Page 38 of Rejected By Dragons

"Yeah." It's her turn to swallow. She turns to take her pot off the stove and carry it over to the sink. Facing away from me, she says, "I was really young when all of that went down."

I was, too, but I remember bits and pieces. Flashes of memory--needing to leave the Fire Kingdom in the dead of night. Explosions in the distance and a stern warning from my father to stay silent and still.

The look in his eyes when he grasped my hand and told me to be brave for my mom. When he kissed my forehead and promised me he'd see me again soon.

My mother's tears.

"We were really close to the border," Amy says, her voice far away. "The commune or whatever--it was on neutral land, but when the fighting got to us, there was no way to escape it."

"How did you escape?"

"We almost didn't." She clears her throat, turning on the tap and starting to scrub the pot with an intensity that doesn't match the amount of residual potion it could still have clinging to it. "My mom wanted to stay and fight, but the others--they all convinced her that she needed to take me and Jett and get out. They said they'd follow as soon as they could, but..."

Her words hang in the air, ominous and weighty and so familiar to my own sad story that my chest aches.

After another few moments of scrubbing, she turns off the tap and sets the pot aside. She rubs a wrist over her eyes.

When she turns to look at me again, her composure has returned, but ghosts linger in her gaze. "My mother spent ages trying to find out what happened to them all. She even went on a trip herself, once, a few years ago. But the commune had been burned to the ground, and no one could say what happened to the people who lived there."

"I'm sorry," I grit out.

"It's okay." She smiles, but it's weak. "I mean, who knows, they might be totally fine on some island somewhere."

"Fingers crossed."

I've entertained those sorts of fantasies myself from time to time. They have a jagged, dark edge, though. I pray my parents are alive and well. But in the deepest, most painful part of my heart, I also hope they're dead. If they survived and chose not to return for me... If they're off living their best lives in some secluded corner of the globe...

Well. Then they wouldn't be the dragons I remember them to be. And on some level, they had might as well be dead.

I swallow hard, my throat tight. Dropping my gaze, I try to let it go and focus on my cereal and my delicious coffee. But I can't.

"I lost my dad, too," I blurt out. "Not in the war, but right after." My vision threatens to go misty. It's been so long since I've talked about this with anyone. "Then my mom, too. She went looking for him--or so she said. But..."

"Right," Amy says, grim, and the understanding in her tone is almost too much. She's quiet for a couple of beats, but I can almost hear the gears grinding in her head. She picks up the bottle of potion she just brewed and holds it up to the light, inspecting it. "I'm not just making this for the phone charger, you know."

"Oh?"

She shakes her head and places the vial back down. "It's a teeny tiny baby step, of course. But if this works, I can move on to more advanced finding potions." She flicks her gaze my way. "Ones that could even find people. Maybe. Someday."

"Do you really think that's possible?"

"I'm focusing on the phone charger first. My spell work is pretty wonky. As often as not it backfires." She frowns, both corners of her mouth pulling down. "My mom always says to keep at it, but there's a part of me that wonders... Being a half breed... It's like I'm too much dragon to be a witch, and too much witch to be a dragon."

Something in the way she says it catches my attention. "How so?"

"I mean, I'm, like the only dragon I know who can't actually fly."

My eyes go wide. "You can't?"

"I've tried to Emerge every year, and bupkis."

I rise. "Me, too."

"Wait, what?"

Her incredulous expression is a mirror to my own, and my heart rate climbs. "I've stood for the trials at the Emergence ceremony in the Air Kingdom four times." My throat raw, I admit, "I was going to try for a fifth the night I left, only..."

Only everything went to shit. The tender bruise inside my chest throbs, remembering.

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