Davin looked...oh hell, he looked almost like I’d punched him in the gut, and the very idea made me feel sick. Did he not want that? Misery wasn’t what I’d been trying to?—
He wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me against him, careful not to crush Twist, but not remotely gentle. “No one’s said that to me since me mam died.” I opened my mouth, wondering if maybe I should take it back. Maybe that was a sacred memory. I’d never lost my mother, how the hell would I know what it was like? He shook his head and kissed me again,so deep that I lost all track of the world, let alone what we’d been talking about. By the time he pulled back, I was a panting mess, and it took me a moment to decode his words. “I love you too, you ridiculous arsehole.”
Then he leaned forward to rest his forehead against mine, the long wisps of his hair brushing against my cheeks and leaving a curtain that almost blocked out the world.
“Come back to the apartment,” he finally rasped, after a long moment of silence.
I grinned back at him. “For the bed, you mean?”
“For fecking ever,” he answered, and that was...well, it wasn’t like I was gonna say no to forever, but it was a surprise. His eyes darted away from mine, but before he could backtrack, my phone started ringing.
“People Are Strange.”
Davin didn’t even say anything at that, just groaned, loud and annoyed, and dammit, I agreed. For just a second, I thought about ignoring it, but...Sexton had almost died the night before.
Well, maybe.
If things had taken a turn for the worse, I should know about that. Or worse, if someone had come for him on the island, I definitely wanted to know that.
So with a sigh, I pulled out my phone and answered it. “Please tell me this is?—”
“A dragon,” Sexton panted, sounding absolutely terrified. “There’s a dragon outside. A real dragon. A huge red flying scaly monster dragon. I think...I think it just landed on the beach. I thought maybe it was you, but?—”
“Clearly it’s not me since I’m still in Avalon,” I interrupted. “So stay in the house. Hide if you have to. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
Davin was squinting at me, probably because...seriously, what the hell? A dragon? From what everyone had told me, I was the first dragon in generations who’d managed to become an actual physical dragon. So if there was someone else out there doing it, what did that mean?
Maybe whoever had attacked Sexton already had figured out how to funnel that energy into becoming a dragon. But wouldn’t that make them a new attacker, different from the one who’d killed all the other dragons?
On the other hand, it might explain why they had only attacked, and not killed, Sexton.
It didn’t matter, though. What mattered was that Davin was already leading me across the parking lot toward his car. “Call your mam. Maybe she can have someone ready to take off by the time we get there.”
It was a little early to be calling a vampire, but this was a special case, and I thought my mother would prefer that I call her than do something ridiculous and try to charter my own flight with a stranger. I could change and fly myself, but that took so much energy, and no one was ever going to say my sense of direction was the best...
No. I let Davin stuff me in the car and dialed my mother’s number. Her pilot was a great guy. He’d be happy to fly me out to the island on short notice.
Fuck me, if I was going to have an island, maybe I needed to get my own plane and learn to fly. Like I could ever afford a thing like that. Plus we’d be less likely to die of pilot error if I just turned into a dragon and flew. At least I was sure I was capable of doing that.
Mostly.
My mother’s tired voice answered on the first ring. “Flynn, dear, what’s wrong?”
And that was my mother. She might not be thrilled to get a call first thing after waking up, but she would never, not once as long as I lived, not be there for me.
CHAPTER 9
It was ridiculous how short a time it took from making the call to touching down on the island, but at the same time, it took far, far too long if Sexton was in real danger.
Two hours.
It was long enough for someone to land there in dragon form, eat Sexton in two bites, and take off, leaving not so much as a trace by the time we could arrive.
But also, who had access to a plane at the drop of a hat?
“I should have flown myself,” I mumbled to Davin.
He rolled his eyes and squeezed me tight with the arm he had wrapped around me. “That wouldn’t have worked any better, love. We would have had to teleport here to arrive as fast as you wanted, and I think that’s still just science fiction.”
