“What happened to you?” I cried, reaching past my dad to touch Nik’s wounded neck. At least, that was my plan. Nik caught my fingers before I’d made it an inch, squeezing my hand in his gloved, metal one.
“You first,” he said, his angry gray eyes boring into mine. “You slept with me and vanished!”
“You slept with this man?” my father demanded.
“That’s none of your business,” I told him angrily, then I whipped back toward Nik. “Not in front of my dad!”
“Screw your dad!” Nik yelled, making me jerk back in surprise. Nik never yelled.
“Do you know what I’ve been through?” he went on, his voice as thin and jagged as barbed wire. “You trapped me with magic and ran away! I tried to find you, but by the time I got free, you’d vanished. I was still searching when the whole city went nuts, and I looked up into the sky just in time to watch you get eaten by a building while riding a dragon.”
Before this moment, I hadn’t actually thought about how our escape must have looked from the street. Hearing Nik describe it, it sounded pretty terrifying. “I was—”
“I was afraid you were dead!” Nik roared at me, the fear in his voice finally breaking through the rage. “Where the hell have you been? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I couldn’t!” I yelled back, losing my patience. “I wanted to. I wanted to do a lot of things! But I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
I snapped my mouth shut. That was a question I definitely couldn’t answer in a crowded restaurant. Before I could think of the right thing to say that would calm him down enough to get us somewhere I could tell him, though, my dad opened his mouth and made things worse.
“You are demanding knowledge to which you have no right,” Yong said haughtily. “You should be grateful my daughter speaks to gutter trash like you at all.”
Listening to those words was like watching a car crash in slow motion. I legit could not believe he’d just said that. Nik’s reply, though, was totally predictable.
“You want to talk about rights?” he said, eyes narrowing in a glare that made my blood go cold. “You have no right to be anywhere near Opal, you abusive piece of shit.”
My father stepped back in shock. “I have never abused—”
“You hurt her all the time! Do you know how hard she fought to get away from your controlling bullshit? She nearly killed herself trying to get out of the curse you put on her! Everything she’s been through is because of you.”
“I gave up everything for her!” my father roared, making me jump. He didn’t normally lose his temper like that for anyone but me. But apparently Nik could push his buttons, too, because despite barely having enough fire to stay upright, smoke was curling from Yong’s mouth as he bared his teeth at Nik.
“I don’t care what you think you gave,” Nik spat, ignoring the warning. “I know what I saw, which was a dragon throwing a hissy fit because a grown woman didn’t want to be his pretend daughter anymore.”
Yong’s smoke thickened. “She’s not my ‘pretend’ anything! She is mine, period. I am her father, and I treasure her more than an animal like you could comprehend!”
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said, pushing between them. “Show’s over. Let’s take it down a—”
“The only reason you’re not dead right now is because Opal was too kind to leave you to the end you deserved,” Nik said over me. “I don’t know why. Her life would be infinitely better if you weren’t in it.”
“You know nothing about our lives!” Yong yelled. “I am her family! You’re nothing but a scavenger who preyed on her while she was weak. You don’t deserve for her to know your name, you worthless—”
He never got to finish. One moment my dad’s body was taut as a coil, the next it went slack, his eyes rolling back in his head. He crumpled to the floor a second later, leaving the smoke version of my father standing over his unconscious body like a wayward ghost.
“Crap.”
“What the—” Nik jumped back, his gray eyes flying wide in panic. “What the hell just happened?”
I was wondering the same thing. It looked as if my dad had dislocated himself again, probably because he’d gotten way more worked up than his weakened body could handle. Even his smoke ghost was having trouble keeping itself together, his edges swirling like clouds in a high wind.
“Craaaaaap,” I said again, prodding the ambient magic floating through the restaurant. It was the same city magic that was in my apartment, but the saturation out here in the real world wasn’t nearly as thick as I was used to. Even if I could have scraped enough power together, there was no way I’d have been able to manage the complicated conversion to dragon fire under these circumstances. I was too tired and too distracted. Particularly by Nik, who’d grabbed hold of my arm.
“Opal, what is going on?”
“Oh, are you ready to listen to me now?” I asked. Probably more sharply than I should have, but I was so pissed at him. Pissed at both of them for making such a mess out of what should have been a simple conversation. If their fight hadn’t already been the talk of Loveland, it definitely was now. The story would be all over the Underground in half an hour, and then the predators would come running. I had to get us out of here before that happened, but my dad’s limp body was too heavy for me to move on my own, and Nik still hadn’t let go of my arm.
“If you want to help, give me a hand,” I told him, nodding at my father’s
