“You’ve spent too much of your life ’round vampires,” he said, rolling his eyes. I glanced at Paul, but he didn’t seem especially surprised at the word. I supposed that made sense, when he worked for a woman who never went outside in the daytime. Dragons were weirder than vampires, maybe. Davin wasn’t done, though. “Sometimes human people just mean what they say. And it’s fair. Owning an island is a fecking strange thing to do. But you’ve got to remember your da is probably a thousand years old. Back then tiny men were always determined to run their own little kingdoms, so it’s how he learned he was supposed to be. No one ever tried to convince you to rule anyone.”
It was an excellent point. More than once, my mother had openly despaired my ability to even run my own life, let alone anything more than that. She’d once said she would have gotten me a houseplant, but it would have been a death sentence for an innocent living thing.
She hadn’t been wrong.
And if I couldn’t rule over a house plant without killing it, then what business did I have running a whole kingdom?
“Anyway,” I said, trying to get back on track, even if the whole island thing was an enormous distraction. “It’s Dad’s island. It’s good he came here. It’s probably safe. I don’t...I don’t want to say it’s safer than Mother’s house, but also, it might be?”
Paul frowned, no doubt feeling a need to defend my mother’s ability to kick the asses of all comers, but Sexton nodded. “Evenif it isn’t, taking him to your mother’s home adds the element of landing at the airport and then having to drive him through the city. Which isn’t necessarily dangerous, but it’s certainly more dangerous than staying here. Especially when he’s unconscious and can’t help to defend himself. And when there are apparently at least two dragons who intend to kidnap us, well...” He sat back in his chair and sighed like a melodramatic teenager.
Hard to blame him, since he’d already been attacked once in the last week.
“It’s yer man Fearson,” Davin said, before taking a casual sip of his tea. “No question. He’s a dragon, even if not much of one. The only one I’ve smelled in Avalon other than your family. We’re certain it’s a dragon—or multiple dragons—doing this, right? It must be him.”
I considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Arthur did say that he was relocating his business from London to Avalon. That’s kind of a weird choice. London is a huge international hub, and Avalon...well, it’s technically part of LA, but it’s not really. It’s hours away from LAX or other travel hubs, and it’s more expensive than just a regular town in California.”
“What’s a Fearson?” That was Sexton, always asking the important questions.
“He’s a septuagenerian business owner from London who Davin and Twist said smelled kind of like a dragon.” I paused and frowned, then looked at Davin again. “Except that Arthur said he seems to have aged kind of like a normal human. That doesn’t exactly fit, does it? That he’s seventy and looks seventy.”
Sexton nodded at that. “I’ve met a few dragons, and none of them have ever aged like humans. Although...the ones born more recently have been different. My father once introduced me to a lady he said was only about half his age, and she was...well, I told you dragons have cut themselves off from each other. And from humans. She had known my father sinceshe was a baby, but barely let him in, and seemed to expect him to attack her. We didn’t stay long, but she looked older than he did.”
The overall picture was getting less blurry with every story I heard about dragons.
“She was a shut-in?” I asked. “No friends, no family?”
“No one,” he agreed. “I was about nine when we were there, and she acted like even I was a threat. My father was there to ask about a...a keepsake he’d left with her years before. She still had it, and I think that was the only reason she let us in at all.”
He reached down the front of his pajama shirt and pulled up a black leather cord that ended with a beautiful peach and ivory cameo with a woman’s profile on it. She was stunningly beautiful, and it took me less than a second to place why: she looked like Sexton.
“Your mother?” I asked him.
He smiled, looking down at the piece and nodding. “My father had it commissioned, because he...well, as he said, she was human. He knew she wasn’t going to live my whole life, and he wanted me to remember her. Then she died when I was born, so I never even met her. At the time, he left all of his things with the other dragon; just took me and left. We came back just for the pendant nine years later.”
Like a movie that started on a blurry scene, then slowly came into focus. Dragons, I was beginning to realize, had been slowly killing themselves, not just individually, but as a species, partially because of this threat.
I shook my head and sighed. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You stay here with my father”—when Sexton started to protest, I held up a hand—“like I said, it’s safer here, if only because of the trip. I’m going to go see Mother, and maybe she can make safer arrangements to have the two of you moved to her place. Or maybe she’ll agree with me that the island is safer,and send security here to make it better. Either way, Mother is better at knowing how to take care of people than I am. I should have gone to her to begin with when you were attacked. And for now, I’ll feel better if my father isn’t out here completely alone and unconscious.”
“He was squirrelly enough with worry when it was just you alone out here,” Davin muttered in Sexton’s direction. “And I’m still not entirely sure why he gives half a damn about you.”
Sexton bared his teeth at Davin in a non-smile, then looked to me. “You know she’ll want him there, with her. How could she not?”
There was a vulnerability in his voice that melted me right where I sat, and actually made Davin stop scowling and stop to look at my cousin.
“She probably will,” I said, because there was no point in pretending otherwise. “She loves him, and she’s a protector. She’ll want to be able to do it herself, and frankly, I think being out here on the island would make her nervous. It’s not the safest spot for a vampire.”
For some reason, Sexton smirked at that. “She lives in Southern California, so she’s hardly a bastion of sense when it comes to where she ought to be living. Aren’t vampires supposed to favor Portland or some such nonsense? Forks?”
I buried my face in my hands and sighed. “Thank you for outing your secret love of YA novels, we all appreciate that. But seriously, California has plenty of dark hours. Going farther north just means fewer hours outside in the summertime, since it doesn’t get dark until later. I’ve never met a vampire in my life who was willing to risk their life on diffused sunlight.”
Sexton raised a brow at me and glanced over at Davin, but he didn’t say anything. Fair enough, though.
“Davin doesn’t count. He calls himself the daywalker for a reason. You’ve seen him stand in complete direct sunlight with no problem.”
“Indeed. He’s the very most irksome vampire. Not even weak to their usual weaknesses.”
“So we go back to Avalon and talk to the senator,” Davin interrupted, glaring between the two of us like we were unruly schoolchildren, and he was waiting for us to make some clever, shitty comment in answer.
