The timing was too perfect, and Alice just knew his announcement would be about the Council. What had those pompous, overpampered vampires done now?
Drew shook his head. “I’m sorry. You’ve been relieved of duty and are commanded to report to the Council this evening, an hour past sunset. It sounds like they want your head.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
While Alice availed herself of the facilities, Bast stayed with Drew in the living room. He’d taken the time to retrieve a comfortable pair of jeans but kept his feet bare. The wings made it impossible to don a shirt.
He slipped his eyes closed, allowing what Drew told him to digest. The summary of what had happened in the night. Worse, the phone call he’d received this morning. All because he’d not been himself.
There were fleeting images in his mind, the echoing screams of men and women bouncing in his ears, but every time he tried to focus on a detail, it eluded his grasp. But he remembered the flying. The exhilaration as wind glided over his skin and swirled around him. He’d forgotten what it felt like...
Wait.
Forgotten? How could he have forgotten something he’d never known? Yet he remembered something else too. Not just a memory he’d had to retrieve, but a sense of purpose. Of being.
“I was a dragon,” he said, the words sounding right. “I flew and...I was a dragon. And you know what else, Drew? More important than all of that, I think I’ve found my mate.”
Drew’s head jerked up, not surprisingly. “Alice...she’s worth it?”
“And more.” He couldn’t even find the right words to express how much she’d come to mean to him. “I’ll ask her later when we’re alone, but I think I want to be with her for the rest of my life. No—I know I do. I’ll go to the Council and ask for permission to turn her.”
It was a scary and wonderful thought. A realization that the person he wanted to spend a few hundred years with was this close to forevermore being his. They would exist as vampires together until time saw fit to cease their lives...another six or seven hundred years from now.
“They may not approve,” Drew said, his voice somber.
“They will.” He had to think positively. Had to. “When I prove that I’m not a threat, they’ll have no reason not to. And if they demand I resign my post...” Adrenaline surged through him at the thought. “If they want me to leave, I will.”
“Goddamn,” Drew whispered. He looked up, blue eyes shining. A grin splitting his face. “I’m happy for you. What a fucking day, huh? You’ve discovered your heritage after years of searching. You’ve become the talk of the vampire community. You’re on your way to getting hitched.”
“And I was a dragon!” Bast shouted.
Alice returned, wearing an oversized T-shirt and shorts. Wet hair dripping. Skin pink from hot water use. She smiled, almost beaming. “You were. And you were beautiful.”
Bast took a moment to steady his mind and keep weak legs from collapsing altogether. Dragon. Of all the creatures he’d researched, hoping to find the one that bore his ancestor, that one had never crossed his thoughts. Not even a flicker of an idea in his imagination. The heat, the smoke, the wings. It all made sense now.
He remembered the words Locke the werewolf had told him, that he was something more than just vampire. That had meant so little before. Now a new world had opened up before him, one his mother might have known would visit upon him one day but still remained silent about. If she would see him, perhaps he’d pay her a visit in the future and try to mend their broken past. The thing that had come between them had been obliterated.
He still wanted to seek out his father and trace the bloodline, to know who he was and how he’d come to breed with a vampire, but just having the knowledge he’d been seeking for so very, very long settled a restlessness inside of Bast. He knew who he was. What he was. He could explain to anyone who wanted to know why he didn’t have all of the vampire traits, but selective ones.
And fucking A, he could shift!
“I have a lot to think about,” Bast said. He wanted to find the right way and time to approach Alice about becoming a vampire. And he would do it right. A big fucking diamond ring. Down on one knee. The whole shebang. “A lot to do. And the Council wants to see me because they think I’m a little different now? They knew that.” A growl rumbled in his throat.