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He got a wicked, knowing grin. “No, I’m not really the party type, but I hope you have a great one. I know your mother’s an amazing cook.”
He blew a kiss at Mom and then he was gone, just gone.
Suddenly, all the other Dragons came, and there were dozens of friends and guardians wandering around going, “What was that? What happened?”
“They wanted, well, you know what they wanted,” he answered. “Now we have many ysidri to deal with. Sebastian? Samuel?”
Harden stood there, staring. There was a cart on wheels, big enough for a ysidri, the chest of treasure. There were all the ysidri; the armored ones had been ill-used and needed help. He was bleeding, and he was—
His poor tunic. That was his final thought before he simply collapsed into Brayden’s arms, the world going dark and blessedly quiet.
Chapter
Eighteen
Brayden was pretty sure he still wasn’t recovered from the battle at their homestead.
Fall harvest festival had passed, and they were coming up on what he would have called Thanksgiving, and he thought Tyr and Cade and Harden had decided to call it Friend’s Feast before. But he was still reeling from late summer.
He felt a little obsessive, in fact, about protecting his mate and their baby and Seren, the winged ysidri, who was growing with leaps and bounds.
On the good side, Harden had trained the first pack of ciucui to guard well and they were cutting their teeth on that, guarding the farther-ranging bwostfal. Brayden worked with them a lot, actually, because sometimes he just needed to get out of the house and not go on patrol, do something useful but not something that would take him far away.
He was talking to Harden about it all the time, though. He wasn’t letting it fester. Harden knew how scared he was of something happening, but no one else had come and Harden’s mom seemed to feel as though no one would.
But now, in the deep of the night, he sat at the kitchen table and stressed.
What if they came back? What if one of the ones that Harden’s mother had killed were found?
He was never going to forget the sight of her plunging a dagger into a that soldier’s heart and killing him, and—
“He’s not dead.”
Brayden blinked up at Harden’s mom. “Pardon me?”
She sat across from him. “I didn’t kill him. As long as he leaves the dagger where it is and doesn’t pull it out, he’ll be fine, no problem.”
He blinked, and his hand went to his chest, horror filling him. Leave the blade in? For the life of a dragon? “What about the others?”
“Well, I don’t know. I didn’t deal with the others. My brothers and sisters did.”
Brayden stared at her. “I’m incredibly stressed.”
She patted his hand. “I can tell. It’s really not good for you.”
“Who are you?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I’m a member of a very, very special family with a very specific family business. But instead of following in the footsteps of my siblings, I fell in love. I mated with a farmer. We raise animals and crops and we raised a child, one single solitary child. I’m sure you realize that Harden is also a very special dragon.”
That was an understatement.
“Oddly enough, it seems in my family it’s either one or thirteen. It’s very rarely a different number.”
Thirteen.
Children?
His heart started pounding faster.
