But what?
A decade ago, the largest animal egg known to science was that of an ostrich. But that was before the fall of The Wall. The Wall had been a magical barrier hiding monsters and magic from human eyes for millennia. The day it fell had changed the course of history forever.
I still remember standing in the hallway, gawking at the little horns sticking out of my neighbor’s kid’s head. I tried to tell myself that it was for a school play or something, especially since Luca just waved at me like usual as we took the elevator down to the lobby. It wasn’t until we’d both stepped out onto the street that we realized something was up.
People were freaking out, and there was a centaur, yes, a freaking centaur, standing right there at the corner. By the wayit moved, it hadn’t been a costume. Then I started noticing the little things, like the fact that Luca had hooves.
I remember Luca’s panicked eyes looking back at me as he asked, “Do you see my horns?”
I’d nodded, because what the fuck else was I supposed to do? And the poor kid started hiding behind me so no one else could see him. Smart thing too, because some idiot had already started throwing rocks at the centaur. Luca begged me to go back upstairs with him, so I did, because he was a kid, and again, what else was I supposed to do?
We’d been back in our hallway when I received the text from work telling me not to go in. I ended up in my neighbor’s living room as we watched the news report together. His parents burst in about five minutes later. Apparently, Mr. Oak was a faun. Mrs. Oak was plain ole human, but their kid had come out with his daddy’s good looks.
I’d been in such shock that I’d just nodded as they told me how glad they were that I’d been there to protect their boy. For some reason, they’d told Luca to “thank the nice witch from next door,” but I was so shocked by everything that I hadn’t protested or asked why they’d referred to me as a witch.
That had also been the day my mother broke the news that we’d come from a family with magic. Each woman had a magical talent, though many never figured out what their talents were. Hers was rather garden-variety and harmless: she could make the room she was in smell nice. I’d always thought it was the air freshener. She’d never encouraged me to find mine because she’d wanted to keep me safe, and in her experience, womenwith magic who weren’t well protected were often exploited, and she couldn’t do much to protect me.
I’d been upset at her for weeks for hiding something like this from me. And I’d even tried finding my talent using the spaghetti on the wall method, but never had any luck.
The first few weeks after the fall of The Wall had been rough. There were a lot of scared and angry people, and they took it out on all the strange beings who’d hidden amongst us, even though they’d never caused trouble before. The Oak family eventually moved away to Darlington, a now world-famous magic and monster town.
I looked down at the egg again. “What am I supposed to do with you?” I asked as I picked up my phone and typed: egg large warm iridescent. Expensive.
I scrolled past two pages about exotic poultry breeding, a Reddit thread I closed immediately on instinct, and an Etsy listing for hand-painted decorative gourds before I hit something that made me stop. A forum. It had the aesthetic of a site built in 2007 by someone who cared deeply and had kept caring ever since.
There was a thread on dragon eggs. Not just dragons, but drakes, and wyverns too.
I looked at the egg.
I looked at my phone. The egg sat there on my dish towel, warm and green and absolutely unconcerned with my internal crisis.
“Right,” I said out loud, to nobody. “Okay. That’s… Yeah.”
It was a different color from the one on the screen, but apparently, that didn’t matter because dragon eggs came in every color imaginable. It was the scale-like texture of the shell that gave it away. Nothing else in this world was quite like it, according to the posts on the forum.
I got up off the floor, taking my phone with me, and started reading.
According to the thread, pure dragons were extinct, and the only ones still in existence were those that could shift into human form. They reproduced with eggs as well, and just as I’d already guessed, a warm egg meant that there was life inside.
Didn’t the “Dragon of Darlington” get married a few years ago? It was the first time the world had actual confirmation that dragon shifters existed. But wasn’t his wife human? The media had made a big fuss about it. Maybe this was their surrogate egg?
I eyed the egg suspiciously. “You’re not their kidnapped egg, are you?” It better not be! Or else I was in big trouble. Hell! I already was.
My phone buzzed. A picture of Karim’s face stared back at me, taken from the time we’d gone on that trip to London. I ignored it. Because I was really shit at lying, and what would picking it up accomplish anyway?
Hey, I have the dragon egg you murdered someone for?
Want to switch duffel bags?
Did I even trust Karim with something so precious, especially now that I knew something was living inside? This was someone’s child! Did that make this trafficking?
My phone lit up again, this time with a message demanding I call him. Now.
I kept looking at the egg. I didn’t know what Karim had planned to do with it, and I didn’t trust myself to imagine it charitably, mainly because I didn’t trust him, period. And I was done pretending that instinct was something to argue myself out of or ignore. He’d killed someone over this. Whatever he’d intended to do, it had not been to return it safely to its owner, because people who intended to return things didn’t bludgeon and strangle people for them.
I was already screwed either way, and I knew I couldn’t stay here. I’d known it in a low-grade, background way since I’d come through the door. But now, it sharpened into something clear and non-negotiable. Karim knew where I lived. He’d been to this apartment a hundred times. If I stayed, he’d find me by sundown, possibly well before.
I searched my closet for a backpack that would fit the egg. The duffel was too big for me to carry comfortably for any length of time.
