“Now you know all of it,” Nicholas said, ignoring Dylan’s joke.
“No, I don’t,” Cami countered. “You still haven’t told me what this ability is I’m supposed to have, that’s going to save the rest of dragon-kind.”
Elijah looked at Nicholas. He could sense the doubt in Nicholas, sense the way that his cousin was trying to decide how to handle the delicate, difficult question.
“It’s hard to explain,” Nicholas said.
“We should explain it as much as we can, without her actually having the ability yet,” Alistair offered.
“I agree,” Elijah said.
Nicholas’s irritation was plain enough without his ability to sense it twisting around his relative’s body in coils, tightening and relaxing. “Fine,” Nicholas said, turning his attention onto Cami.
“So?” Cami’s instinctive fear and concern ebbed away, replaced by curiosity.
“Your father’s family, the Keanes,” Nicholas began, speaking slowly. “They’re important in our history.”
“All dragons, the world over, have certain abilities, and they tend to run in families,” Alistair said.
“Yes, that much I had kind of gathered,” Cami said.
“The Keane clan were sort of the source of those abilities,” Nicholas explained. “They had the ability to augment or take away the abilities other dragons are born with.”
“Wait. What?” Cami looked around the table. “Like just suck someone’s abilities right out of them or something?”
“Something like that,” Elijah said with a smile. “The males of that line were good at boosting others’ abilities; the women though”
“So, you’re saying that What does this have to do with a prophecy?”
Elijah looked at Nicholas.
“The Keane clan hasn’t had any girl children in about ten generations,” Nicholas said. “They tried every combination of pairings with other dragonsand that just seemed to dilute the ability they had.”
“And they just all had boys?”
Elijah nodded. “They’d occasionally have a girl, but she would end up dying in childhood,” he said. “Your father had two younger sisters; both of them died as infants.”
Cami looked down at the table, sadness rising up in her to displace her curiosity. “That must have been terrible,” she said quietly.
“Normally, we mate among our own kind,” Nicholas went on. “But with the Keane family no longer having girl children who survived, for ten generations, the secondary abilities of all dragons have been weakening, becoming erratic.”
“So, your father decided to try and find a mate amongst regular humans,” Elijah explained. “The Seer prophesied that if he did, he would have a female child. And that would reinvigorate the magic in all of us.”
“But in order for it to take root, to really stabilize things,” Alistair chimed in, “she would have to have a child with another dragon. One from our clan.”
“Okay,” Cami said, after a few moments’ silence. “So, this isn’t just about getting my dormant dragon genes activated. And it isn’t about me saving dragon-kind by getting together with one of your clan. I have todid you say mate? And have a child.”
“Preferably a girl child, but any child you have would help to stabilize things,” Dylan said.
“And the Seer was pretty sure you would have at least one girl child, since you’ve got the human genetics,” Elijah explained. “But only if you were to mate with someone from our clan.”
“So, what you’re saying is that you kidnapped me in order to activate me and eventually get me to have a baby,” Cami said, looking around the table.
“We hoped that we could convince you, eventually,” Nicholas said. “After you came into your abilities and started to accept what you are.”
Cami tilted her head back and looked up at the ceiling, and Elijah wanted nothing more than to get up and go to her, pull her close to him, and relieve the tension and fear and sadness and anger he could feel rumbling through her mind. He could remove all doubts. But he knew it would be wrong; even if she hadn’t told them directly that she was on alert to any kind of manipulation of her thoughts or feelings, it would be wrong to alter her emotions without her consent.
“Well, it makes sense that you’d all be treating me like sex with me would get you the winning Powerball numbers,” Cami said, sighing, and Elijah couldn’t help chuckling.
“Mating isn’t just sex,” Alistair told her.
“Oh, I’d gathered that there was probably more to it than that,” Cami said wryly. She closed her eyes and sighed once more. “I know I said I wanted to know everything, but this is kind of”
“A lot to take in?” Dylan asked.
“I was going to go with ‘a fucking nightmare,’” Cami said, and Elijah grinned in spite of himself. He could feel her processing the information they’d given her, feel her mood starting to shift. It wasn’t entirely positive, but she wasn’t rejecting the information outright.
“No one is going to pressure you into anything,” Nicholas told her. “If nothing else, you should stay for the week so you can embrace what you were always supposed to be. You should let us awaken your dormant inheritance and learn what it is to be a dragon.” Elijah watched as Cami closed her eyes once more and took a deep breath.
“That part, I’ll agree to,” Cami said. “Anything about mating or having a babythat’s step, like, fifty.”
“Fair,” Nicholas said, and Elijah caught the fleeting amusement from Cami’s mind.
“If nothing else,” she said, opening her eyes and looking around the table, “I need to come into my full abilities, so I have the option of taking away all of your abilities.”
Elijah grinned. “Now, that’s what I call fair,” he said.
CHAPTER TEN
Cami
Cami stared at the selection of clothes that the Overton men had gotten for her the night before, thinking, They want me to have a kid. They think The full scope of what the four cousins had revealed to her over breakfast still didn’t quite make sense to her. In her mind, Cami kept seeing Elijah, standing back from the table, with wings coming out of his back. It could have been a gimmick; but somehow, she didn’t think it was. There had been no setup—not really—and she had to believe that it would be hard for someone to conceal a rig for wings that big. Each wing had been bigger than Elijah!
The image of Elijah with blue-black wings coming out of his back was a hard one to get out of her mind, and the thought that they believed she was capable of such a transformation was even harder to reconcile with everything she thought she’d known about the world. Her mind kept rebelling, insisting that it was some weird cult thing, that she had no evidence objectively that any of what they’d done was honest or true. Alistair could have just been saying that he used some kind of hypnosis on her. Elijah could just be very good at reading body language. Despite the lack of setup, the displays of producing fire and wings could have been entirely planned.
“This isn’t the kind of thing you can call your friend and tell them about,” Cami mused to herself, sighing. She wanted to call Jessica, or Isobel, or any of the women she’d been out with the night she’d met Alistair, but there was no way to communicate to them what was happening without coming across as crazy herself. There was also the issue that in spite of questioning the basic sanity of the men in the house with her, Cami was still curious: what if they were telling the truth? What if there was something in what they were saying? They had—allegedly—known her father by reputation if nothing else. Didn’t she owe it to herself to find out more about what they might know?
Thinking about her father gave Cami one avenue for getting some input on her decisions. The four Overton men had let her leave the table without pursuing her, and she’d gone to her room after muttering something about putting on real clothes; it had been fifteen minutes or more, and nobody had come to harass her, so she thought they were giving her space. She took her phone
off the charger and opened up her contacts list. Normally, her mother was one of the last people she wanted to talk to about her life, but given what she’d heard about the circumstances of her birth, her mother was the only one who could, if she cooperated, give her the details that might confirm the story the Overtons had given her.
Myra Bakersfield picked up on the second ring. “It’s about time I heard from you.”
Cami restrained the urge to sigh at her mother’s idea of a greeting and decided to do what she could to keep the conversation brief.
“Hey, Mom,” Cami said. “I was just wondering if you could answer some questions for me.”
“What kind of questions? I’m supposed to go meet your Aunt Phyllis for coffee,” Myra said.
Cami sat down on the edge of her bed and looked out through the window into the mansion’s side garden. “Why did you leave my father?”
That was jumping in at the deep end, and Cami knew it, but she also knew she was unlikely to get much real material from her mother as it was.
“What? Why do you need to know?”
Cami counted to five in her mind, forcing herself to keep calm. “I’m getting some genetic testing stuff done, and they want a family history,” Cami lied. “And I need to fill out all the details.”
“Why would they need to know why I left your father for genetic testing purposes?”
Cami had hoped her mother would be more distracted—that maybe Myra would have had a drink or two before going to meet with her sister for coffee, or at least that she’d be too involved in whatever she was doing to ask too many questions.
“They don’t,” Cami admitted. “I want to know. You never really told me.”
“He had some ideas for how he wanted to raise you that I disagreed with,” Myra said defensively. “And he washe was involved in things I didn’t want to be a part of.” The second reasoning was close to what her mother had always used as an excuse, so there was no surprise there. The first, though—that was at least somewhat new information.
“What do you mean, he had ideas about raising me that you disagree with? And what kind of things was he involved in that you didn’t want to be a part of?” Cami wasn’t sure her mother would actually cooperate, but it was as close as she was likely to get to real answers from Myra.
“Your father came from a pretty weird background,” Myra said. “Isn’t genetic testing, like, diseases and things?”
“Diseases, drug interactions, stuff like that,” Cami said. “Do you know if he had anything like that going on?”
“He did have acondition,” Myra said. “I was never all that clear on it.”
“Do you know if he has any family living? Maybe I could make some calls?” Cami wanted to get the real story—the full story—on her mother leaving her father, but she knew Myra was unlikely to open up on it. Every time she’d asked when she was younger about the subject, Myra had said something, given her some small token explanation, and then changed the subject.
“I don’t think he has any living relatives,” Myra said. “I’m not even sure if he’s still alive or not, come to think of it.”
“Do you think his condition had anything to do with that?” Cami’s heart beat faster in her chest as she compared what the Overton men had said with what her mother was saying.
“What’s with this sudden interest in the past?” Myra was starting to shut down, Cami knew.
“It’s just with this gene testing thing I’m doing, I have questions,” Cami said. “Did Dad ever, like, hurt you or anything like that? Is that why you left?”
“No,” Myra said. “Your father never hurt me. He just I knew that it wouldn’t work.”
“How did you know?” Cami was tempted, for just a moment, to reveal the real reason for her questions, but she knew that her mother would have an even harder time handling the situation than her friends would.
“Like I said, he was involved in some things that I disagreed strongly with,” Myra said.
“What kind of things?” Cami wished she could make her mother just come right out and say it, but she knew that would never work.
“Just—some things, okay? He was involved in some kind of social club” Myra sounded upset, and Cami considered again whether it was even worth pressing the issue.
“What kind of social club? Are we talking Masons or some kind of Illuminati thing?” Cami asked.
“Something like Masons,” Myra said. “Look, this is all so far in the past. I know he had some kind of condition, it made him act strangely, and I decided that I couldn’t raise a child with him. That’s as much as I can tell you.”
Cami sighed. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “I guess I’ll just see what the testing can tell me about my biological family.”
“There’s one thing,” Myra said after a long pause.
“Yeah?”
“Hethe night I left him, he told me he wanted to set you up with another ranking family in thethe group he belonged to,” Myra said. “I was about five or six months pregnant at the time, and the idea of you being practically engaged to someone before you were even born was just too much for me.”
Cami blinked, surprised that her mother was—for once—giving her real information. “I guess I can’t really blame you for that, since I’m pretty sure I would have objected strongly,” Cami said. She could almost picture her mother, frizzy, dyed-red hair and all, looking worried on the other end of the phone line.
“Just in case, as you’re digging into all this stuff,” Myra said, “I can’t remember the name of the family he wanted to ‘ally’ with, as he called it. Over something? Overdown? They might know something about your father, but I want to tell you, Camille—take whatever they have to say with a grain of salt. Your father was into some weird things, and they probably are too.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Mom,” Cami said. She knew she should try and press for more, since her mother was apparently in a confessional mood, but she also knew that there was every chance that Myra Bakersfield would shut down. One of a handful of things she’s truly good at: shutting down just when you get to the point of a conversation. “I’ll let you get ready to go see Aunt Phyllis.”
“Call me in a few days, baby girl,” her mother said. “I hate how much of a stranger you’ve gotten to be.”
“I’ll give you a call,” Cami promised.
She managed to get her mother off the phone after a few more promises, and then set her phone down as soon as the call disconnected, thinking. While Myra hadn’t exactly confirmed what the Overtons had said, there was enough of an overlap that Cami couldn’t discredit what her own eyes had seen. She fell back onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling. It didn’t seem fair that she was just finding out about her father half a year after his death, that she hadn’t ever heard from him before, that there was a whole other world—apparently including various kinds of magic—that she’d never had an inkling of, and she was expected to save it. She closed her eyes and tried to think of what she could, should, and would do next.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Alistair
Alistair approached Cami’s door quickly, bringing up a hand to knock before he could question his approach. He and his cousins had given her space in the hours since breakfast to process what they’d told her and what Elijah had shown her; but after Cami had skipped lunch, staying in her room, they’d all known something needed to happen. And then, of course, the messenger had arrived. Alistair took a deep breath. He had to get Cami out of the house. He knocked on her door.
“Coming,” he heard her say, and then the sounds of movement from the other side of the door. Alistair fidgeted, waiting for Cami to come to the door, tempted to go ahead and open it to tell her the news; but he knew that it would undo whatever goodwill she still had toward him and his cousins. Alistair took a deep breath and made himself wait. A few minutes later, the door opened to reveal Cami in a borrowed tee shirt and jeans and socks, her hair down, looking up at him in confusion. �
�What’s up?”
“We need to get you out of the house,” Alistair said. Cami raised an eyebrow at that, and Alistair noticed that in spite of the jeans and tee shirt, she hadn’t put on her bra. Wonder if she’s got anything at all underneath, Alistair thought. After all, they’d gotten her basic clothes for the week but drawn the line at borrowed lingerie items.
“Why do we need to get me out of the house?” Cami asked, crossing her arms over her chest and looking at him levelly.
“Well, we were going to get into this later, but there are some politics involved in our kind,” Alistair said. “We were planning on introducing you to the rest of dragon-kind, at least local folks, but on our own terms.”
“Okay, so what’s the issue?”
Alistair pressed his lips together, trying to decide how much to tell her, how much he even had time to tell her. “There are some members of our kind who are going to be here soon,” Alistair said. “A messenger came about twenty minutes ago to notify us, so they should be here within the next twenty-thirty minutes. We don’t want you to meet them yet.”
“Why not?” Cami frowned.
“A few different reasons,” Alistair said. “On the bright side, it means you get out of the house for a bit.”
“I have one condition,” Cami said, after a moment of thinking.
“Anything,” Alistair said. “Anything as long as you’re willing to leave with me pretty much immediately.”
“We’re going to the mall, and we’re getting me bras and underwear,” Cami said. “In fact, you’re taking me on a shopping spree.”
Alistair smiled. “I’m not made of money like Dylan,” Alistair said. “But I think I can cover a shopping spree that’s a couple of hours long.”
Cami turned away, and Alistair watched her grab a hoodie that Elijah had contributed to the pile of clothes they were loaning her for the week. Cami quickly twisted and tucked her hair into a messy bun, and then pulled the hoodie over her head, smoothing it against her body.
House Of Dragons (The Cami Bakersfield Saga Book 1) Page 8
