Still, he didn’t question anything as he parked in Mother’s driveway and we all got out of the car. Carmen was still carrying the tiny ball that was Twist, who was still purring away.
My mother was halfway down the stairs when I threw the door open and marched in without knocking. She looked at me, at Davin behind me, and then at the still-snotty Carmen, who looked utterly awful, and I could see the Mother in her activate.
So I decided to turn the dial up to eleven by announcing it out loud. “Fearson has kidnapped her son.”
The look of sheer rage that crossed my mother’s face in that moment was...well, I’d said it before, and suspected I would be saying it till the day I died: my mother was a terrifying woman.
She marched the rest of the way down the stairs, her feet thumping ominously on each step, and when she ended up in front of Carmen, there was what I’d been banking on: true empathy. They were sisters now.
My mother was still trying to deal with the very idea of not being able to protect me, and here was Carmen, dealing with herson being kidnapped by one of the very monsters my mother was afraid of on my behalf.
Maybe she couldn’t help me with whatever we were headed for in the North Sea, but this? This wasn’t just right here in the heart of her territory, but it was literally her responsibility. Carmen was one of her subjects, and so was Esteban. Anything she did to Fearson now was completely justified in the eyes of the senate.
A little gift, you could call it, from me to my mother.
Putting an arm around Carmen and drawing her into the house, she turned to look at the vampires who’d congregated in the doorway. “This monster has kidnapped one of our own.”
The clock started ringing right then, and instead of distracting from her speaking, it seemed to highlight her as it announced the time to be one in the morning.
“We have five hours till dawn.” She turned to Carmen. “Tell us where, and we will destroy him and everything he’s ever held dear, before the sun rises.”
From the dining room doorway, András Bajusz gave a slow, measured clap, nodding to my mother. This was why he adored her, after all. Her tendency to unleash hell on the people who hurt her own, and the fact that she considered the vampires of Los Angeles hers. Even Carmen, whom she’d never been especially friendly with before.
I had a suspicion that was going to change after this. They could get together and complain about how their adult sons were tiny babies who had no business making their own choices.
Less than ten minutes passed before vampires were piling into cars and heading down my mother’s driveway. She had replaced me in the passenger seat of Davin’s car, because I might be willing to let a lot of women sit in the back seat in my favor, but this was my mother.
The queen always rode in the front seat.
Even Carmen didn’t question it.
Twist was almost vibrating in addition to the purr for Carmen, she was so ready to kick this guy’s ass. Or maybe eat him. Carmen had told us where she was supposed to bring me, which matched the information my mother had dug up on where Fearson lived, so there hadn’t even been a need to wait and research.
Or at least, no one had wanted to.
One of theirs had been taken, and frankly, if I were one of them, I’d have been pretty pissed at dragons using vampires for their internal power struggles. I was already pissed about it, and I wasn’t one of the group being ill-used.
The vampires who had been at Mother’s weren’t the only ones to arrive on Albert Fearson’s drive uninvited. I suspected Blair had more than a little to do with the cars that joined our group as we drove, particularly when her own glitter-pink monstrosity was one of them.
It seemed like another snippet about dragons, though, the fact that Fearson’s California home wasn’t even in my mother’s ridiculous upscale neighborhood, but another half hour outside of Avalon, practically the middle of nowhere. I wondered if it even counted as part of Los Angeles anymore.
Not that it mattered for my mother’s purposes. The dragon had one of her constituents prisoner, so a county line was no longer an obstacle according to senate rules.
That had been quite the mistake on his part.
It seemed odd to me, though. Was he or wasn’t he an ancient and clever dragon? The picture Arthur had mentioned implied no, but again, a seventy-something dragon looking like a seventy-something human...even if my theory about dragons needing a community was right, how alone would a person have to be, to age that strangely?
This time, there was nothing like the subtlety of sneaking onto Gerald Forsyth’s property to retrieve Amelia. Nope, the whole group of cars went straight up Albert Fearson’s drive and splayed out across the enormous green lawn, stopping in random places and, I imagined, blocking each other in.
Fearson himself showed up at the door, and I had to give him credit for having some balls to do that. On the other hand, he was sneering, like he was annoyed more than nervous.
Dragon versus vampire, I remembered in the moment.
He probably wasn’t too worried, all arrogance aside.
So I jumped out of Davin’s car almost before he finished putting it in park, and marched past the arriving vamps to put myself between him and them. I could absorb any amount of fire he thought to throw at them.
Minions—I assumed human ones, not that I had any way of knowing—on his side started to come out the door behind him, one with an unconscious man slung over his shoulder. It had to be Esteban.
