Chapter 5
AVALON
Flynn
Davin with power tools was something special.
It turned out that he was also certified as an electrician, and Caspian had arranged for him to get the required training to carry that over to work in the US, so . . .
Well.
Yeah.
He tied his hair back so it wouldn’t fall in his way, and stripped down to his tight white T-shirt and jeans and work boots, and just . . .
“Your young man is very handsome,” Wu Mei’s wry voice reminded me of where we were.
Her penthouse.
Davin paused in cutting a hole into her drywall to look at her, confused, but once he realized she was talking to me instead of him, his lips quirked up on one side, and he went right back to work.
Even the damned protective eye gear and the bits of white drywall dust in his hair couldn’t make him less hot.
Fuck me, why hadn’t I gotten him into bed yet?
If I hadn’t been dead on my feet after getting Sexton settled on the island, maybe .
. . but it had taken forever, because Sexton had awakened again and insisted that we summon his own pilot instead of Blair, because he didn’t want to be trapped on the island with no way off.
Then we’d had to take him to a store to buy a refrigerator worth of food to feed him up again.
And Sexton had tried, but he’d been very little help.
So in the end, we’d fallen into bed the moment we’d gotten to Davin’s, and nothing remotely sexy had happened.
I was not nearly as intelligent as I thought. That had to be the problem. Anyone with a brain would have ignored everything else and just thrown Davin down on my mother’s dining room table the night we met.
But that was okay. It could be fixed. I could cancel the job installing Mei’s security system, which was going to make us nearly enough to pay for the tax bill just from the installation, and go sleep with him now.
That would be an excellent choice.
It also wasn’t going to happen. Mei was planning to do her own policing of the system, so mostly, we were there to install a lot of expensive gear and then tell her chosen employee how to work it. Also, Davin would be available to fix anything that broke or give further lessons if they were needed.
Fortunately, no one was going to have to monitor Mei’s penthouse but the people who had already chosen to work for her.
Unfortunately, it meant that this was the only time we had a chance to make this ridiculous amount of money, so we had to take it, and couldn’t cancel in order to go back to Davin’s and sleep, and then have long, slow, luxurious sex when we woke up.
Again, this adulthood thing was for the birds.
Except why should the birds be punished?
I sighed and dragged my eyes off Davin, turning back to Mei. “He is. He’s the hottest. Did Mom tell you I killed Gerald?”
She quirked a single eyebrow at me, as though expecting me to take the confession back. When I didn’t, she lifted the other brow to match and gave me a nod. “Well done, then. What is it the children call it today, taking out the trash?”
I didn’t think “the children” called murder any such thing, but Mei was an ancient vampire.
It wasn’t surprising she wasn’t dialed into Gen Z slang, and frankly, it was closer than I’d have ever expected.
Unless by “children,” she meant the latest generation of vampires, who were mostly a little older than that, and .
. . hell, I didn’t even know which slang was whose anymore.
I’d grown up around people who still unironically referred to the vapors, a woman who’d once told me she was going to “twenty-three skidoo,” and some dude I was entirely convinced was at least a hundred years older than me who’d once called me a “crypto-fascist” because I had lived in a home that had servants at age fifteen.
I still didn’t even know what that meant, let alone when it might have come from.
So instead of getting into what kids said which slang, I just shrugged. “He was trying to kill us at the time, so I gave him a dose of vitamin D.”
Davin turned to look at me this time, pausing his cutting into the wall, his head cocked, and a mildly scandalized expression on his face.
Dammit. Slang again.
“The sun,” I said, loudly. “I meant the sun. Not every D always meant . . . that.”
And of course, now Mei was laughing at me.
Oh, not aloud or anything. Mei wasn’t much for laughter.
But her lips were pressed together and there was amusement dancing in her eyes.
“I must invite you two over more often. You are always so”—I braced myself, waiting for an insult, like childish or ridiculous, but she ended with a tiny smile and then—“young.”
Well, it wasn’t quite the same as saying I was childish. I didn’t even think she meant it as an insult.
“How is your cousin?” she asked, changing the subject entirely. I wasn’t even surprised that she knew I had a cousin, or that there was something going on with him.
“Other Father is correct and he is a slithering snake who does not deserve our concern,” Twist offered before I could manage to say anything, and really, her English comprehension was getting excellent.
But I wasn’t going to say that to Mei. I didn’t even think it.
Twist was as untrusting of my cousin as Davin, and I was convinced they were both wrong.
I smiled at Mei. “He’s tired, but he’ll be fine.”
The twinkle in her eyes hadn’t died away at all, and she leaned to one side in her chair, resting her chin on two of her fingers, looking at me speculatively. “Do you truly trust him?”
“I . . . what?” Had she understood Twist? No, that was silly. I’d thought we were talking about Sexton’s attack the night before, and she hadn’t paused when I’d implied it, but she was headed in a completely different direction than me.
She let the silence hang heavy in the room for a moment, before sighing and shaking her head at me. “Trust, Xiǎolóng, is a difficult thing. You wish to trust him because he is your family. But you mustn’t ever forget that his instinct was not the same as yours.”
“What, you’re saying not to trust family?” I didn’t particularly like that, as much as I did understand it. The thing was, vampires didn’t tend to trust anyone. But my only family had always been—
“Not at all. Your mother is perfectly worthy of your trust. She would never consider betraying you. I feel similarly about my brother. He is more my brother than he is anyone else’s creature.
He puts family first. Your cousin? He is not like them.
Even less like you. You are . . . you are very much like your father. A surprise since he did not raise you.”
“And Sexton isn’t like my father?” That was probably fair. Why would Sexton be anything like a guy he’d barely known, who wasn’t even his dad?
She made a face at the very idea, and it almost made the answer pointless. Still, her acerbic tone was never to be missed. “No.”
Across the room, Davin scoffed. “You can say that again. If Flynn’s da was anything like Flynn, he’d have had nothing in common with that little weasel Sexton.”
She lifted a brow in Davin’s direction, but continued looking at me. “Your young man doesn’t approve of your cousin?”
“I mean . . . he did buy me from Scary Mary with the intention of doing to me whatever the other dragons are doing to each other. Sort of. I guess.” I made a face at the end, because I didn’t think even Sexton had truly known what the hell he was doing.
He’d been scared, and scared people acted like jerks sometimes.
“You . . . guess?” She said guess like it was a strange foreign fish she’d never seen before, and she required it to be explained immediately.
“I mean, he didn’t even know. He didn’t realize that a dragon’s energy can’t be permanently stolen. He was clueless.”
For a moment, she watched me, considering, then slowly, she nodded.
“You were both correct, of course. Your energy can only be stolen for as long as it takes to use it. Power, however . . . can be stolen. It’s simply more difficult, and requires a certain kind of magic. One that most humans do not have.”
That was different. I waited for her to explain, and when she didn’t, I leaned forward in my chair. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Kinds of magic are capable of stealing power more permanently. Certain body mages. Death mages. And of course, life mages. You call them, I think, arcane mages now. They can truly transfer power, permanently. But it’s quite difficult, even for them.
” She waved a dismissive hand, airily, as though the incredibly heavy topic didn’t matter at all.
“I have never met a dragon who was any kind of mage other than some sort of elementalist. Control of water or wind can hardly do such dangerous things. So perhaps it is entirely out of reach for a dragon. I am certain that it is for your cousin.”
And that was true. Sexton was an elementalist, just as she’d said, and he’d have never been able to use that to drain my power.
For a moment, I considered calling Sage McKinley, since he’d given me his card back when his familiar had discovered Suzy. He was an arcane mage, so no doubt he’d know more about the idea of stealing someone’s power.
But the whole thing was silly, wasn’t it?
Sexton had been attacked, and they had stolen not his power, but his energy, as I’d been expecting. It wasn’t like Sage could help with dragons being dicks. He wasn’t famous for that, just for being an arcane mage.
Besides, I wasn’t sure where I’d put the card he’d given me. Davin might have even thrown it away when he’d cleaned out the back office in the shop. I should have called him to let him know that Suzy had found her mage, if nothing else.
Oops.
Story of my life.
Mei, a little like Davin, didn’t seem to either notice or care that my attention had drifted off, and waved her hand in the air again.
“I am not suggesting that you change yourself. Merely that you should be cautious. I would dislike losing my little dumpling to a less than judicious reaction to an untrustworthy family member. That would be a tragedy.”
But she was wrong about this. I didn’t need her to agree with me, but I was sure of my own belief.
Sexton had done what he’d done out of fear and ignorance, and maybe those things couldn’t be ignored, but my cousin had actually been trying to do better.
He’d acknowledged that he was wrong, and he was improving himself.
I wasn’t just trusting him because he was family.
I was trusting him because he was making changes, and hadn’t proven himself unworthy of my renewed faith in him.
He would never be like my mother or Davin, the people I was building my foundation on, but I didn’t believe for a second that Sexton was going to betray me. Not now.
Besides, even if he did have ill intentions, Sexton was as cunning as every post-season-one Baldrick in the British TV show Blackadder. He was a hammer who thought he was a lock pick.
Across from me, Mei gave a sigh, and when I looked back up at her, she was shaking her head sadly.
Crap, I’d done it again. “I’m sorry?”
But she wasn’t annoyed with me for my straying attention. No, it was so much worse than that. “Not at all, little one. I remember being human. Being able to love like that.”
Davin, who’d been in the process of pressing a panel into the wall, froze, and turned to look at her. “What do you mean by that?”
For a moment, she stared at him. Then she shook her head and motioned to me.
“I refer to his faith in his ineffective cousin. But you have no need to worry about your own emotions, daywalker. Dragons are longer lived than any vampire I have ever met, perhaps including the ever-irritating senator. You shouldn’t have to live with the betrayal of death.
So perhaps you will retain that measure of humanity most of us lose after a few dozen decades. ”
The betrayal of death.
What an odd way to look at death. As though humans chose to be so short-lived and abandon their vampire loved ones.
But didn’t they?
They chose to remain human, which meant that one day they would leave.
It had never even occurred to me, even before learning I was a dragon, to ask to be made a vampire. It hadn’t been a conscious choice, but it had been a choice, and one I’d made easily. I had never wanted to be a vampire. Mother had never suggested it.
Somehow, I suspected that if Wu Mei had been my mother, that would not have been the case.
As much as I liked Mei, I thought maybe I was better off.
Davin turned back to his work, clearly still unsettled. I would have to talk to him later, when it wouldn’t be a clear insult to the woman who was about to write us a check with a lot of zeroes, to tell him that not all vampires forgot how to love people.
My mother wasn’t effusive, but she was the oldest vampire I knew, and I had never once in my life doubted that she loved me specifically, let alone that she was capable of love at all.
Davin would never stop being able to love new people just because he was a vampire, with or without me. He was too inherently good for that.
Mei was just a different kind of person than them. That was all.
When we were all finished with the installation, setup, and training, and Davin was taking the first batch of his tools down to the car, Mei came back to me with a check that was even bigger than the amount we had agreed upon.
The sharp look she gave me said not to say a damn word about it, let alone question her.
Twist, who was curled around my shoulder surveying the scene with sharp blue eyes, noticed the other thing Mei was handing me first. “What is that object, Father?”
Folded up in the middle of the check was a small, faded photograph. It was a man I’d never met before who looked very much like Mei, with Mei on his left, and on his right . . . was my father.
“It is the last time I saw him,” Mei explained, her words clipped and emotionless. “I thought perhaps you could make more use of it than I.”
Uh huh.
She wasn’t fooling anyone.
Wu Mei was a better person than she pretended to be.
Incapable of love, my ass.
“I appreciate that,” I told her, trying hard to pretend to be as unaffected as her, and probably entirely failing.
The elevator opened again with a bell sound, and Davin strode back in to pick up the last bag of tools, standing well away from us, waiting.
Mei nodded to me, and without another word, turned and left us alone to take our leave.