Dragon's Blood

Different

When Iyla woke the next morning the air coming through her window was no longer welcoming and cool. It was a cold and frosty February morning and she was freezing. She stood up, wrapping her duvet round her and dragged herself, duvet and all, into the living room. Living in a flat meant no stairs, which meant minimal distance between her bed and the sofa where she now flopped down, tucking her feet up and folding the duvet around her toes before looking around her for the TV remote. Then she remembered, they'd sold the TV two days ago.

She looked at the bare space on the small table in the corner where the TV had been. It hadn't been the greatest TV, it was small and old fashioned with no fancy extras but still, it seemed a bit unfair that the food the money its sale had got them had already been eaten and now she had an empty stomach again as well as no TV. On her birthday. Sometimes things sucked a bit.

Sam had always worked hard, there was no denying he did his best. But he had unfortunately not left school with any qualifications and had been, by his own admission, a bit of a drifter before he became Iyla's guardian as her only living relative. She had to admit, she found it odd, he seemed so clever to her, he certainly wasn't stupid. He had told her he was twenty years old when he became her main carer, she wondered what had kept him from applying himself at school and college until that point but she respected him too much to ask and he didn't talk about himself at all, like ever. He was always happy to talk about her mother, Karen, her father, Ian, who was his brother, and about her brother Tobias. She could almost see them in her mind, like memories but not because they were just based on what she had been told and her own imagination. Sam said she looked like her mother so that made it easier to form a picture of her - dark brown hair with just a hint of red when it caught the sun, a dusting of freckles and bright green eyes.

Whilst Iyla couldn't understand why Sam hadn't done well at school, she could understand that suddenly becoming a surrogate father to a difficult toddler at the age of twenty had probably had a somewhat negative impact on his career prospects. She assumed, although he never confirmed this, that he had fled their families birthplace because he couldn't bare the pain of the memories it evoked to be in the places he and his brother had grown up. Moving so far away had also made life tougher for him in some ways though, no familiarity, no connections. He had been on his own with no money, no job prospects and he had managed to build them a life and put a roof over their heads and keep it there.

Early on, he had made a friend, now their landlord, a kindly man named Alan Kamal. A simple interaction where Sam had helped Mr Kamal change a tyre when he'd seen him struggling at the side of the road had begun a decade long friendship. All Mr Kamal saw was a determined, respectful young man with a young child to support who needed a break. They had been living in a caravan before Mr Kamal had rented them the flat above his shop and given Sam a job there. People had been wary of Sam at first, he looked quite different obviously, albinism was not something many people had come across and, for some reason Iyla could never understand, that sometimes meant he was treated differently. Mr Kamal had, at times in his life, been treated the same way and he had taken the younger Sam and angry little Iyla under his wing. His own wife had passed away just a year before they met him, he had no children of his own and he had just got the biggest heart. There was no way they paid enough rent or this flat but that was all he would let them pay, and that was only because Sam insisted on paying something. For his part, Sam went out of his way to work as hard as he could, extending his job description to maintenance, both of the shop, the flat and even Mr Kamal's own home and car. Sam may not have had academic qualifications, but he could turn his hand to anything.

Sam was also artistic and creative, his hobby of wood carving bought in a little extra income and the animals he carved were astonishingly realistic. Iyla's favourites were the mythical creatures, the dragons in particular, and there were many of those dotted around their flat that she wouldn't let Sam sell. Beautiful and elegant, they almost looked alive, as if they were going to take off into flight, breathing fire as they went.