He paused, looking up at me. “What if drinking blood makes me into a regular vampire, and I can’t go out in the sun anymore?”
He looked utterly stricken, more horrified than I’d ever seen him in the months we’d known each other, so I stepped in and wrapped my arms around him. “That isn’t going to happen. But if it did, we’d just start going out only at night. Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out.”
“Father,” Twist said, in her usual tiny kitten voice, and I looked down to see that she’d reverted to her two-pound size.“Father, I want to return to my place over your heart. I do not like it here. It smells of pain, and my leg hurts.”
Aww, her place over my heart. It was fair enough, really.
When she leaned down and licked at her front right paw, I could see it was still burned. Fucking Tadhg.
I glanced back at his body, to reassure myself he was dead and couldn’t hurt my kitten again.
Then I leaned over and scooped her up.
I opened my jacket and...well, my mother was going to be pleased. It was going to need to be replaced, because the whole front had been scorched in the fire Tadhg had spat at us. I frowned at it. “My favorite coat.”
“My favorite bed,” Twist whined piteously, so I turned my attention back to her.
“It’s okay, kiddo,” I promised, opening the coat to show off her usual pocket, intact, then lifting her up so she could climb into it. “You’ll still be okay in there. I’m just afraid I’m going to have to replace the whole thing, because those scorch marks aren’t coming out.”
Davin sighed next to me, taking his own jacket off and shaking it. “I’d offer you mine, but it didn’t even fare as well as yours.” Sure enough, little bits of burned leather sloughed off as he shook it, most of the front of the jacket a complete loss. He couldn’t even wear it back out to go home.
Which was a concern, because summer or not, it was freezing cold this far north, especially in a storm.
A throat cleared nearby, and I looked up to find a wan Sexton looking at me expectantly. “Not to rush you, or seem ungrateful. I really am quite grateful. But is there any chance you could look for the way to unlock these monstrosities?”
It was an excellent point, really.
Davin dumped his jacket’s remnants on the floor and we started looking around the whole prison, trying to find keys. Theplace was every bit as awful as I expected, and frankly, I wasn’t sure how we were going to deal with it. Some of the dragons there had clearly been imprisoned for a century or more. Maybe much more. One guy was just sitting in the back of his cell, hitting his head on the wall periodically, muttering a list of names over and over again.
I wondered how many of them were going to be able to rejoin society.
Or...had any of them been a part of society to begin with?
If my supposition had been right, that the community made the dragon, and dragons had been getting more and more solitary for centuries, then how would they heal?
I couldn’t just move a horde of dragons into the city of Avalon and not expect people to notice.
Could I?
Although...mother did still own Gerald Forsyth’s former properties, including the burned-out husk of his ridiculous home. Maybe if we brought them to California and kept them together, reintroducing them to society slowly. Like a hospital, of sorts.
We could teach them about modern society, and what dragons really needed to be healthy, all at once.
Help them build their own communities, even if only with each other.
Maybe that was what a dragon hoard was supposed to be. A literal horde.
And maybe telling them that would give a bunch of terrible people lots of power.
Hmm.
Something to consider, I supposed.
We made two full circuits of the prison, and I counted the inhabited cells the second time: sixty-three dragons. One empty, one with the remains of the murdered Shella, and one with arepaired hole in the back that I assumed had been the place my father had spent the last thirty years.
Fuck, I needed to do something nice for him.
I wasn’t sure they made a card that covered the whole “so you escaped prison to save my life” thing, and it wasn’t like my mother was leaving out any tiny aspect of care that I could step in and cover. That wasn’t in her personality.
