I cringed, because, well, I was the one who’d given Sexton my phone number. I’d practically taken him in, even though Davin still thought his ultimate goal was to kill me or something else equally sinister.
But he was the only family I had other than my mother, and frankly, I thought Sexton had gotten a bad start in life. He’d been raised by a father who clearly loved him, sure, but that fatherhad disappeared when he was a teenager, and he’d never had anyone else care about him until me. Was it any wonder he was a bit of a fuck-up? All he’d had for most of his life was a giant pile of money.
Not to say that having money wasn’t damn convenient, but being rich and alone sure didn’t make someone a good person.
If anything, it seemed to divorce them from reality.
I was kind of grateful my mother hadn’t raised me to think of myself as rich. Hadn’t just bought me everything I demanded simply because I wanted it. Had I usually gotten what I wanted? Sure. But it had never been treated as a given.
I’d never been treated like a tiny prince who would one day be ruler of all I surveyed.
Sexton definitely had.
“You going to answer or just listen to it ring?” Davin asked, dragging me out of my thoughts to realize I was just sitting there staring at him.
I sighed and reached into my pocket just as the ringtone cycled back to the beginning. Sliding the accept call button, I sighed again into the receiver. Sure, I was going to answer in case it was some kind of emergency, but I wasn’t going to let Sexton think he wasn’t bothering me.
“What’s up?” I asked in my best attempt at a no-nonsense tone, as I held the phone between Davin and me. No reason to pretend he couldn’t hear anything my cousin might say, after all.
But Sexton didn’t say anything.
I scowled. “I swear to everything that’s decent in the world, Sexton, if you’ve butt dialed me in the middle of?—”
“Help,” he rasped, forcing me to cut off mid-sentence, and for a second there was only ragged breathing on the line. “Indigo. Can’t...” There was a clatter then, and I could barely hear him breathing, then a thud that could only be a body hitting pavement.
Then there was only breathing.
“Sexton?” I demanded, but there was no answer.
Davin scowled, but for once, not simply in annoyance at my cousin being a pain in the ass. Before I had a chance to scramble off his lap, he’d done it for me, picked me up like I was a doll and set me back in my own seat, even grabbing the seat belt and pulling it across me while demanding, “What’s Indigo, and how do I get there?”
I presumed—hoped, really—that Sexton had meant a particular fancy French restaurant downtown, so I started giving him directions to get there. It was only a few miles away, but all I could think about was my cousin and his ragged breathing on the phone.
He’d made such strides in the last few months. He’d even met my friends and not been a complete dick to them.
He had to be okay.
Right?
CHAPTER 3
Indigo was still open for the night when we pulled up, and one of their parking attendants rushed up as soon as the car reached the curb. I couldn’t blame him; Davin’s car was as hot as Davin the man.
I ignored him, leaving Davin to handle that as I went looking for my cousin. He hadn’t been inside when he’d called, I was sure. The echoes behind him had sounded like outside noises, and the clatter of the phone hitting the ground had sounded like pavement, not cushy carpeted restaurant.
Wishing dearly that Twist was there and not back at the shop with her own dinner, I lifted my nose to the air, hoping that maybe I could get a whiff of...well, whatever it was that vampires seemed to smell when people or dragons or such were around. Davin could smell people’s moods, for fuck’s sake, why couldn’t I just catch a whiff of...what? Eau de dragon? What would that even smell like? Brimstone?
A moment later, before I’d even made a decision, Davin walked past me, his own nose in the air. Because unlike me, hecouldsmell whatever the hell “dragon” smelled like.
He turned before we reached the restaurant, heading down the sidewalk a ways and then into an alley alongside thebuilding. I didn’t immediately see any sign of Sexton, but he kept walking, so I followed along. He had to have smelled something.
Halfway down the alley, I caught sight of him. My cousin, laying face down in a filthy alley, his phone four feet away from him.
I rushed past Davin and dropped to my knees next to Sexton, expecting the very worst. Our fathers were both gone, after all. Someone had been systematically killing dragons for centuries.
But Sexton wasn’t dead.
He was breathing. When I pressed my fingers to his neck searching for a pulse, it was there. His skin, on the other hand, was freezing. It was like touching a vampire, which was very wrong for a dragon. I’d always run hotter than an average human, so I expected Sexton was the same.
