“Pretense?” Devon asks quietly, looking sick to his stomach.
“Indeed,” Remiel mutters, also not looking too healthy.
Don’t they get how wrong this is? Vito is incensed but before he can say anything, Constantine speaks.
“Where is he?” Constantine asks again. “And answer me, how did you get to him?”
Remiel smiles a sinister smile and holds his hand up on which lays a crystal that is glowing a bright white. In a sudden flash of light, the crystal smashes and Remiel closes his hand into a fist. “I have a source,” he says. “One moment, please.”
He Astrals out, leaving them all agape at his sudden disappearance…again.
“He is really starting to piss me off,” Xane says, pointing to where Remiel disappeared. “I am going to kill him when he gets back here.”
“Focus!” Vito shouts, drawing back to the matter at hand. “We need to get on the same page and figure out a way to help Aefre. That is the only thing that matters. All of your petty differences can fucking wait, for Christ’s sake!”
“Agreed,” Devon says and stands up again. “We need to work together, or we are all going to lose her...and I don’t think a single one of us wants that Fraser to get involved...”
“Fine,” Xane grumbles. “I will call a truce, for now. But as soon as this is over, I am going to find a way to kill him. Who’s in?”
Vito ignores this and wanders over to the windows to stare at the Dragons. He hears the three men plotting Remiel’s death, but it doesn’t interest him. All he cares about is getting Aefre home and safe. He hates that he can’t beat Sebastian and just take her from him, but it would be a suicide mission and while he would, without question, die for her, there is no point in dying just so she can remain under his control.
“And while we’re at it,” Xane shouts out suddenly, “you had better not stand in my way when I see Sebastian again.”
Vito peers back over his shoulder as Constantine growls, “Get in line. That boy is mine.”
“Oh, fuck no,” Xane growls back. “He was the one responsible for killing my child. His painful death is mine.”
My child? Vito turns fully around now. Xane’s child? “Your child?” he croaks out.
Xane focuses on him briefly. “Yes, the child that Xerxei lost was mine. Ours. Killed by Sebastian and her traitorous father. They will both face my wrath!”
Vito steps back in shock. “Your child?” he whispers, and it stabs at his heart. Aefre thinks that the child she lost was Xane’s? He had always hoped that she somehow knew it belonged to him. That it was something he could share with her when the time was right, so that they could grieve together, so she could help heal him. But all along she thought it belonged to another. He feels the tears prick his eyes and he turns abruptly away from the men arguing about who is going to kill whom first and how.
They don’t really care about Aefre. All they seem to care about is avenging their own demons. Well, if that is the case, Vito decides that it will be up to him to save her. He scrunches up his eyes and tries to find the dead magick that he used to possess before he was turned so many centuries ago.
If he has learned one thing by returning here and being with Aefre and all of these creatures, it is that it never really dies. It just gets suppressed to the point where it becomes almost extinct. All he needs to do is want it enough. It sounds so simple but when he tries, there is nothing. No spark, no light, nothing.
But then he feels the burn across his palm, and he looks down to see a slight flicker of lightning there. It is small and inconsequential, but it is there, alive and waiting for him to draw strength from it. He promised that he would save Aefre or die trying and he realizes that now is the time to step up.
But the first thing he needs to do is get those Dragons off the lawns. And from where he is standing, there is only one way in which he can attempt to accomplish that.
Vito opens the French doors and steps outside. He flinches from the stream of Dragon fire sent his way, but he holds his hands up in surrender. He walks the five paces to the edge of where the wards are hovering and he stops and looks up at the fifty-foot-tall Black Dragon in front of him, trying to hide the immense fear as She ducks down and gives him a look with Her enormous green eye that suddenly makes him wish he had never been born.
“Delinda isn’t yours,” he says clearly and loudly.
He waits a beat and then opens his mouth to say it again, when the Dragon Empress Shifts and is now standing in front of him as a woman who most definitely is Aefre’s mother, Tiamat, Empress of the Dragon Realms and Underworld.
She gives him a menacing smile. “Repeat that!” She commands him.
“I said, Delinda isn’t yours. She isn’t the true heir. She is the Faerie child,” Vito says. His hands are sweating with sheer terror at the confrontation with Aefre’s mother, but he holds his ground. They need to know so they can leave here, and he can get to the Ring and back to Aefre.
“Lies,” She hisses at him.
Vito shakes his head. “Truth. She belongs to Aelfric, ex-King of the Light Fae.”
Tiamat rakes Her talons down the wards, and they shiver as if about to drop, but to Vito’s great relief they hold against Her power.
“That is impossible,” She snarls at him. “Delinda is mine. She is a Dragon.”