Dragon Tamer

Chapter 20

"Not necessarily." Harry got up from his chair and sat beside me on the bench. He plucked the diary from my hands, opening it to the first page to see who's diary it was. He grunted. "This is Joseph Dricino's book. I have his son's Jeremy. He mentioned Prince Archibald's death in his diary. It shook Joseph. He was never the same after that. He was too young to know the details of his death, only that he was in incredible pain. I'm assuming Joseph described the same symptoms as Camden?"

I nodded, mouth dry. The symptoms were exactly the same, even the thing crawling around inside him.

Harry grunted again, peering up to Dad then to our other brothers who had put their books down to crowd around us. Not used to having everyone's eyes on him, Harry ducked his head into his book and continued his synopsis: "Jeremy hated seeing his dad so torn up over something the Ackers had declared wasn't his fault. It was just a genetic condition. Jeremy thought maybe if he figured out what it was that caused this illness in the Ackers it would bring his father peace of mind."

"Did he ever find out what it was?" Kaden asked.

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose, a small sigh escaping his lips. "None of the princes that generation got sick, so he couldn't study them. All he had to go on was the notes Joseph left behind. He was even allowed to read the Ackers' books to see what the family had on this illness. They wrote it off as a genetic deformity and left it at that."

Harry shook his head in incredulity. "You'd think a family with as much resources as they do, they would try to find a cure. Anyway, there didn't appear to be a pattern in the illnesses. Sometimes it skipped a few generations, once it happened to two generations in a row; it was always the youngest son and they were in pain, feverish, and something growing inside them. He didn't find much else on the illness, but he did discover how the Ackers got their magic." He sat up a little straighter, taking on a more professorly stature. "A very long time ago, an Acker saved a dragon's life--before we began taming them, that long ago--and in return the dragon cut himself and bled into a cup. That Acker wasn't given any powers, but he did live to be a hundred and fifty years old. In this time, he bore three generations. His heirs' powers grew with every generation. His first family could only communicate with dragons telepathically. The second could control fire. The third Bonded with one dragon each and shared their powers."

It was an interesting piece of history, but everyone knew the Ackers got their magical blood from a dragon. I didn't see what that had to do with Camden's current predicament.

Harry turned to me, sensing my doubt. "You said Marco attacked him when he saw Camden's dragon eyes, right? Maybe he can sense something we can't in Camden and he's afraid of him."

"You mean, he's, like, uber powerful?" Giles guessed, scratching his head. "Camden's sick because his blood is too potent for his body?"

"It's possible, yes," Harry agreed. "That's what Jeremy thought, as well. He thought that maybe if his father had taken him to the birthplace of dragons, Archibald might have survived. After all, for the longest time, the only place for a dragon to be born was in the lava of a volcano; they needed the heat to weaken the egg shell so they could break free. Of course, since all the volcanoes erupted, dragon eggs don't need to be in lava to hatch-- as we witness every year."

"So," I said, my mind turning over and over at the possibility of saving Cam, "you think the dragon blood in him might calm down--in a sense--if we take him to a volcano and drop him in some lava?" I wasn't the only one who thought that was crazy, right?

"You said he stood in front of a fireball and didn't get hurt. The lava shouldn't hurt him."

It was the "shouldn't" that worried me, but really, what other options did we have? We could sit here and let him die, or try to bathe him in lava and either watch him melt or he could get better and be the first Acker to survive this illness.