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Something heavy was on my neck and my back when I awoke with my head on fire and my thoughts blurred. Causing me to wonder if Kim had thrown her weighted blanket on me again, tossing and turning in our bed. Had I been drinking last night? What was I celebrating, and what was that weird smell?

Big diesel engines must have been idling somewhere nearby because I could hear unique tones of heavy rumbling that reverberated in my body. Instead of being annoyed, I felt comforted by the sound and feel of sensations that accompanied a warmth that transcended the physical to the mental. Leaving me luxuriating in the comfort of being wrapped in love. Was it Kim that I felt? Why did she smell so strange, yet so familiar? Why was everything so dark?

I didn't know what to make of the whispers in my mind, chalking them up to a hangover instead. Not knowing what else to think of small voices in my head wondering when they could leave the hospital, begging for someone (me) to calm their pain, or wailing for lost family members. I must protect them. I can do that by taking their pain into me. Why wouldn't I?

Yawning, it felt like my head split completely open as my jaws hinged unnaturally wide. One weight on my neck slithered over me, catching my skin in odd but delightful ways.

"Please stop squirming. I was just getting comfortable, and you need your rest." A voice, alien but gentle, crooned near my ear, causing it to twitch. My heart raced, with panic washing through me like a tidal wave, as the oddities of my body and my surroundings registered.

Before my sharply rising alarm that this wasn't the result of a hangover could manifest itself, the smell of lavender flooded the nose that I could now see was occupying the center of my forward vision. What I had taken for darkness were in fact walls of scales surrounding the area that each of my eyes could see. Sleep reached out and took my foggy thoughts into its embrace once more...

This time when I awoke, I only smelled and felt four others with me. But, I'm not ashamed to admit, the only one that mattered to me was the one I lay wrapped tightly against.

A small one noticed my awakening beneath the shield of Dan's tented wing when I lifted my head to kiss my wife's neck several times. Hoping that she could feel it at whatever dim and remote location the aliens had stolen her. There was a reminder of what I had done last night, and what I continued to do the moment I had awoken, my arm burning in sympathy with my wife's. An impossible thing that I had done. A thing that I couldn't explain. A thing that I just... did. My scales fluttered in alarm. I didn't really know anything about myself anymore. I felt like a tower with one too many foundational supports knocked away. I wasn't sure about myself anymore. I needed... family.

I had been encouraging her body to heal itself by focusing my thoughts on the wound that still smelled raw and unhealthy to me. The doctors had assured me that everything went as well as I could hope, and a great deal better than they'd expected. That the angry discolored inflammation, buried beneath the wraps and braces, was completely normal. But my pregnant wife counted on me, and it wasn't time to listen to the empty words that the surgeons themselves remained unsure of. The surgeons had been acting weirder the longer the surgery went on. They were afraid of me. Afraid of what I did that also made their diagnostic and electronic equipment unreliable.

What I was doing terrified me. The amount of power that I was putting into Kim's healing made everything else I'd done yet pale in comparison. Linking minds, hearing thoughts, providing relief, and relaying emotions had been child's play compared to the output I was pouring into my wife's fractured body. Guiding the smallest building blocks of her body to reconnect and bridge their fractures. I don't know how, but I did know how, but I had been instrumental in the surgery's success. It would have failed if I hadn't been there. If I hadn't had the others with me. Sharing themselves. Supporting us as I supported and shared with them. What was I talking about? I wasn't sure anymore. Where was Alex? Maybe I should get someone to call my kids again? No... I needed Alex. The phone wouldn't let me hug my children safely against my self. It was an ersatz comfort.

During the surgery, my mind's electrical presence had caused so much interference in my video link that I had to insert part of my head inside the operating room. All to prevent having to ask the surgeons to allow me to turn them into organic cameras that I would receive an audio and video feed from. Energy fields swirling from my head had had the lights in the operating room flickering wildly and the MDs becoming frequent victims of electrical shocks from their metallic instruments. Occurrences that vexed the medical team badly and lengthened the time it took for the surgery to reach completion.

It had been nearing 2 A.M. when Child sentries perched on the hospital roof roared a greeting to a large male winging through the pitch-black stormy night. It was Brian, coming in for a running touchdown out of sight of the rooftop observers. Trotting back into view with his wings dragging on the ground at his sides and steam hissing from the snow that touched the open membranes to greet all that remained awake at the late hour.

Perched between the wings on his back were two long oval shelters, dark forest green against his black scales. Which remained installed between his wings when I awoke the next morning to see him still dead to the world with his head across my shoulders. He had been jittery and reeked of excitement at his arrival to learn what he could about... everything. Yet the moment he stopped moving to lie down and allow his many passengers off, he was out like a light. Tired beyond any hope of wakefulness by the grueling pace he had set for himself on his cross-country flight, his body had seized the first opportunity it had to rest.

His companion, one of my newest friends, had been up since dawn. Serena. Who was asking me to explain further what I had learned about Kim and myself. I asked her to give me a minute to inspect my wife after rousing and quickly get my unnatural fill of what had occurred while I had slept. Nothing had changed in Kim's smell from last night, and her body didn't feel any different. Once I was sure my children were fine, I turned my eye to my friend to see her rubbing her head and frowning.

"What's wrong?"

"I... I heard you in my head. I think. It was like someone asked me to be patient but inside my own thoughts."

Worried because I hadn't even considered asking her out loud before doing it mentally, I wanted to make sure she was all right. If I couldn't make sense of this... how could I protect the others?

"Are you..."

The look of concern dropped from her expression, and she began writing furiously on the tablet in her hand as she fired a barrage of questions at me. I should have seen this coming.

"Since when could you do that? Can Kim do that? Have you met anyone else that can do what you did? Are all children of the egg capable of it? Brian has not shown that capability yet. Will he? How are you..."

I tried to explain it to her the best I could, wishing Prometheus would do more than just sit and stare at me as I tried to convey what type of impulse such a strange action involved. Her questions' specificity left me grasping at straws and being able to do little else other than tell her what it felt like to connect to other thinking beings. Leaving me confused more often than not about myself. I wasn't even like the others, let alone a human. I felt so alone. Kim, please come back to me.

Much of what I told her I did during Kim's surgery was what the surgeons relayed to me. I amused Serena (and distracted myself) by repeating what they had said in the surgeons' own voices for effect. Listing how I had guided them to connect one nerve cluster after another through sensing what and how they felt to me. How the nerves had begun to re-knit themselves before the wound was stapled shut by what I think was my urging. None of us knew anything about how Children healed or what to consider normal. How I knew that it was me all along. But didn't know why I didn't tell them. Or... maybe it was Serena I didn't tell... Why not keep it a secret? It was what a human would do. But I wasn't.

She looked disappointed that I couldn't tell her more. But shrugged philosophically when I apologized for not being able to elucidate how natural it felt to do what I did. It'd be like asking the author of this story to explain how it feels as their brain fires the muscles in their forearms and hands to type this sentence. What did I even have anymore? Could you really call these things I stood on hands? Of course not. You don't equate animals with humans.

"Oh, well... Brian and I are still working on getting an EEG machine to read his brain activity. The big lug keeps frying them by just thinking excitedly. We've been trying to engineer one with the other university departments to withstand the unexpected power of your species' brain activity. From what you described to me; it sounds like you could blast a scanner apart just by being in the same room as it. I'd love to see the patterns your mind generates once we get one sorted out. I suppose it should just be expected, given the size of you. The answers will have to wait until we can get it figured out with those engineering nerds."

Her jacket ruffled in the heated wash from my nose when I snorted in amusement at her calling anyone else in the world a nerd. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

She looked up at me, paused, and then stalked around my length, rapping her cheek with her stylus, while eyeing my body like I was a horse on the auction block. A few minutes later, just as I was trying to keep Brian's sleep undisturbed while I moved his head to lie on his front legs, Serena reached my head again.

"You've gotten bigger since I last saw you! What have you been eating? How often, and how much? Do you have any strange new inclinations? How often do you have bowel movements? What are their size and consistency?"

"Jesus, Serena! I need to go right now if you want to watch!" Heaving myself to my feet as I snarked at her, I nudged Dan's flank with my nose to show my appreciation for keeping the falling snow off my wife. Humans don't express thanks by rubbing other creatures' sides with their noses.

The crazy scientist did not, in fact, want to watch. But she wanted to know where I would have my morning glory to get a sample afterward. While it was still hot and steaming disgustingly in the hole I had scratched haphazardly through the frozen ground in an empty field nearby. Other mounds of disturbed earth and snow around my excavation (and let's not forget the smell reaching my enormous nose) told me I wasn't the only one using the field as a latrine. I felt bad later when I learned that the open area was a soccer field that required extensive repairing after the other mindless animals and I had turned it into a minefield.

"Tell me how Colorado is going for you, Serena," I asked, my ears canted attentively with the scent of my invitation to put her at ease. Did she even know what the smell of fresh hay meant? Of course not. If I was Tom, I wouldn't either.

I wanted to know her own situation after I'd had my fill of water and what tasted like venison flavored oatmeal from a stainless-steel trough tended to by two men stirring the mixture over an electric heating element. Feeding from tubs like the human I was. The Tom I wasn't. Settling once more with my side pressed against my wife's. A sleepy thought floated from one of my children, and I soothed him wordlessly.

"Why did Brian insist on bringing your family with you, and why couldn't they escape him until he fell asleep?"

This was finally my chance to get out of my friend what I sensed had been bugging her the past few times I'd spoken to her. Fear was heavy in her thoughts, even if it didn't show in her speech. Someone had threatened her and her family.

Serena walked away from Brian's head and didn't answer at first. Rubbing the area between his nostrils while looking at him with genuine affection in her expression but with turmoil in her head. Brian reacted to her smell. His free right paw jerking before rising and gently wrapping around Serena to draw her closer to his snuffling nose. His mind slipped farther into the depths of sleep with a last few grumbled words.

"Safe with me, promise..."

Serena smiled at him without asking me what he said and rubbed his nose again.

"I know we are, you big goofball."

Climbing his encircling fingers like a ladder, she sat down on his wrist to answer my question.

"He's changed. This wasn't how he was when he was human. It's a little overwhelming to see so much strength be so protective of us. And the way he thinks now, the leaps he can make in our analyses. How he seems to think in parallel. I talked to him about his sleep preferences the other day, and he bound away from me without a word to ask a graduate student to adjust an experiment and told me what the result would be before the poor girl could even start. His tail launched a 2000 kg tractor into the air when he spun around, and he barely even felt it! When he learned what he did, he said..."

"Serena...what happened? What are you so afraid of? Is it really Brian that you're worried about?"

I could sense what it was, of course. But I wanted her to say it. This was for her benefit, not mine, and she showed me just how smart she was. I showed myself that I was doing the same thing she described Brian doing right after acknowledging that he had changed. My scales shivered with a whisper, and I blinked back sudden dampness in the corner of my eyes. Ever since I'd woken up... I had felt different too. The mental image I had of Tom from yesterday was fading. What had I done to feel this? You save your mate's leg and her happiness. Yes, I had.

"You already know, don't you? You're reading my thoughts. You can't stop, is that right? No..."

Serena answered her own question in what I was now realizing was a defense mechanism. She couldn't make sense of the things happening to her, taking refuge in learning about was sensible instead.

"... No. That would be like asking a human to stop hearing spoken words, wouldn't it? How... How do you deal with sizeable crowds? Hearing everyone's announced thoughts would overwhelm, wouldn't it? No... I'm thinking like a human. It would overwhelm a human. Not..."

I smiled fondly at my friend even while dark amusement danced across my thoughts. The edges of which brushed against Serena's rapidly spinning mind. The feeling of her thoughts was a whirlwind. New data and information rapidly taken into the maelstrom, only to periodically shoot outwards. Raw data compiled into neat hypotheses decreased entropy at odds with my metaphor's destructive power. If only she knew the turbulence hidden behind the periphery of my emotions.

The touch of my mind against hers slowed that tornado for a moment, letting the underlying anxiety briefly abate. A tense laugh came from her mouth, her hands flying to cover her lips, as she cast a startled look up at me. After a moment, she relaxed and took off one of her gloves to rub Brian's scales. Every so often, slipping her fingers between two of the armor plates to massage the skin beneath them. A pleased rumble came from his throat while she watched him before turning back to me.

"Brian doesn't scare me, nor do any of the other Children of the Egg. I haven't seen evidence for all your size and strength that any of you would harm a human being without being attacked first. Even if the way you think is becoming less and less familiar to me as a human."

My head jerked back in alarm while my scales bristled, and my fins stood on end.

She knew, she knew, she knew! She knows I'm not Tom anymore! Yet I am Tom!

The smell of my solicitude suffused the area, and I had to send dismissive thoughts to Dan when his head peeked beneath his wing, where I lay with Kim, to see if I was okay with what I was being told. With what he had already gone well on his way toward making peace with.

Serena held up her hand just as I opened my jaws to deny what I knew, but refused to accept, was true. With a struggle, I signaled my acceptance with a ripple of the fin on my arched neck.

"Please, let me finish before my family comes out here again. I don't think I have the courage to admit this in front of them. We can talk about your identity in a bit, I promise."

She paused to look down at her hands, and when she looked up again, I cooed in sympathy with the emotions in her gaze.

"I'm afraid for my family. My youngest daughter came home from school to see... to see... I don't even like saying that word. It leaves a foul taste in my mouth."

We both knew, and I bobbed my head to agree with the unspoken message.

"****** scalies go home' spray-painted across my driveway, and my garage on fire is what she came home to. Do you know how much it hurt me to sit my children down and explain to them what those fucking people meant by 'go home' with the smell of what was left of our garage in my nose? That people hate them so much that they'd be willing to kill them because they're black? That one of our neighbors was dead because 5 minutes before Jacqulyn came home, someone shot him in a gunfight when he tried to stop the hate directed at us? That those people had branded Simon across the forehead with the word 'Traitor' and broke his jaw by kicking him in the head as he lay dying in a pool of blood?

"Do you know what the look on their faces was when I told them the same man who never failed to greet them with a smile and ask them how their day was going when they played outside was murdered on the street in front of our house? Do you think any of my other neighbors cooperated with the police after all that happened in broad daylight? The only person willing to call in the murder was Crazy Steve around the corner, and he had no information to offer other than the gunfire he heard. Let me tell you that no one who values their life will bother Crazy Steve, and he has already promised that he will find those who did this. Crazy Steve has an aura about him like Liam Neeson in 'Taken', an odd feeling to his presence that makes you feel safer whenever he is around. I owe Steve a debt that I can never repay, for it was him who stopped my daughter from seeing Simon's body. I don't know what he did when he was in the military, but between him, Brian, and Alyssa, they have a formidable citizen's watch assembled. Not that other humans are much help..."

She finished with a cynical laugh that tightened the vice around my heart. Acting on my first instinct, I reached out to comfort her. Building a wall of strength around her by piping the resolve that lay within Brian's thoughts to keep her and her family safe, even if it cost him his life. Hey dry, emotionless, despairing laugh, choked off with a gasp. Pressing her hands to her breast, the strength that she'd been underestimating of the feeling I shared with her from the titan on whose arm she sat stunned her.

The confusion I felt grew until tears leaked from the eye facing away from her. No one noticed as I wiped them away with the back of my wing hand, covering the motion by bumping my muzzle against Serena's chest in solidarity.

Her ragged breathing came under control as I watched her out of one eye, thrumming with sympathy and trying to give her support through means that felt so right to me even if I could understand that their use should horrify me. Not wanting to bother her husband Shawn and her daughters who were helping a Child. A Child that had reached for his mother imploringly when she left him to die in the room she had set ablaze. Easily and without care for the inhumanness of what I did, I called for other Children to come and join me in comforting Serena.

"Thank you all for showing me I am still cared for by others who have lost so much more than I have. This really helps." Serena told Becky, holding her hands out to rest on each side of her wide muzzle. Just barely reaching from one side to the other, she rested her head against the tip of the college-aged female's snuffing nose. "Even if it causes me so much pain to think that I have to go to those who are no longer human to find comfort when those of my species turn on me because my skin doesn't match theirs. Listen to me... whining like I'm the first black woman ever targeted for what she was born as. I had just hoped I would never have to have the talk my parents gave me with my own children. I'm just a naïve fool living in her ivory tower, aren't I?"

I trilled at her, reminding her she deserved none of the blame that she'd just laid at her own feet.

You just spoke to her like a bird, a part of my mind reminded me. What are you? I am not Tom.

Brian, more and more aware of Serena's distress breaking through his colossal fatigue, pushed back with the weight of his mind on my suggestions to remain asleep. Not even the heavy, tranquilizing smell of lavender could subdue him. Clarifying that he didn't want to sleep anymore with the sensed distress of Serena nearby. I would not force myself on him. My scales shivered with the thought that I would ever force someone to do something against their wishes with the gift I'd developed through Kim.

Why not? The human in me thought. Might makes right.

? No, no. The Child argued back. That didn't feel natural. I was a protector, not a master.

"Can you keep him under?" Serena asked me, feeling him shift beneath her and the snuffles of his breath as his nose became more investigative of the scent of her emotions. "Please, Tom, after what he did yesterday and last night, he needs to rest as much as possible. I'm afraid that he has strained the flight muscles of his shoulders."

She lay her hand on my head just beneath my eye to convey her earnest plea as I drew closer again to nuzzle her, my scales rippling with peaceful scents as she filled the left side of my vision. More Children nudged their way beneath Dan's wing alongside his own head to convey their expressions of support to my small distressed friend. I wished I could have honored her request but doing so would have been at the expense of Brian's desires.

"I think I could, Serena, but against his wishes it wouldn't be right. He wants to soothe you and is fighting my soporific suggestions alongside his own exhaustion. No, he wants to be awake, and I will not force him to remain otherwise."

The sly emotion that I felt beneath the anxiety, only slightly diminished by Sarah and Becky's exuberance, changed to one of relief at my response.

It confused me. Why would she need to test me? Wasn't I the same? No... cold realization froze my heart... I wasn't, was I? Tom was gone. Tom was me.

"If you can feel my thoughts, then you should know how much I am glad to hear you say what you have. You have changed in strange ways, Tom, just like all the others." Serena said calmly, breaking news to me that was terrible but expected all the same. "Look at how you, the Children of the Egg, no longer react to my stroking the scales of your faces. One of the most guarded gestures that a human might perform, the touching of another's face. The intimacy of this motion is now second nature to you.

I gazed at the others with wide eyes. They were unsurprised. At peace with this change in themselves. Dan nuzzled me, drawing a contented thrum.

You are weak. Look at you! You are lost, you monster. Nuzzling another man like a dog! Not a man. A Child of the Egg. Why would I deny him this community? It made little sense. But it did at the same time. My mind was rending. The gulf between who I was then and now grew ever wider. What caused this? You saved them. You can save them. I knew the truth. I hated the truth.

"But that doesn't frighten me. Just like Brian, no matter how large or strange he's become in his thinking, all of you are so quick to consider whether what you are doing is right. Tom, you could have done what I asked of you with no effort at all, couldn't you have? You could have held Brian asleep for as long as you wished, isn't that right?"

She continued after I gave an agreeing bob of my head at the end of my arched neck. A normal gesture for a Child. Yes. That is what Tom is now. I didn't want to listen to her words, though. Of course we were dangerous. I could flip a car onto its roof by brushing against it without a thought. I could make someone a drooling idiot at hundreds of meters with nothing but the force of my mind. She should be afraid of what Tom has become. What I was. What was I?

"I just wish... I just hope that I can trust that you are not simply telling me what I want to hear. Tom... your abilities... Tell me, how much of an effect do you think you can have on humans?"

"I don't know, Serena. But it scares me to think about it. I don't want to find out. When I stopped that sniper yesterday... I could have killed her if I wanted to."

You should have. A human would have. Do you want to protect or not?

"I know I could have. But that would have been wrong. I could stop her without executing her, so I did. Taking her life, even after her actions, was wrong. I am better than her. Learning the pain that she caused was a far better outcome than more blood staining the ground."

Something shifted in her mind, and I knew that I'd passed another level of her test. A tension that had set in her shoulders and the corner of her eyes since I described what I'd done faded from her posture. A set of doubts eased that I could have pried from her if I'd desired. An unforgivable action if I had. Sensing her thoughts through tangled emotions was one thing. Forcing her to accept a change in behavior was quite another. It was different when I did to those causing harm. I rationalized to myself. But these innocents? They did not deserve to have anything forced upon them by me or anyone else who had these abilities. They deserved protection. Not my domination. I just wanted... I wanted family. I wanted them to tell me I was the same.

She looked me solemnly in the eye as I felt her thumb rub back and forth across the fine scales just beneath it. I could see, smell, and sense her relief.

"Never forget how you felt, Tom, no matter how conflicted you are by what has happened to you and how you adapt to who you are now. I think everything will be alright in the end for you and the rest if moments like that inspire you to rise above the actions of others."

A plaintive whine to show my hope that that would come true was the best I could muster for her heartfelt assurance. To convey the sense of my thanks more fully, I opened myself to her to allow her to place a tendril of her own thought into the wellspring of my emotions. She shudderingly inhaled, and her eyes grew hazy for a moment before her mind withdrew. She nodded to me with an understanding look on her face that made my fins flare happily.

Brian roused enough to drowsily slur Serena's name as his unfocused eyes fluttered open and shut a few times. Constricting his pupils to narrow slits to focus on his extremely close friend, his eyes found the focus they needed to take her in and assure the mind linked to them that his small one was alright.

"You smell like you have been crying again, Serena. Have you been telling Tom about..."?

I nudged Brian with my tail to shake him out of the language he had defaulted to, and he began again.

"That is not a cheerful story to relive, Serena. I should have been there for you instead of being off trying to convince my young admirer that..."

"I not mindless chaser of tail! I know me Alyssa. I know you Brian. I prove Alyssa equal to Brian. Yep, yep! You see, sun sees, all see! Yep, yep!"

Brian ignored the strident chirruping from the female cozied up against his flank, and her interruption, when Serena used the opportunity to admonish him for his perceived failure.

"Brian dear, I know that you blame yourself for not being there to stop what happened to our home and poor Simon. That kind of evil has existed in this world far longer than..."

"Honestly, we have no idea what drugs to even begin introducing into her body to fight infection," Herath told Serena and Alex. Having woken up from the restful sleep, I made sure she got laying against Benjamin in the hospital waiting area. "Or what kind of toxic reactions she might develop to them. This is alien biology, which, let me make sure, uh-huh, yep, I didn't learn about anywhere in my life. Ever. So, the mere fact that she's alive is all I can tell you. By the way, did you know that her core temperature seems to hold steady at 115 degrees? There is just no shortage of oddities concerning her physiology and recovery, and I am reduced to pure fantasy in predicting what may occur from here on. For all I know, if we had left her limb severed, it could have grown back on its own!"

"It doesn't matter..." Brian replied, the scent of finality stressing the declarative beat of his agitated tail against the ground. Puffs of snow being sent curling into the air with each thump of the muscular limb. "No more deaths, no more danger, no more fear will I allow anywhere near you or your family. I promise! The death of a single well-meaning innocent was one too many. We will meet those that use terror to advance their mores with something that I know they will understand. Insurmountable strength."

Brian lifted his wing, while I craned my head over his body to see the small female whose scent was all over the older scientist, to berate her.

"As for you, if you wanted to prove yourself in this senseless challenge that no one has placed in front of you other than yourself, you should have stayed in Fort Collins like I'd asked you to and where you are most needed. Your sky friends need to patrol more systematically. They aren't ready to be without your leadership."

"Are too!" Alyssa chirped obstinately with a dismissive flick of her wing. "I outstanding leader! Exceptional leader know when to trust! Lesson you learn by me when Alyssa beat into big scattered brain with tail fin!"

"Nonsense! Just yesterday, three of your best wing scouts went over the whole of sector 17 to see how many dogs they could get to chase them instead of..."

"We should go," Serena whispered into my ear after I wrapped it around her like a curtain when she beckoned me closer. "They could be at this for hours."

"We... will... not..." Brian said, grunting with the strain of pushing Alyssa's long snout away from him with a paw while she resisted with the full strength of her body. The rustling sound of leathery canvas made conversation briefly impossible when she beat at his head with her wings. It was comical, and, after the so-far successful outcome of the surgery, I could relax enough to laugh for their sakes if not my own. Encouraging Serena to forget the troubles behind her in Colorado with her family and herself here safe where I could monitor them as I should with all my friends. The laughter did not touch my heart. How could I laugh when I didn't know what I was? I wanted to cry. Nothing had made sense since I woke this morning.

Wait... something about that was troubling. But what? Of course, everyone would be safe if they were where I could guard them. Maybe they should stay with us in the safe zone at my home....

That was what was wrong... I think. It was getting harder for me to remember just why they shouldn't stay nearby. Brian had the right of it. At least he understood how to protect our friends where they could be happy in their own home... Speaking of people that should be by my side at all times...

Uneasy scents of alarm and my troubled thoughts infected those around me to make them hyper-aware. Even Alyssa and Brian quit their playful (not even they knew the growing feelings they had for each other that I could feel behind layers of conflicted thoughts and chaotic emotions) grab-assing to join the others standing in alarm with their head and eyes looking for danger that was only in my mind.

Whispers came from the others' minds, echoing my thoughts. Seeking my brother, who wasn't where he should be. Veronica, a Child 10 years old and almost completely filling the hall she had squirmed into, was dozing languidly with eyes half-lidded in boredom. Behind her, an exasperated nurse was lying on her tail to check the burns running the length of it while the bodily extension swept back and forth idly to thump between the two walls that limited its pendular motions. In front of her, her lethargic gaze found my brother, who had tiny Arnold clinging to his back with his head on my brother's shoulder, and Jack, looking aware but still dazed in a wheelchair next to him.

I sighed with relief when I saw through Arnold's energetic mind that Alex was signing his release paperwork. My brother was going to be where he should be beside me! I trilled happily in excitement and flapped my wings. My brother was coming back to me!

Alex stumbled into the desk, which was the only thing keeping him from falling when Arnold leapt from his back to approach his father's conveyance. Jack felt perplexed at his son approaching him, and I could sense that he might recognize his surroundings once more. But Jack still had no handle on what had happened to his family and didn't recognize the strange winged creature with its front legs on his lap as it stared into his face. A beckoning cry of need came from down the hallway at the exit, and a flare of emotion reached me from Jill. Desperate to bring her family into her embrace once more where she would never let them go ever again. A treble of yearning came from me with my fins shivering. Alex... you don't trust me, do you? I'm a failure. He needed to be with me, but I couldn't protect him without my connection. Please, Alex...

Arnold butted his head against the back of the wheelchair and pushed it, squalling loudly, down the hall. A long black mark where the locked wheel ground itself away against the linoleum floor, evidence of the child's strength. No taller than a small pony and barely as long as a pair of motorcycles, he was still stronger than nearly any human alive, even at his size.

My brother watched them go for a moment until Arnold stopped to investigate the noise making his wings raise in visible irritation. His curious mind turned the sight of the brake over in his thoughts until he lifted his paw, and with a single precise smack, undid the safety brake to allow the wheelchair to roll freely. Pleased with his own cleverness at figuring out the strange device, the one-year-old bound around his father's chair a few times before nudging it on its way into his mother's anxiously awaiting embrace. The world whirled in front of eyes that weren't mine when Jill swept them into her arms and spun on her hind legs, bugling joyfully. Arnold squeaked with delight, but it saddened me to feel Jack retreat into himself once again.

An anxious call from next to me distracted me from following my brother's progress outside and Jack's lurching recovery. Serena had her hands full getting Brian to calm down. Trying to get him to understand that her family was just fine and were inside the hospital helping where they could with the Children. He settled, eventually, but remained keyed up with his ears open wide even then.

I asked Serena to call my children for me, wishing once again that I had some way of doing that myself, so I didn't have to rely on others for something I used to take for granted. They were happy that she was here with their mother and me. They were even happier to hear that the surgery went well. Serena and I had to curb their enthusiasm, which made my heartache and led me to whine like a kicked puppy for not being there for them by telling them it was too soon to know if the limb had suffered too much damage or if it had taken too long to reattach. The next day or two would be critical in determining the fate of her leg.

Irma promised she would continue praying for her mother. Serena asked my daughter to join with her on the phone for a quick prayer, and I bowed my head as they pled for Kim's health. Mumbling Amen at the end with them, I told my children that I would call them again as soon as I had information about when we'd be able to move her to her home.

"How are you doing at home, you three? Will I still recognize our home, or have you burned it down?"

"No..." Lucy started unconvincingly. "Yes... but it was only a few tents, and Tree Shaker said she was really sorry that she knocked the heater over. I feel bad for her dad! She says she can kind of remember being human, but it makes her cry so hard that I don't know what to do for her. Luke and Angie think that we could help her by having her draw what she remembers. Some new adults call it association and want us to help her before she destroys something else. She's bigger than Irma dad! But someone hurt her terribly before she came here looking for food. Parts of her leg are missing, like they cut it off with a saw. It's just a stump beneath her knee."

"Lucy, dad will help us with that when he gets home. Isn't that right?" Irma tried to help me out, as Luke was just speaking up on whatever else had gone wrong there. Irma would have said something if things were truly hazardous. I could count on her to keep them as safe as I wished to. She was their flesh and blood. Their guardian. She would know how I felt. I hope she knew how I felt. I was so alone. Alex... Kim... my family... sadness blanketed my thoughts, and I struggled to keep those bleak weaknesses from spilling into my voice or scent.

"Besides, it's time for you to go to the common area for Mr. Pemberton and Mrs. Suzuki to see what school lessons you need..." Irma added, the mention of school for my youngest two making me perk up in interest. I talked over their groans of protest to adamantly remind them I expected no less than their very best effort. I didn't care how long it'd been since they'd last been in school.

Only with many promises that I would call them immediately if anything changed with their mother could I achieve the bitter task of getting them off the phone and beyond my ability to know how they were doing. Fielding their perfectly reasonable questions that no, nothing else was wrong, and Kim wasn't worse off than I was making it sound. Irma was beginning to sound suspicious about why her mother had been unconscious for so long, and I told her the truth. Which didn't amount to too much. I told her to contact Thumper (if the rotten shit would answer) and ask it to explain, since Prometheus was no fucking help at all, and relay any information that it gave her. The rumbling growl that overloaded the phone's speaker were my feelings about Thumper given voice.

After the phone call had ended, I settled to stare distractedly at my wife's side and continue the instinctive ministrations that I had begun during last night's surgery. The others taking the hints that emanated from me to leave me be to focus on... I don't know what exactly... until my brother finished the byzantine process of being discharged from a modern hospital.

"Hey, what are you doing, Tom? Stop!"

I didn't give my brother much choice in the matter when I scooped him from the ground immediately after he exited the treatment center with a paw to trap him against my chest with an arm where I could safely shelter him from the blustery cold of the sullen day. I was realizing the overzealous protective nature I was displaying more and more of wasn't how I'd been acting when I fell into an exhausted sleep at the end of Kim's surgery. But I didn't care. Now that I had all my family accounted for, I could turn part of my attention to Alex's health.

"Hello again, Serena and, I'm guessing, Brian. It's good to you again."

Alex fended off my sniffing nose by punching the interior wall of a nerve filled, delicate, nostril like an ass when I was just trying to make sure he smelled alright. I had to make sure he was healthy somehow. What scent would tell me if he wasn't? Pain was the acidic smell of tart fruit, and infection was the stale, off-putting, sordidness of a neglected gym bag.

"Are you sure you're okay, Alex? Maybe I should connect to you again... Please?"

"No, Tom. I am not comfortable with you doing that with so little known about what it is you're doing."

"But no one else has had any..."

"Tom, are you going to force that connection on me? Because those arguments aren't relevant, and you know it."

"I just want to make sure you're alright after what I did to you," I grumbled, looking at the ground and feeling like a colossal bag of shit.

"And I appreciate that, Tom. Because if you had forced your mind into my own, I would have known my brother was gone."

That was a conversation stopper that plunged the area into an awkward silence that no one wanted to break. Alex was more than justified to think that way, too. I didn't feel myself anymore. I didn't even know if I was changing or if I was making mountains out of molehills.

"Hey," Alex said, appearing beneath my nose and looking up into my eyes that were definitely not tearing up in sadness.

"This is weird for me too, okay? Yeah, you're acting a little off. If I grew a tail and suddenly found out I was psychic because of my crazy ass lover, I'd act off too. You're still my little brother. No matter how goddamned big and strange you are."

He held his arms out for me, and I pressed my nose against his chest with my eyes squeezed closed and a whine of desperate longing. Pleading for his acceptance of what I was. His scent flowed up my nose with each powerful snuffle when he threw his arms around my snout as far as he could to ease my disquiet the old-fashioned way.

The human way.

"What is happening in Colorado? What are these sky friends you speak of?" Dan asked Brian after I released the single finger I had curled around Alex so he could speak with Serena. The pair walked into the tent where my wife's leg remained to discuss her case with the doctor examining the repair with ultrasound. I split my attention between their conversation and the one that continued outside.

"The surgeons have described what they saw yesterday as anything unlike what they believed was possible in living tissue before." I heard Alex tell Serena, making me swell with pride, knowing that I was the reason they witnessed such medical precedence last night through to this morning.

Brian listened just as I was, with a neat fracture appearing in his awareness when he divided his mind. His right ear fin canting to follow the report on my wife's condition in the tent. It was curious that he could think in parallel as I did, but none of the others listening in seemed to yet. Kim thought that way as well, and I wondered if it was just a matter of time before others developed that skill too. I found it hard to believe that our minds could operate differently to such a degree. Maybe... maybe they were not changing the way I am? I hoped for their sake they weren't. I was losing who I was. A tiny voice... a tiny small voice lost in the powerful currents of the mind I now had. Who was Tom? Not me! Don't know who Tom is! Never heard of him!

"It was Alyssa's idea... stop that!" Brian snapped at the eponymous Alyssa when she sat on her haunches and began bowing to everyone with an exaggerated and theatrical flare of her wings.

"... It was Alyssa's idea after things got really problematic in the area from locals and others who seem to misunderstand what is going on at the University. And... also the fact that some people just hate us for supposedly being under the complete control of the aliens and on a mission to suppress all humans. Many of them are also using the chaos resulting from first contact on Zero Day to assail anyone who isn't identical to them and full of the same hate. After the cowardly threat to the Willow family and the murder of their neighbor, I'm afraid I've had to firmly insist that they remain with me at all times."

"Dr. Archbold said that he could feel Tom's presence in his mind the whole time. You had spooked all of them frankly, along with the surgical team assistants, with what they described as a feeling of force that was rushing around them just beyond their ability to grasp. But they also said they felt the strangest sensation of calm the entire time. That the surrounding energy would not harm them. Mrs. Tanner cried when she explained it to me. She told me how it felt like her deceased father had returned to give her a hug and tell her there was nothing she couldn't do. She never once doubted what they were doing."

"And that is the same energy that you suspect was being directed by Tom towards his wife's injury? Do you suppose the emotional boost was a kind of side effect? You know that given what Tom himself has told me that he is likely..."

Trouble weighed heavily on Alex's mind, and it made me want to launch into the sky and cry my sorrow out over the fact that I knew I was the cause. His inhuman, supernatural, alien, brother. Tom that was.

"I know. It's just as likely he doesn't even need to. I'm sure he and all the other... changed can hear us just fine. But can they pay attention while having their own conversation?"

Serena told Alex that Brian acted in a similar manner. I saw the large scientist's ears twitch briefly. Folding flat and then flaring again to accompany the emotions I sensed from him, he continued to prod at the tendril connecting us in wonder. He had split himself three-ways. I didn't know what to feel about how alien my own thinking felt. Tom couldn't drive a car and answer a phone call without spacing out. Now, Tom could fly, organize a coordinated response from dozens of others, absorb their pain, and strategize all at the same time. I was a monster. How dangerous was I?

Brian sagged in defeat with a sigh as he faced the reality of the cost of his overzealous protective instincts. I was continuing to struggle with this concept that perhaps my family would not want my protection either. Alyssa paused her strident listing of everything that she had accomplished and nudged her nose beneath Brian's chin, emitting scents of approval and comfort to buck him up.

"But they don't... I just wish they would allow me to protect them as I wished to. I had the best idea for portable living quarters that would perfectly fit between my wings and had the sleekest streamlin... No... dear Serena is right. They must still live their lives as best they can and don't need me wrapped around them every waking moment. No matter how much it would make me happy."

"Is why sky friends exist? Maybe tell more? If good idea maybe Becky... I sorry... maybe I make elsewhere?" Becky asked, lying peacefully on top of her father with her sister, Sarah, next to them both beneath his wing. Sarah was barely awake, judging by the feeling coming from her and the dull, unfocused look to her dull eyes. She had been on patrol with a few members of Boyd's forces either on foot or wing all night, covering most of the city as a kind of scout. Not much different from Alyssa's sky friends, her proud thoughts told me.

"Many industries have suffered a nearly total collapse in employment, and some of those without jobs have become surly and violent with Children of the Egg for becoming what they see as 'puppets' of the aliens. The industries in which extraction of fossil fuels are integral are only a small sampling of the broad sectors of careers dismally affected by the actions of these callous but seemingly good intentioned aliens. Widespread recognition of just how completely we're reliant on that finite material as not only a source of energy but also as a source of an incalculable number of other material goods has only begun to set in. The number of people who have lost their jobs already makes my scales ruffle in immense dismay. The number that soon will cause me to wonder if our society is resilient enough to survive these shocks. Meanwhile, those that remain with steady income cannot purchase many things they once took for granted in a modern first world nation. There is little doubt untold numbers of households must make wrenching decisions across the world rather soon.

"Since the aliens have become more aloof after they revealed their existence to us on Zero Day, and are beyond harm regardless, the projected anger has fallen onto those of us already the most out of sorts. The certitude of many holds that we have entered a devil's bargain with the aliens for the power and strength of these bodies. Others think they have brainwashed us and we are no longer the individuals we once were. And yet even more simply don't trust us because of how alien we ourselves appear, and how unfamiliar our behaviors are unfortunately becoming."

"Yes, Tom... Serena has approached me about the oddity of my own behavior." Brian addressed me, correctly interpreting the mental and physical signals that issued from me. "A most peculiar conundrum, I must say. How can one realize they have changed when they themselves feel as much themselves despite what others say? Is who I am completely subject to how others perceive me? Is it irrelevant how I feel? Troubling questions! I have been meeting with the psychi..."

Alyssa jabbed her wing backward into the rambling Brian and hooked one of her phalangeal claws under his hip joint. He broke off with a startled squeal and glared at the unimpressed female who flicked her head with a circular motion to cast the scent of her impatience and remind him to stay on topic.

"... Ahem!" Brian grumbled, getting up and sidling away from striking range of the younger female next to him. His tail sweeping up a pile of snow deposited by the still falling skies to rest on before he felt ready to continue. Grumbled asides to himself turned into a vexed hiss when Alyssa pushed herself up on four paws to settle once more against his side with a smug look on her face.

"Pardon my digressions and the interruptions of this... this... scaly strumpet! As I was sa... OW!"

"You call me strumpet and I call you bitten!" Alyssa said with a snarl at Brian after biting his foreleg. He raised the limb and shook it twice before ruffling the scuffed scales smooth. Tucking the leg safely beneath himself and away from the ominous display of the three sets of dagger-like fangs overhanging her upper and lower jaws. (The first Child I'd seen whose teeth formed an arrangement like that, but she would not be the last.) Brian himself didn't even notice when, as he started speaking again, his wing draped across the happily thrumming female next to him. Everything forgiven and forgotten in mere seconds.

"Dr Herath had the forethought to keep some cameras up close to the replantation of the limb. Watch this time lapse video of one of Kim's nerves knitting itself together over the course of five minutes. Do you see the flickers of electrical discharge racing down the axon bundle?"

"I've only been able to guess at the potency of their nervous systems from the peripheral effects on my equipment by Brian and the other... dragons. It makes me hurt just thinking about the amount of pain most of them went through during their transformation. I mean my god! The entire makeup of every nerve in their bodies, completely redone! They must have felt like they were being burned alive!"

She wasn't too far from the truth. Kim had told me afterwards that the entire process had felt worse than childbirth. I was confused, though. Was I always a monster? Was I was born as this? I flexed the muscles in my shoulders and chest to raise and shake my wings. The smell of my unease grew when I exposed my sides, causing Dan and his daughters to feel anxious over my wellbeing. Tom was not feeling very good.

The two-way nature of my connections manifested when I felt the feedback of Brian's concern as the pattern of my thoughts became more erratic. To me it felt a fish was swimming upstream against a powerful current into my mind as his own emotions pushed into me to express his worry. Brian's eyes turned from Dan's, with whom he was talking to mine. I hid myself from him with only limited success, as more than a small part of me knew that I was wrong to hide these troubles. Children of the Egg did not hide their pain. They shared it. Tom knew. Tom didn't know. My scales rippled uneasily, and my eyes watered again.

"With the unemployment rate for Colorado reaching 40% there are ample opportunities for hatred and fear to take hold. Alyssa and her sky friends have been instrumental in providing for communities all over Colorado and Wyoming. It hasn't worked nearly as well in Denver, however, which seems under siege from gun violence, riots, and arson for reasons that make me wonder just how healthy it is for certain human cultures to live in population densities above a certain level.

"Alyssa's sky friends are mixed teams of twelve to fifteen Children of the Egg and humans that patrol designated regions. They provide security, emergency services, transportation, conflict mediation, and perform odd jobs. Since many can no longer afford the scant fuel that is still available, and the lack of fuel severely curtailing even normal city services, these services are necessary to keep society functioning at a basic level until we can find more permanent solutions. ?

"Which is where universities like ours enter the conversation!" Brian became more animated, his mind racing with possibilities that made me feel stupid for not being able to keep up with him. His thoughts leaping upon each new idea to tear in a frenzy of innovation that left me raptly following the leaps of logic in ways that I never could have before. Brian's head bobbed and wove energetically with his long thick neck curling and uncurling in serpentine waves. His infectious energy making my head bob in time to Alyssa, Becky, and Dan's.

"Vast amounts of money are being redirected from government programs rendered useless by the situation. A temporary bicameral, bipartisan, alliance in congress, along with the cooperation of the White House, is setting up programs to find solutions for the manifold problems presented by our massive reduction in oil reserves."

"The fires! Tell about the smokey air!"

"Of course." Brian acknowledged Alyssa's input along with a friendly squeeze of his wing. Noticing for the first time that he was holding her against himself, he glanced at her with one eye before returning to us without pushing her away. I was quick to note that his tail came forward to encircle her instead, however. "Unfortunately, solutions to this calamity cannot occur soon enough as the problems continue to mount. For example: The number of trees being felled by illegal logging for firewood is becoming extremely problematic for the health of the ecosystems in the state. A forgiveness which would normally find itself extended for the exigency of the population who no longer have the means to heat their homes.

"But the areas that are being logged, when not snowbound as they have become, are also the same terrain that unknown numbers of Children of the Egg have fled to from more settled regions. What is even more unfortunate, is that many of these dragons are no longer themselves and can react unpredictably from the chaos that comes from the shards of their human psyches interacting with what they have become. The numbers of Children of the Egg in this state's forests alone are in the hundreds or perhaps thousands. There have been many unhelpful confrontations between the dragons in the wilds with the humans. Many have died, and the inconceivable number of wounded is taxing the health care system to the breaking point with all the other health issues at paw."

I didn't like that Brian was adopting the word dragon to refer to us and expressed my displeasure to him. His response made my scales ruffle when his mind shrugged off my mental rebuke, leaving me with no option other than to drop it. Why was I upset over what we called ourselves? It was pride in what we had become. We weren't dumb aggressive beasts for others to conquer in primitive displays of martial strength. Why did I have so much pride in what we'd become? Because I wasn't a damn fairy tale, that's why!

Alyssa moaned sadly, and I keened quietly for her with a press of my nose into her neck as flashes of her exile into the forest, and the forest fire she'd experienced while there, came from her mind. I shared them with the others who joined me in nuzzling her neck sympathetically. The small ones listening to us put their hands on her legs in a show of solidarity.

It was comforting to know that the others cared. It was comforting to know they responded to the feelings I could share with them. I thought everyone should know how others feel. Children and small ones alike.

A quick flick of Alyssa's tongue across the bridges of our noses was our thanks for showing our compassion. She gave a heartfelt, thankful smile to the small ones at our feet and a gentle nudge to each with her nose before retreating under the canopy of Brian's wing. We were sad that she sought retreat from our comfort but could understand her desire to be alone with the one who had brought her memories back to her. I alone could sense her confusion, however, and understood. What the hell had I just done?

From the darkness of Brian's wing, her startling indigo eyes met mine, and we traded rapid and uneasy thoughts between us. I wasn't alone in not being comfortable with how easy, how alarmingly easy, the way I acted changed. The way we thought changed. She too recognized that who she was was changing, and it took actions like her licking our noses to thank us for her to break out of the unconscious acceptance of those alterations to her identity.

? Prometheus...

"Like many others..." Brian continued, somewhat baffled by the turmoil Alyssa and I felt. A turmoil that, if he had ever felt it at all, had long since become so miniscule that it no longer registered in his emotions. "... our University is pursuing alternatives to ancient sources of petroleum through other sources at breakneck speed to compete for lucrative opportunities in funding for the University from patents and investments from government agencies. Meanwhile, we are attempting to recruit as many of the unemployed as possible, who either have the skills necessary, or desire retraining, to assist in those efforts to work literally around the clock."

Waggling his head side to side sadly, the smell of his disappointment lay heavy around us in a brief break from the blustery wind of the ongoing squall.

"A significant number of these individuals are not only refusing to participate in these attempts to retrain them, they are doing their best to sabotage the efforts for others. I am disheartened to have to tell you that their efforts are finding sympathetic ears in state and federal governmental bodies. I fear that it is likely that positive steps going forward will soon cease, followed by the appearance of a more combative attitude."

Alex returned to where he belonged, and I had to sniff him over anxiously one more time to make sure he was still okay. And again, he hurt me by pushing me away.

"Tom, that has got to stop." He chided, pushing on my nose until I honored his wish and moved it back. My brother growing distant in my sight as he did in my mind. I didn't want that! Why should I stop caring?

"Please..." I begged him. Why was I acting this way? What was wrong with me? Alex... I wanted to help Alex, but he didn't want me to. He was right in front of me, safe. But he was a thousand kilometers away. Alex, my brother. Our connection should be strong... what are you afraid of?

His privacy, I knew. But I didn't know! Why was he afraid to open himself? I had promised that no harm would come to him! Why would I lie? What I could do remained unknown. But I knew! Brothers should protect each other! Children of the Egg should protect the small ones. Yes! Children should protect the small ones and... I could protect them all. Kim and I both could...

"Alex, Serena, come with me please to somewhere more private. I need... I need to speak with you and Prometheus. Alone. Dan, where is Virginia?"

"Virginia is with Boyd on a flight over the city before they head to the base at the airport. She left a few hours ago."

"Tom, can you tell me what Dan just said? Tom?"

Protecting others was all that mattered. I couldn't protect him. Yes, I could. No, I couldn't. If he was hurt, I wouldn't know!

"Tom?"

He was here, but not here. Someone that was right in front of me in should be sensed. This was wrong! I am different! You are as you should be. You are not human. Yes, I am. You are a Child of the Egg. Yes, I am. Is it normal for me to read other's emotions? No. Yes. Should I feel guilty being able to investigate other's minds? Yes. No.

A hand reached up and grabbed my ear to yank on it.

"Ow! Mother fucker!" I barked shrilly as nerves all over the side of my head lit up like a Christmas tree. Since when had my ear been so big? Since when could I move it? Jerking my head up and out of the grasp of my attacker, my eye looked down to see my concerned brother looking back at me.

"Tom, I need you to focus on me."

My scales shivered as my brother spoke to me. The there, not there, small one was speaking to me. What did the human, no, what did my brother, need? I couldn't feel him. This made little sense. He didn't want me to feel him. Alex didn't trust me. I needed him to trust me. I could protect him. He didn't trust me to protect him.

"Tom!" Alex said, frantic to get my attention as I tried to look at him from a different angle. Why didn't he seem to have any depth? Tears rained from my eyes on each side of the specter of my brother. I failed him! I was failing my brother! He was slipping away.

"Prometheus get over here. Now!" He said instead. I couldn't understand him. Why was he shallow? Perhaps if I looked at him from above? You know why he looks flat. You can't understand him. You are different. You are not human. I am human. I need... I need... something. Something was wrong with me... Nothing was wrong with me.

"Alex... I don't feel right.... can you help me?" I asked in a perfectly reasonable voice. I tried to cough and made a harsh grating noise come from a throat that felt too long and entirely too flexible. Why was that? "Can you tell me why you don't trust me? I seem to be lost in the sauce right now."

"Brian, Serena, have you ever seen anything like this before? Brian, have you ever acted this way? What is wrong with him?"

I heard them, but I was too far to really interact with them. I could feel that I was losing control of my grasp on reality. Turning inwards, I applied myself to walling off my abilities to prevent anyone else from suffering what had incapacitated so many the last time I lost control. Closing off the hundreds of connections I had forged, I shut myself off so that no one could feel my identity dissolve.

My children need me. They need strength. I am Tom, I am strong. You are weak. Small ones have poisoned themselves. I was a small one. I am a human. You are not human. Alex, why can't I feel you?

"I can't sense him anymore." Brian exclaimed suddenly, standing tall with his wings open in alarm. "I felt his panic and his confusion, and he shut the door on me! Tom, can you hear me?"

My sight was growing watery and I could feel my scales clacking open and closed rapidly, releasing the smell of my distress. Groaning, I lay on the ground and swept my wings forward to cover my head. Coughing hiccups swelled in my throat and burst from my mouth as my confusion increased.

What was I?

What was I?

What was I?

Where was Kim? Did Kim know who I was? I never doubted for a second that she knew who she was. Hurricane Kim always knew who she was. But who was Tom? Tom didn't use to be the size of a house. Tom didn't use to read other people's emotions like human Tom used to read the newspaper.

"What is wrong with me!" I said with great heaving sobs wracking my body. My tail whipping with the frenzy of my emotions until someone else lay down to trap it beneath their body. The thrumming vibration of someone's throat worked its way up my spine. I couldn't release the hold on my mind to find out who it was. It wasn't safe for anyone. Not around me.

"Get away from me! Get away! I do not know what I am!"

Craning my neck to place my head in my hands, I screamed as I clawed at my face with the sharp points of my claws. You have failed. You couldn't protect your wife. You can't protect your brother. You are a monster. No. I am Tom. Not a monster. I am a child of the egg. You are human. I am not human. Humans don't act like you do. Humans can't do what you do.

Screams ripped open my throat and fiery blood gushed from my open jaws in a spray that flew from my mouth where it lay on the cold frozen ground. Dimly, I could hear the other humans. Not humans, dragons. Warding everyone away from me and the frenzy that I couldn't make sense of. Some human pounded their tiny fists against my wing, yelling to for admittance.

It was the shallow human. My brother. He wanted to know. As did I. But I couldn't know, and neither would he.

I was scared. I was so scared. None of this made sense. My mind spun in circles as I muttered to myself in fevered nonsense. Round and round the drain I went. I was Tom. I was a dragon. I was a Patriarch. I was powerful. I was weak. I was lost. I was afraid. They had stolen Kim from me. Alex was afraid of me. I had abandoned my babies.

"Please... please..." I begged to anyone and everyone. "Someone tell me what I am? If I can't protect... I can't protect... Kim... Alex..." The ground retreated from my face and then rose to meet it violently when my nose slammed into the hoary earth, leaving me briefly stunned.

"What are you doing? Stop him! He's hurting himself!" Alex said, his voice choked with emotion and making him hard for my ears to understand as they whizzed through the air again and again. Light flashed in my vision as my head hammered the ground with the alarming repetition of a woodpecker seeking a tasty grub beneath the bark of a tree. The idiotic sound of that children's cartoon, that I remember seeing on the Saturday mornings of my childhood, haunted me as I suffered through the collapse of my identity.

The smell of alarm grew powerful in my bloody nose. I left prints in the snow in the shape of my broad snout until friendly, warm, others worked to keep my face from contacting terra firma once more.

Then, I heard the voice that froze me as rapidly as I had lashed outward. Prometheus... I hissed his name in my head. Or thought I had.

"Prometheussss..."

A voice that I couldn't, wouldn't, recognize as my own sibilantly drawled out the onetime omnipotent computer's name. It was the hissed voice of a serpent preparing to strike. Prometheus... Fucking Prometheus... He fucking dared to think he could explain to the others what was happening to me?

No.

Rage boiled away the fog of my confused doubt in an instant. The nuclear heat of my anger over the knowledge that my family was not the same providing clarity. My family no longer existed as they should have. We could never relate to my human kids again. These aliens that claimed to know the future had allowed my wife to suffer badly while helping others. They had been the reason behind why some had suffered until they acted like mere animals trapped and cornered in cages.

I attacked. I attacked the embodiment of all that had happened to my world, my self, my wife, and my family.

The last look I had of Prometheus' expression was tired resignation before my jaws clamped onto his throat just beneath his jaw. I ripped the larger creature off his paws to slam him onto his back amongst screams of disbelief and fear. Mounds of snow exploded into the air and hid us from the Children who overcame their shock with preternatural speed to rush to stop me. Prometheus's strangled breathing was all I could hear. Unleashing the force of my mind I beat upon the edges of his, seeking to dominate the alien consciousness that remained beyond my reach.

Tremendous impacts rattled my spine as I slammed my tail into his belly and chest again and again. Muscles creaked with the enormous force they were exerting from the corners of my jaws as I tightened my hold on his neck. Something in his body gave under the assault of my tail and I could smell blood everywhere. The thin whistle of his breath stopped as I sealed his windpipe with the force of my jaws. The cracks of his scales shattering echoed in my ears like gunfire while I throttled the life out of the origin of all that had happened to my family. To everything that mattered to me.

I couldn't protect them. I was a failure so complete that I couldn't even resolve what I was in my own head. Sobs and tears came in torrents from me. I hated him. Why wouldn't he fight back? Why did he deny me the satisfaction of him defending himself? I hated him. Loud keening came from my throat. I couldn't make sense of the world anymore as a veil of tears hid it from my sight. My mind was aflame from a fire that I had started. I hated myself. I wasn't strong enough...

An enormous mind, Virginia's, rammed itself against the wall I had sealed myself behind. My ribbons of thought squirming back and forth behind the limits of their prison, seeking the connection they could feel just on the other side of the invisible division. Virginia wasn't alone. Alex was with her. Dan was with her. Jill was with her. Big Bang was with her. All the ones I had met, helped, and bonded with, were with her. A welcoming array of stars radiating pleas to allow me to let them in.

Snouts nuzzled my neck, cooing gentle requests to let Prometheus go. Tails stroked mine, sending entreaties for me to end the assault on the fallen alien. Hands touched my chest over the war drum that my heart had become, pleading for me to calm. Kim... I failed you... My children... I failed you...

Prometheus' limp head and neck fell from my jaws when they opened. I tugged on my tail to free it from the alien, but a touch stopped me from making his wound worse. Careful paws drew my spike straight upwards from the torn flesh I buried it in. Released from the effects of the attack, I flopped onto my side and hid my failure from all those sympathetic eyes that I didn't deserve. I cried desperately for the return of my wife. For the return of what my family lost. For a body and life that were beyond retrieval.

I cried miserably for my lost wife, for my absent children, for my failures. A small one's scent grew in my nose. Picking up through smell what I couldn't through my tightly sealed mind and eyes. Alex... Brother... Help me...

"Tom... I don't know... Tom... I'm opening my mind to you. Tom... I don't know what's wrong with you, but you are not the failure you think you are. You are not the lost failure you have been shrieking for hours that you are. You are my brother. You are Kim's husband. You are the father of your beautiful children. You are an exceptional husband and father. Little brother, I want you to feel how proud I am of you after everything that's happened to you. Please... touch my mind to find the stability that you need. Your family needs you. I need you."

Like the first trickle of water breaching a failing dam, Alex's consciousness wiggled its way through my crumbling shield to reach me. Wrapping myself around his tendril of thought as the lifeline it was, I did my best to let go of my doubts and fears to be the protector that Alex... no... that everyone thought I could be.

I could protect all of them.

I would protect all of them.

"Alex..." I said, succumbing to my exhaustion and my relief. Only now noticing that the whole day had slipped past me as easily as the tears that continued to slip from my eyes. "Thank you..."

The shocked and alarmed feelings I could still sense from the suddenness of my savage attack on Prometheus fell away. Explanations were being given to those terrified by my assault on the computer. Understanding in their minds changed thoughts of fear at my actions to cold malicious desires for revenge and the death of Prometheus for what he had been a part of inflicting upon the world. Whimpering in pain, I shied from the icy needles of those dark thoughts. Not wanting a part any longer in vengeance for what they did.?

I felt like a newborn as Virginia slid me on top of herself to carry me back to my mate and my fretting children across the hospital campus. The glowing primal thoughts of my special daughter begging me to come closer to my wife's womb and the cluster of life forces there. A trio of smaller, dimmer, stars next to her own crying out to me with desire, hope, and warmth coloring their own special minds. Our children, my children. How could I be so selfish? Luke, Lucy, Irma... our babies. I'm sorry.

The titan carrying me banished those thoughts with the power granted to her mind by the long years of the life that she'd led. Even the uniqueness of my mind provided no resistance as I willingly bent to allow her grandmotherly aura to soothe me into somnolence. Sending me into restful sleep with my brother held tightly between myself and my Kim. The network of connections between myself and the others weaved itself into existence once more. Expanding outwards from the close bond that I had forged with my Alex. He, for the first time, being able to get a sense of the wonder of being able to feel the emotions of his nieces and nephews. Being able to feel just why I had been acting so erratically since I'd awoken that morning. The nearly complete void that should have been my excitable and dynamic friend, lover, and mate.

"Tom, what I'm saying is that you are going to have to come to grips with the fact that you are changing and that it's gotten worse since these powers that you and Kim have awakened." Alex told me sternly the next morning while walking back from a convenience store alongside me. Only a block from the hospital, I could keep in contact with my love and our children and maintain the healing they needed as I got to work out the kinks in my shoulders and hips. Just as important as my contact with my family was my contact with Alex. I trilled with delight as my tail tip shivered excitedly to display my happiness.

My brother was here for me! He was helping make sense of what was happening to me! I was Tom!

My wings shifted on my back with the itch to fly and show how happy I was that I wouldn't scratch until Kim was with me to enjoy the sky and this joy with me. Or was that Kim's desire? Did it even matter?

Conscious of where I was, I lifted my head from near Alex's own to look around with an anxious eye on my surroundings. The angry, restless miasma of thoughts I could sense behind every door and window was omnipresent. This city was not a happy or healthy one.

A male high overhead in the bright day full of reflected light from the freshly fallen snow roared with giddy happiness, making me shiver with his thrill. A larger female trailing behind him and two other males tried to use her stronger flight muscles to overtake one of the nimbler males leading her through a corkscrewing motion in a spirited game of aerial tag. I could taste the air with her jaws parted in a joyful grin and tongue flapping at the corner of her mouth as the teenaged Tanya chased after the males she had adopted protectively.

The play stopped, as did my heart, when a younger teenager in the group suddenly cried out as a cluster of minimally healed bullet wounds in his shoulder spasmed painfully after a particularly sharp turn. His wing crumpled and a banshee scream came from my throat in alarm along with a jab of urgency to Tanya who was already folding her wings to plummet beneath the spinning Jacob.

Alex fell into my shadow when I extended my wings and crouched to launch in assistance. Thankfully, the danger passed without disaster given that I was much too far to have been of use. Tanya, in a beautiful display of aerobatics, had slipped beneath the out-of-control Jacob upside down to catch and wrap her legs embracingly around the younger male before righting herself. With strong flaps of her wide wings, she swooped down to where she sensed me with the two lost males trailing behind and tweeting assuagements to the crying Jacob.

I finished the last few blocks to the hospital with Jacob on my back. The distressed child had his eyes screwed shut with the fear that he had felt from his terrifying drop. I dissolved his pain, but for his terror I was just a steadying presence for him that also showed the love and concern of his adoptive family. Tanya and the other two orbited above us as aerial scouts with our party now including an injured child. Relaying to me anything they found suspicious. Which was far too many things for their anxious and untrained minds.

All this provided a welcome distraction for me from thoughts that continued to run in parallel about what I had been discussing with my brother. My mental state, and what my family would really think about how I seemed to slip further and further away from the dwindling remains of my humanity.

While it had pleased him to learn that the reconnection with me wasn't the soul-destroying, mind controlling, mental transgression that he had feared. It still left him more than a little discomfited to feel my presence so large in his mind. I had shown him earlier the extent that I could connect to small ones like him. To our mutual surprise, we could sense each other at a deeper level than any other small one that I had linked to so far. We were both quick to realize that it was likely an effect of being siblings. Alex had tried to second guess that as a cause of the more profound sensation that we experienced, but I wasn't so ready to push the consideration aside with a sweep of my tail. I explained to him that whether we were biological brothers anymore was irrelevant. The important thing was the fact that he and I both still considered each other brothers to our cores.

Which was extremely confusing to me as a human. My cheery grin turned sour, as did my scent. I... was Tom. But what was I now? How could my mind set affect how I interacted with others in such a way? It wasn't... human, I resignedly sighed.

"You are still Tom, brother." Alex said, next to my paw as I took one step to every twenty of his. "Get that through your thick scale covered skull. Prometheus explained a great deal to us while you were in... what I can only describe as some kind of fugue state yesterday. Many things he relayed pertained to the psychology of dra..."

I grumbled in my throat. A harsh, gurgling, raspy sound that made him pause before continuing.

"Look... I know you don't like that word because of the negative light they get viewed in in western societies. But Tom... you are literally a dragon. Even despite your alien origin and species' name. On that subject, Children of the Egg is a mouthful to say anytime someone references your new species. So, please give a little here. Remember, many societies revere creatures that share your... appearance now as well."

"It's not just my feelings I worry about. Remember Sparrow? How many others think like he does? I don't want people to associate us with..."

"Well... attacking other dragons and nearly throttling them to death with your mouth will not help that either..." Alex muttered to himself, completely forgetting the size of my ears and that I could approximate his thoughts through sensing his emotions to a degree near the level of other Children. ?

I knew his concerns were valid though, and he looked away from me in shame at feeling the emotions coming off my scales.

"Tom... I... damn it. Tom, is this really how you feel? I'm doubting who I am from your feelings. This isn't some game of the aliens or a trick on your part? The strength of your emotions is..." He stopped to rub his head and my fins trembled unhappily while doubt at my ability to control the output of my brain grew dramatically. "Have you spoken to your counselor lately? Maybe I should call her?"

I snorted my appraisal of the likelihood of that being worthwhile then looked at the youth on my back. The injured adolescent male was now laying on his side with his wing partially extended to relieve some pressure on the wound that dribbled dark blood on to the membrane of my wing. Ultrasonic whining underlay his breathing from the pain and fear of his near accident, and the cruel betrayal of being shot by a neighbor, that he thought he could trust, continued to dog the poor male. I licked his wound clean for him with my head curled all the way around and nuzzled his cheek for good measure. His dazed eyes glanced at mine for a moment with the ghost of a grateful smile before fading into restorative slumber when I encouraged him to rest and allow his wound to fully heal. To help him along, I further dampened the nerve responses in the region and calmed the rapid signals that made the muscles there spasm intermittently.

"I haven't heard from my therapist since Zero Day. I think that she might be in the same scaly situation as me, or dead. Regardless, I don't know what good she would be. She helps with my PTSD, not transforming into an alien dragon. Are you sure you don't want a ride on top? I can open my scales to make sure you're warm, you know, and I'm sure Jacob wouldn't mind you cozying up to his chest either."

I knew he wouldn't. The poor male would give anything for a chance to pretend that his father hadn't abandoned him with Alex in his embrace.

"No thanks, Tom. The wind is picking up again, and your back is twenty feet in the air. Stop ignoring what I said earlier, too. I want you to work with me to... balance who you were and what you are before we return to your home. Tom, you need to be ready for the possibility that your children might not understand how you've changed in the few days you've been away. Tom, I don't want your mental stability based on the biological need to connect to your children's minds. I don't want them being forced to make that decision until they truly understand what being connected to you means."

I was sad, so very sad, to hear what I and my brother had been thinking said aloud. God... I just wanted to take Kim, my children, and my brother, and just go away so we could figure this out. None of this was fair. None of it would ever be fair. How could I come to terms with myself so quickly? How could I spare my children the burden of me? Why did I feel to my very core that it was so terribly wrong to think of my gift as a burden? Because I wasn't human anymore. Because I found it harder and harder to think just why I shouldn't share the emotions of others and myself freely with any other thinking individual. I began to think the only reason I still squelched any emotions from reaching others at all was because of the 44 years I had spent as a small one.

"I can feel some of your turmoil Tom, please level with me. What are you feeling? What help do you need, little brother?"

"I do not...I do not know!" I exclaimed bitterly with a flick of my head, a quick jerk of muscles in my ass that shouldn't exist sending my tail tip cracking past the sound barrier.

With a long-suffering sigh, he pat the top of a foot that was as thick as his chest was high.

"I don't know either, buddy. I don't know either. Let's get back, okay? It's time for me to go on the shift I volunteered for."?

Filled with restless energy, I could not sit down without my wagging tail be a danger to everyone else and continued to pace with ground eating strides around the block the hospital sat on instead. Probing the limits I could be from the medical facility while maintaining the healing aura that I knew continued to enable the patients within to find out as much as I could learn about myself. Including some of the most important patients of all who sent javelins of fear lancing through my senses whenever my presence faded too much for their comfort. Doubt continued to gnaw at my thoughts like my pet dogs with an elk bone that I discarded after chewing on it myself like a toothpick.

Dan and Big Bang lay together in their convalescence, watching me as I carved a path through increasingly tarnished snow. My tail lashing back and forth to give away my inner turmoil. Alex accepted me, but now what? I brushed his mind again to make sure he was still there, receiving his irritated reassurances in return. He knew how I felt now. But did anything change? No, it had not. I was still not human. I remained a Child of the Egg.

And now, I was a dragon whose presence terrified many of the small ones. Time to think had led many to realize that they only had the word of Children on Prometheus' nature. Not knowing that we could not lie because of our natures, that they couldn't sense with the limited human faculties, they would not trust us. Which was reasonable.

As far as they knew, I had snapped and attacked another dragon for no reason whatsoever. I weighed thousands of kilograms, stood around eight meters tall, and thought small arms gunfire tickled. I was a fucking out-of-control animal that shouldn't exist and could feel the fear of hundreds within the limits of my second sight. I sighed. Only time and more rational actions from myself and other Children could allay their fears. I could've eliminated their fear, but the human and Child parts of my mind recoiled in revulsion. Although for very different reasons that left me even more unsure of my identity.

All my confusion, and what was my response? The least helpful thing imaginable. I put the one creature which could have given me some answers about my nature into a goddamn bloody coma.

Not being able to take it anymore. I jumped into the sky and followed immediately by an honor guard of dozens of Children. The tornado of scales and wings surrounding me to provide some level of comfort for my fractured mind. The glory of flight interspersed with the terror of being a human who was in mid-air without a parachute.

Trying to figure out how to get Alex's memories of just what exactly Prometheus had told him left me just as confused as I was when I leapt skyward. Instead, having to rely on the memories of other Children who had been witness to the conversation and who were all too happy to give me their recollections. The mob of friends I had accumulated in my time away from home chattered eagerly with each other over the rising and falling noise of a protest in the city off to the west.

A small flight of a dozen Children led by Alyssa peeled away to investigate. Alyssa had the prudent idea of thinking she could help that radiated outwards to the others via me to give them all a cheerful sense of purpose. Which I cautioned them against and reminded them to stay well above targeted ground fire from the small ones they wanted to help. Just in case.

The anger coming from the direction of the mob was so heavy on my mind that the metallic biting taste of how Tom remembered blood felt coated the tongue flicking out to swipe at the tip of my far away nose. Was I hungry? Hadn't I just eaten yesterday, or was it today?

The disturbance that Alyssa had gone to investigate came into view and the Children aloft with me moaned at the senselessness that was ongoing in the city's center. An ululating wail came from back at the hospital as the sight passed through me. Cries and thoughts of alarm spreading like wildfire around the Mayor as she reacted to the sight of her citizens (my family!) seething with so much rudderless animosity. Injured as she was, she couldn't comfort her children as she so desperately wanted. Her heartbreak twisting my emotions violently in sympathy, I did what I could do to help the Mayor.

The two crowds were clashing violently in the middle of the street with a line of police officers caught between them with clouds of riot control agent obscuring much of the street. Pushing back and forth in a tectonic clash of melee weapons and, more alarmingly yet, bristling with rifles and other long arms. I heard no gunfire yet, however it was only a matter of time before the massed humanity would fire the first shots from the weapons that Alyssa saw.

Dan, Virginia, and Big Bang ignored their injuries to pin Mayor McLean and prevent her from doing further harm to herself with the whipping of her head in denial. More screams came from her for her (children, my children!) city along with the battering waves of her fear. We watched through the eyes of Alyssa's aerial force as the situation deteriorated further. A large armored vehicle with a water cannon on top suddenly disappeared behind a cloud of dust just after the police officers standing next to it scattered in a panic. A concussive thud followed that flung the bodies of several nearby small ones into the air and sent the repurposed military vehicle crashing onto its side like an elephant in the throes of its own death. The line of police surrounded the vehicle and pulled five from the rear door before one and all fleeing into the nearest building to barricade themselves inside.

Hundreds of other humans fled running down the streets until only a hardcore remnant of both crowds remained, taking cover wherever they could on the streets with long guns bristling. Gun fire erupted that overtook the screams of the wounded around the armored truck. Return fire from the newly embattled police officers added to the bedlam as the number of injuries soared.

Without thinking, I thrashed my head in time to McLean's as her sky rending roar of denial pierced the air and echoed off the surrounding buildings. Others took the place of the oldest of the Children to hold the Mayor down while she writhed on the ground with physical and mental anguish. Her wildly swinging tail collapsed a tent and smashed the equipment next to it while her haunting cries filled the air to add to the confusion of the little ones. A member of the council, who had stayed behind, came from another tent when he recognized his boss' pleas to act.

"What is happening ma'am?" He shouted at her tear stained and sobbing head as it waggled in despairing convulsions pointed skyward.

"My children! The city center! Help them! Help them! My ch-ch-children need help!" Her screamed plea dissolving into rattling trills that the man (David) didn't need to understand.

"Go! Go! Go! Find out what's happening!" He threw orders to the nearest Child, a young male cowering with distressed eyes in sympathy for those hurt in the blast and for McLean's feelings only meters from his own overwhelmed mind. Ignoring the pain thrumming through her body as her tail angrily thumped behind her, Big Bang answered the pleas for help in the young male's stead. Rising to tower into the sky on two legs, she spread her wings with a deafening challenge taken up by the others.

With the last obstacle preventing the conflicting sides They deserve life! For our future! Death to the dragons! Death to the traitors! from rushing each other forced away, a full-fledged riot raged. Dozens of voices, including my own, joined in a piercing keen of lament. My chest squeezed, and I felt tears of shame and sadness burn in my eyes as our hearts grew heavy and flight became a burden. Pain from those wounded in the crowd just a few miles away careened through my mind and onwards. Even the small ones, immune to the emotions I was a channel for, sensed horrible events were at play far before the first responders among them began shouting to be ready for massive numbers of casualties.

Boise, Idaho was going to burn if we didn't do something. We could stop this. I could stop this. Tom would be strong even if he did not know how. No, that was wrong. Tom was a leader. Tom was a Patriarch. Tom would guide. I was a guide. The edge I had been dancing on receded from beneath my four feet. All of human Tom was me, but now, I was greater.

The fog in my mind that had dogged me since yesterday blew away as if the impossible titan Shadi herself had flapped her wings inside my head. I knew the answer to what I was. Right or wrong, it did not matter. I had found my self. I had found who I was now. I was not just the husband, the father, the brother, the friend, the Child, the human.

I was a guide. It was all that made sense. Everything that happened to me must have had purpose. This was it.

It was time for action. It was time for me to get my feet beneath me and to spread my wings.

Dan, Virginia, Brian and Big Bang were already pumping their wings into the air as they climbed to my altitude and surrounded me in a race to the city center. The five of us singing a powerful call to action that another dozen Children answered by rising into our slip streams to follow. We had to stop them before this got worse. We had to! The sight of eight unmoving bodies lying around the partially destroyed armored truck burned my mind as Frankie orbited above them, crying loudly for the crowds to allow medics to reach the casualties. Cries ignored by the unsympathetic crowds. Dan screeched his rage and fear when angry small ones repeatedly kicked an unconscious cop in full riot gear in the head. The woman's head whipping back and forth limply as I saw the crimson lines of blood running from her nostrils and mouth to splatter against the visor of her helmet.

Reaching back with my mind, I wrapped myself around my children to swaddle them in the sense of my presence, hoping it would last until my return. Having to steel myself against their expected powerful bursts of emotional dismay when my connection waned over the increasing distance. Creasing my snout with a determined snarl, I cut myself off from them and their shock to keep them from feeling whatever might happen to me in the fight to come. A parallel thought to Jill, rocking from paw to paw in indecision as she whined at the sight of my diminishing silhouette, asking her to remain and watch over my wife and children. I felt my throat shiver with her gasp as I boosted her connections to my vulnerable family and placed her in the center of the network at her insistence. My children's primitive minds distracted by this new one reaching out to gather them shyly into its loving embrace just as her stockier body encircled my mate's.

Virginia touched me with her thoughts, reminding me I didn't have to come to stop this. That she and the others could handle it. But knowing that the city my children! was in danger and that the fallen officers deserved to get the aid that they needed. Some in the dueling crowds, attempting to guard the casualties, were beaten by both sides in response. Sanity was fleeing the minds of those involved. Months of frustrated rage were bubbling to the surface. Like magma in a volcano, it had found a vent that allowed these tensions to explode to the surface.?

Alyssa and her wing took turns swooping downward with cars plucked from the streets below to send them crashing to the ground between the warring factions. Efforts that I begged them to halt and await our reinforcements after the wing of one male became so tattered from gunfire and his own mass that he cartwheeled, screaming the whole way, downwards into an abandoned store. Bringing half the structure down on top of him and leaving him groaning and unconscious. Another Child, landing on the run to shield some unarmed protesters caught in the crossfire, had his flank and neck set on fire by a thrown pyrotechnic. Shrieking unintelligibly, he galloped away from the fight to a drift of snow collected against a natural windbreak that he threw himself into with a monstrous keen that briefly drowned the sounds of battle around him.

A group of humans, huddling from the firefight inside a fast-food restaurant, rushed outside to help extinguish the fire by scooping handfuls of snow onto the smoldering dragon. I connected them with Jeffrey to let them know each other and helped dampen the pain of the burn to keep the young male from accidentally crushing his helpers. The good Samaritans received Jeffrey's profound gratitude as the melting snow cooled the charred scales covering his shoulder and wondered at the warm feeling that blossomed within themselves.

Scores of casualties already littered the street when a group of gunmen bagged a target I didn't need to sense to know that they had been waiting for. A man stood among a group of his compadres to aim a large tube with a primitive sight on the side of it skyward as a female swooped by to release an addition to the growing barricade spanning the street.

Night Flyer's triumphant cry turned into a scream of panic when the weighted net fired from the large diameter barrel just behind her wrapped around her wing. The ensuing fall that would have been survivable instead became fatal as she rolled through a bus stop. There was a crash, and then Night Flyer gurgled helplessly with her front paws feebly reaching for her neck and the steel beam that had impaled her throat.

In an instant, the beam broke free of its mounting with a gruesome tearing of flesh and arcs of steaming blood flying as her body convulsed mindlessly to destroy everything it encountered. Including, I squalled in horror to sense, a family crushed when Night Flyer's massive tail burst through the wall they hid behind to kill all three of them. With one last rattling tremor, Night Flyer died. Her last thought was confusion. The same thought that the little girl Maxine, killed by the spasm of the Child's tail, had in her final moment before tonnes of brick and muscle ended her short life.

Only the shock I had felt when Kim was torn from me prepared me for the what I felt when Night Flyer died and took the young family with her in her terminal paroxysms. The yawning gulf I had felt open inside me when I thought I had lost my friend differed from the frozen block of ice that shattered against my head when the feeling of those deaths echoed through me and then onwards.

It felt like the sadness of the world had fallen upon my wings when my flight dissolved into brokenly aimless drifting. I saw through dozens of tearful and bleary eyes when my concentration and focus fractured like glass at the feeling of death.

This was different than the death of the other humans. This was intimate. I had been close enough to them when they died to share the connection. Their lives left along with their warmth. I felt it in our very cores, as if a pall had chilled the light that they had shined upon and into us.

Our agonized shrills froze the battle just out of direct sight in front of us. Wracking sobs reopened my throat wounds once again as I added my voice to the others. Virginia, a reluctant visitor to far too many funerals over her long life, was our emotional reservoir. Pouring comfort through me and across my network to assuage the worst hit of feeling the pain, the denial, and the panic of knowing we were dying. No... that pieces of us had faded with Night Flyer, Maxine, and her parents. Two Children, so distraught that they had folded their wings and let gravity take them, lay on Virginia's back while pouring rivulets of burning tears upon her flying body.

Alyssa and her flock had landed on a tall building a few blocks from the fight that had resumed after the thunder of the grief we felt had ceased echoing. Only once the frightened combatants on the ground knew that the horde of demons some expected weren't coming. Leading her flight to cower in misery beneath huddled wings as they rubbed their heads against each other's. Seeking assurance in ways alien to the human in each of us.

New resolve rose first in David and swept across my network with the boost of mine and Virginia's encouragement. No more fear. We would stop them all from hurting themselves! Couldn't they feel the anguish that they were causing in each other below? All the Children could, why couldn't the small ones? I wanted to help! I thought these feelings would help them calm. That they would help them see reason! Why did I feel so mistaken?

Had I forgotten already... what it was like to be human? Were humans truly so numb? Why... did I not... understand how someone could ignore this? I had to stop this before it spread. I could! My family was in danger if the violence spread!

The wind scoured the tears from our eyes and scales as Virginia and the others arrayed alongside me. We had to stop the violence that the protest had descended into. Fear and anger were a cloud every bit as tangible to us as the CS vapor wafting about in voluminous clouds. The reasons those left of the protesters and counter-protesters were shooting at each other, the cops, and us as soon as we flew into view varied as much as they did. And this close, I could feel every one of them borne up to me by dark impulse.

Virginia landed first with four Children behind her unfurled wings. The blast from her arrival clearing an area that she could touchdown in without injuring those running from the shootout. Bullets skipped off her hardened scales as she surveilled the battlefield before her with angrily narrowed eyes and lashing tail. Lowering her head, she roared her fury at the senseless death of so many and charged forward. Her footfalls making the street vibrate with each slap of a massive paw against the snow crusted asphalt and concrete. Shocking the combatants into stopping with the sight of her hulking frame where I could not. Too far, and my mind and network too fragmented, to find what I needed to get them to stop myself.

Automobiles of all types flew before Virginia as she picked up one after the other with her mouth to throw into a makeshift barricade to separate the warring parties. Shooting each other for being on the wrong side of a line set in their minds. Even those that wished to support those like me who had lost their humanity in this mad test were just as guilty in sowing death it's time for those racist xenophobes to fucking die! as their opposition. This is Earth, this is America! Kill them all! For purity!

Dan came down heavily on the roof where Alyssa and her wing remained huddled and collapsed one corner with his weight. Unnerved by the death of Night Flyer and the many humans, they were shell-shocked and whimpering in fear beneath their wings as bullets tore at the tough membranes. Long bleeding gouges and holes in their wings numbered in the hundreds when Dan curled his much larger body around the Children to shelter them all. Scales opened along his inward facing flank to convey calm while his long throat vibrated with a steady rumble to comfort the terrified group in his embrace. My connection allowing him to tell a story to draw their attention away from the sound of screams, gunfire, and explosions. His wings formed a canopy that hid the roof entirely from sight, and the thick canvas proved resilient enough to form a shelter that kept them out of harm's way for the time being.

The twin scientists Big Bang and Brian both shrieked an ear shattering challenge at those trading fire with the outgunned police forces huddled inside of the large shop they had broken into for safety. The huge plate-glass windows had had the interior shelves piled against them to provide some concealment, but very little in the way of effective cover. Police cruisers brought in close for an additional barricade provided more protection. A resource which several officers used as they fired outwards in all directions from behind the bullet pocked vehicles. A man screamed in pain when his upper arm was shot and then immediately replaced by another patrolman from inside when he stumbled into the store for first aid. Another police officer fell to the ground dead with a look of surprise on his face where a fatal wound hadn't irreparably marred it by destroying his cheek and orbital socket.

Andrew's last thoughts slipped from him to his co-combatants and I felt their tears even as they continued to hold their embattled line. So, my efforts weren't as worthless as I had thought.

The banshee screams of Big Bang and Brian drew a scattering of bunkered news crews out of hiding, much to my irritation. Sometimes holding up cameras, hoping to catch something through blind luck. Others, more brazen or suicidal, stood to film an incredible display of our strength as the giant researchers plucking vehicles off the road as they flew by. Only to let their cargo fall once more to form another wall separating the besieged officers from all sides. Even if the police were not our friends, we were theirs. The only ones they had left here.

Festering anger from a few among the police was our return for trying to restore order. A lucky shot into the mouth of a male causing thick blood to drip from between his teeth and sending him soaring upwards with a loud keen of distress. I absorbed his pain and the roof of my mouth joined my burning throat in sending signals of dull agony. I spat a glob of blood to the side which coated the windshield of an abandoned police cruiser and landed briefly to gather a group of unarmed civilians too terrified to move into my arms. Jumping skyward once more, I set them screaming in mindless fear on top of a two-story building with a warning to watch for snipers and resumed scanning for more in need of rescuing.

With our involvement in the gunfight, more and more cowards were choosing to run in directions that they obviously hoped would prevent us chasing after them. There were no more of the tubes capable of launching the nets. I wondered why there had been even one in a battle among humans. The armed humans still had some fight in them even as the retreat became a rout.

A pair of Children were wrathfully snarling at a group of men who were attempting to hack off parts of Night Flyer's body. Using her dead bulk as cover while their brethren laid down suppressing fire at the pair of males snapping their jaws at the shooters. A human threw a small smoking cylinder at Jamal and I sent a warning to him that arrived too late for him. Not recognizing the danger immediately, the small improvised hand grenade detonated and tore off two of the fingers of his left front paw. Pain blazed in my snout as garnet blood seeped from the face of the stunned male.

I was busy pushing a city bus with my head across the road when Jamal started trilling in agony and pawed at his ruined snout. Scales had shattered in the blast that drove metal shrapnel into the bone of his disfigured muzzle. Damage that he made worse with the wild swings he took to bat at his own nose. Virginia roused from her protective posture and, with a snarl that her family would have never recognized on the nonagenarian's face, crushed three gloating at their killing of Night Flyer and the wounding of Jamal with a swipe of her tail. Curling her head around, I saw her throat inflate before a violent hiss with all her teeth displayed spooked them into running away from her looming tail.

A woman popped out from an alleyway with her arm cocked to throw another smoking and sparking grenade at Virginia with her head turned away. A fatal mistake as I relayed what Chan saw as he flew overhead to the elderly Child. Her tail swung the other way and volleyed the improvised explosive back towards its thrower. The woman barely had time to widen her startled eyes before she disappeared in a cloud of dust and debris that reeked of her blood. Her severed arm flopped to the ground while the rest of her corpse flew back into the narrow she had come from.

The police were yelling at us from behind their barricade not to let the gunmen escape. I couldn't influence them with all the chaos, and picking their individual thoughts out was like trying to pull string out of a knotted ball. But I was more than able to pick out the violent thoughts of those who remained within my range, and soon I and the others had two dozen of the hostiles pinned beneath our limbs helplessly.

I paced up and down the street with Big Bang at my side with our heads swinging back and forth in relentless searching. Mine for more attackers, reaching out with my thoughts to make it safe enough for the emergency responders to make their way into the hell that the road had become. Big Bang kept her head low to sniff at every body that lay in the road to direct a parade of crying Children horrified by what had happened and traumatized by the number of wounded and dead. Every conscious survivor getting the special attention of one Child. Their special caregivers sharing their warmth and whatever conversation they were capable of in comforting the wounded awaiting rescue by decidedly less bullet resistant small ones.

The results of the battle surrounding me overwhelmed my senses. Acrid burning plastic from the fires stung my nostrils as the lingering clouds of CS kept my eyes flooded with tears. It took me a moment to process that I was looking at Boise Idaho and not Basra Iraq. Dozens of bodies lay all over the road. I could see even more could slumped behind windows and crumbled walls. Many of the bodies I saw were corpses that had met their ends today in insipid violence that had led to nothing.

Besides Jamal's injuries and Night Flyer's grizzly death, five other Children suffered in pain from the explosive charges flung at them. A young one, so small that I couldn't help but fling up my head with a haunting moan, had a sizeable portion of her right wing severed from her body along with a sizeable chunk missing from the top of her tail. The damage had split her spinal fin into two to lie in tattered, bloody ribbons against her side. Sobs of pain from her proved contagious and made the small ones working on her openly weep in sympathetic response.

No point had emerged to show the world why the changes it was undergoing served a purpose. Nothing here to explain the frustrations and concerns of these citizens to their government. The feelings I could now pick out among the wounded left me wondering what they had hoped to achieve here.

It was with a sickening lurch of my stomach and a painful convulsion of my throat that I had to accept the realization that some had come here to kill. After today, more would find justification in inflicting more destruction. I worried we were only witnessing the start of a new phase. I didn't have to watch television to know that the reporters now wearing body armour were streaming live to every news market in the country with their coverage of this latest tragedy.

The screams of the wounded had given over to weakening moans and cries for help. Help that was slow to come because of continuing hostilities. Ducking as a bullet whined past to strike Big Bang in the side of her neck and drawing an outraged roar from her in response. The round fired had been big enough to leave a visible crack in several of her scales. I flared a wing to point with my claw at the window that the hidden sniper had fired from and Alyssa slammed to the ground in front of the structure I had pointed at. Using a quick jab of her tail, she punched through the remains of a window to withdraw with a kid, a fucking kid, squirming in the coils of her tail. ?

The onetime college student trotted off with barely contained fury in her frame to give the teenager to the police who were moving down the street with weapons blazing away at movement everywhere and setting me on edge. Reinforcements from the sheriff and SWAT had arrived, and with the increased firepower they had felt confident enough to push forward and join us in temporarily securing the scene. Vehicles drove up to each Child protecting a living casualty to provide shelter for the first responders to stabilize the injured. No one letting their guard down for a moment as paramedics and firefighters loaded survivors, litter bound and ambulatory, into whatever vehicles could accommodate them to a more secure location.

Vigilance justified as fresh bullet holes appeared in the side of an ambulance, followed by a prolonged burst of return fire. I futilely bellowed for them to stop but found myself roundly ignored and took a shotgun slug to my shoulder, resulting in half a dozen cracked scales for my troubles. A SWAT team member screamed, taking a round to his leg and joining the throngs of wounded. The wrath I could feel soaring within the police force as they traded fire with the pair shooting at them from a window was alarming, and I had to do something that I didn't feel right doing. With the chaos of the mass action past, and my mind more clearly able to identify the dim feeling of each small ones', I carefully, oh so carefully, pressed a little harder with a message of peace and relaxation.

Everything was going to be okay. No one else was going to die today.

Police radios hissed static and video cameras died at the same time the cracking of gunfire ebbed off into silence. It wasn't just the sounds of violence that faded to nothing either. The moaning of the wounded had stopped when I included them in the message I had pushed. Sending out comfort to each of them at the same time I received and dissipated their pain. Interjecting myself between the firing of their nerves and the receipt of those signals in their brains. Just as suddenly as it had begun, the static ceased to and let the unbroken stream of radio chatter continue.

It took a moment to realize the deafening silence was nearly complete for one reason.

Me.

Some of the aware Children used the interlude to collect the shooters with my guidance. The rest stared at me with shock radiating in their smell and the set of their fins. Lost Children looked at me with reverent awe that set me on edge with anxiety that made my tail twitch and thump. Their awe feeling as if thousands of ants were marching across my mind and beneath my scales. The attention of the cameramen and reporters now lay upon me. My image, standing in the middle of an urban war zone, broadcast across the country on live TV.

The police who had been firing at the hidden snipers let their weapons fall to dangle at the end of their slings. Turning instead to call out for the shooters to step forward and face justice for their crimes. Demanding an end to a losing battle and the already sickening destruction. Those lying in wait didn't step forward as the police had hoped, as my message may have led them to believe. The combatants dis-engaged to fade into the background of white noise instead. Blending in once more with the continuous hum of other small ones' minds until I could not find them anymore. Their thoughts matching the others with concern over the wounded and dead and no longer ones of violence.

I didn't like this. I didn't like this one bit. What had I done? What I had to do. I had made them stop to save their lives.?

"Young Tom, what have you done?" Virginia quietly chirruped at me.

I watched a law man finger his rifle and felt his distinct feeling that he would much rather be using it to put those motherfuckers in their places than calmly take the last of the violent criminals into custody. My confusion over whether what I did was right abated knowing that I had denied at least some the catharsis they sought in bloodshed.

"I... I did... this. I stopped more lives from being lost." Sweeping my wing to indicate the stabilizing situation. It conflicted me, had I done right? I had stopped more from dying today... why was I so uneasy?

"You...you controlled their minds, did you not? Tom, this is a very dangerous thing you have done..."

"No! No! That is not what I did. I asked them if there was a better path! Is that...that is what I did, is it not?"

I was crestfallen when she shared a look and uneasy thoughts with Dan. Thoughts that I strove not to hear. They had learned quickly and were beginning to understand how to make private thoughts, despite myself being the cynosure of the surrounding connections.

"You have had an inconceivable amount of responsibility placed upon your wings, Tom with being...something that I feel I should be regardful of. But you are confused and unsure of yourself. This time you acted to save lives. But we worry that you are not... whole at the moment, and that now and here is not the time and place to use your mind in this way."

All the cameras were on us, recording our every piped word, and my morose display. Sitting down to process what I was being told, my tail brushed against a car and in a burst of frustration I pushed it away onto the sidewalk. I was doing so well. Had they known this whole time how confused I was? I thought I had found meaning...

I was so distracted that I didn't feel the approach of my friends until a nose brushed against my cheek and a tail curled up over my swishing tail and around my haunches. Another muzzle appeared in my sight before Virginia's much larger snout rubbed tenderly against mine. Her wings fanning out to pull me and four others against her broad chest to share tender our tender glow.

?"Tom, a part of me, an unknown part of me, recognizes what you are and wants...no... needs to help and protect you. Right now, that means helping you reclaim yourself. Virginia and I can feel it within you. A void has opened in your center that threatens to swallow you whole. We cannot make you go Tom. But, please, return to the hospital to allow these instincts whispering in our minds to rest."

Sighing out of my nose, I saw the wisdom in what Dan said to me while we rubbed our heads amongst each other. Each of the five of us taking a turn to nuzzle another Child, lost or aware, when they approached to join us. All to comfort me.

Like moths to flame, we drew the attention of the small ones. The only thing they could sense was that they were more at ease. In the fight's aftermath and the tenuous calm that followed, a bubble of stability grew centered on ourselves. If I was to leave, I was going to heal the situation as best as I could before I did. Tapping into all the tremendous fear and pain swirling about me nauseatingly, I broke away from the others to stand tall with everyone's attention on me.

Raising my wings, I flapped them once with a powerful contraction of muscle that sent snow eddying through the air. Blowing all the sensations of comfort that I had just absorbed into everyone within range of my telepathy. On the back beat of my wings, I drew all their fear and pain into myself. Like an erupting volcano, their dark emotions hissed and fizzed upwards within me until they filled me to bursting as I stood towering on coiled hind legs.

All the small ones ducking underneath my tail looked Lilliputian from my lofty height with snout pointed at the graying sky. Cracking open my jaws, I poured the feelings of trauma from the others, through me, and out into the heavens above. Allowing none of the emotions to find purchase in my mind or for myself to glean intimate details from those I was trying to ease. Taking in so much from so many taxed my abilities in strenuous novel ways. Unable to cope, a cantankerous knot of sensation built up at the base of my neck where it could find no easy release.

As tall as I stood, new shadows still fell over my head when Dan, Big Bang, and Virginia surged upwards to join me, balanced precariously upon hind legs and tail. With trumpeting blasts of thunder, we cried away the pain I had eaten as bonds between us doubled and trebled in strength.

Our declarations of strength rolled and echoed across the city as we thumped back to four paws one by one. Growling last words of solidarity to each other with our heads bobbing and weaving to take in the news crews and first responders shouting out to us. Acknowledging at last that others had been wanting to speak to us.

It had been so easy to forget they were there. They were so small. It was dangerous to treat them like this. I shared with the others, and they looked down to blink in mild surprise to see so many small ones standing around our feet at the same time they demanded to know our intentions. I didn't mean to ignore them... just everything about them was so small! It was like when I was a human trying to track squirrels. That sense of vertigo that overcame me from time to time and had its source in the fact that my head was seven meters above most of the species I used to be. Humans which, by the way, could fit wholly inside my mouth with room to spare.

An officer hiding behind one of Big Bang's legs was yelling up at her after she had curled her head around to see what had been banging against the tree sized limb. The cop was asking for our names and how to contact us. Demands to answer for the day's events to determine what the legal aftermath of this would entail.

When Virginia explained that I was leaving, since I was drunkenly turning in circles trying to make sense of my actions and thoughts, the cops exploded. Their reactions knocked me out of the senseless fog I was murmuring to myself and I leapt back away from them with my wings raised upwards in alarm and tail twitching madly.

"You aren't fucking going anywhere! Not until we know exactly what you're doing, and why none of us have felt right the whole time! You... you..."

"No! We want them fucking gone! I don't care what they were doing here, they can get the fuck out of my city! You... fucking... let fucking go of me!" An enraged woman these fucking things killed my sister was struggling against one of her fellow officers with her rifle waving in the air. Three shots cracked upwards before they pinned her to the ground, disarmed, and then released. Popping back up in a purple mottled rage, she spit on the man that was holding his hands up placatingly and stormed off. Throwing her badge on the ground as she did and four more followed her after leaving their own badges on the snow. It was a sure sign the time for us to go had arrived.

Looking around to reassess, I asked the ranking officer the most pressing questions I could imagine.

"Is this everyone? Is this really the only response a city this size can mobilize for an emergency? Four ambulances, one SWAT team, and 30 cops in riot gear against thousands upon thousands of protestors armed to the teeth?"

"No one fucking asked you, alien. I don't care what the others want with you or who sent you here to interfere with a law enforcement operation. And, if I ever find out you had something to do with my officers lowering their weapons in the middle of a firefight with people that deserved to die, I will find a way to kill all of you. Now give me your names and where to find whatever fucking hole you crawled out of, then get the fuck out of here."?

The younger Children bristled and raised their fins to shake them in an unmistakable expression of anger that went right over the heads of the officers. I turned my head to stare down one cop who had gotten three M67 fragmentation hand grenades from somewhere I can give you three. We never met, are we clear? from a man wearing black camouflage. He squared his shoulders defiantly when he saw he had my attention and hooked a finger into the safety pin of the grenade in preparation to throw it at me or one of the others. His all-consuming disgust for us and his complete disregard for anyone that didn't wear a uniform the only thing I could discern within his mind. I nudged him to get him to back down from his attempt to throw the grenade.

He brought his arms down as he swayed on his feet with the effect of my mental prod before another officer hooked his arm to stop his movements, snapping him out of the temporary pause. He resisted, I nudged him again, and he collapsed to the ground. The men next to him shouted in alarm when the hand grenade rolled free from his failed grip on it. As the officer was restrained, his hooked finger had pulled the safety pin.

An officer with a combat veteran background called out a warning "Grenade!" reflexively and ran to kick it away before I stopped him with a snarled command.

"NO! Don't kick it!"

The spoon was in place, secured by the secondary safety. If he kicked it, he risked arming it for real this time. I shared with him an image of what he needed to do. Picking the grenade up with a ginger touch, he reflexively followed the visual I had sent. Making sure that he held the spoon handle against the body of the grenade, I watched closely as he reinserted the safety pin and then zip tied the whole assembly together with a plastic strip laced through his plate carrier.

The static from his radio vanished when the aftereffects of my rushed, informative thought faded to nothing. A SWAT team member was signaled over to police up the three grenades and secure them in an ammo container nearby.

"STOP THIS!" Big Bang roared angrily.

"We come to help, not antagonize. We not attack even when you attack. Now ask you be calm! Calm like water not at boil! Okay? Bigger fish to eat, look at all the hurt!" The hulking scientist stalked around and chastised the officers who had abandoned helping the EMTs and firefighters treat the casualties to focus all their attention on us. Big Bang wasn't the only one irritated by their actions as the SWAT team was yelling at them to get their heads out of their asses and into gear.

Seeing that she had made her point, Big Bang snorted in distaste and flopped to her belly. Beckoning me with a flip of her head to join her on the ground.

"No see many trucks to carry hurt others! You put hurt ones on Big Bang and Respected One's backs! We carry, we calm, we help, lives saved! Hurry now before I poke!" The chemist drilled her tail tip twice into the ground to emphasize her point. Making a small crater in the asphalt with her body.

"This isn't over..." Dickfuck hissed at me before reluctantly moving away to finish what he should have been doing instead of threatening me. "I know you're behind what happened to Corporal Jones and everyone else as well. We will charge you with what happened here today. I'll see to it. And if that doesn't work, I will slit your fucking throat while you sleep. This country will be pure!

"Do something about officer Dickfuck." I told his fellow officers warningly. "I won't be spoken to like that."

Ranks were closed around him as he was shuffled from my angry gaze. Not a damn thing would be done. The thin blue line would protect their own. It would be up to me?to report his words to the city council and whoever I needed to from Boyd's forces, but I had no more use for the man myself. The man was lost. Lost to violence, I didn't bother reaching out to him like I had others. Fuck them all. I wanted... I wanted... I didn't want this. This purity horseshit. I felt like that was something we had just witnessed the beginning of. The most troubling part was just how many among those that should help to instill order in this city I felt make agreeing thoughts with the policeman who continued to yell all the things he was going to do to me while I was safely asleep.

This was a terrifyingly slippery slope and absurdly dangerous at that. Was I the fucking thought police now? No one should ever be judged for their thoughts. This was the stuff of nightmares, like in those insane dystopian novels my wife likes to read and pretend that she doesn't. How could I judge people for what they thought in their own damn heads!

Struggling to make sense of anything at all proved useless. So, with a frustrated howl, I turned away from those that were advocating bloodshed. Settling with my tail pointed at the officers instead as a crude dismissal that left them to deal with the fact that an officer of the peace had just tried to throw a damned frag grenade in the middle of an American city.

"If no more medical services are coming here, then we have to bring them to the responders instead. Load as many as you can on to our backs. We'll walk them back to the hospital. Move!"

Half of the miniscule police force wanted to continue to argue with me or demand that I leave immediately. For once, the more even-keeled half got their way (coincidentally having the higher ranks among their number) and we soon had a motley array of people loaded onto our backs. Dan and Virginia shouldered the wounded Children and a large male under Alyssa's direction reverently accepted the burden of Night Flyer's body. As he passed us to take the lead in a formal procession, we each reached out to rub our muzzles against her cooling body with plaintive whines in our throats.

The young wounded female Gabrielle howled in agony as they loaded her. Her tail shifting, easily breaking free of its makeshift splints, and reopened her wound to pour blood down her hip to patter onto Dan. He moaned when I deepened his bond with her at his own insistence and, for the first time, someone else willingly accepted the pain of another in my place.

I thought nothing more of the feeling of tiny feet crawling all over my back scales as I surveilled the street. Sounds of other disturbances still concerned me as the periodic snap of gunfire just past the edge of my mental horizon kept the cops in anxious and prickly attitudes. Something else was going on that kept the situation's response wanting. Something which no one here knew of. A fact that didn't bode well.

Heads came up to look above after Alyssa called out a warning and two army helicopters swooped low overhead. That didn't bode well at all.

The others followed my lead in raising their wings to shield their passengers from sight of attackers and the growing wind blasts ricocheting through downtown. With protective shields raised, we bobbed and wove our heads in vigilance to cover all angles of potential attack on our way through the city. An attack that came quickly when a pick-up truck came bouncing towards us down an unplowed side road, aiming right for our legs as we passed. The driver leapt from the out-of-control vehicle at the last minute. Anticlimactically slamming into the palm of Virginia's raised paw and crumbling against the massive strength of her outstretched leg. The truck died with a rattling hiss and a small engine fire that the elderly female extinguished by crushing the truck into the snow with one blow.

Bryan, next to her, swept the man up in his paw to toss carelessly onto his back when Joe floundered in the snow. The police officer that had demanded accompanying us to verify our identities handcuffed the man made him sit between to ride out the smooth undulations of Bryan's back on our walking return to the hospital.

And my waiting family. Whose presence I could feel shimmering back into existence. Flinging my head up, I bugled into the air, not caring in the slightest how inhuman it was to my startled passengers. Surges of thought and far off answering cries answered mine. Soon, the sound of wing beats perked us all up, including the small ones despite their misgivings, as an additional honor guard arrived. Far fewer than I expected came. Even though I knew why at the same time I made the observation.

Others needed help! First Light go with others to help! Father, you stay with Becky? I scared!

It wasn't until Dan roared with all the anguish of a parent not there for their endangered child that I realized how wide my web had become and how easily the others were using it. It was like... well, the internet I suppose. But made up of minds. Since I had left the hospital, I had grown stronger. My mind generating the power to fuel the connections as they spoke with and felt each other through my creation.

Not just me either, I realized, when an incredible blast of anguish struck me square on the nose like Godzilla himself had punched me. Jill!

My will power just barely held me back from running to the feelings that I could sense emanating from the hospital's direction. It would have been the death of everyone on top of me if I launched.

I could feel what was ailing her already though, and transferred the burden that I thought, that she thought, she'd be strong enough to handle back to me. The strain of hundreds of minds joining the constant chatter and hum of the others in the landscape of my mind. All concerned by the sense of unease that lay heavily upon their thoughts.

Only a few Children remained clustered tightly around my wife when I padded through over the wall of plowed snow acting as an ersatz barrier to the temporary camp. All the rest, I could sense, gone to other points of the city to assist with the civil strife. This time, with more authority to prevent the resistance and undisciplined nonsense I and the others had met with at the protest. The city council had left, and so had several officers from Boyd's forces. A quick sniff told me that the two Lieutenant Colonels had come and gone already, which provided me some relief. I was glad to know that the military operation which was here to assist with precisely these kinds of events had sprung into action.

Whether military assistance would help stifle the fire or only make it burn hotter, I could only guess. But in the United States of America, I didn't imagine it going over well.

Something else that didn't go over well was the Children still left here, including the Mayor who had tears pouring unchecked from her eyes, noticing the casualties on our backs.

Their anguish buffeted me, and my children responded with emotional psychic cries of their own. Not able to take the dual assault of misery, my own sobs broke across the parking lot. Chains of despondence weighed my movements while I tried to power through the emotive turmoil that wasn't entirely mine but which I was more than sympathetic towards. The howling of the Mayor was loudest of all while her blood sprayed into the air in glittering beads as she flung her head in denial at the number of dead and wounded.

Jonah and my brother were there awaiting me when I lowered myself to my belly and crept forward as low as a snake to fit beneath the roof of the drive-thru for the emergency room. The reporter yelling the entire time about ditching him to soar away to where the story was.

After a quick muttered "not now" to him, I ignored him as I leaned my head into Alex's uncertain touch when he hesitated. Just because his enormous brother wanted to feel the assurance that only family could provide, he had to make it weird. I sighed, my eyes closing briefly, as I felt his hand glide across my cheek to my neck. Then he was gone, all his attention focused on the stream of injured being helped down my sloped wing. After the wounded came the deceased. I shivered at the feeling of the bodies sliding down the membrane of my wing and a strangled whimper came from my throat.

Those were people I felt. I should be able to feel their warmth. I should be able to sense their light! They shouldn't be dark! They were voids! I tried to touch the thunderous silence of Night Flyer's mind. Feeling around the edges of the hole that her absence had punched into the fabric of reality around me. My mind burned. I couldn't stop... I couldn't... She was gone...

Operations halted when I jerked my head off the ground, slamming it into the roof and destroying part of the ceiling. Sorrow came from me as a haunting ululation that the others picked up. The dismal mourning echoed back and forth in the tight confines my head and forequarters were in. It was the lack of her. She... I had been with her in her mind... she had been so confused. So afraid. I had been all around her, trying to hold on to her. Tell her it was going to okay, telling her she had had purpose, whispering to her she wouldn't be alone. In my grasp, her light had faded. Her warmth had cooled. She slipped away like a summer day. She, and the family killed by her body, both snuffed out like candles.

Another howl of agony and emotion chased the first from my long neck. Then, Alex was there again. Alex, my brother. I felt so much... How could I control this? It's too much... It's too much.

"Tom, I won't even pretend to understand, but you have to deal with this later!" He yelled in a rush, nurses behind him already calling for more help. "Let the other dragons unload the wounded! Go! Get them calm! They can grieve later!"

The 'them' he referred to were wailing in sympathy out in the parking lot. Even Dan was lost to misery despite being decades my elder and a veteran of a war that he had never volunteered for. Thoughts of his daughter and the actions he needed... needed... to undertake warring with the sorrow for the dead. On his back, a light extinguished. A man, who didn't think humanity had a future any longer and was so angry at those he viewed as the reason, slipped into the void while he awaited treatment.

I broadcasted an aura of resolve, and sympathy, to all the others as I dug deep to find the strength to meet the challenge here. Children and Human alike. We could deal with this later. We had to deal with this later. My strength, my wife and children, needed me. Others needed me to be their leader. The others needed strength in the face of this turmoil. We would all meet it together, my presence conveyed to them, turning their stricken cries into ones of determination. The small ones nearest me, and with the deepest connections like my brother, picked up the call and told themselves that they would be better than those who were causing this chaos.

My chest scales scraped and ground against the dirty tarmac they pressed against when I wriggled forward to let Dan in next. Another sheen of oil and grease to film my outer coverings that made me itch just thinking about it. The feeling of Dan's hot panting breath on my tail fin chased me from the overhang and I rushed past the injured Children being unloaded carefully by the tent my wife's leg remained within. It only took three great bounds for me to cover the length between me and my mate and the source of the confused feelings that were still a jumble everywhere.

Jack had seemingly rejoined the living and was standing next to his wife's snout with his son in his arms while he rubbed him between his wings. As he stood beside his love, he forlornly chanted his dear one's name like a mantra that would heal her. I knew she could distantly hear him, but the best response she could give was to twitch a bloodshot eye in his direction. Her labored breathing was intermittent as she lay on her side, her massive body limp against the ground. All to help everyone here, including my family. Taking on what was becoming more and more natural to me had nearly killed her.

"It is going to be okay. It's going to be okay. I promise. Let go, Jill. Let go of everyone. I cannot force you. It will destroy you if you do not do it yourself. Let me show you..."

With the speed of thought, I was beside her light. A beacon that led her to the tether I had helped her form just a short while before. There, I showed her how to unhook herself. Leaving her attached only to the husband and child who cried out for her with their minds just as they did with their voices. Just a few hours had been enough to unravel her like a loosely wrapped ball of string. Drool mixed with blood from where she had bitten her own tongue came from the corner of her jaws as I stopped her body from shutting down. I had gotten here in time.

But just barely.

"I am so sorry. Please believe me, I never knew this would happen. Please, Jack. I am so sorry for what I have done. I should never have done this..."

"Maybe...Jill not as strong as I thought..." Jill said with a groan before her heavy eyelids fell and she slipped into unconsciousness. Jack looked shaken, and unsure of what was going on, as his kid trilled in terror at watching and feeling his mother fade. Jack pat my leg in an empty gesture before asking me to leave them be.

In a frenzy, Serena ran past my lowered snout, pausing just long enough to tell me that Jill's vitals were stabilizing, and continued her slipping and sliding sprint to Bryan. The large academic already attempting to cajole some medical personnel to begin treatment on the seriously injured Children we had returned with. A tiny ball of rage developed inside me at the lack of help he was getting, having to resort to the only treatment he could manage himself. Which was keeping pressure on the young female injured in the fight. All but standing on her while I worked to dull her pain. Beneath his paw, her thick garnet blood continued to ooze through the soiled fabric stuffed into the wound. The only care Jamal could get were swipes of his tongue and that of a younger male's. The two working in tandem to get his facial wounds to clot and doing more damage to his skin, even if they were achieving some success.

It took little imagination to realize what happened. The Children were being prioritized lower than the small ones.

An estimation that was a little unsympathetic on my part. Only a few were doing it out of spite or negligence. Many in the hospital just didn't know. So, I corrected that.

Becky shrieked brokenly when her father left her behind by launching after the missing member of their family. Bryan holding her from behind as she flailed with one reaching paw extended out for her receding dad. A medical team stumbled out of the hospital seeking the heavily bleeding little girl they had expected to find, only to realize that I had innocently misled them on what species the girl was. I had to remind them with two lungs each the size of a horse who else needed help right now. Which didn't spur them to move until Angelica appeared to yell at them to get to work. Her much quieter voice and the threat of employment forfeiture moving them when my stentorian bellow did not.

A blast from the direction of the city reverberated in my chest and McLean gave a strangled whistling cry before slumping over. Knocked out by a barrage of pointed thoughts coming from me and every other adult to sleep.

The explosion had come from the direction of city hall. Too far for me to feel, but not hear. Roaring of pain rose to volumes unmatched by even what had just sent the column of dust into the air that I could see. The steady thuds of a heavy machine joined the cacophony, and a law enforcement helicopter appeared from between two buildings. Spinning out of control with its tail boom nearly severed and trailing smoke, it landed hard against the ground in the middle of a parking lot. Becky's cries became painfully loud when she could see her father loop around once where the helicopter had appeared before diving behind a high-rise with his front legs stretched out to grab something unseen.

I sent out a warning and a call for help as far as I could stretch my mind. Begging all that could feel the tug of my thoughts to send anyone with medical training.

Pressing myself against my wife, I closed my eyes and got to work. It was going to be quite a while before I could rest. Concentrating, I spread my awareness outward to provide hope.

...