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What would I do without my mother’s ego? I restrained myself and kept from rolling my eyes despite wanting to. “Do all dragons track their bloodlines like that?”
“We do,” my father answered, and he reached over and petted Garnet. “Both our families do due to the high chances of hatchlings becoming any one color. The odds for us favor navy, red, and orange dragons, but the reality? Any hatchling of ours could be any color.”
That did not bode well for me. While I enjoyed solving mysteries, I preferred when the mysteries couldn’t twist around and bite me in the ass. “Is that old snake still alive?”
“Barely,” my mother growled. “I feel a need to go beat him again. Darling, we should drop in and pay those serpents a visit. They deserve to be beaten.”
My father sighed. “As you wish.”
“Do they live here?”
“They live about an hour from here. By air, of course.” My mother made a thoughtful sound, and she got out her phone and sent a text. “I do believe we’ll do that tomorrow. Expect us the day after to take your little family on a rock hunt for Garnet. Darling, don’t forget your saddle. You will need it. We are not going by car.”
My father heaved another sigh, longer, louder, and with a dramatic flair. “You’re going to make me carry a rider?”
“Yes, I am.”
If looks could kill, my mother would have been dead, leaving me to find a shovel to bury her. Fortunately for us all, my father huffed and puffed but accomplished exactly nothing with his fussing. “Very well.”
“Excellent. Now, Kinsley, do tell us about your life in Dragon Heights. I’m just burning to know how well the testing system works, how viable it is for migrants, and the things you would change to make it more obtainable.”
I recognized when my mother meant business, and as I valued my life, I did as told.
FIFTEEN
Poor bird.
Sunday, April 26, 2167
The Gray Ward
Dragon Heights, Wyoming
I basked in the glow of freedom and waltzed through my morning routine, taking care of Garnet and Tourmaline before settling in to check the news, evaluate what I’d learned, and begin the tedious process of evaluating every photograph I’d taken.
The photographs would be a problem.
The images showed ghostly shapes, and I recognized the carts and stalls from my second trip to Shrine Hill. The haunting quality of the pictures baffled me. Until the photos, I hadn’t believed in the possibility of ghosts.
No wonder my mother had sounded baffled by my claim there hadn’t been anyone at the shrines.
There had been people there, I just hadn’t seen them, heard them, or noticed their presence. Somehow, my new camera had perceived what I had not.
I had questions, and the images provided no answers—at least not yet. While the images were hazy, I could make out the features of those I’d photographed, able to identify some of the dragons I’d met during my second visit to Shrine Hill.
Some form of magic had been at play, and I’d been unaware of it the entire time. I’d noticed how it had seemed strange for us to be alone. I hadn’t noticed anything beyond that oddity.
What sort of magic could bend reality in such a way? Where had I gone? Where had everyone else gone, if I hadn’t been the one to vanish mysteriously?
How could a camera pick up what my eyes had failed to see?
With so many dragons having seen me at Shrine Hill, if someone did examine my search history, I could get away with tossing in some research on the more unusual powers of every color. Most would assume I had questions based on what I’d learned. Some, like the tin ability to open any jar, were common knowledge and viewed as a harmless inheritance.
As someone would report the strange disappearance had I vanished off the street, I performed some searches for strange and weird news, funny news, and satire in Dragon Heights, finding nothing relevant to my trip to Shrine Hill. While I doubted someone was checking my specific internet connection for my activities, if someone were to search through my browser history, they would find chaos. I tossed in a mix of online comics, general research suitable for testing into the system, and a ridiculous number of kitten photos.
That chaos would serve me well, costing investigators a great deal of time and effort if they wanted to deduce what I was doing and why.
I forced myself to focus on my most immediate problem, which involved understanding the nature of draconic magic.