The tremors came before dawn.

  Malik felt them through his claws where they rested against the barn floor. Not earthquake tremors. Not the deep subterranean shift of settling earth. Something rhythmic. Deliberate.

  Footsteps.

  Many footsteps. Very large ones.

  He was on his feet before his mind fully caught up, wings spreading instinctively, claws gouging furrows in the old wood floor. The barn was still dark. Lena had her head up, ruby eyes already open, already scanning. Zoe slept on in the deep straw, one small claw tucked under her chin.

  Grandma Evelyn closed her Bible.

  That was how Malik knew it was serious. Grandma Evelyn did not close her Bible for small things.

  "What is that sound?" she said quietly.

  Malik moved to the barn doors and looked north through the gap.

  The horizon was wrong.

  Not the color of it. Not the shape. The scale of it. Things were moving against the pre-dawn sky that were too large to be moving. Silhouettes that didn't resolve into anything his mind had a category for. Ten feet. Twenty. Fifty. The largest ones were shapes against the stars, blotting them out one by one as they came.

  "Wake Darius," Lena said. Her voice was the specific flat calm of someone who had already made all the decisions that needed making.

  Darius was in the far corner. Malik crossed the barn in three strides and put his muzzle close to his father's head.

  "Dad."

  Nothing. The withdrawal had taken him somewhere deep in the night. His breathing was shallow and fast, scales twitching with tremors that had nothing to do with the footsteps outside.

  "Darius." Louder.

  One eye opened. Emerald. Still mostly black at the pupil. He blinked twice, slow and confused, a man surfacing from underwater.

  "Something's coming," Malik said. "I need you with me."

  Raul appeared at the barn doors while Malik was still trying to get Darius upright. The old rancher had his shotgun and his boots and the particular expression of a man who had already assessed the situation and arrived at a number of profane conclusions about it.

  "You want the bad news or the really bad news," Raul said.

  "How many," Malik said.

  "Lost count around forty. And that was just what I could see." He paused. "The small ones are maybe ten feet. There's some out there that are. Well." He paused again. "Big."

  "Weapons."

  "Clubs. Spears. Some kind of. I don't know. Tubes. Blowguns maybe. Long ones. The ones carrying those." Raul stopped. "Those are the ones that worry me."

  Malik had already moved to Lena. "Zoe stays in the barn. Against the back wall. Deepest corner."

  "I know," Lena said.

  "Grandma stays with her."

  Grandma Evelyn stood. "I am not hiding in a corner while my family—"

  "Grandma." Malik looked at her. She looked back at him. Eighty-one years of absolute authority against whatever he was now. "Please."

  She looked at him for a long moment.

  "You come back," she said.

  "Yes ma'am."

  She went to Zoe. She sat in the straw beside the sleeping child and she opened her Bible again, spine cracked and comfortable in her hands, and she began to read in the particular way she always read. Not frantically. Not for comfort. Just as a matter of course.

  Malik watched her for one second.

  Then he went out into the dark.

  The first giant he saw clearly was perhaps twelve feet. Broad through the chest. Carrying a club that had been a tree not long ago, bark still on it, roots trailing. Its face was human enough to be wrong about it. Too broad. Too flat. Eyes set too wide, catching the pre-dawn grey like an animal's.

  It saw Malik and stopped.

  Then it made a sound. Not language. Not quite. Something between a grunt and a call, carrying in the pre-dawn air, picked up and answered from somewhere further out in the dark.

  "Okay," Malik said quietly, to no one.

  He breathed in. Felt the heat build in the column of his chest, rising from the place that had no human equivalent, the furnace that hadn't existed three days ago and now felt like it had always been there.

  He exhaled.

  The golden fire rolled out controlled and precise and the giant threw itself sideways and the tree-club caught the edge of the flame and went up instantly, dropping from burning fingers.

  More sounds from the dark. Answering calls. Getting closer.

  Lena came up on his left, ruby scales catching the first grey of pre-dawn. No words. She had already calculated everything that needed calculating.

  They held the yard.

  For a time it was enough.

  The small ones, ten and twelve feet, came in ones and twos and Malik burned them back and Lena hit the gaps and Raul put his shotgun to use on the ones that got close enough, which didn't stop them but slowed them, and the horses in the far paddock screamed in the way horses scream when the world has gone entirely wrong.

  Then the blowguns started.

  The first dart hit Lena.

  Malik didn't see it come. Nobody saw it come. One moment she was holding the left flank and the next she made a sound he had never heard from her before, a sharp truncated sound, and her left wing folded wrong. She didn't fall. She held. But the wing hung at an angle that meant something had changed in her, some function of the lattice altered, and whatever the dart had done it had done it instantly and silently from somewhere in the dark.

  "Lena."

  "I'm fine." She wasn't fine. She was still standing and still fighting and those were two different things.

  The second dart hit Malik in the shoulder.

  The world went sideways for three seconds. Not pain exactly. More like the color temperature of everything shifted, like reality had been briefly adjusted to a different setting. He felt his flame response stutter, try to engage, catch wrong. He shook his head hard and it came back, sluggish and incomplete.

  Blowguns. Silent. No warning. Payload that rewrote function in the specific targeted way of a thing designed by something that understood what it was shooting at.

  The giants knew about dragons.

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  Had prepared for dragons.

  He felt Darius before he saw him.

  The specific signature of his father's energy, the emerald frequency he had known his whole life without knowing he was knowing it, surging up from the barn behind him suddenly and without warning.

  Darius came out of the barn doors at a full run.

  Not the shuffling, shaking creature from the far corner. Not the man who had needed to be walked between two people to find the south pasture. Something else. The withdrawal still on him, still in his shaking claws and his too-wide pupils, but underneath it something older and simpler and stronger had taken the wheel.

  He passed Malik without stopping.

  Went straight at the cluster of giants pressing the yard from the north.

  And Malik understood in the way you understand things in the middle of a crisis, without time to name the feeling or follow it to its conclusion.

  He went after him.

  They fought together for seventeen minutes by the clock on the farmhouse wall that Malik could see from the yard. His father's fire was raw and unfocused and ran too hot, scorching the earth in wide arcs, but there was no hesitation in it. The tremors still moved through his limbs. He fought through them the way he had apparently decided to fight through everything else tonight. One direction. Forward.

  The giants gave ground.

  Then the large one came.

  Malik heard it before he saw it.

  The footsteps at a different frequency, lower and further apart, the specific bass note of something whose weight was a geological fact rather than a biological one. When it cleared the tree line he had to recalibrate his sense of scale twice before the number settled.

  Four hundred feet. Perhaps more.

  It moved with the indifference of weather. Not targeting. Not tactical. Just moving through the space the farmhouse occupied the way a river moves through a valley it has always moved through.

  Darius saw it.

  Turned from the smaller giants without hesitation.

  Malik was already moving but Darius was already moving faster and in the wrong direction, not away from the large one, toward it, and Malik understood what his father had decided and tried to calculate whether there was another option and found that the math didn't produce one.

  "Dad—"

  Darius hit the large one's leg like a wave hitting a cliff.

  It didn't stop it. Nothing was going to stop it. But it slowed it, three seconds of stumble as the giant addressed the nuisance at its foot, and in those three seconds Lena got Zoe out of the barn through the back and into the south pasture tree line and Grandma Evelyn moved with the speed of a woman who had buried a husband and two children and was not ready to bury anyone else tonight.

  The giant's hand came down.

  Not a swing. Not aimed. Just the casual corrective motion of something enormous addressing something small.

  It hit Darius.

  It hit Malik two seconds later when he arrived too late to matter.

  The world became impact and rotation and the specific velocity of a body that has been moved by something large and indifferent. Malik's awareness telescoped down to a bright point and then the hay barn at the back of the property arrived and the walls gave way and the roof came down and then nothing.

  He came back slowly.

  Hay. Dust. The smell of old wood and darkness. Something heavy across his back that resolved into roof beam when he moved against it. The movement resolved into pain that resolved into an inventory of what still worked and what didn't.

  Most things still worked.

  He lay still for a moment under the debris. Listening.

  The footsteps were moving away. The calls between the giants further now and further still, the swarm passing through rather than stopping, a tide moving on whatever tide logic moved it.

  Somewhere a horse was still screaming.

  Somewhere else was silence.

  He understood the silence before he understood it.

  He lay there under the hay and the roof beam and he listened to the silence for a long time.

  Then he got up.

  He found Lena in the south pasture.

  He found Darius near the large one's last position, where the earth was pressed flat in the shape of an enormous foot.

  He found Raul by the barn doors he had never stopped defending.

  Grandma Evelyn he found in the south pasture tree line, seated against an oak, Bible still in her hands, open to whatever page she had been reading.

  Peaceful.

  He stood over her for a long time.

  Zoe was not in the tree line.

  He searched the south pasture in widening circles, calling, the sound that came out of him low and involuntary and not anything he had a word for, the sound of a thing reaching for its own and finding absence.

  He found her small sapphire form at the edge of the pasture, at the fence line, curled small.

  He pressed his muzzle against her and stayed there.

  The sun came up over Michigan.

  The horses had stopped screaming.

  The farm was very quiet.

  He buried them where they had fallen.

  Not buried. He was a golden dragon and this was his family and some things you did the way they were supposed to be done.

  He pulled a long breath in through his nostrils.

  Felt the heat build slow and even and precise in the column of his chest, rising from the furnace that had no human name.

  The golden fire came out steady and controlled, the way he had watched his father tend a grill on summer evenings.

  The way Darius had taught him without knowing he was teaching him.

  He held the flame until there was nothing left to hold it for.

  Then he stood in the quiet of the Michigan morning and the violet-gold shimmer came again at the edge of his vision.

  He didn't look away from it.

  "I know you're there," he said.

  The shimmer pulsed. Warm. Patient. Waiting.

  He stood there for a long time.

  Then he spread his wings.

  And followed it north.

  The sky above Michigan was the same sky it had always been.

  He didn't look back.

  He already knew what was behind him.

  What he needed to find was ahead.

  Whatever it was.

  Wherever it led.

  He flew.