Page 184 of Nine-Tenths

"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 automaticreaction, 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 actualfuck."

"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 benot calmright 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…opinionson 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."

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