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I steadied myself with a deep breath. Fire roiled in my lungs, licking at my ribs and warming the space around my heart. I stormed down the hall, past the sun-soaked library and the neon-lit workout room, going down the spiral staircase and through the domed living room. Anyone else likely would have gotten lost inside our home, but I knew this place like the back of my wings. It had been in our family for generations, ever since the first dragons arrived through the Tear all those years ago. And we had zero plans on letting it go anytime soon.
“Where you running off to?” It was Xavier, standing in the doorway to his bedroom. He wore a tank top, the golden scales on his biceps catching the multicolored light from a stained glass window, reflecting some of it back onto the smooth gray stone that made the walls of our fortress.
Xavier had the ability to control time, but only through turning it back by a couple of seconds, along with getting vague flashes of the future at random moments. And as opposed to the fire that I could breathe out in my dragon form, Xavier produced a stream of sand. Which didn’t sound all that intimidating until it was cutting into your face and filling up your lungs, crushing you under its weight, drowning you without a single drop of water.
He also had the biggest baby face out of all of us, making him seem even more harmless than he actually was, considering he worked as a personal bodyguard to the rich and famous.
“I’m grabbing something from my room and heading to Claire’s shop. I think she’s found something.”
“About the sickness?” he asked.
I nod, and Xavier’s face lit up. He pushed back a soft strand of dark curls that fell on his forehead, revealing a spackling of light birthmarks that popped against his glowing skin. “Well, then give me three minutes to put on some shoes. I’m going with you.”
“You don’t have to,” I assured him. I was close to my brothers, but we rarely worked together, and when we did, things usually went south. We just had very different ways of looking at the world, and that created challenges we weren’t always equipped to handle.
“I’m going,” Xavier insisted, his voice loud.
“Going where?”
Our other brother, Maddox, walked down the hall with a white towel around his neck and sweat beading his forehead. Icy-blue scales followed the line of his left eyebrow, more of them creeping down the side of his neck. He held a glass of water, the sides slick with condensation.
Maddox was—to no one’s surprise—an ice dragon, able to manipulate the temperature around him to suck out all warmth and replace it with a searing, bone-shaking cold. He could shoot a stream of ice from his throat, forming them into body-piercing icicles if need be. He was also the gym rat of the family, usually worried about his diet and workout more than anything else on his agenda.
It was a rare thing, having each kind of dragon represented inside a single family unit. Typically, dragon types were passed down from parent to offspring, so we should all have either been thunder dragons or onyx dragons. But—once in a dozen generations—the unexpected happened, and a rainbow flight was born, one in which each dragon type was seen.
“Damien says he might have found something about what’s going on with the dragons. Down at Claire’s shop.”
“The Marvel girl that refuses to acknowledge I exist, even though it’s clear we’d make a perfect match together?” Maddox asked.
“That exact one,” I said with an eye roll. Claire had a magic shop on the coast, right off the Pacific Coast Highway, and she had been my best friend since we were little kids, getting bullied together on the playground. Luckily, my dragon woke up sometime around sixth grade, and the bullying immediately stopped.
A kid who could turn into a dragon the size of a Rottweiler with razor-sharp teeth and the ability to breathe fire suddenly didn’t make such an easy target. Who would have thought?
“Great. I’m going with you guys.” Maddox wiped some sweat off his brow and tucked the towel into the waistband of his black gym shorts. “Maybe I can walk out of there with a cure for War and a girlfriend for me.”
“Don’t hold your ice,” I said, turning to leave my two brothers so they could get ready and we could get down to the shop already. I wasn’t planning on turning this into a field trip, but after the events of the last few weeks, from watching my mother die to attending her funeral, which my little brother was notably absent from, I began to feel the importance of family becoming more and more prominent in my heart.
I just hoped neither of them fucked this up, as little brothers tended to do.
