The pull on my mana was gone. Apparently, my daughter had gotten everything she needed with that stunt she’d pulled. For the time being, at least.

  I had always thought that a child needed to be born before they started causing trouble, but there we were!

  Granted, I didn’t think our unborn child was actually aware of the world around her and her place in it yet. Whatever had happened was not something I could explain. But I had applied several rounds of thorough diagnostic spells, and I was firmly convinced that our darling troublemaker was developing the way a normal baby should, for a given quality of the word ‘normal.’ I had no idea what was normal for a draconian-fae hybrid, after all. I only knew that Alys wasn’t carrying around a child with a fully developed mind.

  Speaking of my mate, she was decidedly not a poisonous puddle on the ground, which I was grateful for. Her sudden ability to drink my blood with no consequences did baffle me, though. Whether or not she was carrying our child shouldn’t have made a difference, but apparently, it did.

  I tried to press Grandmother on the subject, but she only got a delighted, mischievous twinkle in her eyes and turned all my questions away.

  At any rate, it seemed that Alys now had my level of poison resistance. This was further evidenced when she rubbed her snout, smearing the blood her claws had accidentally drawn from me onto her cheek, and suffered no ill effects.

  That little discovery did prompt me to clean things up in a hurry, however. While Alys was bafflingly fine, Soren, Amara, and even Aesa wouldn’t be if my blood got onto them.

  As we cleared the table and settled into our preferred seating arrangements, mugs of juice or wine in hand, I tried to compose myself. This took a startling long time. I wasn’t sure why I had reacted to sensing my daughter’s presence by bursting into tears, but I was extremely grateful that no one had drawn attention to it.

  Yet, just as things were finally calming down, Grandmother decided to throw things into chaos once again.

  “I will be leaving tomorrow morning,” she announced, with no preamble.

  There was a moment of perfect shocked stillness before Amara burst into speech.

  “I want to stay! We… we can’t just leave! My sweet hatchling needs support, and I want to meet my grandchild, and… and…” She was almost losing her breath, her chest heaving with every inhale.

  “Daughter. Calm yourself, and let me finish.” Aesa sighed, staring at my mother with an expression split between pity and exasperation.

  Amara bit her lower lip almost hard enough to draw blood, but settled down next to a very conflicted-looking Soren.

  “I need to go back to my lair to collect some things, and to inform Lilly that she will be moving here. If she wishes to do so,” Aesa added in mild vexation, at the sound of Alys’ growl. “I will likely be gone for a few days, since packing should not be rushed, but I will return quite quickly. I trust you will all survive without me?”

  The dryness of her tone did nothing to hide the worry hidden in the question. Aesa wasn’t so much joking as she was demanding genuine reassurance.

  “We will be fine, Grandmother,” Alys replied. Her tone so perfectly matched Aesa’s that I had to hide my grin using the rim of my mug.

  “Hrm. Good. I am partially making this trip so I can collect the ingredients and tools I will need to lay proper wards around this place. The fact that we haven’t begun this task yet is only barely justified by the importance of what we have been doing.” She was trying to grumble, but the pride was obvious in her voice as her eyes trailed over my dragoness, lingering on her stomach.

  None of us had been eager to discuss what had happened, beyond the assurance that Alys and our unborn child were well. A bright little smile still fitted over Soren’s expression from time to time. Amara had been buzzing unabashedly with happy eagerness before Aesa almost gave her a heart attack. The Molten Expanse herself was now lounging on her favored couch the way only a smug cat could.

  Alys and I were far more shaken, but that was understandable. It’s not every day you feel your unborn daughter touch your soul with hers! I was going to cherish the memory with a fierce protectiveness until the little troublemaker was born and I could give her a true hug.

  “Would you like me to pack some of the, ah, ingredients we worked on today for you?” I offered. “I can either go make some more now, or you can leave a bit later in the morning.”

  The sooner The Molten Expanse could grow her personal power, however slightly, the better. Even if she couldn’t stay forever and loom over everyone and everything that meant us harm, the threat of her retaliation would still be invaluable to us, to say nothing of the opportunities such a thing could provide her.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  The true powers of the world, the people like Autumn and The Molten Expanse, all knew each other relatively well. Theirs was the sort of power that kept growing, yes, but it grew steadily. Predictably. That, in turn, meant they could usually anticipate each other’s actions. If I could provide Aesa with a sudden advantage…

  Suffice to say, plenty of her enemies would have a rather nasty surprise coming their way.

  Grandmother’s eyes softened as she looked at me, nodding gently. “Yes, that would be appreciated. I do not want to keep you from your bed, so I will leave later than I planned to. I… thank you, my child.”

  “Of course,” I replied with complete sincerity. “We are family.”

  It was amusing, the sort of fierce, protective pride that word filled me with now. I loved my parents. I truly believed I did. But they had also saddled me with misery and entangled the word ‘family’ with a host of negative feelings.

  And now, all those negative feelings were being pushed aside by the way Alys’ family had embraced me.

  It was these thoughts, and the lingering warmth of what I’d experienced when our child’s soul had brushed (or, rather, slammed) against mine, that lulled me to sleep in Alys’ arms that night.

  —

  In the midst of all these events, I had almost forgotten about certain other things I had planned to do the previous day. It was Alys that reminded both Grandmother and me, in the bluntest way possible.

  “If you made me craft all those pots, and then you fail to use them,” she growled, amusement shining through her forced scowl, “I am going to be upset.”

  That was how we ended up devoting the morning to two distinct tasks. I kept an eye on the purification process of particularly potent refined draconic materials, while also trying to produce mutated manchineel saplings with Alys.

  It was a good thing that my dragoness apparently shared my poison immunity now, because the trees frustrated me to no end. Even with her there to supply the soil with all the poison the trees could possibly need, which let me focus fully on coaxing them to life, it was still a slow and painfully exacting process.

  The spirit might not have managed to make the trees infertile, but it had come extremely close.

  The trees I grew from the seeds were frail, finicky, and extremely demanding about soil quality. When I finally managed to force a sapling to take root, it was inside a pot that contained close to ten times the poisonous potency of the original mutated manchineel trees.

  I’d been forced to dip into the poison stores I’d brought from home for some truly vile concoctions to support the faltering toxicity of the tree’s poison veins. Even then, I suspected it started to work only because I was the one who had created the original trees, before the spirit twisted them to its own ends.

  The true success came when Grandmother returned with more flowers. I made one of the blooms take root inside the tree, generously feeding it everything it needed to continue growing. Only then did the mutated manchineel well and truly stabilize, with no danger of suddenly deciding to keel over.

  Still, with that symbiotic relationship in place, and with the first successful example of transplanting a tree (whose roots had immediately attempted to spread out beyond the confines of the pot in search of other trees) for reference, I was able to repeat the process four more times. I was even able to keep monitoring the alchemical refinement process going on in the background. Just before noon, I had five trees ready for Grandmother, along with the ultra-refined draconic materials.

  “Do you believe they will survive if I move them now?” the dragoness rumbled in her full form, eyeing the scrawny saplings.

  “There is no danger of the trees dying at this point,” I told her. “And they’re no longer trying to suck up ridiculous amounts of toxins in order to supplement their own failing biology. As long as you have your kobolds water them with poison occasionally, they’ll be fine. When the trees grow a little, you can even stop doing that. The ones in the forest certainly don’t seem to require it. Do you need some poison as well?”

  “No, I can source large amounts of mundane poison easily enough,” Grandmother replied, her voice colored by a hint of mirth. “Unless my kobolds should use something a little more potent?”

  “No, regular poison should do. It’s just a precaution at this point. Though… I am curious how the flowers will fare in a different location. I cannot offer nearly as much assurance that they will thrive as I can for the trees.”

  Unlike the mutated manchineels, the origin of the flowers had nothing to do with me. There could be any number of traps hidden within them, including a curse that would cause them to wither when taken too far from their place of origin. I didn’t think that was the case, but I had no experience dealing with powerful nature spirits, so I was letting my paranoia out to play.

  Grandmother shook her head. “Worry not. I do not believe there will be any problems. Though I might need to ask for your blood, on occasion."

  I nodded, easily accepting that. Now that we had unlocked the flowers’ full potential, we had no idea if they would continue to perform at their best, or if their potency would fade when they weren’t being watered with all four of the special ‘ingredients’ regularly.

  Aesa could provide dragon fire, her own blood, and poison easily enough. The manchineel ought to provide the latter all on its. But fae blood, particularly of the poisonous variety, was much harder to come by.

  “Hrm. Well, this means I ought to leave now.” Aesa made the saplings disappear into whatever storage item she used, the nature of which was still a mystery to me. “I will see you soon, children.”

  There was reluctance in her eyes as her gaze swept over me, Alys, Soren, Amara, and one very confused and embarrassed Winter fae, whom my new mother had tricked into sticking around ‘for a little while longer’ as soon as she woke up.

  The force of Aesa’s wings buffeted us in shockingly warm winds, which sent tingles racing across my skin when they replaced the bite of Winter far too suddenly. And then her figure was rapidly fading in the sky.

  A sudden sense of loss struck me. I had grown to enjoy The Molten Expanse’s company with shocking speed. Now that she was leaving, however temporarily, I realized that I didn’t want her to go.

  That is going to be an issue later, I groused in the safety of my mind, because I knew that having Grandmother around would be an exception, rather than the rule.

  Yet even with that unhappy thought washing over me, I allowed myself to get drawn into Amara’s chatter. As she regaled us with tales of what she had been doing with Kiri while we busied ourselves in the lab, a smile easily slipped onto my face.

  No matter what the future had in store, I let myself luxuriate in the warmth of being surrounded by people I genuinely loved, and who loved me.

  The warmth of a family.

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