“Charlee made me drink a bottle of sack mead, last year,” Lucas said. “I don’t think I could ever touch it again.”
“Sack mead is hooch compared to the good stuff. You’ll like it. I personally guarantee it.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Lucas did like mead. Perhaps too much. It slid down the throat with a vaguely fruity taste but had the same bite as a really good brandy did. He was ripped out of his skull but didn’t mind at all.
The little bar around the corner had all the signs of being a Kine bar. There were shields on the wall and the same rough wood on the floors that the hall had on the walls. They served mead by the glass, which was surely the biggest tip off.
Lucas held up his glass, which had mysteriously refilled itself and he hadn’t noticed. “Huccum you look younger every time I see you? That a Kine thing?”
Asher held up his glass, too. His hand was completely steady, unlike Lucas’. “I don’t look younger. I look just the same. You look older, because you are older. Twenty years’ time, you’ll think I’m a smart-ass kid.”
“You speak from experience.”
“Yeah.” He said it heavily.
They drank.
The walls below the shields were the same rough wood as the floors, and everywhere there were posters and flyers, hand-lettered ads and more. The whole bar was a community notice board, but the flyer that kept catching Lucas’ eye was one with a glowing sphere drawn on it and thick black lettering.
Discover your aura! Learn the Herleifr art of Divination!
Asher put his empty glass down with a soft thump, which told Lucas he wasn’t as sober as he appeared. “Now I caught up with you,” Lucas said.
“You’re two drinks behind.”
“Can’t have that.” Lucas looked for his glass and didn’t find it. “Where was I? Yeah, caught you. Now we’re the sh…same age.”
“Okay,” Asher agreed easily.
“Hated you when I was a kid.”
“I know.” Asher was smiling.
“‘Coz you knew everything.”
“I know.”
Lucas rolled his eyes. “Charlee is like you now. She looks like she knows everything.”
Asher tapped the glass in front of Lucas with his own. “Drink.”
Where had the glass come from? Lucas shrugged and picked it up. “Huccum you don’t use a gun?” Where had that question come from? Oh well, it was out now.
“Gun isn’t silent.”
“Shit, no,” Lucas agreed. “SEALs use blades, but they’re supposed to be sneaky. Everyone knows about you, now. Bullets kill Alfar. So, why no gun? You good with the sword?”
“I’m good with the sword.”
“Huccum? That a Kine thing?”
Asher shrugged. “I practice.”
There was a flyer pinned to the wall with staples, except for one corner that kept lifting and drawing Lucas’ gaze. Tarot Readings. Reliable. Unnur Method trained medium. Call 202-555-6773. The little tags at the bottom with the number repeated on them had all been removed except for one.
Then he felt himself being lifted and looked up. He wasn’t aware that he had lowered his head but he had to look up anyway. Asher was hauling him to his feet. “You need a pillow,” the big guy said.
“Can’t go home. Passport’s in Turkey.”
“I’ll get you back to Turkey tomorrow. You’re not going anywhere tonight.”
“Pillow here, then?” Lucas asked, feeling like it was a killer question. Considering how pickled he was, he thought it was a pretty witty comeback. They were crossing the floor toward the door. He wasn’t aware of moving his feet, but apparently he was. Or Asher was carrying him. Either, or. “Where we going?”
“My place.”
“You got a place?” He was amazed, although a corner of his mind was laughing at himself. How did he think Asher had passed as human for so long if he didn’t behave like one? Besides, he wasn’t a vampire. He had to eat, shit, shower and shave just like the rest of the grunts. Lucas hadn’t spotted a take-out counter or a mess anywhere in the hoity-toity halls Asher had pulled him through.
The entire thought was complex enough to make his head hurt and he groaned. That was pretty much the last coherent thought he had that night.
* * * * *
Charlee begged a bowl of stew from the kitchen staff and sat at the counter to eat while they worked. She knew most of them well, and the chatter was free and easy. Andrea, the Amica running the big gas range, mulled a large glass of mead in a pot off to one side of the meal she was preparing, dropping in spices a bit at a time until the kitchen smelled heavenly. Then she poured the hot drink into a self-warming cup and gave it to Charlee. “Drink that before bed and you’ll sleep through just about anything. You look exhausted, honey.”
Charlee thanked her for the wine, then wove her way back through the lines of wounded to the rotunda, then up to the private quarters on the second floor, to her room. It was quiet and still, there, and she changed into yoga pants and a T-shirt, and settled in front of her laptop. It was four in the afternoon in New York. It was possible she would catch Darwin at his desk.
She opened up a chat window and shook her head at the advertisement at the top. Develop your Kine magic skills. Real, learnable. Courses start at $99. Registered Instructor. Click here for more.
She put the cursor inside the chat window and typed.
CHARLEE: knock, knock!
Then she sipped her mulled wine and winced at the heat.
DARWIN: Hey! You stopped working for thirty seconds! I’m impressed. :)
CHARLEE: ha ha.
Then she hesitated. Was that why she had wanted to talk to him? To get it off her chest? It had been sitting there, a hard mass, ever since Lucas had left. She pecked out the message quickly and hit send.
CHARLEE: i saw asher 2day
Darwin’s status changed briefly to “writing” then shifted back to “reading”. It sat there for a long while.
Yeah, I didn’t know what to make of it either, Charlee thought.
Then his response popped up.
DARWIN: you okay?
Charlee sighed.
CHARLEE: dont know
Her cellphone buzzed, and she sighed again and picked up the apron dress she had been wearing and dug it out of the pocket. It took so long to get at the phone through all the folds and material, she didn’t wait to check the caller ID. She just answered it so it wouldn’t go to voicemail.
“I figured you could stand a phone call. You can’t type worth shit,” Darwin said softly. “So the big guy showed up.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen him,” she reminded Darwin. “He passes through here a lot and there’s council meetings and strategy meetings and he’s expected to turn up at all of them, but today….” Today he sought me out specifically. She remembered something. “Lucas was with him, Darwin. He probably took Lucas back to New York and they were going to go drinking, so it’s remotely possible you’ll have Lucas leaning on your doorbell in a few hours, too drunk to get the key in the latch. He has zero tolerance for mead.”
“You’ve had more practice than him,” Darwin said and she could hear that he was smiling. “I consider myself warned. Is that why Asher came to see you? Because Lucas was with him?”
“That’s what he said.”
“That’s why you’re suddenly chatty, then.”
“Why?” She was genuinely curious.
“Because he didn’t come looking for you himself. He only came to bring Lucas to you.”
Charlee sighed. “I sent him away. He’s abiding by that. The man has too much honor.”
Darwin was silent.
“What?” she demanded, almost able to hear the wrinkle of his nose. “Too much information, Darwin?”
“Sometimes I’d like to crack your heads together. Both of you. Then sit you down and do the Dutch uncle thing. You’re being a girl, Charlee.”
“I am?” She didn’t like that much.
“You love him because he’s being honorable and doing what you ask, but what you really want is for him to ignore everything you said and come get you anyway. Even though the High Council would flip their lid, even though Eira would skin him alive, even though his brother the earl has first dibs on you, and the whole Kine social structure says he can’t have you. But you want him to ignore all that and turn his back on the society that you pushed him back into.”
“He had to go, Darwin. The Alfar invaded.”
“Agreed,” Darwin said gently. “And you know all that, too.” He paused. “You sound tired, kiddo.”
She swallowed, abruptly close to tears. “Maybe that’s it.”
“Why don’t you sleep on it?” Darwin said reasonably. “Drink some warm milk and sleep in, if they’ll let you. It’s gotta be close to one in the morning there.”
“About that,” Charlee agreed. “I have the warm milk already.” She glanced at the mug of mead, where steam still rose lazily from the lid.
“Then go and get into bed. Go on. I’ll wait.”
She smiled and crossed over to the bed, shucking off her clothes as she went. She slid beneath the thick feather quilt, and put the mug on the bedside chest and the phone to her ear once more. “I’m back. Tell me about your day, Darwin. Did your hip behave itself?”
“It’s always better in summer. It’s been a good day. Want to hear some trivia?”
“Sure.” She realized she was smiling. Darwin hadn’t given up on his favorite research project even when the Kine had become just another alien species here on Earth. If anything, now that he could be open about his area of interest, his obsession with the Kine and their ways had increased. He loved imparting anything unusual he uncovered.
“They just took back Ganxiao the other day,” Darwin said.
“I know. I helped treat the wounded. But that’s not what I’d call trivia.”
“No, but what they found there is, kind of. The Alfar had control of that hall for nearly a year. It was the first one they took, I recall. After the hall was retaken, half the Red Army whipped out their phones and took photos of everything they saw. I guess it was their first look at the inside of a Kine hall. They don’t have one in the populated areas of China.”
“Too difficult to blend in without epicanthic folds,” Charlee pointed out. “Especially in medieval times. China was isolationist for a very long time. Ganxiao is in the mountains, away from everyone.” She sipped, and suddenly yawned hard.
“Exactly. Have you ever considered that the mountains and the isolation was why the Alfar hit there first?”
She blinked. “An Einherjar mentioned that, when the war first started. I can’t remember who. Something about the thin air and the altitude.”
“Right. Look at that great big tower over London. The air at the top of that thing would be pretty thin, just like a mountain top.”
“That’s the trivia?” she asked.
“I guess none of it is really trivia. But that’s not why I’m telling you this. The dudes who took the photos dumped them all on the Internet. I’ve spent a day or so finding them all and going through them. Took me a while to find them because it’s all in Chinese, but once I figured out Ganxiao in Chinese script it was like hitting pay dirt. Hundreds of them.”
“You clever little researcher, you.” She closed the lid on the cup and put it on the chest. Darwin would eventually get to the point. He always did and besides, the detours were usually worth the wait.
“The Ganxiao hall is out in the open. Right there on the side of the mountain,” Darwin said. “It looks like an ancient monastery.”
“That’s probably deliberate,” Charlee pointed out. She snuggled down into the bed, pulling the covers over her, and switched off the light. Her phone glowed blue, lighting the cave she had made with the covers.
“I’m damned sure it was deliberate, but that explains why the Alfar found it. There was something else in the photos.”
He had arrived at his point. Charlee smiled to herself. “What?” she asked.
“There were trees all over the mountainside, way up about two hundred feet above the natural treeline. They’re trees I’ve never seen before.”
Charlee considered it. “Alfar trees?” she wondered aloud.
“Alfheim trees,” Darwin agreed. “It’s a good bet. There are pockets of the same trees lower down, among the sparse stuff that grows naturally there, which is to say, not much. The Alfheim trees are twice as high, twice as thick, and taking over the land. Plus there’s something else.”
She waited.
“There are caves and tunnels and whole rooms, dug out of the side of the mountains.”
“That could have been there before,” Charlee pointed out. “The Kine built Ganxiao before Genghis Khan was terrorizing central Asia. They could have expanded the holding any time after that.”
“The Kine build,” Darwin said. “They don’t excavate.”
Charlee thought of where she was lying. The Second Hall had been scooped out of the inside of a mountain. But she couldn’t say that. The exact location of the Second Hall wasn’t something that was generally discussed. “They don’t always build,” she replied. “They’ll take advantage of local conditions and local setups.” She hesitated. “But you don’t think that’s what happened at Ganxiao.”
“I think it’s one of the Alfar races,” he said. “One of them planted a forest for themselves. One of the others dug out a home inside the mountain.”
“Why do that?” she asked. “They’re quite capable of building what they want. Look at the tower.”
“A tower that lifts them up where the air is thin and cool. I think they were terraforming.”
Although terraforming was something that only humans could do to an alien landscape, she grasped his meaning right away. “Turning Ganxiao into another Alfheim?”
“Exactly.”
She considered that for a moment. “You think that’s trivial, Darwin?” she asked, finally.
“You don’t think the Kine that were there saw all that for themselves and knew exactly what the Alfar were doing, straight off the bat?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think I want to take that for granted. Would you send me the links for the photos?”
“Sure.”
She yawned again.
“I heard that,” Darwin said. “Turn off the phone and snuggle your pillow. Time for your beauty sleep.”
She would have argued with him, except that she could feel sleep sliding over her, stealing her thoughts. “Night,” she said, or thought she said.
Only a few seconds of blissful peace passed, then someone started hammering on the old, thick oak door, making it tremble against the frame. Charlee struggled awake and sat up, staring at the door blearily. She glanced at her phone, which sat next to her on the mattress. She hadn’t put it aside before sleep had taken her.
Then she picked it up and looked at the screen saver more carefully. It was eleven in the morning. She had slept the rest of the night and well into the next day, the sort of sleep that passes in a heartbeat, solid and undisturbed by dreams.
The door shuddered again. Well, it didn’t shudder. It was a normal knock, but because of the thickness of the door, most people had to bang heavily on it to be heard.
“Coming!” Charlee cried. She climbed out of bed and pulled her dressing gown off the hook on the back of the door and threw it on. She held it closed around her and cracked open the door an inch or two.
O’Malley, an Einherjar who looked barely twenty years old and whose hair was more carroty than her own, peered at her through the crack. “Sorry to wake you, Charlee, but he’s insisting on talking to you.”
“He?”
O’Malley stepped aside and jerked his head toward the other side of the corridor.
Asher leaned against the wall, his arms crossed, his expression grim.
Her heart squeezed, stealing her breath. She gripped the edge of the door. “It’s okay, Eugene
,” she told O’Malley. “He’s pretty harmless.”
“Not with a sword in his hand.”
“It’s in my belt and it’ll stay there,” Asher growled. “Let me in, Charlee. Please.”
She nodded to O’Malley, who stepped away from the door reluctantly. “Call if you need anything,” he said. Like most of the Einherjar, he was very protective of the Amica, and Charlee’s informal alliance with Roar was well known. Even though nothing had come of it, no Einherjar would pre-empt an earl’s choice. She was forever marked as unavailable, so Asher’s demand to speak to her made O’Malley uneasy.
“I’ll be fine,” Charlee assured him.
He moved away from the door, clumping down the corridor to where the stairs to the lower levels began, where he leaned conspicuously against the wall there. He was going to stay close by, just in case.
Charlee pulled the door open. “You make friends wherever you go, don’t you?”
“The Alfar just love me,” Asher agreed. He stepped inside and looked around. “This place is hard to find.”
He looked so good! Now that laun had been lifted and he was free to be who he really was, Asher had peeled away the human layers and was more Einherjar than ever before. He wore leather armor and his weapons openly, and from the rumors and gossip Charlee had heard, he was fighting in the front lines nearly every day.
“He’s one of the strongest stallari out there,” Eira had said in passing. “I would not have wanted to meet Asher on the battlefield when I was human.” Then she had laughed. “I didn’t get the pleasure, for Roar found me first. Asher has honed his skills since then, as he was required to do, so now he is one of the Kine’s sharpest instruments.”
Asher looked the part. He looked strong and enduring. Charlee pressed her hands together to stop herself from reaching out to touch him. “My room is hard to find for several reasons, including determined Einherjar. Why are you here, Asher?”
“Shut the door.”
She hesitated. “That’s probably not a good—” It was all she managed to get out. He pressed her up against the wall beside the open door and kissed her. She heard the door shut. Then his hands were in her hair, around her, pulling her up against him.
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 53
