Blood Bonds by Adrienne Wilder

wouldn’t even look at him then. Dobson looked at him. Dobson was not afraid to look his son in the eye, even when he was begging him for death.
    And one day the screaming just stopped. William was a mess but he didn’t hurt any more. It was like his body had decided it would take a break. Another set of x-rays showed strange rounded areas in his spine and shoulders, like he’d grown joints for limbs he didn’t have.
    The doctors still didn’t know what to make of it. They sent for specialists across the United States. Medical journals wanted to do interviews, and in desperation to help his son, Dobson agreed.
    Looking back, it had been the wrong decision.
    Not long after the bone changes stopped, William lost his hair. All of it. And it didn’t happen slow. It was like someone had dosed him with a round of chemo. The nurses went in to roll him over and jarred him enough to shake it all loose.
    Like a fucking Christmas tree that’d been left in the house till March.
    Three days later, his teeth followed the same path his hair took.
    Dobson knew then. In his gut he knew. In Beijing he’d seen half-breeds, quarter breeds. The half-breeds were bare of any hair, not even a patch around their nuts for crying out loud. Completely slick, from head to toe, like they’d been taking Nair baths or some shit. And they were always Male.
    Then there were the Lesser-Breds. That’s what the wyrms called them. Lesser, because they were mostly Human. As if wyrm blood was somehow better. Lesser-Breds were second generation down or greater from the beast blood.
    The quarter breds or less were a little more difficult to spot. They looked Human. Hair, height, freckles and moles. And they could come in both sexes. Unless you caught a look-see at those devil marks they had on their body they could fool you. Some of the birth marks were large and obvious but a few had small ones which were easy to hide.
    On occasion, the color of their eyes gave them away.
    It seemed the last genes to want to let go would be passed down from any females in the line. The Kin gene equivalent of the X chromosome wouldn’t be turned on in the presence of a Human X chromosome. But pair it with a Y and the switch was flipped.
    ‘Course it wasn’t the doctors at that backwoods hospital who figured it out. No, sir.
    As soon as Dobson realized his son was somehow carrying Kin blood in him, he’d transferred him to a private military facility. The U.S. government owed him the favor. Once there, specialists in metaphysics examined the biological changes happening to William. A team of geneticists was called in for consult.
    It was confirmed. William was a Lesser-Bred. The problem genes had traveled down from his mother’s side of the family, attached to the X chromosomes, and now that there was a son in the Female line, they could be expressed.
    Dobson took the news straight faced. By the time the white coats were done talking about pleiotropic effects, mobile DNA, sex linked traits, and recessives, he’d made up his mind to turn this problem into a solution.
    They didn’t know how long it would take. But William wasn’t going to be William for much longer. Apparently, the further removed from the Kin sire, the more unstable the genes became. Results were, to say in the least, unpredictable.
    Dobson went home and took his wife out for a ride. He punched her in the head, knocking enough skull into her gray matter she was never going to get up. Didn’t matter. She wouldn’t need to where she was headed.
    He sold her for a hundred bucks to a flesh trader in the Dens.
    Dobson had his son moved to the basement of the Atlanta Draconian Prison Facility and waited for the rest of him to disappear.
    It took awhile, almost five years, but pretty soon he wasn’t one bit Human. He’d transformed into some hideous combination of Kin and man. He wasn’t as large as a pure-bred wyrm. About the size of a horse. His front legs were different, more Human in their