Chapter 126 126
Annabeth's POV:
The GPS kept telling me to turn left where there was no road, so I gave up on it somewhere around the third "recalculating" and just followed the handwritten directions Marcus had given me. Right at the dead pine, left at the mailbox with no numbers, straight until the road turns to gravel.
The road turned to gravel about two miles before I expected it to, and my car made a sound that suggested it had opinions about that. But I kept going because Marcus had said the cabin was "just past the creek" and I could see something that might be a creek up ahead, or might be a ditch full of rainwater, hard to tell.
I found it eventually: a small cabin set back from the road, surrounded by pine trees that blocked most of the weak December sun. It looked old but not falling apart, the kind of place someone had built decades ago and then abandoned until recently. There was smoke coming from the chimney and a truck parked out front that I didn't recognize, dark green and covered in mud.
I sat in my car for a minute, engine off, hands still on the wheel.
This was weird. All of this was weird. Visiting my father at his cabin like we were normal people with a normal relationship, like he hadn't been a stranger for eighteen years and then suddenly not a stranger in the most violent way possible. Like we hadn't killed people together. Like I hadn't watched him rip apart Order operatives with his bare hands while his eyes burned red.
The bond pulsed warm in my chest. Kaelen, checking in without words. I sent back something that probably translated to "I'm fine, just being dramatic" and got out of the car.
The air was cold and smelled like pine and woodsmoke. My boots crunched on the gravel as I walked up to the front door, which had a knocker shaped like a bear's head that looked like it came from a yard sale in 1987. I knocked anyway.
I heard footsteps inside and then the door opened.
Marcus looked... different. Not physically, he was still the same tall, scarred, intimidating man who'd appeared in my life like a wrecking ball. But something about the way he held himself had changed. His shoulders weren't as tight. His jaw wasn't clenched.
He was wearing a flannel shirt, the kind you buy at hardware stores, red and black plaid that should've looked ridiculous on a legendary dragon who'd killed fourteen people escaping the Order. It didn't look ridiculous. It looked like he was trying, which was somehow worse.
"You found it," he said.
"Your directions sucked."
"They got you here."
"Barely."
He stepped aside to let me in, and I walked into the cabin and looked around. It was small, one main room that served as living room and kitchen, a door in the back that probably led to a bedroom. The furniture was mismatched: a couch that sagged in the middle, a wooden table with four chairs that didn't match each other, a kitchen that looked like it had been updated sometime in the nineties.
There was a fire going in the fireplace, actual logs burning, and the whole place smelled like coffee and woodsmoke.
"It's not much," Marcus said behind me. "But it's quiet."
"It's nice." I meant it, actually. It suited him. Small and isolated and not trying to be anything it wasn't.
"Coffee?"
"Sure."
He went to the kitchen, which was really just the other side of the room, and poured two mugs from a pot that looked like it had been sitting there for hours. The coffee was going to be terrible. I accepted the mug anyway and wrapped my hands around it, feeling the warmth seep into my fingers.
We stood there for a second, him leaning against the counter, me standing in the middle of the room like I didn't know where to put myself. Because I didn't. There was no script for this, no template for "getting to know your absentee dragon father after surviving a traumatic rescue mission together."
"So," I said. "You live here now."
"Looks like it."
"How'd you find it?"
Marcus took a sip of his coffee. "Contact of mine. Dragon, been underground longer than me. Runs a construction company about forty miles south of here. He owed me a favor from about fifteen years back, something I helped him with. He owns this land, wasn't using it."
"You have a lot of contacts, don’t you?"
"I have people I've helped over the years. Dragons, mostly. Some humans who know what we are and don't care." He shrugged. "You live long enough, you accumulate debts. On both sides."
I tried to imagine Marcus helping people. It was easier than it should've been, actually. He was terrifying and violent and had definitely killed more people than I wanted to think about, but he'd also spent eighteen years protecting me from the shadows. Violence in service of something. Maybe that was the only kind he knew.
"He gave you a job too?"
"Construction. Manual labor, mostly. Carrying things, breaking things down." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Turns out being inhumanly strong is useful when you need to move concrete blocks."
"You're working construction." I couldn't keep the disbelief out of my voice. "You. Marcus Thorne. Legendary red dragon... Working construction."
"Someone has to pay rent, and my saving won’t last forever."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. The image of Marcus, red-eyed killer, showing up to a job site with a hard hat and a lunch box was too absurd. He looked at me with this expression I couldn't quite read, and then, and I swear this actually happened: he smiled.
My father smiled.