Corin grinned. “You defend your hoard admirably, young dragon. But I doubt your mother would be pleased if you burned down her house, even if you got rid of me with it.”
“You heard that? Saw that?” Maya blurted. Her expression faltered, confusion and a hope that clutched at his chest showing through the cracks.
“Of course. He’s a young shifter, and telepathy will be his main method of communication in this form. It’s very common to start with feelings, before moving on to individual words and then sentences.”
Maya swallowed. “I—thank you.”
Corin frowned. She could hear it, too? But Maya was human. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have any telepathic powers at all. But she was mother to a dragon shifter. Maybe that changed things?
“No one told you this?” No, he thought—that was the wrong way around. “You haven’t told anyone that you can hear his telepathy?”
“That’s not really relevant to the situation at hand, is it?” She crouched down in front of Tomás, who scurried onto the newly available higher ground—her head. “Ow! Tomás, Mama doesn’t like it when you climb on my head, remember? Claws back on the floor, please. There we go. Thank you, sweetpea.” She kissed him on the top of his head. “Are you hiding something in the cupboard, my love?”
“Chree!” A very strong sense ofnobuffeted out from the little dragon’s mind.
Corin leaned against the doorframe. “I heard there was a dragon here with a very impressive hoard,” he mused out loud. The hum of gold against his skin was beginning to itch. He suddenly had a new appreciation for his parents putting up with his own early hoarding instincts. The presence ofnot-their-goldunder the same roof must have been excruciating. “But it can’t be that impressive, if you don’t even want to show it off. Very powerful dragons are brave enough to show off their hoardsandstop them from being stolen.”
Suspicion bubbled against his mind. But if there was one thing any dragon loved almost as much as having piles and piles of gold, it was making sure that everyone knew they had piles and piles of gold.
Maya didn’t sigh with relief, but she’d worked for him long enough he could tell that was what she wanted to do. “Thank you, sweetpea.”
She opened the closet door and Tomás leaped to the shelf at the very top—too high for Maya to see into it without standing ona stool. She brought one, and her spine stiffened when she saw what was hidden up there.
“Oh,” she said in a very small voice. “Shall I get it down for you?”
Absolutely not. Tomás was a big and strong dragon, and would do it himself, which meant Corin got to watch Maya gently lifting a battered briefcase from the closet’s top shelf while Tomás gripped it with his claws, wings beating wildly.
Maya blew a wing-buffeted curl out of her face. “Here we go,” she said uncertainly, sitting back to let Tomás take center stage.
The little dragon strutted on top of the briefcase, puffing out his cheeks.
“He’s not breathing fire yet?” Corin asked in an undertone.
Maya paled. “Should he be? I know that not all dragons breathe fire. Apollo has his sparkly magic, instead, and you have—whatever it is with your shadows, but…”
He will have inherited his father’s powers. What sort of dragon is Tomás’s father?The question stuck in Corin’s throat.
Before they could continue the conversation, Tomás leaped off the suitcase and wrestled the clips open.
“Chree!” he announced, striking a pose in front of the case’s contents.
Corin bit back a curse.
He’d recognized theOcean of Starsat once. His grandfather had brought it into the family hoard, and the stories of how he’d gotten his claws on it had been told and retold at clan gatherings ever since Corin could remember.
What Tomás had in the box was the heart of the Blackburn family hoard.
“Ah,” he said haltingly. “I see. Yes. The Coronet of Tears. Vellugat’s Collar—that’sveryold. These are all very—very impressive.”
Tomás hefted the necklet—a wide, intricate chain of interlinked golden scales—and squeaked proudly before almost overbalancing. He caught his balance, dropped the priceless Collar, and flicked a handful of rings out of the case with his back legs.
More necklaces. A tiara set with massive, glowing fire rubies. And—
“Fuck,” Corin groaned. Maya jerked. “My apologies. But that … that is…”
He stared helplessly at the short string of gold beads. Next to the fiery jewels and sheer bulk of gold in the rest of Tomás’s hoard, it looked insignificant. Until you knew where it came from.
“An ancestor of mine,” he said slowly, “took that from Troy as it burned.”
