Light Dragons 03 - Sparks Fly

“Brom!”
    “Hnn?” came a familiar groggy sound, one I heard every morning when I tried to rouse my child from sleep. “Sullivan?”
    He was warm, and sleepy, and utterly wonderful as I clutched him to me, ignoring the terms of our previous agreement about how many times I was allowed to kiss and hug him on a daily basis. I wrapped my arms around him and held him tight, tears burning my eyes for a few seconds as I thanked every deity I could think of for preserving my son.
    “Sullivan, I can’t breathe,” he wheezed after a minute or so.
    “Sorry,” I said, reluctantly loosening my hold on him. “Are you all right? Gareth hasn’t hurt you, has he?”
    “I’m OK. Geez, Sullivan, you’ve kissed me five times, way over the limit, and Gareth’s watching. He’s going to think I’m a baby or something.”
    I laughed, a shaky laugh to be sure, but laughter filled with relief as I let go of him and sank to my knees next to his bed. “If Gareth knows what’s good for him, he isn’t going to think anything of the sort.”
    “So very touching,” Ruth said with a sneer, looking disdainfully around the room. “My god, you’ve already turned this place into a pigsty! I can’t believe we put up with you two for as long as we did.”
    “It was no bowl of cherries living with you for the past ten years, either,” I said, still holding Brom’s hand.
    “Ten years? Try three hundred,” she scoffed, scowling furiously.
    “Three hundred years ?” I shook my head. “That can’t be right. I know you have some pictures of you and Gareth and me in old-fashioned clothes, but I haven’t been stuck with you for three hundred years.”
    Ruth opened her mouth to answer, but Gareth interrupted with a curt order. “Go get the guards to move the dragon and the knocker to another room. I don’t trust Sullivan’s magic to not screw up the door so they could get out. I’ll watch her until you get the others locked up properly.”
    “She could try something on you,” Ruth said suspiciously.
    Gareth’s lip curled. “If she does, the kid will suffer.”
    I gave Brom’s hand a little squeeze before getting to my feet and moving to stand between him and the man who was biologically responsible for fathering him. I’d never been one to feel hatred for people; that seemed like such an extreme emotion, and one that made no allowances for shades of grey, but the primary emotion I was feeling now was pure, unadulterated hate.
    “Why are you doing this?” I asked, feeling that I should at least make an attempt to understand the despicable depths of his mind.
    “I had to do something to keep you two from bickering. I had centuries of that, and I don’t need any more.”
    “No, not why did you send Ruth on an errand-why did you kidnap Brom?”
    “I told you-we want gold. The gold you owe us.”
    I shook my head. “You’re an Oracle, Gareth. Surely you could make money by practicing your trade. You don’t have to resort to kidnapping to get it. Is it Thala? Did she tell you to do this?”
    He sucked one of his teeth and looked somewhat bored, leaning back against the door with his arms crossed over his chest. “She contacted Ruth, yes. But we would have done this without her. You owe us, Sullivan. For all those centuries of care, you owe us plenty. We just want what’s due us.”
    “I can’t believe ... ” I shook my head again. “Three centuries? That would mean I’d been with you since ... since I was killed.”
    “We found you wandering around in the snow, too stupid to figure out who you were or what happened to you,” he said, picking his ear and studying his finger. “Ruth wanted to let you freeze to death, or be caught by the dragons who were attacking the castle, but I realized right from the start that you were worth a fat reward. You wouldn’t have been brought back by that dragon god otherwise.”
    “You saw the First Dragon resurrect me?” I was stunned by that thought, although it made sense. If Gareth and Ruth were outside of Dauva when it fell, then they would have had the opportunity to see me wandering around in a postresurrection daze.
    “I convinced her it was to our benefit to keep you alive, so we took you with us back to Paris.”
    “What were you doing in Latvia to begin with?” my curiosity prompted me to ask.
    “Did a scrying the month before and saw that there was something valuable to be had there. Since we weren’t exactly welcome in St. Petersburg at the time, we