Damian held onto her as she drifted off to sleep, intoxicated by her presence but utterly unable to sleep himself. His mind wouldn’t stop wandering, and his dragon didn’t help.
She is happy…yes? it asked him.
It seems so, Damian said, stroking one of his hands against her hip. He could feel his dragon trying to parse human emotions and struggling with concepts and words.
What is a boyfriend? Is it a mate?
No. Yes…well…it can be. Maybe. It’s closer than we were, in any case. His dragon made a frustrated sound and settled inside him in the particularly vigilant way it’d begun to when he was around her. Perhaps distant and unobtrusive, but always watching. You really do care about her, don’t you?
His dragon struggled again with the distance between their experiences. I wish to fly by her side.
But she can’t fly, Damian told it, bemused.
If we were in the Realms, I would take her flying, his dragon told him, one hundred percent sincerely.
Damian shook his head. The only person he’d ever given a ride to was his sister. Austin had sent him a message a few hours ago that Ryana was unchanged. It can’t happen. We’re never going back there, remember?
I know, his dragon agreed. Still. You have your dreams; I have mine.
It was one of the few times that Damian wished he could interact with his dragon outside of his body, instead of being a part of it. It would be nice to give the thing a head pat now and then when it wasn’t trying to impose its will on him or claw its way out of his mortal shell.
He arched his back, stretching a little, and looked around at Andi’s small room. It was just like her—tiny, chaotic, with splashes of vibrant colors and emotions. The red rug beneath the bed looked a bit like a bloodstain in the room’s dim light, and he wondered if that was intentional, considering her interest in violent TV. He scanned the book titles on her small bookshelf and didn’t recognize any of the authors—except for her Stephen King—but he knew what the covers promised from their fonts and colors: fantasy, romance, adventure. Even before she met him, she wished for someone like him, and he found that charming.
On her desk was a scattering of paperwork—a framed photo of her as a child with another child and a woman, brother and mother, presumably—and the photo album her brother’d given her this morning, which he’d brought back through the mirror for her. He wondered if she’d ever look at it.
He wondered if she’d mind if he did.
He scooped her to himself tightly, thinking. He wanted to know everything about her. It felt like a moral imperative to discover who she’d spent her whole life being, now that he was so certain of their future. Once she began breathing softly, just this side of a light snore, curiosity got the best of him. He kissed her dark hair again and extricated himself gently so that he could reach the album and return with it.
She stirred in his absence, and he liked that—the moment of her running her hand across the sheet searching for him in her sleep almost meant more to him than her calling him boyfriend. One was a decision she’d made, but her reaching out over the space he’d just been was instinctual.
“Shh,” he whispered, sliding himself back into bed carefully so that she could find him. A smile flitted across her lips, and she relaxed again.
He bent his knee beneath the sheets and propped the album up against it. Now that he was back, Andi turned to curl opposite him, tucking her back and bottom against his side, freeing his hands. He slowly opened the album, listening to it crack arthritically as though no one had opened it in years, and chunks of pages at the front were stuck together, so he started with the ones in the back.
The sepia-toned woman on the tombstone he’d seen in the cemetery was now here in color. Smiling, in a swimsuit, spraying a hose over two kids running back and forth outside—Andi and Danny—so full of life in the photo, he could almost hear their laughter. Other photos included Andi as a child with cake all over her face, she and her brother dressed up for Halloween. Andi was a princess—a fact that now he knew he would never let her live down—while her brother was some sort of Army man. School graduations, portraits taken professionally, Andi playing tennis, her brother standing proudly beside of what Damian assumed was his first legally-obtained car.
He grinned at the album, certain he’d made the right call. He just wondered where Andi’s father was. After he’d left, had their mother snipped all his photos out? He knew what his own angry father looked like. Even after he’d died, their palace had had seemingly infinite painted portraits of the man. He went for the clump of pages up at the front of the album, caught his fingernails on their edge, tugged, and pulled.
The cellophane there protested opening, crinkling softly, all the while Damian monitored Andi for signs of waking up, but when she didn’t, he felt empowered, looking at images that no one had seen for years.
Andi’s mother, staring challengingly into the camera, sometime in the seventies, before Andi and Danny were born. He could tell it was her from her face. It was the same as the one on the tombstone in the cemetery, with the same steady gaze and well-placed birthmark. And he could tell it was the seventies because of the décor of the room around her and the clothing that she wore, but she looked no younger than she’d been when she’d been spraying the hose. Damian risked crinkling open another page, hopping further back, wondering if he’d find Andi’s grandparents, but no, just another portrait of Andi’s mother—same bold gaze, same birthmark location.
But…this photograph’s background was the fifties. The collar of her dress, the apparent diner she was in, and the car he could see parked outside through the window behind her. If it hadn’t actually been taken in the fifties, someone had put a lot of effort into mimicry. He frowned and moved several pages back—into the twenties. Black and white photos, tinted brown by time, all featuring Andi’s mother. She looked like she was on safari. There was a downed rhino behind her, men already working at flaying the hide from the meat. She had a rifle slung casually over her shoulder as she gave the camera the same defiant stare he’d so often seen from Andi.
He flipped back. The same woman, in regalia he couldn’t place with an ornate headdress. She had a fan in one hand, and her other hand rested on an elephant’s skull with ornate claw-pointed jewelry on two fingers. He moved through the rest of the pages quickly.
It was always the same woman.
The exact same woman.
From the hair to the expression to the birthmark. Sometimes dressed in Western clothing, other times in what he assumed was Asian, looking directly at the camera, proud of the things that surrounded her—which were almost always skulls. The photo album in his lap contained a century and a half of photos, all of Andi’s mother.
Is it possible? his dragon asked although they both knew.
Yes. Damian closed the album slowly.
Andi’s mother had been some flavor of immortal, with additional lifetimes purchased by being a Hunter, in all senses of the word.
His own dragon seethed inside him, confused, chasing itself around in an imitation of his own thoughts. How could the woman he was mated to—the woman he loved—be the offspring of someone so…so hideous?
Clearly, Andi didn’t know…did she? No. There was no way his kind and gentle Andi could’ve had any idea. Her upset stomach at the mere thought of it earlier tonight proved it.
But her brother had known. He’d chosen to take part in their family heritage, and somehow, because of his lineage, and willingness to sacrifice, right down to his own skin, he’d become a dragon.
A dragon. Someone like him, somehow…only, on the Hunter’s side.
Damian tensed at the thought, his own dragon preparing for war, and Andi stirred beside him.
Andi felt Damian pull away from her in the dark and leave the bed. She supposed he was allowed to go to the bathroom, as long as he came back. She reached out to feel the space he’d left and then felt him return, shushing her fears as he crawled back in alongside her. She heard the sound of a book’s spine crinkle and had to hide a grin. She’d always low-key dreamed of sleeping next to someone reading in her bed, and here it was, finally happening.
Then she felt him stiffen beside her. She pushed herself up on one arm and wiped the blindfold up. “Damian? What’s wrong?”
She could see his brooding expression from the dim light coming from her bathroom. “I need to show you something,” he said, sounding grave.
Andi scrambled to push herself to sitting, suddenly awake. “What?” She reached over to pull her nightstand light’s chain, and then focused slowly on what he was holding. The photo album Danny had given her—the one she’d asked him not to touch.
“Damian,” she said with a frown, already feeling disappointed.
“I looked,” he told her.
“You mean you did literally the one thing I asked you not to?”
Now, he was frowning, too. “Yes. I apologize. But that doesn’t change facts.”
“What facts, Damian? That my whole family’s a disappointment to me? Or…I guess that I am to them?” She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and sighed.
“No, Andi, you need to see this,” he said, tilting a page of the album her way.
She leaned forward with a sigh and saw her mother looking like an Asian Katharine Hepburn in Ye Olden Times safari gear. “So?” Andi protested as the rest of the photo came into focus for her sleep dulled mind, and she spotted the dead rhino in the background. “Oh, God…why would you show me that?”
“That’s your mother, yes?” Damian pressed.
Andi forced herself to look at the image again. “It looks like her,” she said, unwilling to be certain aloud—even though in her gut, she knew she was.
“This whole album, Andi…it’s of her.”
“Well, it’s a photo album; that’s what they’re for,” Andi said, sinking in on herself quietly.
“No…I mean…look at the difference between this picture and the next.” He flipped back and forth between one old black-and-white portrait and the next.
“They’ve been made to look old.”
“No. It is old. And this one too. And then there’re all these,” he said, quickly going from page to page like he was holding a flipbook, showing pictures of her beloved mother, over decades of time, almost always with skulls.
Andi put her hand to her mouth. “What is it that you want me to say?”
“Nothing, I guess. I just thought you should know.”
“So, you’re just showing them to me to hurt me?” She heard her voice rise and then lowered it for Sammy’s sake. “Why did you look? I told you not to!”
Damian’s brow furrowed. “Me looking doesn’t change facts, Andi.”
“No, but it was the one thing I wanted. The one thing!” Andi whispered harshly and then realized this was her only legitimate chance to push him back. “You’ve been my boyfriend for like, what, an hour and a half, and this is what you do?”
“Andi,” he said, his voice low.
“No. I think you should leave, Damian.” After looking at the photos, she needed answers more than ever, and she wasn’t going to get any with him around. He reached to hold her, and she put an arm out to stop him. “I mean it.”
He visibly held himself back. “What? Why?”
“Because,” she said, sniffing back tears, trying not to cry. The tears were real, even if her reasoning was not. “Shit like this, Damian. It’s why I said we should go slow.”
“But you said earlier—”
“Yes, and I was wrong.” Andi closed the album and set it down beside her, folding in on herself.
“Andi,” Damian said, his voice soft. She could tell it was hurting him not to reach for her, and that hurt her too, goddamnit.
“I mean it, Damian. This is all too fast…I need to be alone for a little bit.”
She watched his jaw clench before he asked her, “How long?”
“I don’t know.” She wasn’t going to meet her uncle until two nights from now. She’d have to stay away from him for at least that long, so she apparently wouldn’t reek of dragon. “Just…until my head clears. Two or three days. So I can make sure I’m my own person again.” She raised her chin to look at him. “When I’m with you, I just get swept up and dragged along in your wake.” That part wasn’t a lie. Being with him felt like she was always on the verge of getting pulled out to sea. “I don’t want you to go away, Damian, and I still want there to be an us, but I need a little space. It’s not your fault, even! It’s just who you are. I’m not used to this,” she said, looking around at her brand-new sheets, and the tea things that they’d set across her chair to go to sleep, and him, taking up most of her bed even though she was sure he didn’t mean to. “I’m not even used to having a man here, much less a dragon.”
His golden eyes kept searching hers as he frowned. “Last night you wanted me to promise that I’d never leave you.”
“Was that really just last night?” she asked, her question genuine. It felt like a lifetime ago now, and she shook her head. Everything was moving too quickly. She was messing things up, and she didn’t know what to do. She was trapped between her need to really, truly know who her family even was and how and why they’d lied to her, her need to somehow glean information from her relationship to her very dangerous uncle to help keep her man safe, and trying not to break the pride of that said man—who thought he loved her after two short weeks. There was no way to win. Especially not when being around Damian made her feel like she might be able to love him, too. Andi made herself even smaller on the bed, like that could help her avoid the truth. “I don’t know what to tell you, Damian. Maybe this is some fucked-up test, and maybe I’m an asshole. I just know that when I’m with you, sometimes I want to be yours so bad it scares me. I’m not used to this, okay? I don’t feel like this. Ever.”
He crowded her. “You don’t have to be scared of it, Andi—”
“Please don’t tell me how to feel. Not right now,” she cut him off. “Can you just trust me for forty-eight hours? That I’m not leaving you or going anywhere…that I just need to breathe?”
Damian rocked back and ran his hands through his hair, swallowing. “Probably.”
“And can you honestly stay away from me for forty-eight hours without following me or sending people after me or peeking at me through any mirrors?”
He snorted. “Yes, princess.”
“Are you going to hate me after forty-eight hours of waiting?”
“I could never. But I won’t deny that the thought of two days without you hurts.”
“It shouldn’t,” she said, knowing that it was a lie because it would hurt her too.
“But it will. Andi,” he began, and then swallowed whatever else he was going to say, shaking his head. “How will I know if you’re all right?”
“It’s really me who should be worried about you instead, I think.” She pulled the sheets up to her neck, hiding in them. “You can text me.”
He groaned. “If I can text you, then what’s the point?”
“The point is to find out if you can follow instructions,” she snapped. “Jesus Christ, Damian, I’m asking you to do one thing. You want to tie me up and own me. I’m just asking for two fucking days for myself. Where you don’t come through my mirror without asking or go through any of my things.”
He inhaled sharply, clearly ready to unleash a retort, and then restrained himself. She watched his expression go blank, falling into the cruel kind of calm she didn’t want to ever get used to, and a small part of her was panicking, thrashing, worried that this was the beginning of the end, and once again, Andi Ngo was fucking everything up. But either their relationship was real, or it wasn’t. If it was, it’d somehow manage to withstand her bullshit, and if it wasn’t, then she might as well fucking know now. So, she steeled herself to give him the same unforgivingly blank look back and said, “Please, go.”
“As you wish,” he said, getting up out of her bed to pull on his clothes. When he was done, he turned back toward her, and his icy façade had slipped. He looked haunted now and hurt, and her heart missed the smile he’d had with her all evening. “Am I allowed to kiss you before I go?”
Andi bit her lips. She knew if she kissed him, her resolve would break, and everything would be over. “I think that would be unsatisfying for us both, Damian,” she said, which made him look even more wounded somehow, beyond what he could hide from her.
“Very well,” he said. He departed for her bathroom and its mirror, and this time she didn’t follow. She waited what felt to her like an awfully long time, and then stripped her bed, shoving his nice new sheets into a laundry bag, before putting everything he’d given her out in the hall and retrieving her spare set of penguin sheets out of her and Sammy’s linen closet.
She couldn’t keep anything that smelled like a dragon in her room, and that included herself. She walked back into her bathroom with still-not-entirely-dry hair for what felt like her fortieth shower of the day.
Damian’s dragon gave him surprisingly little shit as they re-emerged into the green room of his castle on the mirror’s far side.
Aren’t you worried? he asked it as he strode through his house, heading for the stairs to check on Austin and Ryana.
No. She is frightened by the pull.
Damian grunted. It’s pulling me, too, you know.
But you know what it is, his dragon told him. I do not understand why you cannot tell her she is your mate.
Damian inhaled deeply. He’d been about to when she’d told him she was afraid before she’d snapped at him. But if he felt like this, and he was part dragon, how much more disturbing must it be to be human and have these feelings and not know what to do with them, as they rushed in your blood and rang in your ears. Hell, if he hadn’t had his dragon tell him what was going on back when they’d been together in his car, he still might not know. Might even still be afraid of being with her because it was a humbling thing to feel so exposed to someone. To be fully seen and heard. To have someone watch over you with love.
But what if she never admitted her feelings to herself? What if she always kept him at arm’s length, or worse yet, he told her she was his mate, and she still pushed him away?
She will not.
How would you know?
Because it is our destiny to be with one another, his dragon told him. At least for a moment in time.
Damian paused on the stairs he was walking down. How long is that?
His dragon didn’t answer; he felt it disappear inside him entirely.
Damian traversed the rest of his house in a rush because he needed to stay busy, and burst in on his sister Ryana just as he’d left her, nestled in the hospital bed with her red bird guardian Lyka and his own ‘magic-cat’ Grimalkin at her feet, with Austin sprawled out on a couch across the room from the bed. He walked over to Austin, not knowing what to make of the numbers on the monitor screen that Ryana was attached to, and bit back a reproach. Of course, the werewolf had to sleep eventually. At least he was sleeping here.
“I’m awake, you know,” Austin muttered, inhaling deeply and looking up at him. “Mostly. I’ve got all the alarms turned on.” He swung himself upright on the couch. “And I figured between the actual bird and the bird-brain, if she woke up, one of them would let me know.”
Grimalkin muttered something unkind about dogs and fleas in response to the insult but didn’t move.
“How is she?” Damian asked, pulling up a chair. He reached over to pet Grim, setting him back to purring.
Austin put his head briefly in his hands. “I don’t know. Either she’ll get better or she won’t. It’s only been one day, though.”
Damian nodded as everything he’d been through with Andi flowed through him in a rush. It felt like it’d been a year of a day—too long, but also, not nearly long enough.
“How’s your nurse?” Austin asked solicitously after yawning and wiping his face with one hand. “Zach told me about what happened to her earlier tonight. I can’t imagine what that’d be like, finding out that your entire family was filled with liars. I mean, wolf packs have fights, don’t get me wrong, but at least when we’re assholes, we’re forthright.”
“She’s traumatized, yes.” Damian put his hands between his knees and had a strange urge to confess. “Her brother gave her a photo album in the morning. She asked me not to look at it because she was mad at him, but I did anyhow.”
“So, what?”
“Her mother was in the album. Surrounded in multiple photos by piles of skulls.”
Austin’s eyebrows rose. “Whoa.”
“Yeah. It didn’t go over well. Plus, apparently, her mother’s been alive since at least the mid-eighteen-hundreds?”
“Hooboy.” Austin let out a low whistle and gave Damian a long look. “That explains it, then. I don’t have to be a dog to know you’re in the doghouse.”
Damian snorted. “How could you tell?”
“You’re here, for one,” Austin said. “And, I don’t know, you’ve just got that look about you. Don’t worry…usually, you’re too tightly wound for me to read. No, I only recognize this,” he said, waving his hand in Damian’s direction, “because I recognize it from myself.”
“How’s that?” Damian asked as his brow rose on his forehead.
“You’ve got the look that says you were caught making a mistake. It’s the kind of look I give women all the time, usually when they catch me out with someone else. Only yours is all sad and shit. Mine’s more, ‘I swear I didn’t mean to, baby.’” He said the last like he meant it—like he was actually apologizing to a woman—and Damian groaned.
“Grim’s right. You are a dog.”
“Et tu, Brute?” Austin said, clutching his heart like he’d been stabbed. Damian rolled his eyes.
“In any case,” Damian went on, “I don’t have to have looks like that because I’m never in relationships. You can’t fail to meet people’s expectations if you never let them have any.”
Austin eyed him. “Until now.”
“Until now,” Damian agreed slowly, as Austin continued to stare. “What?”
“You tell me,” Austin said.
“Fucking hell, Austin—”
“You really like her. Obviously.” The man was squinting at him, and Damian fought to maintain equilibrium.
“Yes, obviously. I’ve only come home smelling like her on multiple occasions. Congratulations, you’re the werewolf version of Sherlock Holmes.”
Austin moved forward to perch on the edge of his seat. “You’ve never given a shit about anyone romantically before…not even Guinevere.”
“So? Maybe it’s time for me to settle down,” Damian said, and Austin started laughing. “What?” Damian said, getting angrier by the moment.
“Please. You? Settle? As if.” Austin kicked back on the couch and gave a sharp snicker. “But if you’re not settling, and if you’re really settling down,” he said as his jaw fell slowly open. “Holy shit, Damian, she’s human! Does she know?”
Damian’s hands clenched into fists. Werewolves could also find their mates, so it wasn’t so unnatural that Austin could guess. “No, but if you tell her, I will gut you,” Damian swore.
“Tell her what?” Mills asked, padding into the room barefoot with a yawn. She was wearing pajamas almost exactly like the ones he’d given Andi, and Damian had been so intent on Austin not figuring out what Andi was to him that her incoming presence hadn’t even registered. She looked between them, sending the thick braid of her salt-and-pepper hair rolling across her back. “Hmm. Ryana’s still out cold, so if you’re talking about me—”
“We’re not,” Damian said definitively.
“He thinks Andi’s his mate,” Austin blurted out. Damian whipped his head to look at the werewolf, who threw his hands in the air. “I had to tell someone! And Zach’s not up!”
“Goddammit, Austin,” Damian cursed.
“Don’t gut him,” Mills counseled. “I mean, it’s not a big surprise, really.”
“Oh, so you’ve been talking to my dragon too?” Damian said, lowering his head to his hands.
“No, I mean, you’re different around her, is all. How many times do I have to tell you that I can read your aura when you’re feeling human?” She walked across the room to lay a warm hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Damian. You two suit each other…I’m happy for you.”
He looked up at her and found her smiling. “Does everyone know?”
“Not literally, no. But now that you’ve told the mouth of the south over there, chances are they will shortly,” Mills teased, giving Austin a glance.
“I can keep secrets,” he protested.
“I can’t agree with you because I can’t lie,” she said, laughing.
Austin groaned, and Damian reached across his chest to squeeze Mills’s hand. He found the thought of Mills thinking he and Andi were suited for one another somehow more comforting than all his dragon’s talk of destiny. “What are you even doing up?”
“Jamison’s snoring woke me, so I came down to get a snack.”
“Just put a pillow over his head,” Austin snarked.
“Or just wake him,” Damian said, more reasonably.
Mills ignored Austin’s comment. “Why would I wake him up to stop him? It’s adorable. And it lets me know he’s still alive.”
“Do you worry about him dying often?” Damian asked. He hadn’t even thought to add ‘stopping breathing in the middle of the night’ to his list of fears for Andi until now.
“No,” Mills said with a shrug. “If he dies, I’ll bring him back.”
Austin and Damian looked to one another. “Now I kind of want to put a pillow over his head on purpose,” the werewolf said.
“This is, perhaps, why you’re single,” Damian said.
“Eh,” Austin shrugged. “Well, I guess no one wants a zombie Jamison wandering around.”
“No one said anything about zombies,” Mills said primly, sitting down on the far end of Austin’s couch.
“If you could bring people back from the dead, why didn’t you bring back Michael?” Damian asked her in all seriousness.
“Because I’m not entirely sure it can or should be done, or that I would be left whole after doing it. But if something happened to Jamison,” she said, looking off into the distance, thoughtfully, “I would be forced to try.”
Considering the things Damian had seen Mills do before, he said, “Understood. Although, let’s hope it never comes to that.”
“Agreed,” she said, giving him a cordial smile
“What’re we agreeing to?” Jamison asked, coming into the room with a plate full of cheese slices and a pile of crackers. Damian heard Grimalkin make a high-pitched whine.
“That you’re a snorer,” Austin told him.
“That if you die, I’ll be forced to attempt to resurrect you,” Mills explained. “So please, don’t.”
“Are we talking Walking Dead-style or Dawn of the Dead-style? Or 28 Days Later?” Jamison guessed, moving to sit by Mills on the couch, between her and Austin. “Ooooh, would my robot arm be a zombie arm too?”
Austin pointed at Jamison, proving his point with his eyebrows raised, as Mills leaned in to kiss Jamison’s cheek. “None of the above,” she said, before reaching over to grab a piece of cheese.
“Only Mills is allowed to eat my cheese, Damian,” Grimalkin clearly grumbled in his cat-language that only Damian could understand, from his spot on Ryana’s bed.
“Which, oddly, reminds me…there’s something I have to tell you all,” Damian said, leaning forward, ready to tell them about the Heart of the Dragon he’d had Grimalkin hide in his Forgetting Fire’s room earlier.
Austin rocked forward and looked at Jamison, “Damian thinks Andi is his mate.”
“What. The. Fuck. Austin,” Damian hissed.
“I’m sleep deprived!” Austin said chuckling. “Also, sharing good news is fun.”
Jamison appeared caught between at least three different emotions. “Is this a high-five situation? Or a congratulations thing? I want to be supportive but not tacky.”
“Does she know?” Mills asked Damian.
“No.” Damian shrugged. “She’s human.”
“How does that even work?” Jamison asked, setting himself up a bite of cheese on a cracker. Grimalkin hopped up to all fours on the bed and attempted to stare the man down. “Mister Grimsley, did you want some cheese?”
Grimalkin turned to stare at Damian, ears high and fur bristled. “Tell him if he calls me that, there will not be enough of him left for Mills to save,” Grimalkin growled, but then Mills cut in.
“Oh, no, no, Jamison…only I can call him that,” Mills corrected him, as Austin gestured for the plate to be passed.
“Mister Grimsley,” Austin said with a snort, as Mills handed the plate over.
“That goes double for him. I mean it, Damian,” Grimalkin warned.
Damian made a time-out gesture with his hands, gathering their attention. “First things first: no one else except Mills is allowed to touch cheese in this house without prior permission.”
“Why?” Austin asked, halfway through a bite.
“Damian, you can’t tell them!” Grimalkin protested with a yowl.
“Because…reasons,” Damian said, slicing through the air with a hand. “If you want it yourself, you can buy it. You can even buy it with my money, but if I buy it, it’s mine, okay?”
Jamison’s face lit up with a happy smile. “Andi really likes grilled cheeses, eh? No wonder she’s mate material.”
“Secondly,” Damian went on, talking over him, “yes, she’s human, and no, she doesn’t know, so no one here needs to go and tell her. Not that you’d get a chance to anyhow because, as Austin somehow surmised, I am currently in trouble and over here, alone.”
Austin clucked his tongue and rolled his eyes back in his head like he might go back to sleep. “Uh, with all your best friends and fighters, eating night cheese. This is hardly alone, brother.”
Damian looked around the room at them, even at his sleeping sister, who he hoped for his sake did not wake up to the chaos of this. There was no corollary to this comradery in the Realms, no way he could hope to explain it. “Fair enough,” he granted, relaxing enough to reach over to take a piece of cheese for himself. “Thirdly, and I meant to tell everyone this in the conference room earlier before you all decided that I was an asshole—”
“A fact which Andi seemed to agree on,” Mills interjected.
Damian glared at her, and she winced apologetically with a shrug. “Yes, well,” he recovered and continued, “my sister brought an object of power from the Realms through with her.”
Austin perked up again. “What kind?”
Damian inhaled deeply, about to tell them, then heard Max loudly clearing his throat in the hallway.
“Is Grim still in there, Austin? Is there a reason that I can’t get into the room with the Forgetting Fire?” Max said, coming into the room to find all of them present with a look of surprise, his blond eyebrows arched above his goggles. He was wearing black workout gear and looked ready to go outside. “Why is there a party without me?”
“It’s a cheese party. This is the last of the cheese that the men are allowed to have,” Mills announced, handing the cheese plate over to him. He took it, looking highly out of place, and Grimalkin began a snort-purring kind of laughter.
“Where are you off to this late?” Jamison asked.
“Running,” Max said, plucking at his black shorts with his free hand, which made the paleness of his skin even starker. “I go out in the dark, so no one sees the goggles, or if they do, I can say they’re night vision or some nonsense.”
Austin took all of the bear-shifter in. “Christ, do people driving by you think they’ve seen a ghost? Should we be offering small children therapy?”
Damian pinched the bridge of his nose. “Max, the reason you can’t get into the room with the main brazier of Forgetting Fire is because my sister brought the Heart of the Dragon through with her, and I had Grimalkin hide it there.”
His old weapons master instantly began cursing. “You’re kidding, right? No…you wouldn’t…not about that.”
“What’s that?” Jamison asked around a mouthful of crackers.
“Trouble, I’m guessing,” Mills said.
Austin leaned forward, put a hand to his mouth, and whistled loudly enough to make Mills cover her ears.
“What the hell, Austin,” Jamison complained on her behalf.
“Look, if we have an impromptu meeting without Zach he’ll feel left out, so whatever the fuck this is, hang on. Also, cover your ears again,” he said, and then whistled one more time. They all heard a distant slamming door.
“Coming!” Zach shouted from somewhere above.
“Okay? So. Hold off,” Austin said, looking around.
“Bad news is better with cheese at least,” Maximillian grumbled, taking a slice from the plate he held.
Damian closed his eyes and shook his head. This…was insane. But it was good. And without Andi in his life right now, being here with his crew was the next best thing.
Zach thundered into the room shortly thereafter. “Whoa…why’s everyone up? What’d I miss?”
“Dragons and hearts,” Austin said, drawing a heart in the air with his forefingers like a schoolgirl, giving Damian a knowing smirk.