Whenever we arrived?
Huh.
Mother had already called him, then.
I’d half expected to have to meet him closer to where we were headed, but I wasn’t going to complain about not having to take a commercial flight to...Inverness? Glasgow? Somewhere in the north of Scotland, but what I knew about the details of geography were...more than most people, but not that much. I’d been counting on my mother to make those arrangements, which I supposed still said something about my adulthood...or lack thereof.
Still, I’d never been out of the country, so I’d been lucky to remember to pack my passport in my bag, let alone anything more complicated than that.
“Shall I assume that to be agreement, and that you’ll be on your way soon?” Caspian asked, and like Davin, he sounded amused rather than annoyed by my drifting attention.
“Yeah, yes. It’s . . . sorry. Davin is getting a bag right now. We’re going . . . now?”
His amusement did not abate, and he had one of those voices where it was super obvious he found you entertaining. Or maybe he’d just never bothered hiding the fact that he found me funny. I wasn’t exactly the kind of guy people had to hide their true selves around, unless they were, like, evil.
“We’re flying to Scotland right now,” he said, a smile in his voice. Almost actual laughter, in fact. “We’ll spend a night at a hotel I enjoy there, make some plans, and then go.”
That made sense. “You, um, you think we can handle this. Right?”
There was a beat of silence, and I was concerned that maybe he was about to laugh at me and tell me I was ridiculous and it was unlikely I would even help. “I wouldn’t have agreed to go if I thought it would kill us, Flynn. If I were alone, I’d be a bit concerned about how I could handle your grandfather. But I think with Fearson, you’ve already proven you can handle a dragon. Your mother told me how that went.”
“I didn’t...I mean, it was mostly The Mórrigan, I guess.” It felt weird, calling her that, since I’d gone thirty years calling her nothing other than my friend. Well, that and a slew of entertaining insults.
Douchecanoe indeed.
“I will admit, I am not from the part of the world that worshipped your friend,” he said, and he sounded oddly pensive. “But my understanding of her was not that she interfered on behalf of people terribly often, but that she chose a favored champion based on their own abilities.”
“So you’re saying you think she helped me because I can already handle myself?” I was, admittedly, dubious. I hadn’t ever been in a real fistfight in my life. Scary Mary had almost killed me with nothing but a knife and my own incompetence just a few months earlier.
Davin came jogging out of the apartment building with a duffel slung over his shoulder then, and the smile he shot me was right out of a modeling shoot.
Fuck, my boyfriend was pretty.
“Your mother, rather chagrinned, told me that apparently you’ve been speaking to this goddess for decades,” Caspian was saying on the other end of the line, barely capturing my attention when I had such excellent distractions as Davin in my shirt smiling at me.
“I have,” I managed to agree with him. “Thirty years.”
“Then I should think that she knows you as well as anyone in the world, don’t you?” It was a fair point, and I gave him a halfhearted hum of agreement before he continued. “Tell me, Flynn. How do you think most men would fare in a fight against their grandfathers?”
And that was a record scratch moment for my brain. Because he was right. Even if Tadhg was one of the most powerful dragons ever born, he was my grandfather. He’d been ancientlong before I’d been born. But...“Don’t dragons get bigger and more powerful as they get older?”
Davin was close enough to hear that as he approached, and he and Caspian scoffed at the same time.
Surround-sound-scoffing.
Sweet?
“You were the first dragon in generations who managed to become a dragon,” Davin pointed out.
“Really?” Caspian asked, having heard Davin and sounding intrigued. “If that’s true, it more than answers your question. Because let me tell you, what I know of your grandfather? He might have been stronger than your father by virtue of his age, but I have never heard of him transforming. Becoming a dragon physically is the benchmark that all dragons have been failing for over a thousand years. I was impressed enough when your father apparently did it in desperation. If you’ve also managed it? It says something even more important. I’ll be waiting with bated breath to find out precisely what.”
And then he hung up without even saying goodbye.
Not that that mattered, since we were going to join him on his plane. Going to Scotland.
Yikes.
“Before the airport, we need to drop by Teas(e),” I told Davin, sliding my fingers into my pocket. Before he could make a crack about me needing tea for the road, I held up the ring I’d taken from Fearson. “I want to see if Amelia or Arthur can destroy this monstrosity right now.”
