“Mmm. Channeling our magic through the town and pretending it makes you an electrician. You can do that from home. Or Maya’s home.” Felicity looked up, and Maya caught a flicker of something mischievous in her eyes before she said, innocently, “What about you, Corin? Do you breathe fire? You can join the roster.”
“My flame would not be suitable.” Corin’s voice was cold. “We are trying to stave off destruction, not cause it.”
Maya caught Corin’s eye by accident, and was trapped. The shadows that stormed in his gaze seemed thicker.
“How many types of dragonfire are there? Or dragon … not-fire,” she added, thinking of Apollo’s electric magic.
Corin shrugged. “As many as there are families of dragons, I suspect.”
“So Tomás’s fire might not even befire. It could be anything?” And she wasn’t prepared. She hadn’t even known that Tomás’s behavior meant he was trying to do more dragony things. Likebreathe fire.
“It’s fine, Maya. Look. I’m sure every baby dragon does this—”
“Not usually this young.” Corin’s voice was like a tolling bell, foretelling doom over the garden.
Felicity groaned. “We’re trying to help Mayanotfreak out here. I don’t know if you noticed.”
“Tomás found his dragon form far earlier than any other dragon I’ve heard of. He’s a prodigy. Miss Flores—Maya needs to be prepared for him to find his other powers, as well. Whatever they end up being.” His eyes sharpened—then he looked away, grimacing. “I know you prefer to be prepared, Maya. The least I can do while I’m here is to give you access to whatever resourcesyou need. Especially as, so far as I can tell, the only thing standing between your son breathing fire for the first time is the fact he hasn’t yet figured out he needs to be in dragon form to do it.”
The blood drained out of Maya’s face. “But he loves being in dragon form.”
“Quite.” Corin adjusted his weight, and even through her rising panic, Maya got the feeling he was uncomfortable. “Yesterday, you suggested that you didn’t feel secure asking your new neighbors about things you felt you should already know, as a mother to a young shifter.”
Apollo and Felicity protested. Maya glared at him. He was bringing this up now? In front of her best friends?
He continued as though he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary, or treacherous, or plain rude. “And even the other parents here will not have parented adragonshifter. Baby seals and the like pose their own challenges, but none of them involve spitting one of a variety of magical types of fire.”
Felicity pointed at Maya. “Don’t faint.”
“I’m not going to faint.” She faced him, the mate who’d abandoned her to this town, with her sleeping toddler in her arms. “Thank you for the summary of our conversations these past few days, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know, Corin.”
“No. I’m forcing your friends to hear it. If you won’t tell them, someone has to. And I’m offering a solution,” he went on, while she was still reeling from that bit of treachery. “You need information about raising a dragon shifter child.Thisdragon child, in particular. I can help you with that.”
For one horrible moment, she thought he was going to suggest he hunt down Tomás’s father.
He wouldn’t. Hecouldn’t. She hadn’t been able to.
But she was Maya Flores. A nobody human. And he was the leader of the Blackburn clan. If he wanted to, he could track down the man who’d fathered Tomás.
She kept her voice steady. “You can put me in touch with someone who knows what I should be doing?”
“Yes.”
Was it her imagination, or did his neck bob like he was swallowing?
“Who?”
“My mother.”
18
Corin
Was he deliberately courting disaster, Corin wondered.
His mother. Hismother. The woman who’d hunted down her own mate with a wedding license already partially completed so she could get down to the business of creating a Blackburn heir. And she had succeeded. Corin’s nearest cousins were years younger than him. He sometimes wondered if his aunts and uncles had looked at Igraine after she married into their family and been so intimidated by her generational planning that they’d been completely incapable of reproducing for another half decade.
And he had organized a meeting between her and Maya.
