I was working my way through the second of two plates...so far...when across from me Sexton jerked back in his chair. He looked confused, and then like...like he was struggling to breathe. Or maybe he had a really bad case of the hiccups.
He looked up to me, panic on his face as his whole body jerked again and again. Just as his eyes met mine, and I could almost feel the terror in him, he...simply blinked out of existence.
We all stared at the empty space where a moment ago, my cousin had been sitting.
Twist even abandoned her food to go over and sniff the spot, then scrunched up her nose. “Magic.”
“I thought teleporting still wasn’t a thing,” Davin whispered.
At that, Twist shook her head. “No. Not like his own magic. The other kind. Like the ring. Bad magic.”
My father reached out and put a hand on the chair Sexton had been sitting in, right next to his own. When he looked up at me, there was comprehension in his eyes. “That. That’s what happened to me, too. Someone zapped me one night in the street and I thought maybe they’d been interrupted before they managed to kidnap me. Then a few days later, I had a...a coughing fit? And suddenly I was in a cage on the other side of the world.”
He fell back in his chair, looking tragic and miserable, staring at the spot where my cousin should still be sitting. “I knew. I knew all along, and I didn’t...we might have been able to stop it, if?—”
“You knew it like you knew the bad guy was your father,” I told him. “You’re lucky to be alive, let alone conscious and thinking clearly. And this happened thirty years ago, and you didn’t understand what had happened. How were you supposed to fix this?” Davin coughed into his hand, and I shot him a glare. “This is not the same as when I do it.”
Wait. That hadn’t come out right. I pressed a hand to the furrow between my eyebrows and sighed. “Fine, we can talk about how I’m all messed up later. For now we have to”—I waved at where my cousin had been sitting a moment ago—“we have to go save Sexton. Now.”
My mother started to open her mouth, but next to me, Davin simply stood up and looked at me. “Do we have time to pick up a bag at my apartment? You’ll have to call Caspian and let him know we’re going now. I’m sure he’s still in town.”
Mother stood, her hands clenching and releasing repeatedly, tears in her eyes. “Flynn?—”
“It’s okay, Mother. We’ll be fine. Caspian knows what he’s doing, and Davin is a badass, and...Sexton is in danger.”
“He’d have left you to die,” she insisted. “You don’t have to?—”
“No.”
I blinked in shock, turning to stare at Davin, because he’d been the one to say it. “No?”
He sighed, like it was the hardest thing in the world to do, then shook his head. “When they met, sure. But not now. And I think you know that, Senator. Besides, even if it were true, it doesn’t matter. Flynn wouldn’t leave him to that even if they hated each other. You raised a good man. The best I’ve ever met. Better than me.” I started to open my mouth to protest that, because Davin was the best man in the world, but he reached out and covered my mouth with his whole hand. “Better than you, even, and you know it. He could never just let this be. So we’ll go. And we’ll handle this. If Caspian says we need more help, we’ll get it. We have friends. Arthur and Amelia would drop everything in a second. Blair. Grady too, not that he could do much to a dragon.”
I chuckled at that, since Grady’s superpowers involved being the best surfer in Avalon and knowing the law in a way that always helped the little guy. The US law. I didn’t even know what country the law would be based on, on an island in the middle of the North Sea. Scotland? Sweden? Or once you got out to sea, was it some kind of old school pirate haven where the law was a gentle suggestion?
I finally tugged Davin’s hand off my mouth, but I didn’t even remember why he’d been trying to keep me from talking as I added, “Besides, he’s just one dragon, right?” I looked to my father, assuming that he had an answer for that.
He considered a moment, then slowly nodded. “One dragon. Since you’ve handled the second, there’s just one. He...he did have a lot of human servants, though. Guards, I think? They patrolled the cells. They didn’t talk to us much, but they talked to each other in front of us. They called him the great dragon, like being an asshole was impressive.” He paused, frowned, and looked at his plate for a moment before glancing up at me. “But they knew he was holding innocent people prisoner, and didn’t care. What kind of people does that make them?”
“Ones we will tear limb from limb,” Twist promised as she came to stand next to me on the table. “Come, Father. We will avenge your family.”
And, well, what could I say to that? It was time to avenge my family against the dragon who had wronged us. Who was still doing so, since he’d taken Sexton.
I was not going to let that stand.
CHAPTER 23
We decided to make the time to pick up a bag for Davin, since it wasn’t as though plane flights could be undertaken at the drop of a hat, and it would be faster to stop and pick up clothes that had already been purchased in the correct sizes than go shopping for more when we got to Scotland.
Not that I thought we were going to be worried about whose clothes had been worn for how many days when we were fighting bad guys in the middle of nowhere.
Who cared if they thought we stunk?
They were assholes.
By the time we’d gotten into town and Davin was dipping into his apartment for his bag, my phone was ringing, and instead of the expected call from my mother saying she’d made all the arrangements, it was Caspian.
Before I so much as had a chance to get a “hello” out, he said, “I’m at the Avalon airport. We’re ready to go whenever you arrive.”
