Chapter 13
After the flight back to the mainland, I could tell that Paul wanted to go with us all the way to see Mother, but I promised him that we’d call if we were headed back to the island.
I couldn’t fly the plane myself, after all.
I wasn’t sure if we would go back, or if we would just have my father and Sexton take his plane, which was still on the island, along with his crew, but I had never been particularly good at planning . . . anything.
It had always been easier to let Mother do it. She was good at making plans and she liked it.
Plus the few times I’d tried to do it myself as a kid, she’d lost patience with my fumbling and just taken over, so I’d kind of come to expect that.
It was still a little weird to me when Davin didn’t do that, and let me figure things out for myself.
Still, by the time we arrived at my mother’s place, I was nervous.
She’d spent more than thirty years thinking my father was dead, and while she hadn’t dated anyone in the meantime, I sort of felt like she also hadn’t dated anyone for a long time before him.
Mother just wasn’t the kind of person who felt a need to be in a relationship.
She hadn’t been suffering in lonely silence during his absence.
She’d chosen and been with him because she had wanted to, and that made him not just an answer to an everyday malaise or a simple companion, but something else.
Maybe something even I didn’t understand.
Except that I looked at Davin sitting in the driver’s side of his car and thought that just maybe, I was starting to get it.
And maybe I would never agree with Wu Mei that dying was a betrayal, but there was something there, too. People weren’t cogs in a machine. You couldn’t replace one with another, just to fill a role. If something happened to Davin, I could never find another Davin.
I would simply be without him forever.
The very idea felt like a yawning pit in my chest. Like stepping off a cliff and feeling gravity pull beneath me with no solid ground to hold it at bay.
Like I would fall forever.
Alone.
Davin turned sharply as he parked in my mother’s drive, concern on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Figured that smell out, did you?”
His brows drew together, as though the words didn’t make sense, but he didn’t ask what I meant. He just said, “It’s you.”
Like that answered everything.
And maybe it did.
I leaned forward and kissed him. Softly, slowly.
We didn’t have time for us right then—there was too much else to do, but as soon as this crisis had passed I was going to make time.
I’d close the office for a week and go back to his apartment with him.
Heck, I’d agree to move in there with him, if he would make room for my ridiculous T-shirt collection.
Well, and Twist. She was a nonnegotiable. But Davin would never want to leave her out anyway; he loved her as much as I did.
I was still thinking about whether my cat would like living in Davin’s apartment, which I’d only seen a few times, both when I’d been utterly exhausted, when the front door of my mother’s house opened and there she was, standing in the doorway. She looked worried like she almost never did.
It was starting to annoy me, the fact that there was never time for just me and Davin. Not that it was Mother’s fault. She was just the obstacle in that moment, not always. If I’d given it any longer, Twist might have crawled out of my pocket and made it herself.
I’d have to leave her to stay with her grandmother for a week when this was all done, so Davin and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything at all, not even my furry child who forever hungered. Mother would keep her fed.
I pulled away from Davin with a sigh and turned to the door, muttering to myself about the terrible timing of life, and when he joined me in front of the car, he was stifling laughter. I bumped him with my shoulder, and he bumped me back.
“I’d say we’ll go to your island alone after all this is done, but apparently, you don’t have an island anymore. Pity.” His voice was shaking with his amusement, but . . . well, fuck it. It was funny, wasn’t it? I didn’t own an island anymore.
Thank fuck.
“Mother has a house out in the mountains,” I offered instead.
“It’s near a lake, and she hardly ever uses it.
We’ll take charge of it for a week as soon as this fuckery is over, and not answer phones or doors for anyone.
Let the world burn down around us.” I turned to look at him, eyebrows lifted, and I wasn’t entirely certain whether I was asking him or telling him we were going.
His return smile was warm, all hint of laughter gone. “That sounds lovely. Call it a date.”
Thank fuck.
For now, we had my mother to deal with.
I turned to her, taking a deep breath as we walked through the door she was holding open.
There was nothing for it but to say it, and holding it back wasn’t going to do anyone any good.
So I let her close the door as I turned to face her, then put my hands on her shoulders when she turned back to me, squeezing tight and meeting her gaze head on as I told her. “The dragon who arrived at the island was my father. He’s alive.”
Mother? Well, she’d never in my life let me down, and she didn’t start with this situation. She sucked in a sharp breath, and her eyes filled instantly. “Mercer? You’re . . . you’re sure it’s him? You—”
“Mother. It’s him. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.
But he’s in rough shape. He’s been held prisoner for a long time.
He escaped because they said they were planning to come after me, and he .
. . he wanted to protect me. But he also apparently turned into a dragon to escape, so he used up everything he had getting to the island.
We fed him some broth and put him back to sleep, and Sexton is helping look after him. ”
At that, there was a moment of panic. “Sexton? But he—”
“Mother.” I kept my voice calm and steady, and continued to meet her eye, because I’d known she wouldn’t be happy about that part, and I was ready for her.
“Sexton is protecting him. I promise. He knows that stealing father’s energy isn’t any kind of path to power.
I trust him with my life. With Davin’s. With Father’s. Even with yours, maybe.”
“As much as I don’t trust him,” Davin interrupted, and I turned to glare at him, but he put up a hand to ward me off.
“I was just saying that I don’t trust him as a rule, but in this?
I do. First of all, Mercer’s got no energy for him to steal.
Secondly, Sexton knows that if he wants to become a dragon, Flynn, and now Mercer, are the ones who know how to do that.
The way to increase his power isn’t betraying Flynn. ”
It was a fair point, I supposed, and one Mother could easily understand, even if it felt nearly Wu Mei-like in its cynicism.
“We left them out on the island because it seemed a defensible position,” Davin said, continuing to explain my opinions to Mother, and, well, yeah. I’d kind of forgotten that part.
“Someone attacked Sexton just a day ago, so the bad guys are here in Avalon, even if this isn’t where they’re from.” This part, at least, I remembered. “There’s this guy named Fearson, who’s relocating his business from London to here. Davin and Twist said he smells sort of like a dragon.”
As though cued by her name, my kitten burrowed her way out of my pocket, still blinking sleepily. “Hello Grandmother,” she said on an adorable yawn. “I hunger. And the strange dragon smells bad, but I will kill him for you if you wish it.”
Mother smiled at Twist and immediately pulled out her phone, but without sending a message, simply smiled at it and motioned us toward the dining room. Naturally. She’d known we were coming, so she’d prepared to feed my bottomless pit-ten.
Sure enough, there was food on the table when we arrived in the dining room, and Twist went right to demolishing her portion. There was more than usual there for me, too, and given the way my stomach immediately rumbled, I couldn’t say it had been a bad choice.
I might have to fight another dragon sometime soon, after all.
Mother, meanwhile, took the opportunity of dinner—midnight snack? Breakfast?—to start making phone calls, which was both strange and out of character for my mother. Well, until I realized what was going on. She was calling in the cavalry, so to speak.
The first call was on the long side, and she explained everything that had happened, which surprised me until she hung up with a decisive nod and an, “I’ll see you soon, then, Caspian.”
Oh jeez.
Caspian.
Next to me, Davin shivered, probably remembering the last time he’d seen the consul, when he’d had to be removed from Dublin for his own safety after being attacked and made a vampire by a mass-murdering sociopath.
I hoped Caspian’s presence didn’t bring up all kinds of trauma for him.
I’d always liked the guy, but that was because he wasn’t anything like other vampires.
They were all constantly trying to fit a little niche that society said vampires fit into.
Weird and goth and mysterious and all those stereotypical “vampire” things.
Caspian? He was the opposite of all that. His personality was pure sunshine, and he was almost always smiling. He didn’t go in for mystery or try to seem aloof and cool. He was just Caspian. It was, no doubt, why he’d been friends with my mother for longer than most vampires had been alive.
Mother made calls all through dinner, making security preparations for the airport and the drive and the house, calling in trusted friends to stay over.
Not once, in the entire affair, did she so much as glance at me.
I was no longer necessary.
The moment he finished eating, she asked Davin to go retrieve Doc from his house, even though Twist and I were still working our way through the food. He, at least, paused and looked at me, but I waved him off.
Still, he hesitated a moment. Then he leaned in and kissed my cheek. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Don’t . . . don’t worry.”
When I turned to look at him, his dark eyes felt like they were boring into my soul. Did he know?
Mother certainly didn’t.
I looked away and nodded, but I wasn’t sure how to respond.
How to ask, without asking, if he meant that I felt fucking useless. Dismissed, like I was a child, and not a man reaching his mid-thirties, who was realizing that maybe his mother thought he was entirely useless.
She didn’t mean to be insulting. Probably hadn’t even thought about me or what I might do.
I was Flynn, after all.
Flynn with no real career, whom she’d had to prod into every semblance of adulthood I’d ever reached.
Why should I have expected her to do anything other than take charge? Hell, wasn’t that what I’d wanted?
Davin had only just left, and I found that I was no longer hungry. So I stuffed a dinner roll into my pocket and left Twist to her food, and my mother to her phone calls, and went for a walk.
The east side of the house was a rose garden; had been since my childhood.
It was beautiful, and I thought mother had some varieties of flowers that were ridiculously rare and expensive.
Not that I’d ever put much thought into flowers, but there were roses in almost every shade of the rainbow, from softest pale periwinkle with nearly lavender tips, to dark plum, to a mottled black and pink that had always looked like someone accidentally dropped them in a puddle of ink to me.
Still, in this moment, even in the dark of the middle of the night, it was reassuring. Comforting. Because of my mother, of course. Because she took care of everything, even though I was a useless manchild.
I pulled myself up onto the edge of a wrought iron table and stared out at the bushes, wondering why it bothered me now.
I’d spent years letting her drag me along, kicking and screaming.
Why did it matter to me now?
“Peanut for your thoughts,” a familiar voice said, and for some reason, something in me settled as I turned to look at my raven friend.
“Hey asshole.”