Sebastian merely huffed. “Reynard refused to come. He said he was tied up.”
“I just bet he is,” Perry said with a sweet smile. “And Bertram is missing yet again. I swear, sometimes I forget about him entirely, which, come to think of it, is probably his intention. Now, may we come in, Nate, dear? The boys are being very good, but I’m not sure how much longer they can last.”
Nate noticed that Julius, in particular, was hopping from foot to foot, clearly eager to see both Harry and Darwin.
Whether Nate had wanted to let Perry and Sebastian in or not, their eight young children forced his hand. Nate didn’t want them seen. “Of course. Why not? Should we be expecting a visit from Grandpa Grimmie, as well?”
Sebastian shook his head. “No. For now, we keep Father out of this.”
“Out of what?” Nate asked. “A family reunion?”
The large dragon looked impatient. “No, boy. This is a council of war.”
* * *
This is a council of war.
Those words bounced back and forth in Nate’s brain, frightening and exciting him in equal measure. He’d loathed the idea of the Pedigree from the moment he’d first heard about it, and finding out that was what had warped his mother hadn’t helped. He was afraid, of course, for the safety of his family and friends, but what if, one day, Nate became pregnant with a human child? Dragonkind would label him or her a Disgrace from birth, and the child would be forced away from him and into a cloister. The idea was absurd, of course. Nate would rather die than let anyone take away his children, whether they were scaly or not.
But it haunted him regardless, and it made him consider his own origins.
He understood now why his mother had run, and, perhaps, some of her unhinged resentment toward him.
All of it was a mess, which, of course, not only meant that dragons were to blame, but that it would be up to their far more sensible omega counterparts to force them to see the light.
Judging by the look on Nate’s cousin’s face, it seemed he thought much the same.
Before Nate sat down at the large table in the sunroom, he went to the window and looked out at the whelps. The peacock was shaking his sadly diminished feathered tail only to have it batted about by Octavius, Hadrian, and Malory, who made off with his molting feathers and batted them about. Chaucer, Maximus, Abelard, and Elian rode on Olive’s back. Felix, Cornelius, and Atticus blew smoke rings while they leaned against a rather large stone garden gnome, and Darwin lay with Julius in a patch of sun, the smaller pink whelp curled against the older, violet one. The sight made Nate’s heart constrict, which drew Alistair’s attention.
“Yes, my love?” Alistair asked.
“I’m in,” Nate said. “All the way in. Let’s take down the council. They’re nothing but a bunch of assholes in pretty scales. It’s past time they learned that omegas can also bite and breathe fire.”
That was met with a cheer from Harry, a bubble of laughter from Perry, and applause from the strange omega in the room. The man that Alistair had said was his cousin, as impossible as that seemed.
“Bravo,mon cousin.I feel as if we will get along, as they say, like a house on fire. I am Matthieu Boudreaux and my sire is Alexandre Boudreaux, of the Ruby clan. Your sire, as I understand it, is Etienne Boudreaux, my sire’s clutch-mate. We are, it seems, family.”
Nate had lived so much of his life with nothing, just him and his often-irrational mother. There had been no grandparents or uncles or aunts or cousins. He’d gotten used to being alone, and thought it was what he preferred, but then Alistair literally burst into his life and everything becamemore. Nate was, he realized, surrounded by family—Harry and Perry, gruff Sebastian, dickish Everard, and supercilious Geoffrey were part of it. All the whelps, and Olive, and Steve, and the developing whelps that slumbered in the black nestlers placed on the table in the middle of the room were, too. Nate had no clue who the peacock belonged to, but he got his answer when the bird muscled his way in through the dragon-flap, waddled into the room, honked forlornly, then scrambled up in a flurry of more honks and shed feathers into Geoffrey’s lap. There he curled up and seemed to sleep. Or roost. Or whatever the hell peacocks did when they took a nap on a dragon’s lap.
Nate couldn’t help but see the look that the Topaz lawyer gave Geoffrey, his golden eyes worshiping the other man. From what Nate understood, no dragon should ever look at another that way, but it hadn’t stopped them.
Wouldn’t stop them.
And so Nate decided that they were family, too.
But more than that was Matthieu, Nate’s cousin, of all things. He, too, looked at Geoffrey as if that uptight stick-in-the-mud hung the stars in the sky. Nate might have been nauseated by it all, except he knew how Matthieu felt. He knew it deep down inside what he realized was the heart not of a man, or an omega, but of a dragon.
They were the same, all of them, and so Nate would fight.
“It’s good to meet you, Matthieu.” Nate grinned, his dragony heart feeling like it might burst free of his chest in fear and excitement and sheer joy. “Apparently we’re about to go to war. Welcome to the family.”
33
Matthieu
Five dragons, their four omegas, an iguana, and a peacock sat around a walnut dining room table upon which had been placed five nestlers. Nate had been forced to insert the leaf and wheel in a plush office chair. He gave the chair to Harry, who seemed pleased to have it. As the conversation went on, he twisted back and forth in his seat and fidgeted with one of Alistair’s discarded claws. Steve sat on his shoulders and regarded the claw with apathy.
“If we’re ever to get any traction,” Everard declared, “we’ll need Father’s help. Whether we’d like to admit it or not, his voice holds more weight than all of ours combined when it comes to the council.”
