Chapter 33
Davin was the first to break the silence, coughing and then spitting again, the look on his face like he’d just accidentally consumed literal shit.
“Fuck me,” he said, almost gagging and then spitting again.
“I don’t believe I actually bit someone.
That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done in my life. ”
There I was, standing over my grandfather’s dead body, my uncle and cousin sitting there in cells opposite each other staring at me, my poor kitten injured protecting me . . . and I couldn’t help but laugh.
My boyfriend the vampire was grossed out by blood.
He paused, looking up at me. “What if drinking blood makes me into a regular vampire, and I can’t go out in the sun anymore?”
He looked utterly stricken, more horrified than I’d ever seen him in the months we’d known each other, so I stepped in and wrapped my arms around him. “That isn’t going to happen. But if it did, we’d just start going out only at night. Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out.”
“Father,” Twist said, in her usual tiny kitten voice, and I looked down to see that she’d reverted to her two-pound size. “Father, I want to return to my place over your heart. I do not like it here. It smells of pain, and my leg hurts.”
Aww, her place over my heart. It was fair enough, really.
When she leaned down and licked at her front right paw, I could see it was still burned. Fucking Tadhg.
I glanced back at his body, to reassure myself he was dead and couldn’t hurt my kitten again.
Then I leaned over and scooped her up.
I opened my jacket and . . . well, my mother was going to be pleased. It was going to need to be replaced, because the whole front had been scorched in the fire Tadhg had spat at us. I frowned at it. “My favorite coat.”
“My favorite bed,” Twist whined piteously, so I turned my attention back to her.
“It’s okay, kiddo,” I promised, opening the coat to show off her usual pocket, intact, then lifting her up so she could climb into it. “You’ll still be okay in there. I’m just afraid I’m going to have to replace the whole thing, because those scorch marks aren’t coming out.”
Davin sighed next to me, taking his own jacket off and shaking it. “I’d offer you mine, but it didn’t even fare as well as yours.” Sure enough, little bits of burned leather sloughed off as he shook it, most of the front of the jacket a complete loss. He couldn’t even wear it back out to go home.
Which was a concern, because summer or not, it was freezing cold this far north, especially in a storm.
A throat cleared nearby, and I looked up to find a wan Sexton looking at me expectantly. “Not to rush you, or seem ungrateful. I really am quite grateful. But is there any chance you could look for the way to unlock these monstrosities?”
It was an excellent point, really.
Davin dumped his jacket’s remnants on the floor and we started looking around the whole prison, trying to find keys.
The place was every bit as awful as I expected, and frankly, I wasn’t sure how we were going to deal with it.
Some of the dragons there had clearly been imprisoned for a century or more.
Maybe much more. One guy was just sitting in the back of his cell, hitting his head on the wall periodically, muttering a list of names over and over again.
I wondered how many of them were going to be able to rejoin society.
Or . . . had any of them been a part of society to begin with?
If my supposition had been right, that the community made the dragon, and dragons had been getting more and more solitary for centuries, then how would they heal?
I couldn’t just move a horde of dragons into the city of Avalon and not expect people to notice.
Could I?
Although . . . mother did still own Gerald Forsyth’s former properties, including the burned-out husk of his ridiculous home. Maybe if we brought them to California and kept them together, reintroducing them to society slowly. Like a hospital, of sorts.
We could teach them about modern society, and what dragons really needed to be healthy, all at once.
Help them build their own communities, even if only with each other.
Maybe that was what a dragon hoard was supposed to be. A literal horde.
And maybe telling them that would give a bunch of terrible people lots of power.
Hmm.
Something to consider, I supposed.
We made two full circuits of the prison, and I counted the inhabited cells the second time: sixty-three dragons. One empty, one with the remains of the murdered Shella, and one with a repaired hole in the back that I assumed had been the place my father had spent the last thirty years.
Fuck, I needed to do something nice for him.
I wasn’t sure they made a card that covered the whole “so you escaped prison to save my life” thing, and it wasn’t like my mother was leaving out any tiny aspect of care that I could step in and cover. That wasn’t in her personality.
I turned and frowned at Davin, who was inspecting the fucking murder-button-panel-of-death on my father’s cell.
It looked like someone had hit it so hard that the black button had popped out of place, but that wasn’t what Davin was looking at.
He was looking at a tiny hole at the bottom, beneath the buttons.
A keyhole.
Oh jeez. Had we missed something that obvious?
I’d been expecting some kind of full-prison sort of lever that when pulled, opened all the cells.
I went straight to Tadhg’s body and . . . took a deep breath, because this was a dead body. Not like a vampire dead, but like . . . dead dead. He was cooling, his eyes still wide with shock but now blank as well, and the smell was . . . very bad.
Just the thought of what was causing that made me gag, and I had to take a moment to calm myself before starting to go through his pockets.
Davin came up on the other side of the body and knelt there. I glanced up and realized . . . his jacket wasn’t the only thing that had been burned through. The shirt he was wearing—one of his own—had mostly burned through, leaving only pale chest covered with a smattering of chest hair showing.
“Holy shit,” I said, staring at him, completely distracted from looking for . . . things. “Your shirt.”
He looked up at me, then down at the charred fabric, frowning at it. “I thought Caspian had forgotten the spell to protect us from fire, since the cat got hurt.”
“I did,” Caspian announced as he pushed the door to the room back open, marching into the hall. The vague scent of smoke followed him, but he looked none the worse for wear. “I apologize for the oversight, and clearly owe anyone injured an apology, among other things. Are you all well?”
But that didn’t make sense at all.
“Mates,” came the thready voice of Sexton’s father. “Bestowing all the base abilities of the dragon on the beloved. Strength. Constitution. Claws. Fire immunity. Congratulations.”
Once again, Sexton cleared his throat, reminding me of the purpose of searching Tadhg. Still, as I turned back to the body, my mind was whirling.
Congratulations.
Davin was immune to fire because of me.
Annoying that Twist hadn’t also become immune to fire, but we took wins where we could find them, and I loved the cat, but she wasn’t my boyfriend.
Davin wrenched the remaining bit of his shirt open, and then peeled it off like it was a button-down, tossing it aside. Then he cocked his head and reached for Tadhg’s neck, pulling out a leather cord, attached to the end of which was a key. He held it up triumphantly.
Everyone present seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Davin frowned, though, and motioned toward the entrance. “Let’s test it on the cell with the murdered woman. I’d rather not have it set anything off and kill the survivors.”
I shuddered at the idea, but nodded and followed him to that first cell on the left.
As Davin unlocked it, I stared at the remains of what had once been a dragon. Sure, she’d been kind of a selfish, speciesist jerk, but that didn’t mean she’d automatically deserved to die.
It would always be the thing that set good people apart from monsters, though. Maybe I wouldn’t mourn every death, not even the ones I personally caused. Fuck knew I would never be sad Tadhg was dead. But I would also always mourn the necessity or the fact of killing, while monsters reveled in it.
Monsters like my grandfather had been.
The door unlocked, and nothing horrible seemed to happen, so Davin nodded and handed the key off to me. Like for some reason I was the one who had to release Sexton.
Well, maybe that was where Davin drew the line. He had come to help free my cousin, but perhaps actually letting him out of the cell was an annoying thought? I supposed it didn’t much matter either way. I trooped right down and opened the cell my cousin was in, then his father’s across from him.
Then I stopped and turned a full hundred-and-eighty degrees, pausing and turning back to Caspian when I finished. “Granddad?”
He smirked and lifted a brow at me. “Yes?”
“What the hell are we gonna do with all these dragons?”