I just rolled my eyes at that, turning to Caspian. “I appreciate the offer. I really do. I think...Sexton will want to go. He’s not much of a fighter, but his father might be alive out there, and he cares about that.”
For the first time ever, Davin had my back when it came to Sexton’s rehabilitation. “He will. It’s one of the only things I’ve ever seen him have unguarded feelings about.”
“So that makes four of us,” Caspian said, and then once again turned to my mother as she opened her mouth. “Fiona.”
“Qazvin,” she responded, eyes narrowed, glaring at him as I’d rarely seen her do.
He sighed, and it was weirdly...paternal? Caspian was not related to my mother. They could hardly have looked less alike.
Unless . . . holy shit, wait, had Caspian . . . was he hersire?
“You know that in almost every situation, I will support a person looking for justice on behalf of their family.” Then he reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “But you aren’t alone anymore. Your family has their own voice, and their own ability to seek justice for themselves. And you have made a promise. You are here. You protect Los Angeles. You asked for this, and we were grateful you did. You are the best senator any city in the world has. But it also means that this time, you cannot be a part of something.”
Oh. Oh shit.
It was part of the senate’s rules; rules that Mother had agreed to follow with her election to the position. She wasn’t allowed to leave Los Angeles except for reasons the senate deemed acceptable. Apparently, hunting and killing some dragons who had kidnapped your man wasn’t an acceptable reason to go halfway around the world.
“But I can,” my father reiterated.
I sighed and looked down at him. “You can barely sit up in bed.”
At the same time, my mother said, “You almost choked on soup this morning.”
He . . . pouted.
Fuck me, did I look like that when people didn’t give me my way?
The way Davin started laughing implied that the answer was yes. I turned to look at Caspian, and he was valiantly keeping a straight face, but his eyes were practically glowing with amusement. “Never have I met another person who was more clearly a blend of his parents than you, Flynn Knight. Or will it be Flynn Devlin-Knight now?” Then he glanced behind me, and lifted a brow. “Or perhaps we’ll wait and it will be Flynn Byrne.”
I blinked, then frowned. “That sounds awful.”
“You can get married without changing your name,” Davin was quick to point out, wrapping an arm around me. “It can just stay Knight and Byrne.”
“I would never take anything from Fiona,” my father promised. “It should just be Knight. She did all the hard work of raising a son.”
She rolled her eyes, but then she sat down next to him and started fussing with his pillows and blankets, making sure everything was just so. I remembered it well from whenever I’d been sick as a kid.
“Since neither of you will be going to any facility in the North Sea,” Caspian started, and my mother whipped around to glare at him.
“My son?—”
“Whom you’ve raised to be a capable adult who makes his own decisions,” he continued, then stopped and looked at her, as though waiting for her to finish the sentence.
They stared at each other for another moment, before she huffed and looked away. To me. “Don’t you go anywhere right now.”
“Sure,” I agreed, because well, at the very least I needed a shower and a change of clothes before I went traipsing off to the North Sea.
Good thing I had a passport, even if I’d never needed it before.
My mother turned back to Caspian and narrowed her eyes. “If anything happens to him, I will abandon my post. I will go to the fucking North Sea or anywhere else I find they are, and I will burn it to the ground. I will kill every dragon ever born.” My father cleared his throat, and without looking at him, she reached over and ran her fingernails through his hair. “Except you, dear. And Sexton, I suppose. Maybe.”
“Well, Sexton’s coming with us, I think,” I hedged. “So I guess you’d be avenging him too, if we go get killed. Also, that means we need to give him a little time to recover.” I glanced over at Caspian, wincing. “I hope that’s okay.”
He waved me off. “There’s no rush on my part. I have a bit of research to do beforehand anyway, but I’ll be here in town for a few days if you’re ready soon, and we’ll head to Scotland when you’re ready. I do think faster would be better, given this notion of completing a machine by fueling it with dragons. If they’re alive now, I doubt they will be once this is done. No offense to your cousin, but maybe he can’t make it in time.”
It was an excellent point, and one I would have to discuss with Sexton. He wasn’t ready to go rushing off to a fight, but also, time was definitely of the essence.
Still, these people had been stealing the energy of dragons for who knew how long. We couldn’t go in at anything but full strength, if we wanted to beat them. Two vampires and a dragon could beat two dragons, right?
