It took three days of Bael egg-sitting before the baby finally hatched, giving Jillian plenty of time to recover and Charlotte time to assemble her potion ingredients. They’d both started to lose track of time, only knowing a day had passed because Zed had stopped by to check on them. Jillian was huddled in her nest of pillows, making notes by the light of a lantern. Charlotte was pretending she wasn’t looking at a solid gold bowl that appeared to be filled with emeralds the size of her fist.

And suddenly, the eggshell bowed outward, a strange metallic sound like a car door being ripped off of its hinge. Bael stirred, shaking his head back and forth. While Jillian bounded off the bed–fueled by Clarissa’s comfort food–and ran across the cave, Charlotte approached the embers carefully. It was a strange sensation, not knowing what was going to be inside the egg. Would it be a small flaming bird? A tiny dragon? Or a baby human?

The suspense ended quickly enough when a tiny human fist jabbed through the shell, making Bael shuffle back. It was all so quiet, it was almost off-putting. There was no exultant and incensed howl as the baby left their mother’s body. The egg simply broke and fell away, the bottom cradling a perfectly beautiful little person.

“Oh, look at her!” Jillian cried, tears trailing down her cheeks. “She’s so beautiful, Bael! Just look!”

“I’m going to examine baby as quickly as I can,” she told Jillian, watching the dragon, whose head was hovering over them, sniffing. “Bael, I’m just going to check her vitals and then I’ll get out of the way, OK? No biting. No fire. OK?”

Dragon-Bael snorted. She took that as a non-verbal contract and peered into the shell. Inside was the most beautiful little girl that Charlotte had ever seen, with bright golden hair and a little rosebud mouth. Her head was perfectly rounded and her amber eyes alert. Charlotte did her assessments as quickly as she could, touching the baby as little as possible with her bare skin so Jillian’s would be the first scent and touch the baby knew.

“She’s as healthy as can be,” Charlotte promised. When Jillian lifted her up from her cozy little shell, the baby burst into indignant tears. A little circle of blue flames ignited from her hair, making Jillian coo, “Oh, baby, it’s OK.”

The baby’s hair was on fire.

That was something Charlotte hadn’t seen before.

Bael shrank back into his human form, throwing on a pair of sweatpants. He knelt beside his wife, the most heart-breaking expression of joy and awe on his face. “Do you think that’s going to happen every time she cries?”

“Most of the nursery has been fireproofed anyway,” Jillian said. She took the baby to her breast to nurse, wreathed in blue flames.