Chapter 19
Davin was clearly worried about my sanity as we loaded Carmen into the back of his car. He kept glancing over at me, like he wanted to remind me that Carmen and my mother couldn’t stand each other, but also didn’t want to say anything out loud in front of the stressed vamp.
As she was settling in, he mouthed “what the feck?” at me over the top of the car, but I ignored him.
After we’d joined her, climbing into the front, Twist popped up out of her pocket, and jumped onto and then over the front seat to leap into Carmen’s lap. Carmen startled for a second, then gave a smile and started petting her as she curled up in a ball and vibrated like a little purring machine.
“Your little friend is sweet,” she told me, and some of the tension had leeched out of her.
Davin scoffed. “She’s a monster. But apparently she likes you.”
“She is worried about her son,” Twist meowed at him. “Father would also worry about me if the terrible dragon took me away.”
Davin lifted a brow at me, and unthinkingly, I responded with what I knew he wanted. “She identifies with her. Or at least, she thinks Carmen feels like I would if she were kidnapped. And she’s not wrong. I’d burn a motherfucker to the foundation if they stole my Plot Twist.”
I worried a bit that Carmen would think we were invalidating her feelings by comparing them to what was ostensibly a “pet,” but instead, she smiled and agreed. “Just so. This dragon . . . can you burn a dragon?”
“No,” I admitted, sighing as I remembered that tiny fly in the ointment. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t be killed. And we are going to kill him.”
It was a little odd, that utter conviction, since I really wasn’t much for violence. But this guy? He’d kidnapped Carmen’s son to try to force her to help him. He had attacked my cousin. He had threatened Arthur for no reason at all.
He had helped to kidnap my father and hold him prisoner for thirty fucking years, starving and tormenting him.
Sure, I wasn’t a violent person when I wasn’t forced to be, but in this case I would make an exception.
“He wasn’t coming into Teas(e) to see Arthur,” I said aloud as Davin pulled out of the parking lot.
He glanced over at me, but didn’t say anything, so I explained how I’d arrived at the random notion.
“It makes sense, doesn’t it? He was looking for me, because my father said he’s supposed to kidnap me.
But then he showed up and there was this guy he knew sitting there at the table with me.
So he panicked and started that whole ‘Arthur had a contract with him’ thing.
It wasn’t like he could attack or kidnap or even follow me when everyone in the whole place was staring at him the second he walked in. ”
Davin sighed and nodded. “At least we know he isn’t going to go after Arthur.”
Which was an excellent point. I would rather the assholes come after me, every time. Carmen was case in point of that. I didn’t doubt for a second that she’d have preferred that Fearson’s people had come after her rather than her son.
Which was why we were going straight to my mother. For both Carmen and Mother.
Davin was still dubious when we got back to Mother’s house, I could tell from the way he kept glancing at me from the corner of his eye. He was probably also annoyed that we hadn’t yet had a chance to get extra clothes for him, but we could do that later.
Probably.
I was mostly annoyed we hadn’t gotten to have curry and sex.
Still, he didn’t question anything as he parked in Mother’s driveway and we all got out of the car. Carmen was still carrying the tiny ball that was Twist, who was still purring away.
My mother was halfway down the stairs when I threw the door open and marched in without knocking. She looked at me, at Davin behind me, and then at the still-snotty Carmen, who looked utterly awful, and I could see the Mother in her activate.
So I decided to turn the dial up to eleven by announcing it out loud. “Fearson has kidnapped her son.”
The look of sheer rage that crossed my mother’s face in that moment was . . . well, I’d said it before, and suspected I would be saying it till the day I died: my mother was a terrifying woman.
She marched the rest of the way down the stairs, her feet thumping ominously on each step, and when she ended up in front of Carmen, there was what I’d been banking on: true empathy. They were sisters now.
My mother was still trying to deal with the very idea of not being able to protect me, and here was Carmen, dealing with her son being kidnapped by one of the very monsters my mother was afraid of on my behalf.
Maybe she couldn’t help me with whatever we were headed for in the North Sea, but this?
This wasn’t just right here in the heart of her territory, but it was literally her responsibility.
Carmen was one of her subjects, and so was Esteban.
Anything she did to Fearson now was completely justified in the eyes of the senate.
A little gift, you could call it, from me to my mother.
Putting an arm around Carmen and drawing her into the house, she turned to look at the vampires who’d congregated in the doorway. “This monster has kidnapped one of our own.”
The clock started ringing right then, and instead of distracting from her speaking, it seemed to highlight her as it announced the time to be one in the morning.
“We have five hours till dawn.” She turned to Carmen. “Tell us where, and we will destroy him and everything he’s ever held dear, before the sun rises.”
From the dining room doorway, András Bajusz gave a slow, measured clap, nodding to my mother.
This was why he adored her, after all. Her tendency to unleash hell on the people who hurt her own, and the fact that she considered the vampires of Los Angeles hers.
Even Carmen, whom she’d never been especially friendly with before.
I had a suspicion that was going to change after this. They could get together and complain about how their adult sons were tiny babies who had no business making their own choices.
Less than ten minutes passed before vampires were piling into cars and heading down my mother’s driveway. She had replaced me in the passenger seat of Davin’s car, because I might be willing to let a lot of women sit in the back seat in my favor, but this was my mother.
The queen always rode in the front seat.
Even Carmen didn’t question it.
Twist was almost vibrating in addition to the purr for Carmen, she was so ready to kick this guy’s ass.
Or maybe eat him. Carmen had told us where she was supposed to bring me, which matched the information my mother had dug up on where Fearson lived, so there hadn’t even been a need to wait and research.
Or at least, no one had wanted to.
One of theirs had been taken, and frankly, if I were one of them, I’d have been pretty pissed at dragons using vampires for their internal power struggles. I was already pissed about it, and I wasn’t one of the group being ill-used.
The vampires who had been at Mother’s weren’t the only ones to arrive on Albert Fearson’s drive uninvited. I suspected Blair had more than a little to do with the cars that joined our group as we drove, particularly when her own glitter-pink monstrosity was one of them.
It seemed like another snippet about dragons, though, the fact that Fearson’s California home wasn’t even in my mother’s ridiculous upscale neighborhood, but another half hour outside of Avalon, practically the middle of nowhere. I wondered if it even counted as part of Los Angeles anymore.
Not that it mattered for my mother’s purposes. The dragon had one of her constituents prisoner, so a county line was no longer an obstacle according to senate rules.
That had been quite the mistake on his part.
It seemed odd to me, though. Was he or wasn’t he an ancient and clever dragon?
The picture Arthur had mentioned implied no, but again, a seventy-something dragon looking like a seventy-something human .
. . even if my theory about dragons needing a community was right, how alone would a person have to be, to age that strangely?
This time, there was nothing like the subtlety of sneaking onto Gerald Forsyth’s property to retrieve Amelia. Nope, the whole group of cars went straight up Albert Fearson’s drive and splayed out across the enormous green lawn, stopping in random places and, I imagined, blocking each other in.
Fearson himself showed up at the door, and I had to give him credit for having some balls to do that. On the other hand, he was sneering, like he was annoyed more than nervous.
Dragon versus vampire, I remembered in the moment.
He probably wasn’t too worried, all arrogance aside.
So I jumped out of Davin’s car almost before he finished putting it in park, and marched past the arriving vamps to put myself between him and them. I could absorb any amount of fire he thought to throw at them.
Minions—I assumed human ones, not that I had any way of knowing—on his side started to come out the door behind him, one with an unconscious man slung over his shoulder. It had to be Esteban.
Well, unless maybe he’d gone around kidnapping other people.
But no. “I told you to bring him,” Fearson said to someone behind me, almost certainly Carmen. “I didn’t tell you to bring your pathetic dead army.” Then he motioned to a guy wearing weird black gear, who stepped forward and . . . I’d seen that kind of thing on TV before.
That was definitely a flamethrower.
First of all, shit.
Secondly . . . why did a dragon need a flamethrower?
I threw up a hand, glaring at him. “I don’t care if she gave you what you demanded how you demanded it. Give her son back.”
He curled his nose at me like I smelled bad, which, fuck that guy. I smelled fine. Even if I had been wearing the same clothes for two days.
Dammit.
“Why?” he asked. “So they can die together? I shouldn’t have been surprised there was a vampire infestation in Los Angeles, but it seems I’ll be able to wipe the cockroaches out in one go. I should thank you for bringing them to me.”
A couple of the vampires who had come closer to him shifted nervously, and clearly they were thinking about the relative abilities of dragon and vampire as much as I’d been. Plus, there was a second guy with a second damned flamethrower.
Wasn’t it illegal to own even one of those?
I turned all my attention on Fearson, tried my best to channel Blair’s confidence, and scoffed. “You’ve clearly never met a vampire before. Or maybe the LA vamps are just special. But I grew up with them, and I can tell you that this? Is not going to impress them.”
He glared at me, so either he hated me, or I was succeeding at pissing him off. Or both. I was good with both. “You could save their lives,” he suggested, his voice going silky, and . . . something oozed over my mind.
It was like when Sexton had tried to push inside my mind, but somehow more . . . just more. More unctuous, like his mind was an alien thing, a slime that would simply flow over the top of me and consume everything I was.
The shields my father’s power had taught me didn’t know what the hell to do with this.
What was . . . was the world melting around me? The trees didn’t have leaves, but great fat green drops of some kind of liquid, dripping down to pool on the ground, where the grass had already liquified and puddled, shades of green commingling like too much paint on a watercolor canvas.
Where were we again?
What was I . . .