My mother turned back to me, looking oddly winded for a woman who didn’t need to breathe. She didn’t seem to give a damn about Fearson being my uncle, though. Instead, she said, “Your...friend. You’re...friends. With...”
“The queen of nightmares? That’s what Twist called her. Sounds a little overblown for someone who’s spent the last three decades shooting the shit and sharing snacks with me.”
My mother put a hand to her forehead and leaned into Blair. “My son is...buddies. With The Mórrigan.”
“He does seem the type for it,” Blair said, as she winked at me. “Hell, I’ve only met a handful of people he hasn’t tried to befriend. Ancient goddesses seem pretty much like a regular Tuesday.”
Clearly, I was going to have to look up “The Mórrigan,” but did it matter? She was my friend. Like Twist, like Blair, and like...well, yeah, most of the people I met. The good ones, anyway.
I looked down at Fearson, frowning. “So, I was kind of worried about vampires being able to handle a dragon, but it turns out he’s maybe the least powerful dragon ever. You could maybe even hand him over to the human authorities.”
“Oh no,” Carmen said as she came up behind me, carrying...was that part of a flame thrower? “This bastardo faces senate justice. I demand it. He kidnapped my baby.”
“Mother,” the slightly disheveled and embarrassed Esteban whispered from behind her. “I’m fine.”
Carmen started to open her mouth, but Mother beat her to the punch. “No, your mother is right. He kidnapped one of our own, in an attempt to kidnap another. He faces senate justice.” She looked at me, her expression all business now, and wasn’t that weird? My mother, looking to me for adult answers. “You’re sure he can’t turn into a dragon?”
“He definitely cannot,” I agreed. “Like I said to him, he’s the weakest dragon I’ve ever met. Twist and Davin said he barely even smells like a dragon.”
Fearson ignored me and scoffed at her. “No one has turned into a dragon in millennia. Not even father.”
Mother turned her sweetest, most terrifying smile on him. “Oh sweetheart. It sounds like you haven’t spoken to daddy dearest in a while. It turns out his least favored son managed that feat when you two threatened to take Flynn in his hearing. He escaped and came to warn us you were coming.”
This was clearly news to dear Uncle Albert, which wasn’t a surprise to me.
Tadhg had let Albert use an artifact that had aged him so horribly that he looked, in dragon terms, thousands of years older than his brothers. Why not let him swing in the wind when it was possible someone who could eat him in a bite was coming for him?
No, my grandfather was almost certainly busy fortifying his position, preparing for a siege.
In the North Sea.
CHAPTER 21
The vamp party broke up pretty quickly and started heading out, each in their own vehicles, after they took down Fearson’s minions.
Fearson.
Funny. It had struck me as an unusual name the first time I’d heard it, but given the fact that his father—my grandfather—went by a single name, I suspected the man had chosen it for himself.
What a choice.
On the other hand, it seemed like a choice someone like him would make. Someone alone and miserable and desperate for more power. Someone who would hit a kitten and choose not to stop and check on her. Someone who would deliberately use an artifact that prematurely aged them.
I wondered about his logic with that, but he’d gone silent after Mother had told him my father could change into a dragon and he couldn’t. I didn’t bother telling him I could too. No reason to give away every trick up my sleeve when we were planning a trip to the middle of nowhere for another fight.
It was clear from Fearson’s demeanor—and I was struggling very much to think of him as my uncle, or in fact as anything but“Fearson”—but he clearly thought himself Gulliver being held prisoner by the Lilliputians. As though he could, at any moment he chose, simply break the cuffs they put him in and stride off. I thought he was vastly underestimating vampires, but I supposed that was easy to do, if you thought just the fact of the race you were born into made you superior to everyone around you.
Me? I’d grown up thinking I was the weakling among vampires. Even now that I knew it would be hard for any vampire to kill me, I had a healthy respect for them.
Why wouldn’t I, anyway? What about them not being able to kill me made them less worthy of respect?
Hell, what decided who was and wasn’t worthy of respect?
Fearson.
He’d done that. He’d made it some sort of silly competition where some people were more and better and more worthy than others.
But that was crap.
