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I’d been holding it in for a while, and, completely spent, lacking all self-control, I unloaded, “I love you. Always have. Never stopped. Wouldn’t know how.”

His breathing became ragged, his tight hold got rougher. He started speaking Druidic in a furious flood into my ear.

I couldn’t understand that fucking language, but I thought I got the gist of it. Still, I made him repeat it in English.

He loved me, he always had.

I was the bane of his existence and his reason for breathing.

Still closing my eyes, smiling, I said, “Ditto.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MAGICAL EYEBALLS

We were almost back at the compound before I said, “My father got away, but I watched him burn a whole village to the ground first.” I took a trembling breath, trying hard not to cry. “How about ol’ grandpa? Did you guys finish him?”

Dom stroked a hand over my hair. It was down now, out of its braids and falling in waves down my back.

He hadn’t looked at me, and I knew he was still struggling for control. The chaos and carnage of the battle combined with me disappearing and coming back suicidal had taken their toll on him.

“We did,” he said laconically.

I didn’t want to ask, was scared to know, but, “Any more casualties on our side?”

“Harvey is dead. He died at the last, taking a bite meant for Hamish. It was an honorable death that he would have been proud of.”

“So James, Jasper and Harvey?” I asked in a weak voice. It was too many.

“It could have gone better, but we learned a lot and we’ll be better prepared in the future. Your father won’t get so lucky next time.”

“We’re down two slayers now.”

“We’ll get more, as many as we need,” he said, a special sort of relentlessness in his voice that only someone truly powerful can state and implement with absolute authority.

And he would, I had no doubt.

Dom had clothes for me, but I refused to dress until I had a shower, which he showed me to as soon as we got back to the compound. I wore a blanket from the armored vehicle to the bathroom, but no one said anything about it.

It had been a hellish day, half of our team was inconsolable about the ones we’d lost. The other half had gone to dispose of the dragon remains properly.

The last thing I wanted to do was search the half burnt down compound for my sister’s magical eyeballs, but I got started on it right away, doing a quick, unsuccessful sweep then settling into a longer, more detailed one.

The druids had already gone through various seeking and detection incantations—Sloan was a veritable encyclopedia of all the druid spells—but none had born fruit. They thought the place was too covered in Ragnar the Spellbinder’s stink, and it was skewing their results.

So looking very carefully with our eyes it was. The druids were doing druid things, planning the trip back, cleanup, blah blah blah.

I noticed that Cam was missing an arm. He seemed downright chipper about it, the most cheerful I’d seen him in years.

I asked about it but no one seemed particularly concerned about it, especially the man himself.

In fact he seemed proud of it.

“He bit it clean off!” I heard him telling Corbin. “And did you see the size of his teeth?”

“Why is he so unbothered by it?” I asked Dom in passing, still hunting for eyeballs.

“Growing back his own limbs is a specialty of his,” he explained.