NO!” FORT SHOUTED, LEAPING BETWEEN the Old One and the police. “You don’t know what happened to that dragon!”
“YOU LED ME TO NOTHING BUT DEATH,” the Old One roared, shooting fire straight at Fort and the police behind him.
Fort dove to the ground, and the heat almost singed his uniform as it passed just a foot or two above him. He threw a look over his shoulder to find that, thankfully, the cops had escaped unscathed by hiding behind their vehicles.
“I didn’t know what we’d find!” Fort shouted, pushing to his feet and holding his hands up in surrender. “But these humans did nothing to that dragon. No human did! You were the one who told us that dragons were on our side. We were partners, just like you saw with the skeletons!”
“AND FOR THAT CRIME, MY BROTHER AND SISTERS DESTROYED MY CHILDREN!” the Old One roared again, this time lunging forward, swiping directly at him. Fort quickly threw up a teleportation circle, and instead of cutting him in two, the Old One’s claws passed through empty air above the Grand Canyon.
“Then blame them!” Fort shouted, closing his circle as the dragon pulled his hand back. “By taking it out on humanity, you’re doing the exact same thing your family did. Would your dragons want you to hurt the ones they were protecting? Especially for their sake?”
The Old One reared back, screaming incoherently, his face still contorted with rage. “YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT IS LIKE TO LOSE YOUR CHILDREN!”
“Kid, get out of the way!” one of the cops shouted. “You’re in the line of fire!”
“I’ve got this!” Fort shouted, and summoned a huge teleportation circle behind him, just in case they decided to ignore him and fire anyway. Now if they did, their bullets would fly out harmlessly over the Atlantic Ocean, a spot Fort remembered from a flight to Florida once.
He quickly turned back to the Old One, his hands still held up. “It’s true, I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child. But I do know what it feels like to lose my parents! I’ve never known my mother, and my father only got turned into a Dracsi because I was too slow, too weak to stop it. And yes, I’d have done anything to bring him back… but maybe I didn’t have that right. Maybe it’s not worth putting all these people in danger because I was so sad and angry!”
The Old One sneered. “YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THE DEPTHS OF WHO I AM, AND WHAT MY DRAGONS MEANT TO ME, HUMAN. THEY WERE THE EMBODIMENT OF ALL MAGIC, MY GREATEST CREATION. NOW I HAVE NOTHING LEFT, NOTHING !”
“Maybe not, but…,” Fort said, then trailed off as an idea occurred to him. It wasn’t perfect, and even suggesting it might get him killed, but if it did work, it could save all the police behind him, let alone the rest of humanity. “But that didn’t have to be the last dragon.”
“YOU CAN SEE FOR YOURSELF THAT IT IS GONE!” the Old One shouted. “THERE ARE NO MORE DRAGONS.”
“Your children are gone,” Fort said quietly, hoping this wasn’t a huge mistake. “But that doesn’t have to be the end of their species. You brought the others out of magic, created them out of nothing, right? Why can’t you then—”
The Old One reared back in surprise. “CREATE ONE ANEW?”
Fort nodded and braced himself for anything, readying a teleportation spell back to his bedroom in his aunt’s apartment.
But instead of incinerating him with fire or ripping him apart with his claws, the Old One seemed to be… thinking. “IT COULD NEVER HEAL THE LOSS,” he said finally. “BUT PERHAPS IT WOULD IN SOME WAY PUT RIGHT THAT WHICH HAS BEEN MADE WRONG.”
“A new dragon could be created in honor of the ones that came before it,” Fort said, still waiting for the creature to change his mind.
The dragon picked up the egg on the ground and wrapped his massive hands around it. Even next to the Old One, the egg looked gigantic, but Fort supposed any animal the size of a dragon would have to come out of a pretty big egg.
The dragon closed his eyes, his hands glowing bright blue as the egg slowly knitted itself closed, its cracks filling over until it looked whole and unbroken. The light in the egg now grew even more intense than the dragon’s hands, and Fort covered his eyes to keep from going blind. Behind him, he could hear the police shouting and footsteps heading around the sides of his teleportation circle, only to stop as they were blinded just as he was.
“It’s okay!” Fort shouted, hoping they’d listen. “He’s not going to hurt anyone!”
“What is it doing?” one of the cops yelled.
“Righting a wrong!” Fort shouted back.
The blue light was now so strong that Fort could feel its chill even from several yards away. The cold light of Healing—no, Corporeal magic—passed through his body, and all the aches and pains he’d gotten in the last week disappeared, from training with Sergeant Tower to falling in the Dracsi cavern to even a bit of a runny nose, healed like they’d never existed to begin with.
“I… I AM NOT AS STRONG AS I ONCE WAS,” he heard the Old One say, his voice sounding less powerful than it had. “I HAVE BEEN IMPRISONED SO LONG. I AM NOT SURE I CAN—”
“You can do this!” Fort shouted, feeling energized from the Healing magic. “Remember what they mean to you, and don’t let anything stop you from bringing them back!”
The Old One went silent, but the light intensified, painful even through Fort’s closed eyes. He brought his arm up over his face and turned around, hoping this magic wasn’t going to kill them all, now that he’d finally talked the dragon down. Only, as he turned, someone grabbed his shoulder and yanked him to the ground.
“I’ve got the kid!” one of the cops shouted. “He’s out of danger!”
“Take that thing out!” another shouted.
“NO!” Fort screamed, but the police officer who’d grabbed him held him in place. “He won’t hurt you if you don’t attack him first!”
“We’re doing this to keep the city safe, kid,” the cop on the ground growled at him. “I don’t know what that thing is, but if we let it go, who knows what it’ll do.”
“Don’t shoot unless positive you have a confirmed target!” one of the cops shouted. “On my mark. Three! Two!”
“Please, no!” Fort shouted, but as he did, the light abruptly disappeared, dropping the whole world into darkness.
The policeman holding Fort loosened his grip in surprise, and Fort didn’t wait. He leaped to his feet and ran in the direction where he hoped the Old One was.
“Kid, no!” the cop who’d grabbed him yelled. “Hold your fire!”
Not waiting to see if they did, Fort threw a teleportation circle beneath the spot he’d last seen the dragon, then dove through it blindly, hoping the Old One wouldn’t pick now of all times to float above it.
He flew through the circle and into the display room back at the new Oppenheimer School, crashing hard to the concrete floor, only to feel the whole room shake as the dragon landed next to him, not moving.
Cradled protectively in the Old One’s arms was a bright blue egg, glowing with an inner light. And from that light, Fort could just make out the fact that something inside was moving.