Archive of Our Own ^beta

The attack came out of nowhere.

Literally from nowhere — one minute, Hiccup was walking beside Toothless, taking in the dense, tangled foliage of the new island the dragon riders had discovered, and the next, two red orbs materialized in his path.

He stumbled to a halt, exchanging a baffled look with Toothless, who growled softly and crouched defensively. Hiccup reached out his left hand hesitantly, trying to figure out what he saw; it only took him a couple of seconds to register that these were eyes, red and glowing and floating in midair. Unfortunately, those two seconds were all that whatever the eyes were attached to needed to lunge at him.

A shout of pain exploded from Hiccup as something wickedly sharp pierced his left hand and latched on; Toothless roared in panic, unable to attack what he couldn't see.

With great effort, ignoring the pain shooting through his hand and creeping up his arm, Hiccup swung his arm around, desperate to throw the invisible attacker off. He heard a thud as the whatever-it-was smacked against a tree trunk a few feet away. Hiccup couldn't control his trembling as he inched toward the tree. With a shiver of color, the creature that had attacked him became visible. Hiccup held out his right hand, stopping a snarling Toothless from attacking.

Hiccup had seen, discovered, trained, and learned about more dragons than perhaps any other Viking in the Barbaric Archipelago. He'd grown used to the bizarre, the impossible, the deadly and terrifying — Deathsongs, Changewings, Whispering Deaths, to name a few. But Hiccup had never seen anything quite like the creature picking itself off the ground before him.

Its body was about the size of a Speed Stinger's, but that was where the similarities ended. Bulbous red eyes with slit pupils blinked up at him from above the snub snout, and a mouthful of dagger-sharp teeth filled its cavernous mouth, with one large canine fang on the left side and a hole where the one on the right should be — evidently, the dragon had lost a tooth at some point. Enormous bat ears swiveled on its head. Its body was short and its limbs were long; it sat back on its two hind legs and studied him, its forelegs nearly reaching the ground. A long, spiked prehensile tail curled behind it. Thick purple scales studded its body, and anywhere that the scales were sparse, what looked like thick, coarse black fur or barbs grew. Gigantic bat-like wings sprouted from its shoulders, shimmering ebony in the sunlight.

It was a dragon, Hiccup was almost certain — the scales, slit pupils, and wings spoke to that — but what kind, what class, he had no idea. Excitement thrummed in his veins as he and the dragon studied one another warily, nearly blotting out the white-hot agony blazing in his hand. What a discovery! This could be a whole new class, a completely unique species in the known dragon world! If he could train it, study it—

Without thinking, Hiccup tried to raise his left hand to appease it, maybe even to approach and try to form a bond with it. At the movement, pain spiked through his hand, and he clutched it to his chest with a strangled yell. Toothless rumbled deep in his chest, thin pupils cutting quickly between his rider and the other dragon, which did not seem at all fazed by his outburst.

It fixed him with a strange look, red eyes gleaming hungrily, and Hiccup felt suddenly woozy, like he was falling into or out of sleep. Toothless shrieked; the strange dragon released Hiccup from its gaze and regarded the Night Fury for a heartbeat, then spread its wings — each one at least as long as its body — and took to the air in a rush of wind.

Hiccup watched as it vanished — actually vanished, turning invisible as quickly and thoroughly as a Changewing. "Incredible," he breathed. "Toothless, I've never seen anything like that before, not in the Book of Dragons, or Bork's Papers, or even the Dragon Eye. I mean, we could be looking at an entirely different sub-race of dragons. Wait 'til I tell Fishlegs, he'll—"

He broke off at Toothless's irritated snort. "What?"

Toothless whined and looked pointedly at Hiccup's throbbing hand, still held tight to his chest. Hiccup blinked in surprise; his exhilaration at this monumental discovery had momentarily muted the pain and made him forget that said discovery had been made by the dragon attacking him.

Hiccup slowly drew his arm away from his body and lowered his eyes, expecting to see a bloody scratch or even a cluster of puncture marks. What he did not expect was a large, gleaming white fang lodged deeply in his hand, surrounded by swollen, bruise-purple skin. Hiccup's stomach turned and Toothless keened.

"Oh, Thor," Hiccup managed, head swimming and gut churning. "That dragon was venomous."

Toothless chuffed, nudging Hiccup's chest.

"You’re right, bud. Let's get out of here and find the others. There could be more of those guys out there, and I need a healer to look at this."

The dragon riders had discovered this lush island on a scouting mission and had decided to spend the day exploring it. They'd expected wild dragons galore — most islands in this archipelago had them — but after a while, they'd realized that the island, fertile paradise though it may be, had no sign of life, dragon or otherwise. They'd decided to split up and explore on foot before heading back to the Edge, thinking maybe they'd missed something on their fly-through.

Now, back on the small western beach, Toothless's signal called the other riders to them, and one by one, Hiccup's friends and their dragons emerged from the dense foliage skirting the sand.

To Hiccup's immense relief, none of the other riders had been attacked, but everyone reacted to the sight of Hiccup's hand in varying displays of horror: Snotlout actually shrieked, throwing his arms across his face; Fishlegs squealed in alarm and immediately came over for a closer look, peppering Hiccup with questions Hiccup couldn't comprehend, let alone answer; the twins oohed and ahhed and generally made a grand to-do about it; and Astrid's hands covered her mouth, her eyes blazing in concern.

Hiccup, head spinning and hand singing with pain, finally quieted his team enough to impart to them the most important thing for now: The invisible dragon that did this still lurked somewhere on this island, and there could be more, and they needed to get off this beach and back to Dragon's Edge before doing anything else, including treating his bite wound.

On the way back, Hiccup shouted a truncated version of what had happened to his fellow riders over the buffeting winds.

"It lost its tooth in your hand?"

"Yes, Snotlout, the big white thing sticking out of the back of my hand is its tooth," Hiccup answered. He glanced down again at his hand, through which a concerning numbness had begun to spread from the epicenter of the bite. The bruise-like color (Hiccup couldn't be sure if he was actually bruising or if the venom caused discoloration) and swelling followed the numbness up his arm so that from his fingertips to his elbow, his hand and arm had turned purple and swollen at least twice their normal size, and the only feeling he had in the affected area was the bite itself, which continued to hurt so badly it he could barely think. Or maybe his foggy brain stemmed from the venom, too.

"That is so cool," Tuffnut breathed in reverence. The twins nearly knocked Snotlout out of the sky as they flew Barf and Belch closer for a better look. "Can I have it?"

Hiccup closed his eyes, fighting fear and dizziness and an awful roiling in his stomach that just wouldn't go away. "It's stuck in my body, Tuff."

"We can see that, Hiccup," Ruff acknowledged. "Why don't you just take it out and toss it over?"

"Because," Hiccup gritted out as patiently as possible, "it's embedded so deeply it will be difficult to remove it while flying Toothless. We'll probably need pliers to get a good enough grip, anyway."

"Besides," Astrid chimed in, a forced calmness walling off the storm of emotion just beneath the surface, "we don't know what will happen when that thing comes out."

"Yeah, the venom could cause the wound to bleed uncontrollably, or the tooth could be serrated and make the wound even worse," Fishlegs explained.

The twins stared at him blankly.

"Which would be very bad things," Fishlegs explained like the twins were a pair of irrational toddlers. Which, to be fair…

"Can we please stop talking about my hand?" Hiccup hissed. Toothless warbled worriedly beneath him and Hiccup patted the dragon's scales with his right hand. "I'm — I'm okay, bud," he blatantly lied. "It's just, we can't do anything about it anyway until we get back, and I'd really like to think about something else for a while."

Belying his mostly measured tone, Hiccup's thoughts swarmed through his fuzzy head like twitching, jerking dragons drugged with dragon root: I can't feel my arm it's spreading it's getting worse my fingers are completely numb oh gods my arm is as thick as my father's what if it can't be reversed what if it kills me what if it spreads to my whole body what if it paralyzes me what if I lose another limb…

Fishlegs flew in closer to Hiccup. "Feel up to telling us about the dragon that did that, then?"

Hiccup flashed his friend a pained but thankful smile. "You know me, Fishlegs. I'm always up to talking about dragons."

Snotlout snorted. "Yeah, the only way you'd not want to yak about dragons is if you were dead—" He broke off at the incensed glares Astrid and Fishlegs shot his way. "What? It's true."

Hiccup took mercy on his cousin and haltingly, through the pain and panic, described the incredible discovery he'd made.

"Invisible purple monkey-dragon with giant bat wings and fur between its scales and hypnosis eyes?" Snotlout said flatly after he'd finished. "Are we sure hallucinations aren't a part of the poison?"

"Venom," Ruffnut corrected.

"What?"

"Venom," Tuffnut repeated. "If you bite something and you die, it's poisonous. If something bites you and you die, it's venomous."

"What if I bite something and it dies?"

"Then you probably have rabies," Tuff shot back.

"Snotlout definitely has rabies," cackled Ruff.

"Okay, guys, can we get back to the dragon?" Hiccup sighed, rolling his eyes. But the ridiculous turn the conversation had taken had managed to distract him enough for the mounting fear to not overwhelm him.

But only briefly. By the time they made it back to the Edge, Hiccup had withdrawn into a rigid silence, his arm numb from his shoulder to his fingertips, swollen and mottled purple — and he couldn't move it at all.

Fishlegs couldn't remove the tooth. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that it was indeed serrated, and so deep in Hiccup’s hand that it would do serious damage if he just tried to yank it out. Fishlegs may have studied under Gothi, but as an apprentice, and he didn't feel at all comfortable doing any kind of surgery on Hiccup's dominant hand, as there were so many tendons and ligaments working together to make the hand move and fingers articulate. If he accidentally cut something he wasn't supposed to, Hiccup could partially, or even completely, lose the use of his left hand.

So he'd cleaned the puffy, discolored wound around the tooth, slathered it with honey, loosely bandaged it, and strapped Hiccup's left arm expertly to his chest at heart level with a sling. The riders had wanted to ride for Berk immediately, but the dragons needed to rest before embarking on such a long journey, plus Hiccup felt so exhausted and lightheaded he feared he wouldn't be able to fly Toothless if he didn't get at least a little sleep. Since the poison didn't seem to be life-threatening and the numbness and swelling hadn't traveled past his arm, Fishlegs said he thought it would be okay to wait a couple of hours before starting the journey to Gothi.

So now Hiccup lay on his bed in his hut, pain stabbing through his hand in time with his heartbeat, his entire left arm numb and useless, held to his body with strips of linen. He stared at the ceiling for a while, listening to Toothless shuffling around on his stone. The dragon had clearly wanted to stay up and keep an eye on his rider all night if his earlier hovering and pacing had anything to say about it, but Hiccup had finally convinced him that he needed to be in top shape for the trip to Berk. The Night Fury had nuzzled Hiccup's side and reluctantly curled up on his stone, but he'd been fidgeting constantly, too worried about his friend to properly sleep.

Hiccup worried about himself too. His fingertips stuck out of the end of the bandages, thick and purple and unable to so much as twitch when he tried to move them. Hiccup was terrified that he would lose his arm, or that it would stay like this and he would lose the use of it, which would be just as bad. His hands were his life, his craft. If he couldn't recover from this…

At some point, Hiccup must have drifted into an uneasy sleep, because he dreamed of rows of sharp white teeth and enormous black bat wings and hypnotizing red eyes glowing in the dark.

Hiccup woke abruptly, waiting for the detritus of his dreams to crumble away. He whimpered softly as he realized what had woken him: The pain in his hand had spiked, each beat of his pulse sending shockwaves of agony up his otherwise unfeeling arm. Panic seized his chest — infection?

He breathed deeply, then blinked rapidly, still trying to chase the remnants of the dream away. Those bulbous red eyes had followed him into waking; he could still see them, hovering above him like twin balls of crimson fire.

And then the last shroud of sleep slipped from him and his swimming brain realized that he this was no dream, that the dream hadn't followed him — those eyes were really there.

Impossible.

Hiccup rolled off the bed with a yell just as the creature flapping above him lunged with a strange clicking sound that sounded almost like a guttural repetition of toothtoothtoothtoothtooth.

Toothless woke immediately at Hiccup's cry and lit the nearest candle with a precise plasma blast. He surged to his feet, rounding on the dragon that now perched on Hiccup's bed, all purple scales and coarse black hair and hungry red eyes. It looked bigger here in the confines of Hiccup's hut, though he knew it had to be the same one because of the missing fang.

"H-how did it find me?" Hiccup whispered to himself, fear pushing his heart to its limits, his pulse pounding in his ears. "Nothing followed us from that island."

But of course, he couldn't know that for sure — even if the eyes remained visible, this creature still could almost completely disappear.

The dragon had swooped out of the window right as his friends, alerted by Hiccup's shout and Toothless's shrieks, burst through the door.

Less than half an hour later, the riders were on their way to Berk earlier than planned, spurred into action by the unexpected attack.

"I can't believe that thing followed us all the way from its island," Tuffnut said.

"I can't believe that thing is actually real," Snotlout grumbled.

Hiccup didn't join the conversation; his left side had started tingling and he had a nasty feeling that if he pulled back his tunic, the left side of his chest would be mottled with purple. Hiccup let Toothless take the lead, his prosthetic leg working the tail fin automatically. He kept looking over his shoulder, looking for the tell-tale glow of round red eyes following behind them, listening for the sound of great flapping bat wings, watching for disturbances in the air.

But they found nothing.

Finally, when they stopped to rest on a grassy sea-stack, Hiccup slid off of Toothless and stumbled over to his friends, and announced, "It didn't follow us from the Edge. I didn't see any sign of it."

A chorus of relieved sighs. The riders sat down to eat a quick meal while the dragons dove for fish and Meatlug chowed down on some basalt. Hiccup, preoccupied and queasy, could do nothing more than nibble at his food. When everyone was otherwise occupied, he reached across his body with his right hand and pulled the left side of his tunic up. Dread pooled in his gut as he saw the purpled skin on his side, reaching up to his chest down toward his hip. He poked his side and felt nothing.

The poison was spreading, and it was spreading fast.

By the time they drew near to Berk, Hiccup had completely lost feeling in his hip, and the numbness crept steadily down his leg. If it reached his knee before they got home, someone else would have to fly Toothless, because he wouldn't be able to control the tail fin.

Thank the gods, the stone sentinels appeared before it came to that. He was going to make it! He could see Berk past them, a beacon of hope and healing.

But then, suddenly, something looped around his right arm from above and pulled — Hiccup was yanked from the saddle, his prosthetic still locked in place. He let out a startled cry and looked up to see a disembodied pair of ruby red eyes staring down at him. Like it had last time the creature had attacked him, the pain in Hiccup's hand flared. Toothless roared beneath him as the dragon tugged him again, and with a pop, Hiccup was pulled free from his prosthetic, which remained hooked to Toothless as the dragon screamed and plummeted with a frantic flapping of wings.

"Toothless!" Hiccup shouted, relief flooding him as Snotlout and Hookfang dove for the Night Fury, the Monstrous Nightmare plucking Toothless from his fall right before the hit the water.

The other riders circled around Hiccup, who appeared to be floating in midair, held aloft by an invisible attacker. They hesitated to take a shot; though the invisible dragon's eyes were visible, it would be challenging to hit a creature that they couldn't see.

"How did it find us?" Fishlegs howled, hovering anxiously on Meatlug. "It didn't follow us, we know that."

"It must have tracked him," Astrid said. "Could be Tracker Class." She patted Stormfly's neck.

Hiccup squirmed as the dragon continued to lift him higher. It wasn't a huge dragon, but it must have been strong. It clearly intended to carry Hiccup off. From above, that same clicking call — toothtoothtoothtoothtooth.

"Guys," Hiccup called. "Why don't we discuss this after we deal with this guy?"

"On it!" Green gas swirled over Hiccup's head, enveloping his captor. A spark, an explosion, a shriek —

The dragon released him, shimmering into view as Barf and Belch's attack rocked it. It had been holding Hiccup's arm with its tail.

Hiccup screamed as he hurtled toward the water, but Astrid dove beneath him, and he landed with a huff of air in front of her on Stormfly's back. Gripping the one of the Nadder's spikes with his right hand to steady himself, Hiccup glanced over his shoulder at Astrid with a faint smile. "Thanks."

Her grin was just as fleeting. "Anytime."

Above them, the strange dragon flapped off to the north, clicking and cawing in defeat.

"Maybe it's gone for good this time?" Snotlout suggested.

"Maybe," said Hiccup, but he knew it wasn’t. From Hookfang's talons, Toothless trilled in concern.

"I'm okay, bud," he said. "It didn't hurt me."

"Want to get back on Toothless, fly him the rest of the way?" Astrid asked.

Hiccup looked at the short distance between them and their home island — a hundred feet, maybe, until they reached the sentinels, and then maybe a hundred more once they'd passed them to get to the village plaza. He shifted his left knee — or tried to — and shook his head. "I can't," he whispered, panic latching its talons deeply into his heart. "I can't control my left leg at all."

Fishlegs, Astrid, and Stoick stayed with Hiccup while Gothi worked on him.

"So you say this new dragon keeps tracking you down, even when you're sure it hasn't followed you?" the chief asked as he watched the healer unwind the bandage around Hiccup's swollen, discolored, useless hand. To say he had been horrified to see the state of his son would be a massive understatement.

"At first I thought maybe it could have followed us from its island, but it definitely wasn't on our tail for the first half of our journey here," Hiccup answered, hissing as Gothi poked the bloated flesh around the bite. "So there's no way it should have been able to find me unless it's an insanely good tracker — the best we've ever seen. I mean, it found me across miles and miles of open ocean."

Gothi wrote something with her staff, and Fishlegs squinted to read it. "She says she's going to have to cut the tooth out."

"What about the venom's effects?" Hiccup asked.

More scribbling. "She says that the tooth may be the source of the poison. There's a chance that when she takes it out, the source runs dry, and the venom stops spreading and eventually runs its course. Or…"

"Or?" Astrid, Stoick, and Hiccup demanded in tandem at Fishlegs's hesitation.

"Or the poison could keep spreading, or the spreading could stop but the damage could be… permanent." Hiccup's heart seemed to stutter to a halt. "She can treat the wound itself and hopefully prevent any infection, but she's never seen anything like this before. She can try to treat the symptoms, but unless your body can flush the poison out on its own, there's not much more she can do."

Hiccup nodded, not trusting himself to speak as his father laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

That night, Astrid stood guard outside of Gothi's hut, where the healer had insisted Hiccup sleep so that she could keep a close eye on him. Gothi had cut out the tooth, cleaned and treated the wound, and sewn up the gash in her patient's hand.

It had been a long, painful process, for Hiccup and his attending father and friends, but the tooth was finally out and lying, bloodstained, wickedly pointed and serrated on all edges, on Gothi's work table. Toothless slept by Hiccup's cot, ears perked even in slumber for any sign of trouble.

So far, the poison's symptoms hadn't receded any, but neither had they gotten worse. Hiccup couldn’t feel or move the entire left side of his body at this point, the flesh of his arm distended and discolored.

CRASH

From the upstairs room of Gothi's hut, the sound of clicking and thrashing wings. Hiccup tried to bolt up in bed, but without the use of half of his body, he just sort of flopped over like a beached, well, haddock. Toothless sprung to attention, teeth bared, a warning growl building in his chest, as the mystery dragon swooped down the stairs, fully visible, the tiny Gothi following in its wake, whacking it repeatedly with her staff. The dragon didn't even seem to register her attacks, but Hiccup had to admire her bravery.

Astrid burst through the door right as the dragon launched itself at Hiccup, only to be intercepted by Toothless, who tackled it midair and pinned it to the ground, plasma blast building at the back of his throat.

"No, bud!" Hiccup cried as he attempted to rise from the bed; he lurched drunkenly off the cot and landed face-first on the dusty floor.

"Seriously, Hiccup?" Astrid demanded, her axe on one shoulder and right hip cocked to the side. "How are you ever supposed to recover if you keep getting attacked by this… thing?"

"It's a brand-new species of dragon," Hiccup implored desperately. "It could even be the only one of it's kind."

"One can only hope," Astrid muttered, but she relaxed her defensive posture slightly. "We can't just let it keep attacking you, though." She glanced between Hiccup and the struggling, pinned dragon.

"Get some bolas," Hiccup ordered. "You and the other riders can secure it, and lock it in the Academy until we can figure out our next course of action. No one goes in or out until I've come up with a better plan; with it going invisible, we can't risk it slipping out without our knowing."

Though her expression clearly showed her disapproval, Astrid obeyed.

The next few days were some of the most difficult of Hiccup's life. The swelling went down, but the discoloration and numbness remained. Hiccup found himself despairing, convinced that the right side of his body would be paralyzed for the rest of his life.

His friends tried to cheer him up, but Hiccup barely acknowledged them, so wrapped up in his own mind — worries about his recovery, worries about the dragon, worries about his future. Toothless helped him hobble around his house some so that he didn't feel completely helpless.

Hiccup also spent a lot of time contemplating how the dragon had been able to keep finding him. He worried about what would happen to the creature: He desperately wanted to study it, learn more about it, maybe even train it, but that was seeming like less and less of a possibility. And they couldn't just keep it imprisoned forever. If they didn't, though, would Hiccup spend the rest of his life on the run, constantly looking over his shoulder for the invisible Vampire Spydragon?

And yes, Hiccup had invested some of his ample down time into naming the creature that haunted him. It had fangs like a vampire and seemed to always be able to find him, like a winged, scaly spy, so he felt the name was appropriate.

"I've got to find a way to make it stop tracking me," Hiccup told his father over dinner the third evening after his return to Berk. A little feeling had returned in his left leg, not enough to make him optimistic for a full recovery, but at least enough to cut through some of his depression and offer a little hope.

His father just looked at him.

"I mean, it would be inhumane to keep it locked up for the rest of its life, right? And I'm not just going to kill a dragon for following its instincts!"

His father didn't respond, so Hiccup ranted on, waving his right hand in the air for emphasis. "And, I mean, did you see that dragon? It's unlike nothing we've ever seen before! It could be the window to a whole new world of creatures—" He broke off at his father's frustrated huff. "What?"

"It could be your death, son."

Hiccup clenched his teeth, eyes following his father's gaze to his purple, floppy left arm. Gods, he might never be able to use that arm again. The thought threatened to send him into a spiral of hopelessness and fear, but he shook his head stubbornly. "I'll find a way to deter it. Maybe I'll be able to bond with it, train it."

Stoick snorted. "You are a magnificent dragon trainer, son. But there are some dragons that cannot be trained."

Hiccup knew that, of course. Changewings, Speed Stingers, Deathsongs, Whispering Deaths. And he knew in the deepest part of himself that the Vampire Spydragon would join their ranks.

"Still, I have to try," Hiccup protested. "And even if I can't, it'll have to get tired of hunting me eventually. If I keep escaping, it'll think I'm too much of a bother and go after easier prey."

"Or the next time it goes after you, you might not be so lucky," his father countered. "I'm sorry, Hiccup, but this time, it's you or the dragon. And I am not losing you." A pause. "We'll take care of it in the morning. We'll make it quick."

Stoick stood and left his unfinished dinner on the table. Hiccup stared at it, eyes burning, left arm limp and lifeless on the table before him. He flinched as the door slammed shut behind his father.

That night, the Vampire Spydragon escaped.

Apparently the twins had become convinced that this awesome new dragon with all these fearsome powers of death and destruction would to waste away in the arena, so they'd brought it a midnight snack.

Hiccup woke to a pounding on his father's door and half-rolled, half-hopped out of bed on his right leg, using Toothless as a crutch so he could creep closer to the top of the stairs and hear what was going on.

It was Astrid. "That dragon escaped," she panted, and Hiccup's heart pounded, partly in fear and partly in relief.

"We haven't seen any sign of it," Stoick said, tension dripping from his voice.

"I know. That's because it broke into Gothi's house again. She's okay," Astrid hurried to reassure the chief. "Just shaken up. When the dragon realized Hiccup wasn't there, it just… disappeared. Literally. Snotlout and the twins are out looking for it now, but we all know it won't be found unless it wants to be."

Hiccup's mind whirred with this new information: Every other time, the dragon had known his precise location, but this time, it hadn't known where to look. Why would it have gone to Gothi's instead of tracking him to his father's house? Was it just going to the last place it had seen him? Hiccup didn't think so.

What was it about Gothi's hut? What had made the dragon think Hiccup was there? Was it because Hiccup had slept there, been treated there —

It hit him.

Hiccup patted Toothless's side and the dragon responded quickly to his rider's unspoken request, crouching so that Hiccup could flop his left side awkwardly over the dragon's back and pull himself into the saddle. Hiccup clung to the saddle with his right hand as Toothless bounded down the stairs.

His father and Astrid stared at him as he appeared, lopsided, half of him purple and limp, his arm flapping behind him as Toothless leaped into the room. "Call off the search!" he ordered.

"Hiccup…" his father growled.

"No, Dad, I — I've figured it out! It couldn’t find me because it wasn't tracking me. It was tracking its tooth!" Hiccup thought about that strange clicking sound it made: toothtoothtoothtooth

"That's impossible," scoffed Astrid.

"Is it? Just because we don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't possible."

"You have to admit, Hiccup, it sounds pretty far-fetched," his dad argued.

Hiccup tapped his right index finger against the side of his head. "Just think about it. All three times it came after me, I was with the tooth. The first two, it was still in my arm, and the last time, the tooth was on Gothi's work table beside my cot." Astrid's eyes lit up as she too began to put the pieces together. Even his father seemed to be seriously considering Hiccup's theory. "The tooth is still on that work table, so that's where the Vampire Spydragon came looking for me!"

Astrid blinked. "Vampire Spydragon?"

Hiccup laughed, a relieved, breathy sound. "That's what I decided to call it."

"Hm. Kind of a mouthful. Don't we usually put new dragon species' names up for a vote?"

"Considering I spent over a day with its tooth in my hand and am still partially paralyzed, I made an executive decision."

"Fair."

"So if this is true," Stoick asked, "what do we do?"

"Destroy the tooth," said Hiccup. "I guarantee that when there's nothing left for it to track, it will go back to its own island and find another meal."

Hiccup, it seemed, had been right.

After the tooth had been destroyed, there were no more attacks. The dragon had vanished, this time, Hiccup knew, for good.

And while he mourned the chance to get to study it closer, he still felt like he had learned enough about this incredible creature to make a pretty hefty entry in the Book of Dragons. He and Fishlegs spent much of their spare time — something Hiccup had loads of as he slowly, slowly began to regain some mobility — discussing the dragon, with Fishlegs writing down the entry they had crafted on the new dragon. When — and Gothi now felt certain that it would be when, not if — Hiccup recovered the use of his left arm, he planned to draw the dragon in the book and transcribe the description:

The Vampire Spydragon, Tracker Class, can turn completely invisible, except for its red eyes, and has a hypnotic gaze and paralyzing venom. When it bites its victims, it leaves one of its teeth in them, then retreats and waits for the victim to become paralyzed. It then tracks its prey by the tooth in their flesh, returning to devour their meal while it is helpless to fight back.

Extremely dangerous, avoid at all costs.

Hiccup's recovery was a long and difficult one.

As feeling began to return and his skin slowly turned back to its normal color, his arm came alive with white hot pinpricks. It hurt so badly that he almost wished he could go back to feeling nothing.

And then, when the paralysis did lift at last, Hiccup found that his left side had become substantially weaker than his right. He struggled to climb the stairs in his own home, he had to take far more breaks from his prosthetic than usual, and flying Toothless for more than half an hour at a time left his left knee wobbling like a newborn yak's.

"You'll get there, Hiccup," Fishlegs soothed. "It'll just take time."

"It's been three weeks since the Vampire Spydragon bit me," Hiccup snapped. He didn't mean to be so harsh with his friend, but he had spent so much of his life feeling weak, feeling useless, feeling not enough. He hated feeling like that again — he just wanted to regain his strength, get back to normal, and go back to the Edge.

He wanted his life back.

Toothless cooed and bunted him in comfort; Hiccup smiled and scratched his dragon's favorite spot. "You're right, bud. I'll get there. Eventually."

"And we will be there with you every step of the way," Astrid promised. Fishlegs nodded vigorously.

The twins didn't seem so eager. "Well, maybe not every step of the way," Tuff snorted. "I am not following Hiccup to the chamber pot."

Hiccup's face heated up as Ruff chimed her agreement.

"Yeah, I'm out," Snotlout said.

"I'm pretty sure she meant that metaphorically," Hiccup muttered, pointedly not looking at Astrid as she tried in vain to hold back a fit of giggles.

"Well, we just want to make sure we set our boundaries now so there will be no confusion in the future," Snotlout shot back.

"Ooookay," Hiccup grumbled.

But as he looked around at his friends, Astrid shaking with laughter, the twins taking turns hitting each other in the head with a bludgeon, Snotlout leaning against Hookfang with a very self-satisfied smirk on his face, and Fishlegs smiling warmly, encouragingly back at him, Hiccup felt a wave of peace steal over him.

Sure, the road here had been bumpy and rocky and full of holes, and the one ahead was long and winding, but he wasn't on it alone. He never had been.

He would make it through this because of his friends, and he would regain his strength and go back to the Edge and discover new dragons and explore the Great Beyond.

And he would never go back Vampire Spydragon Island ever again.

…at least, not without a really, really solid plan.