Foundlings by Finley Aaron

Author:Finley Aaron [Aaron, Finley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Knox Press
Published: 2016-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

“Can you?” Master Sparks again looks surprised and pleased.

“You can?” Mom looks appalled.

“I can,” I clarify. “Judy probably can, but she won’t try.”

“I did try.” Judy flashes me a look. “Anyway, I can do something you can’t.” She holds up her fork with a particularly undercooked bite of antelope steak on the tines, and blows a tendril of fire at it. It sizzles for a second before she pops it into her mouth.

Since I’ve seen her breathe fire before, it’s not such a surprise to me. I glance at my parents for their reaction. I’d half expected Mom to be whimpering and freaked out again, but instead she’s giving Dad a look that’s so clear I can read it even though she’s not a dragon.

I told you so.

And Dad’s giving her that sheepish look back, the one that begrudgingly admits that maybe, against all reason, he should have believed his wife.

“You’ve seen her blow fire before?” I ask, feeling stunned and maybe a tiny bit betrayed that they’ve never told us.

“Not as much as that,” Mom clarifies. “But you know my rule about not letting the two of you drink soda pop? Do you know why that is?”

“Because the sugar makes us hyper?” Judy recites the explanation we’ve always been given before.

“Well, that too,” Mom admits. “But there were a couple of times—one was at a birthday party when you were ten, the other was at the back-to-school picnic two years ago—you drank soda and then…”

“Belched fire?” I ask, since Mom seems reluctant to say the words out loud.

“Hardly more than a tendril of smoke,” Mom assures us. “Certainly not open flames like that. But it was enough to make me wonder.”

“What else is weird about us?” I ask. “What other things have you seen and never told us about?”

Mom bites her lower lip and shrugs.

Dad offers, “Your obsession with flying. When you were a kid, you’d jump off of anything. Tree limbs. The back deck. The roof of the garage. You’d get on the swings at the playground and swing as high as you could go, then jump off.”

I grin, remembering.

“You frightened your kindergarten teacher half to death. She called us the very first week of school. She was certain you’d broken every bone in your body, jumping off the swings and sailing thirty feet through the air.”

My grin fades. “You made me promise not to do it after that.”

“You could have hurt yourself,” Mom says.

“Or maybe,” Dad realizes out loud, “you couldn’t have.”

“Dragons are built of tougher stuff than most,” Mike clarifies. “He probably would have been fine, but you were right to ask him not to do it. Best not to give the other children ideas. They would have hurt themselves.”

Judy polishes off her last bite of steak. “What else can we do?”

“Your hearing and sense of smell have always been quite keen,” Dad notes. “Though it’s your ability to see things that always surprised us most.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Judy asks.

Dad shrugs. “Why alarm

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