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Helen caught my eye a few rows away. Her seat was facing me, and she was glaring.

I didn’t glare back, instead ignored her. She’d just lost her brother. She had a right to glare at whoever she wanted. I don’t think I’d spoken one direct word to him, but I felt terrible for her. Sibling bonds could be as powerful as anything, and they’d seemed close.

“We keep going like this, Torst will stay quiet forever,” Caleb remarked.

“Way to look on the bright side,” I told him, tone sardonic. Though the axe was mercifully silent again. All that magical dragon blood, buckets of it, should keep it quiet for a while.

We made it back to Vegas without a hitch.

The group parted ways at the private airport but our work together was far from done. There were several draak still wreaking havoc across North America, and we were a team that now had an effective method to kill even the oldest and most powerful. I still had a score to settle with my father and several slayer weapons with his name all over them.

Corbin left us with some cryptic words about keeping us posted on a lead about a vampire kiss near Phoenix.

I wasn’t sure he understood the assignment, but vampire hunters tended to be fixated on vampires, so no one thought too much of it.

Henri made some noises about returning to France right away, but Corbin dragged him, unresisting, along for the vampire hunt.

Dom sent Sven and Hamish to take the jet to check out a lead in Quebec he’d received while he was sleeping on the plane. The poor man couldn’t even get a cat’s nap worth of rest.

Sven pulled me aside before he departed. He said he needed a private word right as we got back to the casino.

He’d returned in human form from who knows where right as we were loading up and heading from the compound to the airport in Mexico and had barely spoken since.

Sloan heard his request and directed us into a small meeting room and gave us privacy.

I glanced around. The room didn’t even have windows, but I clocked at least three cameras. Damned druids. “Nothing you say in here will be private,” I told him.

Then just listen, he sent the thought.

Oh yeah, telepathy.

Grandfather had a spell he used that caused madness. It also forces you from human to dragon form against your will. Do you understand?

“I think so,” I said, my brain piecing it together slowly. It had been a very long day.

It’s called the breath of darkness. And taken only once it has a temporary effect. Much like taking a drug, it is a temporary high. Taken many times, though, it is permanent. Do you understand?

“Grandfather was what sent them all mad?”

He certainly helped. Him and their own predilections toward destruction and indulgence. You felt it, it is a heady thing. Imagine if you had no qualms about the things you did or saw in that state. You’d go back for more, time and again, as so many of our kind have. Like an addiction it goes from a choice to an inevitability over time and usage.

But you are not the urges you felt back there. You don’t own any part of them now that the breath of darkness has faded from your body. That was his spell, and he is the only one who could cast it. It did irreparable damage to our clan, but he is gone now and we are free of him at last, and of the madness.

Relief was a weak word for what I felt then. The thing I’d most feared my whole long life was banished from this earth. It was a lot to process.

Dom found me sometime later. Sven had left for his next mission.

I was alone, laying face up on the ground, and I wasn’t sure I could make it to our room on my own strength alone.

Dom seemed to pick up on that right away, lifting me easily and cradling me like a child, my head on his warm, firm chest. I moved my head until my ear was over his heart, listening to the beat, and closed my eyes.

I didn’t fall asleep for a long time. My mind was too active, still taking in all of the ramifications. I couldn’t wait to tell Lynn that we weren’t ticking time bombs anymore.

“What did your brother need to tell you in private?” Dom asked me in the elevator. “Was it bad news?”

“No. It was very good. The madness was a spell, and it died with my grandfather.”

He squeezed me closer. “Now we just need to get your sister’s eyes back to her and all will be right in the world.”