Page 28 of A Vampire in a Pear Tree
“Ican’t find a delicateway to ask this, so I’m going to come right out with it.”The redheaded Becket gave me an apologetic half smile.Her voice had a tone that was particularly lyrical, making me sigh to myself about my own voice, which a former boyfriend once kindly referred to as smoky.“Are you with Owain?That is, are you OK with sharing a bedroom?If you aren’t, I’m sure we can bed him down on a couch somewhere.”
I wanted to say that I would prefer if he slept elsewhere, but the memory of the hours I’d spent the previous night being hyperaware of Owain on the bottom of Savian’s kids’ bunk beds remained high in my mind.
“I don’t want to put you to any more trouble than we are, so it’s fine if he stays in a room with me,” I answered, well aware that it had taken every morsel of self-control that I possessed to turn down a stark naked Owain offering to pleasure me, and I wasn’t sure I could manage it again.
Not while an oddly overwhelming protective surge swamped me at the knowledge that the dragons didn’t give a damn about him ...and I wasn’t overly certain about the two vampires.
“We have only ourselves to rely on,” I murmured to myself as I walked across frozen ground to a barn.
“Really?”The woman introduced as Ysolde stopped about a dozen paces in front of us and turned with a pointed look directed at me.
“Dragons have very good hearing,” Aisling said as she passed by with a demon in dog form, whose presence no one seemed inclined to explain.“Jim, if you have something helpful to impart, you may speak.”
“Hoo, baby,” the demon said, walking next to me.“Heya, Berry, is it?Name’s Jim.Effrijim, really, but no one calls me that but Desi and Parisi.So, you’re a knocker turned thief taker?How’s that working out?”
“Desi as in Desislav?”I asked, wondering what on earth I was doing talking to a demon.
“Yup.He’s my dad.Parisi used to be Sovereign.She’s my mom, although she doesn’t remember that, because she went into the Beyond to keep from dying after I was born, and peeps left her in there for so long, she lost her memory.”
“You’re Desislav’sson?”I asked, horror crawling down my flesh.I shot a desperate glance toward Owain, at the entrance of the barn.He immediately spun around, his eyes narrowing on the demon.
“Yeah, but it’s cool.I live with Ash and Drake and their spawn, and Desi and Parisi promised they won’t try to off them.Well, unless they don’t give him the blood moon, but I doubt he’s serious about wiping out dragons if we don’t.”Jim pursed its doggy lips before adding, “Then again, they’ve got their hearts set on taking down the Court, and I don’t see how they’re going to do that without the blood moon.Still, you gotta have hope, right?”
Owain’s eyes went almost black as the pupils dilated, this time with pure, unadulterated rage.He snarled something in what sounded to me like Latin, making an odd symbol in the air, and poof!Suddenly the demon dog was gone.
“Jim!”Aisling spun around, her face frozen for a few seconds before she started toward Owain.“What the hell did you do to it?”
The dragons turned at her words, and I didn’t like their expressions at all.I dropped polite pretense and hurried to Owain’s side, bracing myself for trouble.
“I sent it to the Akasha,” he told Aisling, his demeanor and voice calm, but I could feel anger roiling around inside him.“It is the son of Desislav, and will tell him of our plans.I cannot allow that.”
“What you can’t do is banish my demon without my permission,” Aisling said, looking like she wanted to punch Owain, but her dragon was immediately there, one arm around her as he kept her at his side.“No one abuses Jim!No one!”
I thought of pointing out that the Akasha, while a plane of imprisonment, wasn’t actually a place of torture and abuse, but decided that it was better if the dragons realized they couldn’t mess with Owain without repercussion.
“I have not harmed your demon,” Owain said, and would have said more, but at that moment, Aisling thinned her lips at him and said, “Effrijim, I summon thee.”
The demon appeared, its eyes huge as it looked from her to Owain.“Er ...”
Owain, holding Aisling’s gaze, flicked his fingers, and Jim was gone again.
“Oh!”Aisling said in a near shout, her hands dancing in the air as she threw several wards on Owain.
He looked down at his chest where the wards glowed briefly before dissolving.“Binding wards?”he asked, his eyebrows rising.To my astonishment, he plucked one of the wards off his body, causing it to become visible again, and then with a tightening of his jaw, he crushed the ward into nothing.
Aisling’s eyes widened in shock even as the male dragons drew in around her.“What did—you can’t—did you crush my ward into nothing?”
Owain looked at her for a few seconds before saying, “I am a thane.I can crush more than wards.”
Then he did the ultimate in mic drops, and turned on his heel to enter the barn with the vampires.
The dragons, collectively, looked a bit stunned.
“He utterly destroyed my ward,” Aisling said to Drake, obviously hoping for some explanation.“He didn’t break it—he completely obliterated it!No one has ever done that.I didn’t know it was even possible.And how does he have the ability to banish Jim to the Akasha?He’s not a demon lord.”
“Maybe you guys will have a little more respect for Owain,” I told them all, not feeling particularly kindly toward the way they were treating him.“He may not be a demigod dragon, but he’s not a pushover.”
“No,” Yrian said, his gaze on Becket.“He is not.I would suggest keeping the demon away from him, if for no other reason than I believe we will need Owain’s goodwill.Let us have the sporting, and then we will discuss the blood moon again.”
