“I’ll be damned,” Doc added at the sight of him. “You look like hell, Devlin.”
My father grinned at him, and as strange as the expression was on his too-thin face, it was...nice to see him smile. It wasnice to see him anything. “Really? Because I feel amazing. Best I’ve felt in thirty years, at least.”
Doc’s answer was a strangled laugh, like he was amused, but he wasn’t quite sure he was allowed to laugh at such a dark fucking joke.
That was when the door flew open with a bang, reverberating off the inside wall, and rebounding back into my mother’s side, though I didn’t think she even noticed.
For a second, it was as though time froze. We all stood there, staring uselessly at him, thin and frail and smiling like the Solstice had come early, and my mother, perfect in every way as usual, but for the tears streaming down her face.
And then she was running.
Again, vampire, so she looked like nothing so much as a black and red blur streaking down the stairs and across the pavement.
Then, they were holding each other. Well, she was holding him up, but his arms were wrapped just as tight around her as he stared into her eyes. “Fi,” he whispered. “Look at you. Just as perfect as the last time I saw you.”
“You look like hell, you fucking ass,” she hissed back, and somehow, it sounded exactly as adoring as he had.
He leaned his head forward till their foreheads touched, and closed his eyes. “Never thought I would see you again.”
“And now you’re never leaving,” she answered, as she hefted him properly up into her arms. “I’m going to have someone out to build a ten-foot security fence, and then I’m hiring an army for security. I’ll fucking start a civil war if I have to, make California independent and run it myself. No one is ever getting their hands on you again.”
He didn’t answer her, just smiled and leaned into her.
Sexton sighed, coming up beside me. “I’m sorry. He woke up and absolutely would not listen to me when I said you knew you were in danger, and knew how to protect yourself. He washaving a meltdown over it. Insisted he had to see you. Had to see Fiona. That you needed him, even though I reminded him that we’re both the next best thing to useless right now.” He glanced in my mother’s direction and then lowered his voice. “I can barely walk, and he fucking can’t. This was the worst idea ever.”
“If you think that’s the worst idea ever,” my father said, without lifting his head or opening his eyes, “you should stick around and see my encores. I promise I’ll surprise you.”
My mother? She just hissed in frustration and turned to march them both into the house.
“I expect he’s right about that,” Doc added, coming over to where Sexton and I stood. “Honestly, I don’t know how I didn’t see it long before that you were Devlin’s son, Flynn. The man is so good at bad ideas, it’s like a gift.”
I frowned at him, but also...it was kind of hard to deny. My whole childhood, I’d been like a bad idea factory. Parachuting off the roof of the house, tasting the roses to see if they were delicious as well as pretty, testing out the car cigarette lighter on my finger to see if it’d leave that cool circular pattern in my skin. Hard to imagine a grown ass man being quite so full of nonsense as that, but somehow, I wasn’t too bothered by the idea of finding out.
Sexton, fully on the other side of that equation, groaned. “Lovely. I can’t wait for him to get us all killed.”
Davin shrugged and smiled at him. “At least it won’t be boring.”
That...reminded me of the way he’d talked about his life before becoming a vampire. Dryshite, he’d said, which I had learned was an actually insulting bit of Irish slang about being completely boring. It was...well, boring didn’t describe the Davin I knew, but maybe that was the point. He’d taken the opportunity of becoming a vampire and moving to California tochange everything he hadn’t liked about his life, even if he hadn’t intrinsically changed himself.
And it turned out that Davin kind of liked the chaos I brought to the table.
I stepped up next to him and leaned on his shoulder, wrapping my arms around him. “I kind of don’t want to go inside,” I admitted. “I don’t really want to interrupt their reunion. I know it’s not going to be over the top or anything, but...you know?”
Doc was the one who spoke up. “They’ve been through a lot. No harm in you wanting to give them room to figure things out. But I’m sure she’s taken him to her room, so we won’t interrupt anything.”
That was a weird thought. In every year of my life that I remembered, the only people who’d been allowed in my mother’s bedroom were her, and very occasionally, me. Not even Mirabelle went in there.
On the other hand, it seemed obvious that it was a place my father belonged.
I couldn’t help but smile at the whole thing. I had parents, and they loved each other.
Hell, my mother had certainly just offered to do something incredibly illegal because it might protect him. I’d always known she would burn the world down for me, but there it was in stark relief.
Twist appeared in the empty and still open front doorway. “I have finished eating, Father. When do we go kill the false dragon?”
Davin, without missing a beat, turned to me. “Still hungry, or just bloodlust?”
I couldn’t hold back the laughter at that.
