Chapter 30
Acrash behind me almost sent me leaping into Davin’s arms.
The man in the cage behind me had thrown himself into the thick glass, ragged claws extended, and even fangs showing behind his lips. “You crazy bitch. They’re trying to get us out. What the fuck are you thinking?”
“That they’re barely fit to kiss Tadhg’s feet.
Only one of them is even a dragon, and he’s a baby.
They couldn’t hope to win and get us out of here.
” She stepped toward the glass, glaring at him and flicking out claws as though a real confrontation was possible when the two of them were separated permanently by two sheets of glass and four feet of air between those.
“If the only thing they’re going to find here is death, I might as well turn them in and get an extra meal out of the situation. ”
Wow.
That was so super fucked-up.
At my feet, the guard stirred, and he muttered something about summoning “the great dragon,” which somehow sounded even more ridiculous coming from a half-conscious bleeding guy than it had from either Caspian or the guard outside.
I looked up at Davin, frowning. “Why the hell does everyone keep calling my asshole grandfather the great dragon? He can’t even turn into a dragon.” I looked at the woman, whose eyes had rounded as she stared at me. “Can he?”
She looked to either side of herself, like maybe I’d been speaking to that other dragon in her cell, but then finally, shook her head.
That was good.
Reassurance that Tadhg couldn’t turn into a dragon and eat people or something. Well, assuming she knew what she was talking about, which was debatable, since she was a prisoner.
The door we’d come through banged back open, and guards spilled in from the hallway.
It was only a handful of guys in camo, no dragon at all, unless I was missing something.
Unless Tadhg was just another gravy seal.
Considering Sexton and his dapper suits, even if he weirded them up with sweater vests, and my father, and his apparently very fashionable tastes in all things, I doubted that very much. Guys like that were convenient tools for rich men, but they would never be on the inside of the cult.
Davin spun to face them, a near-feral gleam in his eyes, and I could feel Twist wriggle her way up, wanting out of her pocket. “Is it time for fighting, Father?”
The female dragon in the cell scoffed at the sight of her adorable face.
“Seriously? You brought a tiny kitten to face the greatest dragon ever born?” She turned to the man in the cell across from her, and motioned to me.
“See? An extra meal is a much better choice than some kid who brings fucking kittens to fights.”
I just lifted an unimpressed brow at her, then reached up and pulled Twist the rest of the way out of her pocket. “Sure thing, That Which Stalks. Go eat some sad little men’s rights activists.”
Leaning over, I set her down on the cold stone floor.
The guys in camo all stopped, staring at the kitten, then up at me, like I was entirely out of my damn mind, which .
. . fair. It probably seemed a little insulting, at best, to be threatened with two pounds of fuzzy, clumsy black fur with bright blue eyes and a tiny “mew” that was barely audible over the noise of the alarm in the background.
That tiny mew turned into a low growl, though, and in two deep breaths, two-pound Twist turned into two-hundred pound That Which Stalks the Darkest of Nights.
One guy screamed, turned, and ran back down the hallway.
Yeah, that seemed about right for this kind of guy. Sensible for one of them, even.
Another lifted a hand with a gun in it, though, and Davin took that opportunity to step forward, grabbing his gun hand and just .
. . twisting it all the way around, like it was a screw cap and not a body part.
The man screamed, and a series of cracks filled the air.
Davin took hold of the gun and removed it from the man’s hand, but when he let go of the arm, the whole man fell limp to the ground.
Suddenly, I was less worried about having left Caspian to all the men we’d seen above. If this was what they had to offer, he was going to be just fine.
Twist lunged at another man in the doorway, and Davin . . . expertly removed the magazine from the gun, tossing one in one direction and the other in another, then smiled at the next man waiting to have his ass kicked.
Where had Davin learned how to handle guns? He was a tech guy, not a soldier.
He was so freaking hot, at every opportunity.
Across from me, the man inside the glass cell crowed. “So confident about thinking they were fools, weren’t you? Well Tadhg might have stolen my hoard, but I’d bet it all on them anyway.”
“Only because they’re the first hope you’ve had in a century you old fool,” she shot back, apparently still unconvinced.
Part of me wanted to just go straight to the fire portion of the afternoon and burn these guys down .
. . and a bigger part of me very much didn’t want to burn a bunch of people to death, even if they were shitty bad guys of the sort who got off on pretending to be soldiers because of some deep-seated childish wish that they’d done more impressive things with their lives.
Twist leapt past me in the wrong direction, a man’s arm in her mouth, the limb just holding onto his body by a tiny scrap of flesh, and it took everything in me not to gag.
“Tell her, Father,” she growled, and I deliberately turned to look at her. She was staring at the woman in the cage. “Tell her to remain in her prison even when we free them, or I will eat her as well. We shall see what dragon tastes like.”
“Gross, Twist,” I said, but then dutifully looked up to the woman, even though being a dragon, she’d likely already understood the cat. “She’s gonna kick your ass for setting off the alarm, basically. So . . . good luck with that, because no one here is gonna fight her on your behalf.”
A flicker of movement on my left grabbed my attention and reminded me, oh yes, fight. One of the camo guys was coming at me.
I ducked his first swing and wondered why he wasn’t just shooting at me, but I took a second to consider and realized that in a prison chock full of glass cells, bullets flying would be a very bad thing.
Maybe the glass could keep dragons in, but that didn’t mean a bullet wouldn’t do some major damage to it.
Maybe even enough damage to let a dragon escape.
Or to ruin the machine, whatever the fuck that was.
Well, if he wasn’t going to shoot at me, that meant I had an advantage.
Sort of.
Sure, I still didn’t really fight, but I could dodge a clumsy blow and try to give back one of my own.
Then, of course, Twist finished with her first—second?—victim, and interrupted the moment, plowing the guy straight down into the stone floor. His head hit the ground with vicious force, and just like that, he was out.
I was turning to look for who was next, when it seemed like all the air went out of the room with a great whoosh, and a second later, the alarm stopped blaring.
I spun to face the direction the guy had said my grandfather usually entered the room from, and a moment later, there he was.
He rounded the corner at the end of the aisle of cells, and I couldn’t have mistaken him for someone else if I’d tried. He was wearing an expensive suit, because apparently that was what dragons did.
Well, except for me and my father while he was sick and wearing only pajamas.
After that, the great and powerful Tadhg . . . looked just like a slightly older version of my father. A younger version of Fearson? Because of course he looked better than his own terrible son.
I wondered again if using that awful ring had been the reason for Fearson’s advanced aging, or if there had been something else. I might never know for certain, and I supposed, in the end, it didn’t matter.
What mattered right now was the monster of a man coming toward me, a slight smirk on his too-familiar face.
Clearly, he wasn’t worried about facing me.
I hadn’t . . . well, I hadn’t been unworried, before this moment. I just thought I had an ace in the hole, which, now that I thought about it, was a little less than ideal.
Yeah, I could turn into a dragon.
But right now, I was in a four-foot-wide hallway between glass prison cells, maybe all of which held dragons inside.
I couldn’t just change and flatten everyone and everything in the whole room.
Even if I could change and not kill myself trying to fit a giant dragon into a tiny little space, that change would end up killing someone else—or maybe many someones.
Suddenly, I was a whole lot less confident about what the hell I was doing. Was it another artifact?
No. I was actually thinking things through for the first time.
Damn me for being so bad at that.