He was so freaking hot, at every opportunity.
Across from me, the man inside the glass cell crowed. “So confident about thinking they were fools, weren’t you? WellTadhg might have stolen my hoard, but I’d bet it all on them anyway.”
“Only because they’re the first hope you’ve had in a century you old fool,” she shot back, apparently still unconvinced.
Part of me wanted to just go straight to the fire portion of the afternoon and burn these guys down...and a bigger part of me very much didn’t want to burn a bunch of people to death, even if they were shitty bad guys of the sort who got off on pretending to be soldiers because of some deep-seated childish wish that they’d done more impressive things with their lives.
Twist leapt past me in the wrong direction, a man’s arm in her mouth, the limb just holding onto his body by a tiny scrap of flesh, and it took everything in me not to gag.
“Tell her, Father,” she growled, and I deliberately turned to look at her. She was staring at the woman in the cage. “Tell her to remain in her prison even when we free them, or I will eat her as well. We shall see what dragon tastes like.”
“Gross, Twist,” I said, but then dutifully looked up to the woman, even though being a dragon, she’d likely already understood the cat. “She’s gonna kick your ass for setting off the alarm, basically. So...good luck with that, because no one here is gonna fight her on your behalf.”
A flicker of movement on my left grabbed my attention and reminded me, oh yes, fight. One of the camo guys was coming at me.
I ducked his first swing and wondered why he wasn’t just shooting at me, but I took a second to consider and realized that in a prison chock full of glass cells, bullets flying would be a very bad thing. Maybe the glass could keep dragons in, but that didn’t mean a bullet wouldn’t do some major damage to it. Maybe even enough damage to let a dragon escape. Or to ruin the machine, whatever the fuck that was.
Well, if he wasn’t going to shoot at me, that meant I had an advantage.
Sort of.
Sure, I still didn’t really fight, but I could dodge a clumsy blow and try to give back one of my own.
Then, of course, Twist finished with her first—second?—victim, and interrupted the moment, plowing the guy straight down into the stone floor. His head hit the ground with vicious force, and just like that, he was out.
I was turning to look for who was next, when it seemed like all the air went out of the room with a great whoosh, and a second later, the alarm stopped blaring.
I spun to face the direction the guy had said my grandfather usually entered the room from, and a moment later, there he was.
He rounded the corner at the end of the aisle of cells, and I couldn’t have mistaken him for someone else if I’d tried. He was wearing an expensive suit, because apparently that was what dragons did.
Well, except for me and my father while he was sick and wearing only pajamas.
After that, the great and powerful Tadhg...looked just like a slightly older version of my father. A younger version of Fearson? Because of course he looked better than his own terrible son.
I wondered again if using that awful ring had been the reason for Fearson’s advanced aging, or if there had been something else. I might never know for certain, and I supposed, in the end, it didn’t matter.
What mattered right now was the monster of a man coming toward me, a slight smirk on his too-familiar face.
Clearly, he wasn’t worried about facing me.
I hadn’t...well, I hadn’t been unworried, before this moment. I just thought I had an ace in the hole, which, now that I thought about it, was a little less than ideal.
Yeah, I could turn into a dragon.
But right now, I was in a four-foot-wide hallway between glass prison cells, maybe all of which held dragons inside. I couldn’t just change and flatten everyone and everything in the whole room. Even if I could change and not kill myself trying to fit a giant dragon into a tiny little space, that change would end up killing someone else—or maybe many someones.
Suddenly, I was a whole lot less confident about what the hell I was doing. Was it another artifact?
No. I was actually thinking things through for the first time.
Damn me for being so bad at that.
CHAPTER 31
“Welcome to my home,” Tadhg said, lifting his arms and spreading them wide, as though to hug me or present something he thought impressive.
He certainly didn’t want to hug me, but I imagined he did think his monstrous machine to be quite amazing. Me? I still didn’t even know what its purpose was, other than maybe to drain dragons of their energy so that he could use it. Were the cells all connected somehow, instead of just separate pieces that drained their inhabitants?
