Read The Saint of Dragons for Free Online

to you,” he told Simon, “but it wasn’t safe. I’ve been wondering about you since the day we said good-bye.”
    “ You said good-bye. I was too little to talk,” Simon said plainly.
    Aldric didn’t like to be corrected. “There was no other way,” he said, and then his anger came back a bit. “The Lighthouse School had the best reputation anywhere. I trusted Denman. Didn’t that school take care of you?” At this he seemed to leanforward, worried about the answer.
    “I guess,” the boy admitted.
    “Well, all right, then,” said Aldric, relieved.
    “But I would have liked it if someone had told me who my mother and father were,” Simon grumbled, not wanting his father off the hook so easy. “I would have liked it if I knew where they had gone. And why.”
    “The ‘why’ is easy,” said Aldric. “You’ll understand all that soon enough. It’s the reason I’m here now. I need you to join me on my quest to fight the evil that dwells among us. It has been with us for centuries. It was with us when you were born. We had to send you away to protect you from it.”
    “From what ?”
    “From the Serpents. From the Draconians. Whatever name you choose to use.”
    “Choose a name I can understand,” begged Simon.
    “Dragons.”
    There was a moment now when no one said a word. It was such a bizarre thing to say, Simon almost laughed. But his father said it with all the truth he had in him, he said it with such fear and disgust and such wildness in his eyes that it was clear he truly meant what he said.
    “You were protecting me from Dragons?”
    “Don’t look at me like that,” said Aldric. “I am telling you the truth. A truth few people in this world have ever heard.”
    “I’m listening,” said Simon.
    “The Dragon is a creature of unspeakable evil. It is a monster. A wretched liar, an insatiable thief, and a despicable killer. I say ‘is’ because this creature isn’t an animal made up out of theimagination, or from the distant past. It is real, it is alive, and it is at work in the world today. Living out there somewhere in the shadows.”
    He pushed away his plate. “Fact is, up until recent times, there were great numbers of them. I’ve spent my life hunting them down, one by one.”
    “You hunt down Dragons,” said Simon doubtfully. “The giant scaly reptiles. With big wings and huge teeth.”
    “No,” said Aldric. “They haven’t looked like that for centuries.”
    “What?”
    “Well, Dragons haven’t stayed the same since the dawn of time,” he explained. “They’ve moved on like everything else. They’ve changed, evolved. They look like men now, mostly. They stand two or three feet taller than an average fellow, unless they’re hunched over. They walk like men do, on two feet. They have two heavy, muscular arms. Their bodies are smaller than they used to be, so they can hide under a big coat, but their skin is reptile skin, and their blood is green, and warm to the touch. Their heads are man-sized, and their faces reptilian. Their eyes are glassy green or yellow or pitch-black ugly.
    “We don’t even call them Dragons, that’s how different they are now. They’re more like Dragonmen. We call them Draconians, or Reptellans. Some people call them Serpentines, or Pyrothraxes.”
    “Pyro…?” Simon tried to say it.
    “Pyrothraxes. Pyro, meaning fire,” Aldric rattled on, as if all of this was everyday knowledge. “They use fire as their chief weapon, but not because they need to. These days, Dragons havehundreds, sometimes thousands, of ordinary people working for them. Dragons can be found in business, in politics; most are in charge of organized crime at the top levels. They can be found in every country on earth. Their men do their bidding now with knives and guns and bombs just like all criminals, but the Dragon has a special place in his heart for fire. They simply love fire, and can never get enough of it. You can never be sure what they’ll do with