Chapter Eight
EIGHT
BECKET
“I don’t think poor Allie was prepared for all of us,” Aisling said softly to Ysolde, May, and me.
“This is my fault,” I said, feeling guilty as the castle hall was filled with not just other vamps and a whole bunch of dragons, but now also my bandmates, who had hinted broadly that they would love to see inside until I asked Allie if a brief tour was possible.
“Of course,” she said, looking a bit glazed about the eyes when we all rolled up, complete with my vampire guard escort.
All the ladies turned to look at the newest arrivals, who were greeting Christian.
“That’s Archer with Thaisa, his mate,” Aisling said, nodding toward them. “His twin is Hunter. Their dad is the guy who is evidently trying to destroy the dragons, although no one knows why.”
“Or at least the men aren’t telling us why,” Ysolde answered, shooting Baltic a pointed look.
He didn’t so much as bat an eyelash at it. He stood somewhat apart from the other dragons, his arms crossed as he watched them.
I turned to look to my right. Yrian stood in almost the same pose, wearing an identical expression of watchfulness.
Allie went forward to greet the newcomers as Ysolde went to her dragon, sliding an arm around his waist and leaning in to bite his ear.
I moved next to Yrian as a sense of yearning gripped me, making me feel things I hadn’t felt in many years.
“Why are you standing over here all by your lonesome?” I asked him when I reached his side. “These are your family, aren’t they? Or are the new guys not dragons? They look like dragons to me, but I admit that I’m not very conversant with your people.”
His gaze shifted to the newcomers. Absently, I noticed that the gold of his eyes was now dulled, more of an old gold than the shiny brightness I’d seen before.
“They are ...” He hesitated. “Not kin and yet they are. I would ask my youngest brother about them, but he indicated that the green wyvern was calling a sárkány, so I will get my answer there.”
“What’s a sárkány?” I couldn’t help but ask, telling myself that I didn’t need to involve myself with dragon things any more than was necessary.
That thought was dismissed almost immediately.
I liked the dragons. I liked the women, and while the men were rather intense and intimidating, Yrian wasn’t in the least bit like them.
He was warm and protective and fascinating, and a hell of a fighter to boot.
“It is a meeting of septs.” He pulled out his phone when it meowed at him. “Ah. The Internet mage informs me that he found a laptop for me. I have not had one of those before, but he told me it was better even than the tablet.”
“You bought a phone and a tablet?” I asked, fighting to keep from smiling.
For a man who’d spent almost the last two thousand years out of the mortal world, he sure did love his YouTube cat videos.
The fact that he found so much delight in them warmed me to my toes.
It was just one of the many contradictory facets of his personality .
.. a personality that I was finding more and more attractive as each minute passed.
“It was necessary,” he said with a serious mien that also made me want to laugh.
“I’m sure it was. So, you’re having a meeting with your dragon buddies? When is that? Not that it’s really any of my business other than wanting to make sure I have someone around me when we’re performing,” I asked.
He glanced at his phone. “You have three and a half hours before you must sing?”
“About that, yes.”
“Then we can have the sárkány now. I will inform my youngest brother,” he said, surprising me by taking my hand when he marched across the hall to where Allie, Christian, the ladies, and the dragons were now in a cluster.
My band had gone off with the housekeeper to see what Allie had said was a nice collection of art Christian housed in the basement, so it was just dragons, vamps, and me.
“Are we having fisticuffs?” Christian asked when we stopped next to him. He glanced at the dragons. “You are six. I will ask another guard to join us, so that we might make easy teams.”
“Fisticuffs?” I asked before I realized it. I looked at Yrian. “Why are you guys going to fight? I thought you were all friends?”
“It’s not like that,” Aisling said at the same time May answered, “Dragons get a bit testy when tensions run high, and it helps calm them down if they can have a rumble.”
“Mayling!” Gabriel said, outrage dripping from the word. “Wyverns do not get testy! It is simply that our primal selves occasionally get the better of us, and physical exertion helps alleviate that.”
“Uh-huh,” Aisling said, automatically taking the suit coat that her husband peeled off. “That’s why you guys take advantage of any dragon get-together to beat the stuffing out of each other. Drake, so help me, if you lose another one of your real teeth, I will have many things to say to you.”
Drake looked like he wanted to roll his eyes, but he simply muttered something in Magyar, and proceeded to remove both his tie and cuff links.
“What is this?” Yrian asked his brother.
Baltic, who was also divesting himself of his coat while rolling up his sleeves, said, “We fight. The mates insist on human form only, no weapons, just fists.” He smiled, his gaze on Gabriel. “They are enough.”
“It sounds barbaric,” Allie said as her vampire was stripping down, removing his coat and a fancy vest, his tie, and a couple of rings.
“But it’s honestly kind of mmrowr. No one gets seriously hurt, and Gabriel is a healer, so if someone does break something, he can help it heal.
Christian was hoping he and the others could get down and dirty, and had a small section of the side garden blocked off from the public just for that purpose.
We even got in some of that killer wine the dragons love, since they seem to favor it for recovery time. ”
“Recovery—Yrian!”
“What?” he asked as he handed me his phone, then stripped off the jacket and shirt he wore, leaving him clad in nothing but his shoes and a pair of black jeans. I stared at his bare torso, my mind staggering to a halt, while my tongue felt like it cleaved to the roof of my mouth.
Holy shit, the man had the chest of a Greek statue, all pectorals and a ripple of muscles that disappeared into his jeans.
He had a six-pack, an actual six-pack. My mind had a hard time getting past the idea of a man who had lived in his own griefscape for sixteen hundred years and still had the ability to maintain a six-pack, biceps that turned my knees to jelly, and shoulders that made me—not at all a petite person—feel delicate by comparison.
And then he turned away in order to toss his shirt and jacket onto a bench.
A glorious, full-color tattoo of a dragon coiled down his spine.
“Oooh, pretty,” Aisling said, catching sight of it.
“Wow. That really is,” Ysolde said, then slid a glance toward her husband.
“No,” he told her.
She smiled, and leaned in to whisper something in his ear.
“Becket?” Yrian asked, clearly waiting for me to explain my protest.
I moved behind him to look again at the tattoo. It was a piece of art, with shadowed shading on the scales that somehow held muted colors. “This is absolutely gorgeous. I’ve never seen such an artistic tat. Where did you have it done?”
“Mongolia,” he answered. “My mate arranged for me to have it. I wished to have the image be of her, but she insisted a dragon was more fitting.”
There was something about the set of his jaw that said the memory wasn’t a happy one.
“The battle arena awaits,” Christian announced, gesturing toward my four guards. The three men had stripped down to just pants, while Annaliese peeled off her shirt to expose a sturdy sports bra. She flexed her fingers a couple of times as she eyed the dragons.
“Did you need something of me?” Yrian asked me as Christian suggested teams of two.
“No, I’m just a bit taken aback that you’re so ready to fight your own family.”
He thought about that for a moment, then gave a one-shoulder shrug. “We are primal beings. I used to practice on a pell when my humors were out of sorts. This sounds like it is similar, with the added bonus of honing battle skills.”
I had a vague memory of a historical romance defining a pell as a sort of target dummy for swordplay, so said nothing else, just held his things while he turned back to the others.
“There’s six of each group,” Ysolde said as she accepted one of the bottles of dragon’s blood. “Why don’t you guys make it a bit more fun and have a vampire and dragon pair up? That way you can’t blame one group for beating up the other.”
I could tell no one really liked that idea, but in the end, it was settled that it would be the fairest way to hold what I was beginning to think of as a massive pissing match.
Yrian eyed the vampires. “I will take you as a partner,” he told Annaliese.
“You will, will you?” I asked, suddenly feeling cranky as hell.
“Yes,” he said. Annaliese sized him up for a few seconds, then nodded and headed toward the door.
“Why?” The word popped out before I could stop it. “Do you fancy her?”
“Fancy?”
“Want her. Do you want her?” I asked, my voice taking on a hint of the Hashmallim’s rock-grinding-on-rock tone.
“Yes.”
I fought the urge to punch him in the nose, curling my fingers into fists to stop myself.
“She looks ruthless,” Yrian continued, his expression pleased. “She will have no mercy on the others.”
“Is that the only reason you want her on your team?” I hated that I had to ask the question, but it came out nonetheless. In the back of my head, my inner narrator was having a field day with why I cared, but I ignored her as I was frequently wont to do.
She was way too snarky for my comfort.
“Of course,” he said, his gaze on the others present. “She may not wish to attack Christian, but I will take care of him.”
Christian must have heard, because he paused in a comment to Baltic, who evidently was his partner, and shot Yrian a fulminating glare.