Page 85 of The Flame Game

“Probably,” I complained. “I’m glad you got sleep. You needed it.”

“You needed it even more than I did. What did I have to do to get you on the move?”

I grinned. It had taken him dragging me to the shower to wake me up, and I hadn’t gotten a hit of pixie dust, although I had enjoyed the consequences. “The next time we do that, we have pet sitters, babysitters, and a week.”

“That sounds like a plan. So, where in Maine are we headed?”

I dug out the receipts for a second bed and breakfast Audrey had gone to, one with weird receipts. “Kennebago. There’s a bed and breakfast there.” I hit the internet to look up the place, and I grunted at the results, which implied the place had gone out of business at least three years ago.

“That fills me with foreboding. What sort of town is Kennebago?” Quinn asked.

“Tourist trap as far as I can tell. It has a lake. Currently, there are two resorts there, and they look fairly inclusive. I don’t think there are any actual residents? Well, I guess there are houses here and there for those who run the campgrounds, resorts, and fishing holes. The bed and breakfast isn’t near the lake, and it’s off a remote track. According to the map, we’ll be driving through the underbrush to find it.”

“We’ll park somewhere sane and walk. It’ll be good exercise for us and the pets. And that way, we can at least claim we were hiking if we find more trouble.”

I glanced at him. “Still going with the story you want to show me parts of your old life?”

“Well, that is true. This is a very important part of the story of my life, although I wasn’t precisely present for these chapters. I’m just twisting the truth a little.”

“A little?”

“Okay, a lot.” My husband plugged the lake into the navigation system, revealing we had several hours of driving ahead of us. “That’s not too bad, and the pets don’t mind car rides.”

“For which I’m grateful.”

“Me, too. It’s a good thing we didn’t bring the kids with us, no matter how useful I think they would be helping us with research. Some things they don’t need to see.”

“Yeah. This has been horrific. Even if we had brought them, I would have called angels, devils, and demons until I found someone willing to teleport them to your grandfather once my parents had started trying to light our house on fire.”

“That was really fucking stupid of them.”

“And they came back for a second go at it!”

“That was exceptionally stupid of them,” my husband agreed, and he smiled at me. “You handled that really well. But yes, I would have been sending them to my grandfather after that, too. I am sorry about your roses.”

“They’ll be fine. They’re being cared for, but our next house will have a greenhouse for the special roses, and it’ll be super fireproofed.”

“Not just fireproofed, super fireproofed?”

“Well, I am the best cindercorn, and that means you have to do super fireproofing. And I have two really shitty parents balancing the awesomeness that is my cool parents.”

“Huh. When phrased like that, I guess your parental situation is pretty balanced, isn’t it? You got the worst and the best with them. And you’ll get the rest of your life with the good ones, which I think is fair after having to put up with such a shitty childhood. We will have to discuss sheltering our children too much. They do need to have a base understanding of how the world works.”

“But we can wait until they’re like at least five before exposing them too much, right?”

“We’ll take care to make sure they understand early enough to protect themselves. We don’t want our children so sheltered they’re incapable of telling when someone is up to no good. And honestly, in our line of work? They’ll get exposure early. We’ll just have to make sure we show them the good in people, too. They’ll see the bad more often than I’d like.”

Right. “We are going to use the daycare near work, right?”

“As much as we can, yes. I like that daycare, and it would let us take our children to work with us and maximize how often we can see them. And it would let us do fun things with them after work every day. Once they’re older, we’ll look into schooling options for them, too. We’ll have them make some of those decisions. I attended boarding school, mostly because of my ancestry. Safer.”

“Because you’re part gorgon?”

“Yes.”

“There are boarding schools capable of handling gorgon-incubus doohickeys?”

“Well, they weren’t really aware of my unique genetics, but they were capable of handling children with abnormally high magic ratings. If the kids are okay with it, we may send them. It’s a good way to learn discipline. It’s part of why I’ve done so well. The education met my parents’ standards, but my parents augmented that a lot when I was home. It was pretty rigid, but that’s what I needed at the time. Did I like it? Not really. Every minute of every day is controlled, but I learned how to handle that rigid structuring and monotony really well.”