Chapter 21
The vamp party broke up pretty quickly and started heading out, each in their own vehicles, after they took down Fearson’s minions.
Fearson.
Funny. It had struck me as an unusual name the first time I’d heard it, but given the fact that his father—my grandfather—went by a single name, I suspected the man had chosen it for himself.
What a choice.
On the other hand, it seemed like a choice someone like him would make. Someone alone and miserable and desperate for more power. Someone who would hit a kitten and choose not to stop and check on her. Someone who would deliberately use an artifact that prematurely aged them.
I wondered about his logic with that, but he’d gone silent after Mother had told him my father could change into a dragon and he couldn’t.
I didn’t bother telling him I could too.
No reason to give away every trick up my sleeve when we were planning a trip to the middle of nowhere for another fight.
It was clear from Fearson’s demeanor—and I was struggling very much to think of him as my uncle, or in fact as anything but “Fearson”—but he clearly thought himself Gulliver being held prisoner by the Lilliputians.
As though he could, at any moment he chose, simply break the cuffs they put him in and stride off.
I thought he was vastly underestimating vampires, but I supposed that was easy to do, if you thought just the fact of the race you were born into made you superior to everyone around you.
Me? I’d grown up thinking I was the weakling among vampires. Even now that I knew it would be hard for any vampire to kill me, I had a healthy respect for them.
Why wouldn’t I, anyway? What about them not being able to kill me made them less worthy of respect?
Hell, what decided who was and wasn’t worthy of respect?
Fearson.
He’d done that. He’d made it some sort of silly competition where some people were more and better and more worthy than others.
But that was crap.
No person was better than any other person simply for the accidents of their birth.
Certainly not for being more dangerous than other people.
Grady was perhaps the least physically dangerous person I’d ever met in my life, but he’d kept me going on some pretty dark days. Always showed up for me when I needed a friend and he was able. If anything, I’d have marked him as more worthy of whatever than myself.
Ugh.
I shouldn’t—
A firm hand squeezing my thigh brought me out of what was sure to turn into a mental spiral, and I reached up to put my hand atop Davin’s. “Thanks.”
“ ’Course,” was all he said, continuing to stare at the road ahead of him. How the hell did he even exist?
It was so statistically impossible that the absolute perfect person for me existed in the world, but there he was, driving me around in the middle of the night because once again, someone wanted to kill me to steal my power.
If I had a nickel . . .
“So snacking with ancient goddesses, is it?” he finally asked, after a long silence.
I glared at him a moment, then sighed. “You’re never going to let that drop, are you?”
“I was sitting there on my knees,” he said, shaking his head. “Couldn’t even see her face, because it was like looking into the sun.”
I considered that a moment, but I didn’t remember any especially bright light on the scene, except the way the spear point had shone. Middle of the night and all that. Maybe Davin’s eyes were just that much sharper than mine, that the whole aspect had been worse for him. For all the vamps.
“She looked like my mother, if my mother were an androgynous pixie,” I told him. “So maybe I’m just used to blindingly beautiful redheads.”
He scoffed and muttered something about a mirror that I didn’t quite catch, then shook his head and motioned to the road ahead. “You really think they can actually handle him? Weak or not, he’s still a dragon.”
“Honestly? I know he doesn’t seem ill, but there’s something seriously wrong with him.
Or maybe wrong about him? The premature aging, the lack of connection, the using an artifact for power, it all adds up to something bad inside him.
I’m surprised he’s still alive, and I’m honestly not worried about the vamps.
” I gave an involuntary little shiver at the end, turning to stare out the window, because I didn’t need Davin worrying about something I didn’t even understand.
The crowd was thinner when we got back to my mother’s house, as clearly, some of them had broken off on other business.
They were probably going to move Fearson out of Los Angeles before dawn, and I found that while I had no idea where they had taken him and no idea what they would do with him, I was fine with that.
I didn’t owe him anything.
And he’d hit my cat with his car, the asshole.
The work crew was still going, though, and there was a section of wall taller than me blocking part of the grounds from the road. Strange. It was almost like it was a different place from the one where I’d grown up.
But that was okay. It wasn’t like you could ever truly go home anyway.
My mother hurried everyone either into the house or on their way if they were leaving, with thanks and an indication they would be hearing from the senate on the events of the night as soon as possible. About Albert being executed, she probably meant.
Part of me wanted to have feelings about that, but again, he hit my cat.
With a car.
And then drove off.
So instead of worrying about my heretofore unknown uncle, who’d held his own brothers prisoner, I headed into the house after my actual family: my mother and the rare vamps she trusted around me. Doc and András and precious few others.
“I’ll get a room cleared out for Davin,” my mother was saying as we approached her, and I lifted a brow at that.
“You don’t think that cat’s pretty well out of the bag? We both slept in my childhood room last night.” I motioned toward the stairs, like that might jog her memory.
I might not be willing to have sex with Davin for the first time—if ever—under my mother’s roof, but I wasn’t going to be separated from him like a small child who wasn’t capable of choosing their own bed partners.
She looked at me, blinking like she was somehow confused, then shook her head. “No, of course dear, but the bed in there is . . . isn’t it a child sized bed?”
It . . . well, for my mother’s standards, it was. Full size, child size, same thing, right?
“It fits both of us just fine,” Davin told her, his smile soft and sweet. Funny, he never gave me that smile. I wondered if maybe it was one he’d also given his own mother.
She still seemed dubious, but I wasn’t especially interested in debating the matter. Davin and I didn’t mind sleeping close to one another, and we didn’t need anything more extravagant than we had.
Also, I didn’t want to have any of the inevitable conversations about what had happened at Fearson’s, or the fact that he was my uncle and the monster of the story of my childhood was my own grandfather. At least, not with my mother or her vamp friends.
I loved Doc, but no.
I barely even wanted to think about it, let alone talk to people who would no doubt give me their own stories about times they’d been betrayed by family members or gotten in over their heads trying to fight someone who wanted them dead.
I didn’t need that at all. Because Albert Fearson and the oh so incredible Tadhg were not—had never been—my family. I’d never even met either of them until recently, never spoken to either of them as anything other than antagonistic.
They were the equivalent of monsters under the bed: completely unknown to me.
My family was one vampire who had never been quite sure whether to smother me or leave me alone entirely.
A dragon who’d spent most of my life in prison and only escaped to save my life.
A two-pound cat who could kick anybody’s ass.
A surly Irishman who seemed perpetually bemused by my brain.
And a whole host of friends who’d been there for me, or I’d been there for them, or whom I was just starting to get to know.
Fearson and Tadhg weren’t among them. Hell, I didn’t even know how to spell Tadhg. Given the way both Sexton and Albert had said it, it was probably some Irish spelling with a bunch of random accents and forty-five silent “G”s.
Davin threw an arm around me when we got to the room, and when I lifted my head to look at him, he was pursing his lips. Shit, had I been wrong? Was he about to—
“We should probably let the kitten roam. Your mother will doubtless have ordered her food, but she can’t get to it if we close her in the bedroom.” He waved at my pocket as though to let me know which carnivorous kitten he meant.
I suspected she could pretty easily knock down a door to get to food, but it was a fair point. No reason to force her to go knocking down doors just to get some breakfast. Dinner? Who knew, my circadian rhythm was completely shot at this point, so I was sure she wasn’t a lot better off.
I opened my coat and looked down at Twist. “Want to go wander the house so you can get to your food the minute it arrives?”
“Yes please, Father. I—”
“Hunger,” we both finished at the same time. “Fair enough. You did some heavy lifting with Fearson tonight. I appreciate you having my back, as always.”
“Always,” she agreed.
After she’d scampered down the hallway toward the stairs, I turned back to Davin as I closed the door all but a crack, so Twist could find her way back in, again, with no broken doors. Just another reason I could never have sex in my mother’s house.
I half expected a third degree about the whole “The Mórrigan” thing, but he just slung an arm around me and tugged me toward the bed. “ ’M so fecking exhausted I could sleep standing,” he muttered as we arrived at the bed. “Sorry I don’t have the energy left to go get my bag before we sleep.”
“I should apologize to you,” I corrected him. “I have clean clothes to change into in the morning, and you’re the one who doesn’t. If we’d gone to your place first—”
Even exhausted, his black eyes managed to smolder at me. “If we’d gone to mine first, we never would have left, and we’d have missed all this.” He cocked his head to one side and thought a moment, then looked at me. “They’d have died.”
“Who?”
“Your mam and all the vampires. Carmen would have ended up going to her in desperation if she hadn’t found us.
And the senator would never have come calling to us.
She’d have tried to handle it herself with those vampires, and there would have been no goddess to keep him from using his little”—he made a face and motioned to the pocket I’d tucked the thing into—“trinket.”
I hated to imagine it, but my friend had never been all that interested in my mother or any other vampire. The dead, she’d called them.
“What’s she even the goddess of?” I asked, and instead of answering, he buried his face in my shoulder and laughed.
Fate, it turned out. Well, I hoped that was the only reason she’d be interested in me, and not because I had any particular future in battle or war, or, everything decent in the universe forbid, death itself. It didn’t make sense that a goddess of leadership had much interest in me, honestly.
I was just a guy, doing what I had to do to get by and make sure the people I loved did too.
When I told Davin all that, he just shook his head at me and tugged me toward him, bending me into being the little spoon. Not that I fought that at all. Everyone in their right mind liked to be little spoon sometimes.
“The Celtic gods weren’t like other cultures’ gods exactly.
She wasn’t the high and distant goddess of war with people in wars who worshipped her because it was all she cared about.
Not like Ares being a god of war. Her ilk were more like regular people who were more connected to some things than others, and one of the main things they were connected to were the land and the people.
Like a soldier isn’t only ever a soldier, but you’ll certainly see them in a war when war comes to their people.
It’s not about you being good at battle.
It’s about you being her people, and since you’re battling for your existence and protecting your family, she’s there for that. ”
That was actually a little reassuring.
She was my friend. And because she was my friend, she’d helped me when I had needed it. That, in fact, was downright nice. Having friends was the best, and I’d do anything I could for them, too.