a vacation, not carte blanche for you to run amok and be obnoxious.”
I made a little pout, which let me tell you, ain’t easy when your face is shaped like a Newfoundland dog’s muzzle. Which mine was by dint of the fact that my most magnificent form to date was that of an extremely handsome, debonair, and utterly fabulous Newfie. “Have I ever run amok and been obnoxious?” I asked my demon lord, a kinda clueless Guardian by the name of Aisling Grey.
She lifted her hand and prepared to tick items off her fingers.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I interrupted before she could get going on what may or may not have been a few unfortunate incidents in my past. “Kiss kiss. Have a nice time on Drake’s yacht. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.”
“It’s not too late to send it to the Akasha,” Drake said as he walked past me, a baby carrier in each hand. “You would be able to enjoy our vacation without worrying about whether the demon was causing trouble.”
“Hello! ‘The demon,’ as you so rudely referred to me, is standin’ right here!” I gave Drake a look, but he missed it entirely. You’d think that a guy who just happened to be a wyvern, leader of a group of dragons who marched around the earth in human form, would be a little more aware of things, but Drake was like that, always missing my pithy comments and witty repartee. “And Aisling wouldn’t send me to the Akasha. That’s the cruelest thing a demon lord can do to her charming, adorable, and entirely innocent demon, one who, it might be pointed out, was recently praised for actions above and beyond the call of duty with regards to the birthing of the spawn.”
Drake muttered something extremely rude in Hungarian under his breath as he took the spawns out to the car.
“One,” Aisling said, doing that finger-ticking-off thing again. She made mean eyes at me as she did it. “You will cease referring to the twins as ‘the spawn.’ They have names; use them. Two, yes, you were of great assistance when it came to their birth, especially since you had to don human form to do so.”
I made a face. “Man, that was totally sucky. You should have seen the size of my package in human form. It lacked, babe. It just lacked.”
“Two and a half—you will not tell me, in any terms whatsoever, about your genitalia, be it in doggy or human form.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sheesh, Ash, loosen up a bit. I didn’t go into actual measurements or set up a website devoted to it.”
“For which the world is truly grateful.”
“Yeah, well, I’m still peeved at May for making me take that form. Human form is just so boring.”
“May was doing the best she could given a bad situation,” Aisling said, pointing to a suitcase sitting near the door when István, one of Drake’s elite guard, came in from where the car was waiting to take Aisling and Drake to a yacht he’d hired for a couple of weeks’ vacation. “Just that one is left, István. Are you and Suzanne set for your trip to New York?”
“Yes, we will leave as soon as Jim is picked up.”
“You make it sound like I have a babysitter,” I grumbled, a bit annoyed. “You know, I’m over a thousand years old—I think I can take care of myself for ten days. Just leave me a credit card and the number of the local pizza place, and I’ll have a Mrs. Peel-athon while you’re gone. And maybe a Morgan Fairchild-athon. Rawr.”
“Now there’s a recipe for disaster.” Aisling’s lips thinned as she continued. “Three: You will obey Anastasia. I have formally given her the right to give you orders, and you will respect that and do as she commands.”
“She just better not let that creepy apprentice of hers around me,” I said, scratching an itchy spot behind my ear. “During that lunch when you dragged me to meet Anastasia, that Margarine Chip chick looked like she wanted to gut me.”
“Buttercup is Anastasia’s apprentice and unused to demons,” she said, her nostrils flaring in that nostril-flaring way she had. “You will be polite and courteous to both of them, do you understand?”
“Yeah, yeah, keep my nose clean, gotcha,” I said, wandering over to my favorite British newspaper, the one with the girls flaunting their bare boobies. “So long as Anastasia takes me to Paris to be