Chapter 1

As I printed the order confirmation from Amazon.com, I was grateful once again for the relative silence of my old Canon ink-jet printer. The last thing I wanted right now was to disturb the two sleeping lumps nestled inside my shirt. At a few days old, they didn't do much besides eat and sleep, and feeding them kept me quite busy, while sleeping meant sharing my personal space and body heat. I'd taken leave from the plant this week and next because there was simply no way I could take them to work and no way I could leave them for more than minutes.

I double-checked the order. "Dragon Singer", Dragon Drums" and "Dragon Song" by Anne McCaffrey - replacements for books long since loaned out and never returned. I'd enjoyed them years ago. Now I needed them for research. One of the lumps twisted fitfully, tickling my ribs and making me smile. I couldn't help but reflect back...

It was the second day of May. I'd just returned from a trip that I'd taken to participate in a Ceremony out of town. Quite a ceremony, and I still wore a blissful expression on my face - but that's a whole 'nother story. My daughter, just recently turned "sweet sixteen" had managed to get herself up and to school, but had left me a note welcoming me home and asking me to pick up a few things from the grocery store and to check on her egg.

I checked on the egg first, even before storing my purple robes. She'd brought it home a couple of weeks before, saying it was for some kind of school project. Details were a little sketchy - I guess I assumed that it was one of those home-ec things where you pretend an egg is your baby or something. Eggzavier, as I thought of it (or him) had started off a bit soft, but had firmed up to a brittle hardness recently. I always thought they assigned regular hen's eggs for these projects, but Eggzavier must have been an ostrich egg or something - he was enormous compared to any grade A large I'd ever seen. Little did I know.

Once I was unpacked, I looked over her shopping list. Most peculiar, the list was heavy on inexpensive cuts of meat, like round steaks and flank steak, hamburger and chicken. Was my daughter planning a lot of barbecues? The other part of the list was skin products, moisturizers and creams. No snacks, no diet soft drinks (an addiction we share), no side dishes made the list. As I said, most peculiar. Well, the budget could certainly afford everything she asked for, and if she were planning a little outdoor cooking, I'd discuss niceties like potato salad and chips when she got home from school.

I checked Eggzavier again on the way out. When I rotated him in his bed of heated kitty litter (my personal coffee cup warmer providing the heat), I swear I felt him shiver. I positioned him a little deeper in his "bed" anyway, and gave him a little pat.

I was home again in under an hour. The clock by the front door indicated 4:20, but it's set five minutes fast anyway. My daughter would be home in another ten minutes, nearly last off the bus, unless she stopped to visit with friends. I hung my car keys under the clock and headed for the kitchen to put up the nearly 20 pounds of meat I'd brought in. I never made it.

Little Eggzavier was rocking around in his bed on the coffee table so hard, it looked like he'd roll out and end up on the floor. I quickly set down the plastic grocery bags and reached for him. No sooner did my fingers make contact than a crack split the shell nearly in two. More cracks appeared as I steadied the shell and I thought I was in imminent danger of having a baby ostrich or emu or some such in my hands.

What did emerge, moments later, was nothing I'd ever dreamed possible. In place of some avian oddity, two identical green-skinned creatures with swirling eyes and tiny claws came creeling with hunger from the shell. There was no doubt about the hunger - I felt it in an overwhelming surge of sensation as though it was me and not they. With one hand, I reached into a grocery bag and extracted a round steak, used my teeth to rip off the plastic wrap, then again to rip off a strip of meat to place in their ravenous beaks.