Amethyst Storms (Primordial Protectors #1)

15. Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Alex

My head was reeling, again, as my world once again turned on its axis. Somehow or another I managed to sit on a chair half filled with papers and a map that looked vaguely familiar, only I lacked the focus to recall where I’d seen it before. I had so many questions I couldn’t begin to sort out which to ask first. Fortunately, Emerson saved me the effort by asking one himself as he rummaged through a stack of papers.

“Drakemyre. Drakemyre. Now that is a name I am familiar with, though their line has long been listed as extinct.”

“I’d say I look damn good for a fossil then,” Gramps replied, his snark bringing a grin to my face.

Anyone who’d ever been curious about where I’d gotten the habit of reacting to uncomfortable situations with a healthy dose of attitude only had to look as far as the man who raised me, only it seemed like it was more than that today. When I glanced over at Gramps his gaze was steely, and his feet were firmly planted in what I could only describe as his stubborn stance. Yeah, there was a whole lot going on that I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Best to sit back and see how Gramps wanted to handle the situation I’d got us both in.

His words seemed to have thrown Emerson, for a half second, then he whirled and started rooting around in the pile again, coming up with a large book that bore a crest I had seen before. Weathered and sun faded when Gramps rolled up his sleeve to display the old tattoo on his forearm. It had looked that way for as long as I remembered. Now I wondered just how many years ago he’d had it done.

“My father was Baird Drakemyre,” Gramps declared, arms crossed as he stared down Emerson like he was daring him to say something.

Judging from the grim expression that crossed Emerson’s face, the name definitely meant something.

“The man who ended the line,” Emerson declared.

“He ended nothing,” Gramps declared. “He just lost the patience to keep arguing with fools.”

“There is no mate listed for him.”

“Because my mother was not his mate, nor did he ever find one,” Gramps declared. “She betrayed him and abandoned us both after she and her people looted his hoard and seized our ancestral lands. He brought me across the ocean to settle here, willingly allowing our name to be anglicized so we could blend in and keep the past from haunting me the way it did him.”

“How old were you when you arrived in this country?” Emerson asked as he thumbed through pages, lifting a quill pen with silver etching and dipping it in ink.

“Three months shy of my second birthday.”

“And your age now?”

“Seventy-three,” I answered automatically, only to have Gramps turn and shoot me a sheepish look.

“Not seventy-three,” I muttered and ran a hand through my hair, letting out a shaky exhale.

I kept wondering when I was going to wake up sprawled on the floor of some cave I’d knocked myself silly in, a goose egg on the side of my head and several dozen messages from Gramps wondering why the hell I hadn’t checked in.

“Add about six more decades, kid,” Gramps said.

Blinking, I could only grip the arm of the chair and caution myself not to pass out lest my dragon stomp the space to dust as he trampled over everything to get to my side. A little giggle bubbled up in the back of my throat and forced its way past my lips as I pictured a splintered desk bearing a distinctive imprint of a claw, the floor dented by the force of one of his steps.

Gramps’ hand on my shoulder grounded me, bringing with it a dawning realization that helped chase some of my shock away. Unless Gramps intended his next bombshell to be that I wasn’t his grandson by blood, I had dragon blood in my veins, which meant I had a greater connection to my eggs, my mate, and our dragon, than I’d ever considered possible.

“It was never my intent to keep your heritage from you, Alex,” Gramps said as he nudged some things off the chair so he could perch on the arm beside me. “I just didn’t want you to suffer the same crushing disappointment that I had.”

“Disappointment?” I asked at the same time as Emerson asked what had happened to Gramps’ father.

Gramps waved him off with hardly a glance, then turned when Emerson attempted to persist. Whatever Emerson saw on his face gave him pause as he mumbled apologies and shuffled off deeper into the room, taking his disconcerted muttering and intense scrutiny into the shadows with him.

Gramps sighed and patted my shoulder, though who he was trying to comfort, me or himself, I couldn’t be sure of.

“Your father was a late in life gift for me, a very late in life gift,” Gramps said.

“So how old were you when you had him?” I asked, trying to do the math in my head, but my brain was barely braining at the moment, asking it to do math would have just been cruel.

“Eighty-three, give or take a few months.”

“Eh,” I sputtered. “Eighty-three.”

“Round about.”

“Round about? Round about. That would have made you like, like, a hundred and nine when I was born,” I squeaked. “What the hell? That’s the definition of ancient. You can’t ever get upset about me making old jokes again!”

“First off, your Ionus would know a lot more about being ancient given the amount of centuries he has on me. You just keep that in mind, kid, when you’re giving me shit.”

“Yeah, I’ll try to remember that,” I said and now wondered just how old my mate was.

Now that he had me laughing and joking around with him like my whole world hadn’t shifted left and twisted a little, I could settle in and patiently listen to the rest of the story he was trying to share.

“My father told me all about what we were,” Gramps explained. “Dragons, though our blood had grown diluted over the years as many of our kind slipped into slumber, exhausted after endless centuries of hiding what they were and the endless encroachment by humans. Among my clan there was the belief that no more than six of our kind should remain awake and walking among the people at any one time. Six dragons with six decades to seek out their mates. Succeed and you’d won the right to live out eternity with them. Fail, and you woke another and took their place in slumber, trusting that you’d be woken again. Only some stopped trusting and stopped waking their brethren.”

“Wait,” I said, an image popping into my head of silent, sleeping boulders of flesh and scales slumbering beneath the earth, so deep that not even the bravest explorers would ever discover them. “Are you saying there’s a dragon slumber party somewhere that you’ve got an invitation to?”

“Not exactly. My father never revealed the location to me before he took his place.”

“Why?”

Gramps’ heavy sigh followed, the one I only heard when he was truly upset about something. “The bloodline had thinned to the point that, though my father could shift, I was never able to unlock that potential within myself. My mother wasn’t my father’s mate, she was an omega from a powerful family who believed that mating with him would restore to their line the ability to change their forms and reveal the dragons beneath. Their intentions weren’t honorable. The way my father explained it, the plans he uncovered and later attempted to reveal were proof that they intended to rule the region through strength and intimidation.”

“But it didn’t work,” I said. “The mating part. She never found her dragon form, did she? That’s why they betrayed him.”

“Yes, but that isn’t the whole truth of the story. They were correct in their belief that mating with a dragon of full or nearly full blood would restore the ability to shift, but it only works forward, in the mate and any offspring they produce. The rest of the bloodline remains unaffected unless they discover their own mates, but even a joining of the bodies isn’t enough.”

“It has to be a proper mating, doesn’t it?” I asked as I rolled up my t-shirt so Gramps could see the flame glowing over my heart. “The dominate mate has to share their power, too, for the ability to shift to be unlocked again.”

His eyes widened, then his smile broadened, lifting his slightly bushy beard as he beamed at me. “My boy! I can’t tell you how thrilled I am for you, and how sorry I am for giving up hope without ever giving you the chance to have any of your own.”

The pieces slammed together like a lightning bolt, and I lurched up enough to wrap my arms around his neck and hug him tight.

“Thank you,” I murmured, stunned when I drew back and saw tears in my Gramps’ eyes.

“What the hell are you thanking me for, boy?”

“I couldn’t miss what I’d never had,” I said. “That’s what I’m thanking you for. After everything I’d already lost when my parents fell, I’m glad you didn’t give me something that could have been taken away, the way yours was.”

There was that grim look again. His head hung lower than I’d ever seen it and I knew he had something more to tell me. Something I probably wouldn’t like.

“Son, I don’t know how to tell you this but them ropes, my boy didn’t screw up out there. Those ropes weren’t worn, there was nothing wrong with them, nothing that would have made them both fail. I know I’ve let you think that for all these years, but no one would listen when I tried to tell them that your folks had been killed up there and that there had been a piss poor attempt at making it look like an accident. I wanted to push harder to make the authorities listen, but the louder I got the more they sent the damned lady from the county around to dig into whether or not I was raising you right. Couldn’t risk them bastards trying to take you away from me. You deserved to grow up in the home you’d known since birth, not on the run, where we’d have surely been after I tore them fuckers asunder for trying to snatch you away from me.”

If I had ever needed a shining example of what love was, I had it right there, shimmering in my Gramps’ eyes as he struggled to hold back his tears. He’d given up seeking vengeance for his child in order to raise the child my father had left behind. I’d always known that he put me first in everything, but never had I known just how far that extended and to what ends he’d gone to see to it that I would have the chance to live the life I wanted.

I knew me just as well as he did. If I’d known about our family history and some possibility that I could shift and fly and explore beneath the earth by creating my own tunnels and exploring in ways no human would ever see, there would have been no end to the lengths I would have gone to in my quest to discover a dragon. Hell, I’d fallen into a nest of them without any thought or concern, and that had been without the knowledge of what was in our bloodline. Knowing of my parents’ murders would have only increased my drive, hoping that somehow that quest would put me on a collision course with their killers, because something deep in my gut told me that the two things were entwined.

“Sex and magic!” Emerson blurted, darting to his desk and scribbling away. Hell, I’d forgotten about him and that every single being in this room was privy to the conversation we were having.

With sudden clarity, I realized that I truly wasn’t bothered by that fact. This was my family. Whether the feelings were coming from Ionus or through the power and bond we shared, I knew that his siblings would protect our eggs and the young to follow the same as Ionus would. The same as they’d do for all the hatchlings who’d be born into the family.

Gramps chuckled.

“A crass way of putting it, but accurate in this case,” Gramps confirmed. “Sex and magic are the key to unlocking the shifting gene, but only with the mate the Fates intended. That was the other place my mother and her family screwed up. They believed that any dragon would do, but my father was convinced that wasn’t the case and now you’ve proven that he knew what the hell he was talking about. Only an exchange with a fated mate can ignite the spark in the blood. I just wonder if the Fates knew how far others would go to cheat that system.”

“There is good and bad in all beings,” Emerson muttered. “You shouldn’t judge until you know what another has suffered in their quest to be whole.”

His words carried a great deal of emotion, and I could tell that the topic was a sensitive one for him, but I didn’t have the energy to debate the concept of necessary evil or the ends justifying the means. As far as I was concerned, there was no justification for lying or betrayal, and from the tale my grandfather had told, my great-grandmother and her clan had been guilty of some of the gravest kind there was.

I was willing to bet that Emerson had information about their line buried in this landslide of books and documents, and Gramps and I would be digging into them more, but not today. The pieces Gramps had given me were alarming. If there was something in our history that might one day come back and threaten the lives of those who were rapidly becoming dear to me and the young that I was about to introduce to our family, then I owed it to us all to do all that I could to discover it. Even if it would mean spending more hours here with the slightly confusing and erratic Emerson. Maybe in looking for the answers I could gain a better understanding of him and help figure out why he had Caro’s tail in a spiky knot.