It...well, for my mother’s standards, it was. Full size, child size, same thing, right?
“It fits both of us just fine,” Davin told her, his smile soft and sweet. Funny, he never gave me that smile. I wondered if maybe it was one he’d also given his own mother.
She still seemed dubious, but I wasn’t especially interested in debating the matter. Davin and I didn’t mind sleeping close to one another, and we didn’t need anything more extravagant than we had.
Also, I didn’t want to have any of the inevitable conversations about what had happened at Fearson’s, or the fact that he was my uncle and the monster of the story of my childhood was my own grandfather. At least, not with my mother or her vamp friends.
I loved Doc, but no.
I barely even wanted to think about it, let alone talk to people who would no doubt give me their own stories about times they’d been betrayed by family members or gotten in over their heads trying to fight someone who wanted them dead.
I didn’t need that at all. Because Albert Fearson and the oh so incredible Tadhg were not—had neverbeen—my family. I’d never even met either of them until recently, never spoken to either of them as anything other than antagonistic.
They were the equivalent of monsters under the bed: completely unknown to me.
My family was one vampire who had never been quite sure whether to smother me or leave me alone entirely. A dragon who’d spent most of my life in prison and only escaped to save my life. A two-pound cat who could kick anybody’s ass. A surly Irishman who seemed perpetually bemused by my brain. And a whole host of friends who’d been there for me, or I’d been there for them, or whom I was just starting to get to know.
Fearson and Tadhg weren’t among them. Hell, I didn’t even know how to spell Tadhg. Given the way both Sexton and Albert had said it, it was probably some Irish spelling with a bunch of random accents and forty-five silent “G”s.
Davin threw an arm around me when we got to the room, and when I lifted my head to look at him, he was pursing his lips. Shit, had I been wrong? Was he about to?—
“We should probably let the kitten roam. Your mother will doubtless have ordered her food, but she can’t get to it if we close her in the bedroom.” He waved at my pocket as though to let me know which carnivorous kitten he meant.
I suspected she could pretty easily knock down a door to get to food, but it was a fair point. No reason to force her to go knocking down doors just to get some breakfast. Dinner? Who knew, my circadian rhythm was completely shot at this point, so I was sure she wasn’t a lot better off.
I opened my coat and looked down at Twist. “Want to go wander the house so you can get to your food the minute it arrives?”
“Yes please, Father. I?—”
“Hunger,” we both finished at the same time. “Fair enough. You did some heavy lifting with Fearson tonight. I appreciate you having my back, as always.”
“Always,” she agreed.
After she’d scampered down the hallway toward the stairs, I turned back to Davin as I closed the door all but a crack, so Twistcould find her way back in, again, with no broken doors. Just another reason I could never have sex in my mother’s house.
I half expected a third degree about the whole “The Mórrigan” thing, but he just slung an arm around me and tugged me toward the bed. “ ’M so fecking exhausted I could sleep standing,” he muttered as we arrived at the bed. “Sorry I don’t have the energy left to go get my bag before we sleep.”
“I should apologize to you,” I corrected him. “I have clean clothes to change into in the morning, and you’re the one who doesn’t. If we’d gone to your place first?—”
Even exhausted, his black eyes managed to smolder at me. “If we’d gone to mine first, we never would have left, and we’d have missed all this.” He cocked his head to one side and thought a moment, then looked at me. “They’d have died.”
“Who?”
“Your mam and all the vampires. Carmen would have ended up going to her in desperation if she hadn’t found us. And the senator would never have come calling to us. She’d have tried to handle it herself with those vampires, and there would have been no goddess to keep him from using his little”—he made a face and motioned to the pocket I’d tucked the thing into—“trinket.”
I hated to imagine it, but my friend had never been all that interested in my mother or any other vampire. The dead, she’d called them.
“What’s she even the goddess of?” I asked, and instead of answering, he buried his face in my shoulder and laughed.
Fate, it turned out. Well, I hoped that was the only reason she’d be interested in me, and not because I had any particular future in battle or war, or, everything decent in the universe forbid, death itself. It didn’t make sense that a goddess of leadership had much interest in me, honestly.
I was just a guy, doing what I had to do to get by and make sure the people I loved did too.
When I told Davin all that, he just shook his head at me and tugged me toward him, bending me into being the little spoon. Not that I fought that at all. Everyone in their right mind liked to be little spoon sometimes.
“The Celtic gods weren’t like other cultures’ gods exactly. She wasn’t the high and distant goddess of war with people in wars who worshipped her because it was all she cared about. Not like Ares being a god of war. Her ilk were more like regular people who were more connected to some things than others, and one of the main things they were connected to were the land and the people. Like a soldier isn’t only ever a soldier, but you’ll certainly see them in a war when war comes to their people. It’s not about you being good at battle. It’s about you being her people, and since you’re battling for your existence and protecting your family, she’s there for that.”
That was actually a little reassuring.
