Dragon's Kiss

The call comes at 2 AM.

Dr. Hana Kim is already awake—she's been reviewing case files for the struggling exotic animal clinic she inherited from her grandmother six months ago. The bills are piling up. The landlord is making threatening noises. And now her phone is buzzing with a number she doesn't recognize.

She answers anyway.

"Dr. Kim? This is Officer Reyes, Seattle PD. We've got a situation at the docks—busted a smuggling ring. Lots of exotic animals. Some of them are... unusual. Someone gave us your name."

Hana is already reaching for her jacket. "I'm on my way."

Twenty minutes later, she's standing in a warehouse that smells like fear and suffering. Cages line the walls—birds, reptiles, small mammals, all clearly traumatized. Her heart breaks a little more with each one she examines.

Then she sees him.

In a cage much too small, curled in on himself, is the most beautiful creature she's ever seen.

At first, she thinks he's some kind of large lizard—maybe a komodo dragon variant, though the coloring is all wrong. His scales shimmer between deep emerald and burnished gold, catching the weak warehouse light like living jewels. His body is about three feet long, not counting the tail, and she can see wounds—cuts, burns, what look like electrical marks.

Someone tortured this animal.

"What is this?" she asks Officer Reyes, her voice tight with controlled fury.

"No idea. The smugglers were tight-lipped, but they seemed scared of it." The officer shifts uncomfortably. "Thing killed two of their guys before they got it sedated. Breathed fire, they said. We figured they were high."

Hana kneels by the cage.

The creature's eyes open.

They're gold. Not yellow, not amber—gold, like molten metal, with vertical pupils that contract as they focus on her face.

Intelligence gleams in those eyes.

More than animal intelligence.

Help me, something seems to say. Please.

Hana's breath catches.

"I'm taking him," she says.

---

Getting the creature—she's been calling him "Yong" in her head, the Korean word for dragon, because she doesn't know what else to call him—into her clinic's largest enclosure takes the rest of the night.

He's docile with her, strangely so. Lets her carry him, clean his wounds, hook up an IV for fluids. But his eyes never leave her face, and she can't shake the feeling that he's studying her.

"You're not just an animal, are you?" she murmurs, applying antibiotic cream to a particularly nasty burn. "What are you?"

He blinks slowly.

If she didn't know better, she'd swear he was considering how to answer.

She works through the night and into the morning. By the ...