Page 66 of Nine-Tenths

Chapter Forty-Seven

T raveling to Scotland requires logistics.

We take a few days to secure a B that Patricia and Mum had reconnected through mutual friends in Paisley where they'd both spent their childhoods; how Mum made a pilgrimage home every few years to spend time with her half-sister; how Pattie had some sort of government job that made it nearly impossible for her to get away long enough to return the visit; how Pattie had never married (and how I suspect her of being a big honking lesbian); how we swapped letters, birthday presents, and photos all the time.

So, we don't have anything left to talk about—except the merits of Scottish food and where we want to go for dinner.

Neither Dav nor I have ever had haggis. So both of our heads are bent over my phone as we research restaurants when there's a chuckle—sounds just like Mum, eerie—from the other side of our table, and a: "I know I haven't seen you in decades, but I thought I would've got a wee bit of a warmer welcome than that. "

"Auntie Pattie!" I’m delighted because for all that she had a passing resemblance to Mum, she's dressed less like a pottering older British lady, and more like Onatah.

Big honking lesbian, check.

Besides being blonde and blue-eyed like Mum, and having the same nose, Auntie Pattie doesn't look much like the rest of my family.

Her eyes and mouth are creased with smile lines, and her features are finer.

I might almost say we have the same cheekbones, but hers aren't as sharp and definitely don't come with my stupid ears.

And her haircut is stylish, a trim glossy bob.

"Colin," she says warmly, and sets down her own mug on our table to wrap her arms around me. Gosh, it's a lovely hug. And spending as much time with dragons and hoard humans as I have, I'm starved for them.

"I'm so glad you called, young man," she teases. "Bless yer mum for bullying you into it."

"She didn't!" I protest.

"She did a bit," Dav says.

"And who's this fine ginger-snap?" Auntie Pattie asks, wrapping an arm over my shoulders and squishing me to her side to give herself a better view. She raises her eyebrow, clearly liking what she sees, then looks to me and raises the other one to join it.

"Right, sorry, yes. Dav, this is my Aunt Patricia."

"A pleasure."

"Same, hon."

"Auntie Pattie, this is Dav. He's my…" I hesitate, unsure how to describe our relationship to a mundie. "Well, he's mine."

"A pleasure," Dav says, offering his hand and then jerking it back at the last second like he'd been stung. It was an automatic reaction, I think, because he takes a second to stare at his hand as if he has no idea what just happened.

There's a long moment where Pattie and Dav regard one another, and Dav takes a long, deep inhale through his nose.

"I see." He inclines his head slowly, regally.

"Dav? Babe? What are you—"

My aunt, not even remotely plussed, presses her hand over her heart and offers him a slow, steady curtsy. Which looks, frankly, kind of silly in her shit-kicking boots and ripped jeans.

"Yours, you say?" Auntie Pattie says and tosses me a wink. "More's to say you're his, me lad."

"Wait, wait, wait," I splutter, looking back and forth between them. "Auntie Pattie, what the actual fuck ."

"Language, mo leanbh ," Auntie Pattie chides playfully.

"Is that what you meant?" I ask, scrambling for my phone and bringing up the email she'd sent over the summer in response to the first Instagram photo of me and Dav that went viral. "Runs in the family?"

"Calm down, Mine Own," Dav says. His gentle admonition has the opposite effect on me.

"It's perfectly reasonable for me to be not calm right now! Why didn't Mum tell me!"

"Because I haven't told Helen," Auntie Pattie says. "And you won't either, do you hear?"

"What? Why?"

"It's nothing shameful—" Dav starts, but Auntie Pattie puts up her hand to stall both of us.

The move makes the sleeve of her denim jacket fall back, and in the sallow fluorescents I see what Dav caught, and I missed.

The bangle around her wrist is gold, shiny and bearing a thin plate in the shape of a shield.

It's crisscrossed by a wide red x made of a different metal—copper, maybe?

And the lowest quadrant bears the same little flame Dav's insignia does.

"It's nothing to fluster your mother over.

Our Da, yeah? He had… opinions on dragons.

He was old fashioned in the bad way, you know what I mean?

" Unfortunately, I do. "Thought Georgius of Lydda shouldn't have stopped at one dragon, and said it loud enough he got banged up for it a few times…

" She rubs her hand over her forearm, and I wonder if my grandfather broke or just sprained it.

"And, you know, what you learn in childhood is sometimes hard to unlearn. "

Dav lets out a puffing sigh of regret and pity. But he doesn't say anything, which I think Auntie Pattie appreciates. Anything he said now might come out as condescending, anyway.

Too little, too late.

"Mum’s coming around," I reassure him. "Gem and Stu like you."

Dav grimaces all the same.

"Helen and her Mum left before I was born," Pattie says. "Helen was gone before she really knew what it meant to live so close with the dragons, to see that they really do care. They've got more of a wing in things here than in Canada, you see."

I think about the form letter I got with the electronic signature, congratulating me on my graduation. I wonder if Scottish territories are so small that the dragons actually attend the convocation ceremonies.

"So she was left with all of her dad's prejudices and none of the experiences she would have had when she was older to correct them?" I ask. "That's another way Simcoe has fucked his people over."

Dav makes a noise of agreement.

"So, explain, you're what, in a hoard?" I ask Auntie Pattie.

"Aye, just an employee, unlike you," Auntie Pattie adds warmly.

"How'd that happen?"

"Oh, well, there was a restoration project, and the team lead was impressed with my proposal, you know how it goes.

I'm handy with a drafting table and a protractor.

I was just out of uni and up to my eyeballs in student debt—I wasn't about to say no to a position that came with a free apartment, and enough money to pay off my loans in a year.

" She plays with the bangle around her wrist. "To be honest, I like it.

It's kind of like having a big old family, you know? "

I place my hand over Dav's on the table top. "I know."

I do now, at least.

"May I see?"

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

We both stretch our left arms out, letting the other one turn them this way and that so our tokens catch the best light.

"It's beautiful, mo leanbh ," Auntie Pattie says at length, then turns to Dav. "A Tudor then, are you, sir?"

"Distantly and only just," Dav says, voice croaking. "And your… ah, employer …"

He trails off, licking his lips, eyes darting to me.

"Don't leave us hanging, babe," I say.

Auntie Pattie smiles like a Cheshire cat.

"Raibeart Rìgh," she says gently. "Colin, dear, I belong to His Majesty, Robert the Bruce."

The volume at which I shriek " What?" gets us kicked out of the café, but that's fine with me because it means I have a lot of fresh open air in which to have my freak out.

I take a dozen or so minutes to pace the parking lot, back and forth across the banks of the river—fuming and grappling with the twisting, weird jealousy that washes through me each time Auntie Pattie bursts into peals of laughter at something Dav's said while they wait for me. They’re standing a careful six feet apart, and I love him just that bit more for being so tender with my family, but he’s my dragon.

Finally, I stop in front of them, scuff my boots against the icy paving, shove my frigid fingers into my coat pockets, and grumble, "Okay. Yes. Runs in the family. Happy?"

"Delighted, darling," Dav says, all pleased sass, and I stick out my tongue at him.