Chapter 624 | I’ve Got Pointy Bits Too [GT BONUS]

Chapter 624: 624 | I’ve Got Pointy Bits Too [GT BONUS]

Ophelia snapped her parasol shut and hugged Mr. Stitches against her chest. "I’m not running four blocks in these shoes, and Mr. Stitches gets carsick on sidewalks," she said. "I’ll hold the phones, and if anybody from the hill calls asking about the golden boy, I’m telling them you died."

Dralun grunted twice on his way out the door, and I followed him down into the smell of ginger.

Moss Street ran narrower than Halverson. Laundry lines cut the gaps between fire escapes overhead, and a bodega cat slept across a stack of newspapers outside the corner store. The walk-up at the end had a buzzer panel hanging from exposed wiring, and the front door sat propped wide with a single brick wedged under the frame.

Dralun took the stairs two at a time. For a man built like a loading dock, his footsteps barely registered. I kept pace behind him, my breath coming steady, my hands loose at my sides.

The third-floor hallway told me most of what I needed to know before I saw the apartment itself.

The door lay face-down on the carpet runner, torn completely out of its frame. Both hinges were still screwed into the wood. It hadn’t been kicked in. It had been blown out from the inside, the wood splintered outward in jagged spears, the edges blackened.

Black scorch streaks ran from the doorway down the length of the runner in wide, uneven arcs. The pattern looked chemical. Too hot for fabric, not hot enough to catch the walls. The air carried burned nylon and something metallic underneath, sharp enough that my stomach caught it before my brain processed what it meant.

Blood.

A man stood pressed flat against the wall halfway down the hall, a phone crushed white-knuckle tight against his ear. The name patch stitched over his work shirt pocket read Julio in faded thread.

His other hand braced against the plaster like he was holding himself upright, and his eyes tracked Dralun with the glazed look of someone who’d stopped processing anything except the voice on the other end of the line.

"They keep telling me forty minutes," he said into it, and his voice cracked in half. "He’s five years old, and my wife is bleeding in there."

His eyes found Dralun and went wide, and then his whole body sagged against the wall.

Dralun set one claw on his shoulder for a second. "I’ve got him, Julio," he said, and walked through the empty doorframe.

I stopped at the threshold because I’d been told to, and I looked.

The living room was small enough to cross in four steps. A television lay on its side with the screen spiderwebbed, and a bowl of cereal had spilled across the rug in a milky puddle. A woman crouched against the far wall with a dish towel clamped around her forearm, and the towel had gone red through the middle. She kept talking in soft Spanish toward the corner by the couch, the words coming out steady even though her whole jaw was shaking.

The boy in the corner couldn’t have weighed forty pounds. He’d wedged himself between the couch and the wall with his knees pulled up to his chest, and he was crying so hard that no air went in between the sobs. Bone had pushed out of his shoulders through his dinosaur pajama shirt, pale white spurs tipped in red where they had split the skin. More of them jutted from both forearms at angles that made my own arms ache to look at.

Dralun lowered himself to the floor six feet away and sat down cross-legged. His tail curled behind him so it wouldn’t sweep the cereal bowl, and he tipped his horns toward the carpet. Then he did nothing at all.

I had four hands that could hold that kid still before he finished his next sob. I had a body that could cross the room faster than his mother could scream and a staff in my inventory that could split the building in half. Every piece of the loadout I’d paid for in dignity and gacha pulls was screaming at me to fix this, and I stood in the doorway with my hands in my jacket pockets because a Rank C dragon had told me to.

〘Elapsed: 3:12. Host heart rate elevated. Observation: You want to be useful so badly it’s embarrassing.〙

A spur cracked out of the boy’s left wrist with a wet sound. His mother jerked forward on her knees, and Dralun lifted one claw off his knee without turning his head.

"Not yet, Carmen," he said. "Give him a little more time."

She stayed. I don’t know how she stayed.

Dralun breathed, and I heard every breath because he made them loud on purpose, long and slow through his nose and out again through his mouth. He kept breathing for minutes while the kid wheezed and sobbed and the bone kept creaking out of him. At some point around minute seven, I noticed the boy’s hitching breaths had started to stretch longer between the sobs, falling in behind the dragon’s without him knowing it. By minute nine the crying had shrunk into hiccups, and Carmen had stopped talking and was just watching.

At eleven minutes and forty seconds, the kid looked up.

His eyes were huge and brown and wet, and they went straight to the horns. Dralun didn’t smile, because I’m fairly sure his face doesn’t have the muscles for it, but his shoulders dropped an inch.

"Hey there, little man," he said. "What do they call you?"

"M-Mateo," the kid whispered. "My name is Mateo."

That made two Mateos in thirty-six hours. The Eastside must hand the name out at the hospital along with the free diaper bag.

"Mateo, your Aspect’s scared right now." Dralun kept his voice low and rough and so steady the floor could have stood on it. "It doesn’t know what it’s doing yet, and that’s normal for a new one. You’re not broken, buddy. You’re just new."

The kid stared at him with snot running down his lip. Then he looked down at his own forearm, where a spur had been pushing out of the skin a quarter inch at a time since I walked in, and the spur stopped. None of them shrank back into his arms, but not a single one grew another millimeter.

"Are you a monster?" Mateo asked.

"Some folks on the hill think so." Dralun dipped his head and showed him the chipped horn. "You see, I’ve got pointy bits too, and mine never went back in either."