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Fitz

My Baby Girl has balls , and I am here for it.

No, really, she’s brave as fuck and every time she busts our carefully laid plans to lay the smack down in some way, I fall for her all over again.

I know it makes my reined in bro and the careful dragon want to rip their hair, but I don’t give a single, solitary fuck.

Delores Drew is a perfect combo of both brains and fearlessness in dealing with all the asshats in our sphere.

She’s not quite so reckless in private sometimes, but when it counts?

Oh, yeah, she’s a motherfucking queen in the making.

The grumpy gargoyle’s parents are just staring at her now.

I love that, but I can feel how satisfied she is with the bomb she dropped.

It’s emanating from my mate like arousal does when we’re touching her—victory.

When they say nothing for a few more moments, she scoffs and tosses her hair again.

“Look, I know that came off too blunt, but if we don’t have time, then politeness will not cut it.

You made a bad decision, everyone suffered for it, and now we’re fucked.

That’s reality now, and you have to make peace with it.

Otherwise, we can’t move forward with a cohesive strategy. Capice ?”

“Fucking mob movies,” Aubrey mutters and I bark a laugh.

That’s my little Luca Brasi.

Dolly waves her hand at the dragon, moving on without addressing his constant irritation at our references.

“I’m right, and you all know it. They have to catch up quickly, and the rest of our time here needs to be spent learning more about the past, how things worked, and what this bitch is going to do to further their cause.

I’m not passing judgment on her fury, by the way, because I totally get it .

I’m simply wondering how we prevent the shifter assholes from clashing with her and coming out on top to basically install fascism or the magicals from winning and doing the same in revenge. ”

Felix blinks as if it just occurred to him that we absolutely cannot let either side win this thing or everyone is going to suffer. “It’s like a damn game where you hate both teams and wish they could both lose.”

“ Exactly, ” our mate says as she taps her nose. “They’re both in this for the wrong reasons at their core, which is why horrifying shit is happening. The real rebellion has to come from the people who want both sides to co-exist without suffering. So, the question is, how the fuck do we get that?”

Aubrey nods as he pulls off his glasses to clean them. That means he’s in super serious mode, so I refrain from teasing him. It’s better to let the neat freak dragon do his thing when he gets this way; he has his best ideas when he goes full-on brainiac. “That’s why we need the prey as well, yes?”

“Because they have been subjected to the rule of the preds for so long and are relegated to inferior status,” Renard says with a sad expression. “If they assist us as the Captain and the others are doing, we have a much larger number than the predators in charge, oui ?”

The queen finally shakes herself out of her stupor at his words.

“That is correct, my son. Mythicals never agreed with the subjugation of their kind, but we were fewer in number than those waging the war. Magical beings would not have created a servile race, either, but they could not save themselves, much less anyone else. The network of mythicals and the prey are key to preventing the major players in this aggression from succeeding.”

Renard nods, then I see his throat bob before he says, “I spent several hundred years mourning over a magical fucking orchid, Mother. The responsibility I felt for her death ate me alive and probably would have consumed me completely, but for meeting my first mate, my friends, and now our shared mate. While this status is not common knowledge, I am telling you because I need to say it out loud in order to begin the healing process.”

Damn, that was pretty fucking brave, too. Good for him.

“We deserve that anger, my little fox,” the king says softly.

His face is etched with regret, but I don’t feel bad for him in the slightest. That greater good shit always hurts people who are caught in the cross-fire, and no matter what the two sets of parents thought they would achieve with their supernatural Romeo I was always the wrath of the god, so to speak.

My gaze cuts to the others, hoping someone will give me a clue if this is going well or not.

Dolly winks at me, and though I have no idea how much she saw in this vein at her evil mother’s feet, I know she wants me to get that it’s okay.

“Now that we’ve made promises, it’s time to get down to business.

” She cuts her eyes to me again, warning me away from singing and I pout.

“We have colleagues who are discussing things with leaders in the prey world as we speak. There are others monitoring enemies we need to keep our eyes on in various locations. However, in our trip to your land, we kept our ears open for information from the one species I believe no one is paying attention to.”

“The humans,” the king says with a knowing look. “That’s very smart, Delores.”

Baby Girl sighs, rolling her head on her neck until it cracks, then says, “You can call me Dolly. I guess if we’re going to work together, it will suck less if I don’t have to hear that damn name all the time.”

I snicker, understanding her dislike of her ‘government name’. Felix and I are similarly cursed by our father’s bullshit; we much prefer the names we go by now. “Mind, most people have to earn that, and she’s giving it to you for free.”

Yes, I know I shouldn’t be baiting the royals, but I can’t help myself—their poor son has been mourning a chick who was never even harmed, for fuck’s sake!

In our ambush, death would be much preferable to that bullshit emotional torture.

It infuriates me to the core, and I didn’t expect that.

My mate looks over at me, arching a brow before she puts her soft palm over mine.

“You must understand that we’re all doing our best not to be provoking, so we can accomplish our shared goals.

There will be some outbursts occasionally because we love your son and have watched his suffering during our lives with him.

It’s going to be an open wound for a long time. ”

Mael sighs, raking his hands through the raven hair that is much like the poet’s. “It is fair to be angry, and we cannot blame you for protecting him when we did not.”

“I found my way, eventually,” Renard says with a shrug. “But yes, the people we focused on were the humans, and what we discovered was quite interesting.”

The royals hold a hand up, and the king reaches out to touch the bubble carefully. “I believe we have enough time if you make haste. Once it disappears, you will need to go back to speaking as we did before I touched my amulet.”

Nodding, Dolly continues for the gargoyle, “We found that a lot of historic sites across the continent and in the UK have been closed suddenly, ostensibly for repairs. However, they are all linked to Fae or vampires, which Rennie has sensed at our current institution. They have been away from the nest, he says, and we are wondering if they are helping the magicals loot specific items needed for something important. We have no idea what , of course.”

The queen’s eyes widen, and she looks at us with a worried expression.

“You have less time than you think if they are gathering items and artifacts scattered throughout the globe, son. Many things were hidden to prevent anyone from re-opening the Veil in the future. If they locate everything they need, war is not only a foregone conclusion—it’s imminent. ”

“Looks like we’ll be staying here until we figure out what and where everything is,” Aubrey says with a deep sigh. “We’ll have to contact the others with updates and hope they can keep everything under wraps, until we come home at the beginning of the semester.”

“Why is that?” I frown as I look at my family curiously. “What is so damn important here that ties us to Ren’s clutch?”

Dolly grimaces as she answers, “We will need to use their archives to research every single bit of the history of the mythicals and the magicals, including things that have been left out of the libraries in our world, Fitz. If they open the Veil and let out everything that has been stewing in another realm for centuries without preparation—they’ll burn everything to the ground before we stop them. ”

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that when Dolly Drew and fam take a vacation, it’s a precursor to Armageddon, but somehow, I still am.

Happy Summer vacay, bitches.

The End…