirst.”
Robby shook his head and rubbed away at his eyes. He moved over to the couch and sat down with his hands hanging between his legs and his head dropped. Ben, the vamp, moved back to Maddox’s side. I knew he wasn’t under the Matriarch’s directives anymore, but I still kept an eye on him at all times. There was a natural distrust underlying a vampire and dragon’s relationship. I still didn’t fully understand how Maddox could have a romantic connection with him.
I hooked onto one particular line. “The one sacrificed— yet now again regained. You’re the twin who was regained.” And then another line jumped out at me. The line that immediately followed talked about a death undoing what had been done…
“When were you born?” Dawn asked, pulling out her phone.
“July tenth. Why?”
She typed something into her phone and then looked up. “Because that was the last time there was a dragon sun and moon.”
It happened randomly but never frequently. I’d only ever seen it once in my twenty-eight years of flying this Earth. A dragon sun and moon were what happened when the sun turned a scarlet red in the sky and the moon shifted to a bright blue. The celestial event was named after the first two dragons who had come from one of the Tears, a blue and red mated pair who were the first to establish peace between the humans and the newcomers.
Robby’s next question was the one that permeated through my every thought. “So if my brother’s death caused the dragon fall—does mine end it?”
You could hear a puff of cotton fall against the floor with how silent the room became.
