Andi fought not to play with her phone in her pocket, saying a silent prayer that its recording app was still running as she sat down. Could it hear her uncle clearly? Why hadn’t she thought to check it at home? Why had none of her uncle’s men searched her? Was the fact that she didn’t smell like dragon enough now…and how sure was she that she didn’t smell like dragon and wasn’t putting Damian in danger? Her knee bounced and she stopped it, watching her uncle walk around to the far side of the table with narrowed eyes. 

Uncle Lee had demanded that she come alone to talk to him, and she’d done so. She needed to know just how much of her past was a lie and why her mother had hidden a whole other life from her. And how come Danny, her brother, was a dragon now himself. 

She hoped like hell she was finally close to getting answers. 

“Are you ready to listen, niece?” her uncle asked, sitting himself down in a chair that looked more like a throne. 

“Yes. Assuming you’re ready to tell me the truth, uncle,” she said primly. 

He gave her a pained smile. “I think the first thing I should tell you is, I really am your uncle, Andrea.” 

Andi frowned. She’d been surrounded by “aunties” and “uncles” since she was born, and she’d always known that none of them were actually related to her. If she could believe he was really telling the truth, then it made knowing he was a deliberate murderer—a hunter of sentient, unearthly creatures—even more painful.

“Your mother and I were siblings. We were orphaned after the Shaanxi earthquake in 1556.” He paused to let the date sink in as Andi did the math.

“You mean to tell me you’re over four hundred years old?”  

“Four hundred sixty-four, to be precise. Your mother only made it to four hundred sixty-one, alas.” 

Andi opened her mouth to say, I don’t believe you, but after seeing her mother’s photo album, with all the photos of her mother in exotic locales wearing historically accurate clothing, from black and white film into color, she wasn’t sure anymore. “Go on,” she said, crossing her arms. 

“The chaos after the earthquake…it was phenomenal. They say now that eight hundred thousand people died. All we knew was that our village was wiped out. For the few who survived, it wasn’t that we didn’t want to help one another, so much as that we couldn’t. We were just two more small hungry mouths to feed. Everyone was just desperately trying to get by.” He brought a pipe and a silver match holder out of his pocket, both highly engraved, and took his time lighting his pipe while Andi waited. He sucked in a breath through the pipe’s stem, then released it in a cloud of familiar smoke before continuing. 

“We were, quite frankly, about to die. I went into the wilds, fully expecting not to return. My arms were the diameter of this pipe bowl,” he said, gesturing it at her. “I could see the cut of your mother’s cheekbones below her eyes. There was nothing left for us—not in the world, and not for our stomachs.” He took another long draw on his pipe.

Andi steeled herself. She knew just how persuasive her uncle could be to get his way. “And then?” she prompted.

“And then…I found it. At the bottom of a deep ravine I’d practically fallen into myself—one I didn’t think I’d have been able to scramble back out of alone. The corpse of a dragon. Green, luscious, meaty…dead. I did what anyone would do—and what you would’ve done too, if you had been there, if you’d known what life was like. I carved a piece off of it with a sharp rock, ate it raw, and for a moment, I felt like an emperor.”

They’d eaten a dragon