“It does seem for the best,” Sexton finally admitted.
“And I’ll tell her that if my father comes to her house, then Sexton does too. They’re a set right now, because they both need the same protection and time to recover from being attacked.” I sat back in my chair and drained my teacup, ignoring that it was still scalding. I was a dragon, dammit. I didn’t have to worry about hot things. “Meanwhile, I think we need to look into this Fearson guy. It seems reasonable that he’s at least got something to do with this, and while the facts are a little weird, we can’t rule out him being a dragon.”
“A dragon who ages like a human?” Sexton asked, and he didn’t seem disgusted so much as confused. “You said all dragons have one dragon parent and one human, so there wouldn’t be such a thing as further diffusion of the bloodlines. It doesn’t make sense for a dragon to be only slightly dragon.”
“It does, actually. Or it’s...it’s starting to, I think.” I motioned to Sexton’s cameo, though he’d dropped it back into the neckline of his shirt. “And I think it’s going to be exactly opposite what the people doing this think. Assholes who want power always do exactly the wrong things, though, so I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
Sexton bit his lip, glancing down toward his neck, then back up at me. Like there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that if there was a magical answer for how dragons gained in power, I wasthe man who had it. “You...you know? Do you really think it’s something we can affect? I’m not...I don’t care about all that taking over a kingdom nonsense, but I’d like to be able to fly without my air magic. It sounds nice.”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Davin agreed. It might have been the first truly nice thing he ever said to my cousin, who ducked his head and smiled.
“I do, Sexton. And believe it or not, I’m pretty sure you’re getting there all on your own. It’s just going to take a little time. But I know you can do it.” I reached over and squeezed his shoulder, then turned to Davin and stood. “For now, though, I think we need to get to my mother’s place. I’d call, but I think telling her my father is alive over the phone is the worst idea in the entire history of ideas.”
Paul took another sip of his tea, but nodded and stood. Then he frowned down at the mug. “Any chance I can get some of that tea to take with us?”
Amelia, it seemed, had made another convert without even having to be present.
CHAPTER 13
After the flight back to the mainland, I could tell that Paul wanted to go with us all the way to see Mother, but I promised him that we’d call if we were headed back to the island. I couldn’t fly the plane myself, after all. I wasn’t sure if wewouldgo back, or if we would just have my father and Sexton take his plane, which was still on the island, along with his crew, but I had never been particularly good at planning...anything.
It had always been easier to let Mother do it. She was good at making plansandshe liked it.
Plus the few times I’d tried to do it myself as a kid, she’d lost patience with my fumbling and just taken over, so I’d kind of come to expect that.
It was still a little weird to me when Davin didn’t do that, and let me figure things out for myself.
Still, by the time we arrived at my mother’s place, I was nervous.
She’d spent more than thirty years thinking my father was dead, and while she hadn’t dated anyone in the meantime, I sort of felt like she also hadn’t dated anyone for a long time before him. Mother just wasn’t the kind of person who felt a need tobe in a relationship. She hadn’t been suffering in lonely silence during his absence. She’d chosen and been with him because she had wanted to, and that made him not just an answer to an everyday malaise or a simple companion, but something else.
Maybe something even I didn’t understand.
Except that I looked at Davin sitting in the driver’s side of his car and thought that just maybe, I was starting to get it.
And maybe I would never agree with Wu Mei that dying was a betrayal, but there was something there, too. People weren’t cogs in a machine. You couldn’t replace one with another, just to fill a role. If something happened to Davin, I could never find another Davin.
I would simply be without him forever.
The very idea felt like a yawning pit in my chest. Like stepping off a cliff and feeling gravity pull beneath me with no solid ground to hold it at bay.
Like I would fall forever.
Alone.
Davin turned sharply as he parked in my mother’s drive, concern on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Figured that smell out, did you?”
His brows drew together, as though the words didn’t make sense, but he didn’t ask what I meant. He just said, “It’s you.”
Like that answered everything.
And maybe it did.
I leaned forward and kissed him. Softly, slowly. We didn’t have time forusright then—there was too much else to do, but as soon as this crisis had passed I was going to make time. I’d close the office for a week and go back to his apartment with him. Heck, I’d agree to move in there with him, if he would make room for my ridiculous T-shirt collection.
Well, and Twist. She was a nonnegotiable. But Davin would never want to leave her out anyway; he loved her as much as I did.
