Behind her, David turned, and his expression shifted Graham’s grip on his weapon. He knew what power barely under control looked like. “Allie.”
He couldn’t see her expression when she turned to face her brother, but he did see her shoulders tighten.
“David, I’m so sorry. I didn’t…” A long step back bumped her up against Graham’s chest-the car door limiting his movement. She reached behind her and wrapped her fingers around his wrist to steady herself.
To his surprise, the tension visibly eased, and David suddenly looked like less of a threat. “You’re Graham.”
“Yeah.” They’d never actually been introduced, given the flaming flying lizards and all.
David stepped back, long legs moving him around the front of the car until the bulk of it was between them. “Later.”
“He means you’ll talk later,” Allie murmured, releasing him.
His wrist throbbed where her fingers had been, the skin feeling hot and tight. “I got that. What’s up with the…” A jerk of his head toward the flickering horn.
“It’s a family thing. But you can thank Jack that they’re not solid. I think he drew on David to fuel the transfigurations he did in the car.” She wasn’t exactly looking at him, but she wasn’t moving away, so Graham decided to count that as a win. “I mean, it’s no wonder his uncles freaked—he’s an instinctive sorcerer with Dragon Lord access to power.”
“Instinctive?”
“Unless your boss…”
“Ex-boss.” Probably. She actually smiled at him then, and he hoped the qualifier hadn’t shown on his face.
“Okay, unless your ex-boss kept trotting back to the UnderRealm to give lessons, he’s untrained.”
“He didn’t.”
“You’re certain.”
“As I can be. So he was right; Jack’s dangerous.” He wasn’t exactly asking, he wasn’t stupid.
Before Allie could respond, the paint can Jack had moved to the workbench to examine exploded.
Graham hit the dirt but lifted his head in time to see David clench a fist and the blast crumple in on itself. The antlers seemed to firm up for a moment.
“Jack’s thirteen,” Allie told him as he stood, brushing off his jeans. “That’s always dangerous.” They locked eyes for a moment, but before Graham could figure out what to say, Allie turned away. “Come on, Jack…” She tugged the boy away from the bench. “… let’s go inside. I bet you’re hungry.”
“Starving!” In the low light of the garage, his eyes glowed.
“Do you like pie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s find out.”
Roland followed Allie and Jack out into the yard, staying close enough that Graham had to swallow the growl rising in his throat. He looked away to find David studying him. Speculatively? Suspiciously? Hard to say.
But this was apparently not later as David turned his head to maneuver his purportedly insubstantial antlers out the door. Graham fell in beside Charlie, moving a little more slowly because of her bare feet.
“So,” she said as they stepped out into the courtyard, “figure out what you want to say to her yet?”
“It’s not that easy.”
“It’s not supposed to be easy, dumbass.”
He nodded at David crossing the courtyard. No way the three scrawny bushes leaned toward him as he passed. “How did he get those things into the car if it was Jack who made them insubstantial.” Kalynchuk had never mentioned the abilities of the Gale men, and Roland had been able to stop him cold, sweater vest and all. David seemed like an entirely different level of problem, especially since Graham had no idea where he and Allie actually stood. Or if they stood together at all.
Charlie rolled her eyes. “Please, that was later. I had to blow him in the parking lot and bring them down a bit, or he’d have been walking back.”
Graham literally felt his jaw drop. She didn’t sound like she was bullshitting, and he had a reporter’s built-in bullshit detector. “Seriously?”
“Why do you think Auntie Catherine drove a convertible?”
“She didn’t have…” He waved a hand above his head.
“The aunties are first circle.” Charlie’s smile curved wickedly and Graham’s pants felt suddenly, uncomfortably tight. “She could get as many of those as she wanted.”
All of a sudden, his memories of conversations with Catherine Gale showed up in a whole new light. “So when she suggested we…?”
“She meant it.”
“That’s…” Graham paused, caught by his reflection in the enormous mirror in the back hall behind the store. “Why are there fourteen of me?”
Charlie shrugged as she pushed past. “Maybe it likes you.”
Jack liked pie.
Allie cut him another slice of her mother’s lemon meringue—minimally and nonspecifically charmed with the Gale version of wear nice underpants in case of accidents—and slid the plate across the table.
“We don’t have anything like this back home,” he moaned, shoveling an enormous forkful into his mouth. “Although,” he added thoughtfully, after he’d swallowed, “I did eat a nest of pixies once that tasted kind of the same, but you know…” Sweeping his tongue over his lower lip, he retrieved a bit of meringue. “… chewier.”
“You ate pixies?” Joe put down his fork.
Jack shrugged as he chewed. “Not often. They’re so small you have to find a nest, or they’re not worth it. I like them, though.”
“So are pixies…?” Michael tapped his head, and Allie didn’t think he meant imaginary.
“Thinking, reasoning, obnoxious little shit disturbers. Yeah.” She pulled out the chair beside the young Dragon Lord and sat down. “Jack?” When he looked up from his rapidly disappearing pie, she took a deep breath. “Here, in this world, we don’t eat anything we can have a conversation with.”
“Not unless both parties are enjoying themselves,” Charlie added.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Jack admitted, frowning.
“Well…”
Roland kicked her under the table. “Let’s not confuse him. Jack, here in this world, we have very distinct ideas of what constitutes food.”
His frown deepened. “I don’t know what constitutes means.”
“It means we don’t eat people,” Allie said quickly, cutting off Roland’s certain to be even more confusing explanation.
A nod down the table at Joe. “He’s a leprechaun.”
“Leprechauns are people.”
“Those small things with wings outside?”
“Those are pigeons, you can eat those. Except not those particular pigeons,” she amended, “because I know them.”
“You knew this pie.”
“Not the same thing.”
“My mother says if you limit your food, you limit your chances. My Uncle Viktor has been trying to eat me my whole life.”
“Why?”
Graham’s voice lifted the hair on the back of Allie’s neck. She’d been treating him exactly like the others, giving him a place at the table, feeding him, ignoring the way he made her skin feel too tight and like there wasn’t enough air in the room.
Jack shrugged thin shoulders. “Because of who my father is. Mother says I frighten them because of what I can do, and that fear makes them stupid, but they really don’t like that as long as I’m alive Mother won’t clutch again and that makes me heir. There’s never been a male heir. Mother says there’s no way I’ll live as long as a pureblood anyway, so they can just fuck off and she’ll clutch again when she’s good and ready. Also, they really, really hate my father because he showed up and messed things up. Although they don’t hate him as much as Mother does, but you don’t eat the only egg in the clutch. Is there more pie?”
The pan on the table was empty of everything but a few crumbs of crust.
Charlie pushed her chair back. “I’ll check. You eat like Michael; he was a skinny little shit at your age, too.”
“I’m bigger in my other form,” Jack protested indignantly.
Flames licked at his edges, but before Allie could get out so much as a clichéd “No!” they disappeared and only his eyes showed any evidence there’d ever been a fire. She glanced over at David. He shook his head. If David hadn’t stopped it, then…