No person was better than any other person simply for the accidents of their birth.
Certainly not for being more dangerous than other people.
Grady was perhaps the least physically dangerous person I’d ever met in my life, but he’d kept me going on some pretty dark days. Always showed up for me when I needed a friend and he was able. If anything, I’d have marked him as more worthy of whatever than myself.
Ugh.
I shouldn’t?—
A firm hand squeezing my thigh brought me out of what was sure to turn into a mental spiral, and I reached up to put my hand atop Davin’s. “Thanks.”
“ ’Course,” was all he said, continuing to stare at the road ahead of him. How the hell did he even exist?
It was so statistically impossible that the absolute perfect person for me existed in the world, but there he was, driving me around in the middle of the night because once again, someone wanted to kill me to steal my power.
If I had a nickel . . .
“So snacking with ancient goddesses, is it?” he finally asked, after a long silence.
I glared at him a moment, then sighed. “You’re never going to let that drop, are you?”
“I was sitting there on my knees,” he said, shaking his head. “Couldn’t even see her face, because it was like looking into the sun.”
I considered that a moment, but I didn’t remember any especially bright light on the scene, except the way the spear point had shone. Middle of the night and all that. Maybe Davin’s eyes were just that much sharper than mine, that the whole aspect had been worse for him. For all the vamps.
“She looked like my mother, if my mother were an androgynous pixie,” I told him. “So maybe I’m just used to blindingly beautiful redheads.”
He scoffed and muttered something about a mirror that I didn’t quite catch, then shook his head and motioned to the road ahead. “You really think they can actually handle him? Weak or not, he’s still a dragon.”
“Honestly? I know he doesn’t seem ill, but there’s something seriously wrong with him. Or maybe wrongabouthim? The premature aging, the lack of connection, the using an artifact for power, it all adds up to something bad inside him. I’m surprised he’s still alive, and I’m honestly not worried about the vamps.” I gave an involuntary little shiver at the end, turning to stare out the window, because I didn’t need Davin worrying about something I didn’t even understand.
The crowd was thinner when we got back to my mother’s house, as clearly, some of them had broken off on other business. They were probably going to move Fearson out of Los Angeles before dawn, and I found that while I had no idea where they had taken him and no idea what they would do with him, I was fine with that.
I didn’t owe him anything.
And he’d hit my cat with his car, the asshole.
The work crew was still going, though, and there was a section of wall taller than me blocking part of the grounds from the road. Strange. It was almost like it was a different place from the one where I’d grown up.
But that was okay. It wasn’t like you could ever truly go home anyway.
My mother hurried everyone either into the house or on their way if they were leaving, with thanks and an indication they would be hearing from the senate on the events of the night as soon as possible. About Albert being executed, she probably meant.
Part of me wanted to have feelings about that, but again, he hit my cat.
With a car.
And then drove off.
So instead of worrying about my heretofore unknown uncle, who’d held his own brothers prisoner, I headed into the house after my actual family: my mother and the rare vamps she trusted around me. Doc and András and precious few others.
“I’ll get a room cleared out for Davin,” my mother was saying as we approached her, and I lifted a brow at that.
“You don’t think that cat’s pretty well out of the bag? We both slept in my childhood room last night.” I motioned toward the stairs, like that might jog her memory.
I might not be willing to have sex with Davin for the first time—if ever—under my mother’s roof, but I wasn’t going to be separated from him like a small child who wasn’t capable of choosing their own bed partners.
She looked at me, blinking like she was somehow confused, then shook her head. “No, of course dear, but the bed in there is...isn’t it a child sized bed?”
