by Jen Crane
I grunted at her insult. “Speaking of a thesaurus, Pia, you got any synonyms for ‘smartass computers?”’
“Will ‘insolent intelligence’ do, or shall I keep searching, Stella?”
“No, that’ll do, Pia. That’ll do.”
* * *
The letter was short and cryptic, but I understood the message. More importantly, I knew who had sent it. Bay, my…grandmother. The one I’d recently discovered. The one responsible for god knew how many horrific deaths during the Steward Massacre. Also, the one who’d attacked me and betrayed me to Brandubh.
To say I had low expectations for the meeting was the understatement of the century.
Gresham didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t tell anyone. Was that stupid? Probably. I never claimed to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. That old adage ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me’ replayed over and over in my mind like a foreboding soundtrack to my certain demise.
But folded into Bay’s letter had been a picture of my mother as a girl. The photo wasn’t labeled, but I knew right away who the splotchy redhead was. Radiant green eyes stared out at me. They were eager eyes, innocent. I’d never known my mother when her eyes expressed anything besides regret. Bay had obviously meant the photo as an olive branch. She probably knew I couldn’t refuse an offering of information on my mom. And so I was going to meet her.
Radix was so heavily warded that the campus wasn’t an option for the meeting. I traced just outside of the designated meeting point, which was within hearing distance of The Root, but still outside its warded boundaries.
I didn’t see Bay right away and walked toward the rough-hewn stone bridge and sat on a deteriorating wooden bench to wait.
Watching the Basel River flow by proved too peaceful an endeavor for my mood, so I stood. Sat back down. Stood again, and then began to pace. The sting of a cuticle bit to the quick snapped me back into the present. She was late. Is she coming? Is this another trap? I didn’t think so, but I’d already proven myself naive where my family was concerned. I should leave. No amount of information was worth being set up again. I turned toward the bridge, back toward The Root, and that’s when I saw her.
Bay Drakontos’ dull-gray hair only held an occasional auburn streak. She wore it down. It was curly, like mine. Like my mother’s. But I wouldn’t have known her if it weren’t for those eyes. They were the same dead green, like trodden moss, that revealed such shame when I discovered she’d betrayed me. I could never forget those eyes.
At the moment they held sorrow and…hope. I nodded acknowledgment, uncertain what to say. She had requested the meeting. I intended to let her start.
“Stella, dear,” she began. If she saw my jolt and ensuing smirk at the endearment she ignored it. “I know no apology can ever be enough for the wrongs I’ve done you. But I want you to know I’m sorry. I can never make you understand the hold he had on us, and I will’na even try. I’ll just say…I wish I’d allowed him to kill me before setting that trap for you. Now I know you’re one of us, that you’re my Edina’s, I would rather ha’ died than allow him to own you, too.”
She left the words there on the riverbank. Left them to sink into the viscous mud of my mind. Neither of us said a word. I swallowed hard and turned to face the river as I thought about my mother, about the fear that gripped her so acutely she couldn’t be reasoned with to help me in such a desperate time. And then I thought, maybe there was a way I could get the answers I needed after all.
Can I forgive Bay? I wondered. If I truly believed the dragons weren’t culpable in the Steward Massacre, that they were only weapons that Brandubh had used, then I had to. Didn’t I? But there are varying degrees of forgiveness, and forgiving doesn’t have to mean forgetting.
I settled for cordiality and the pursuit of information about my mother.
I intended to be cordial. I did. But my mouth had another idea. “You knew who I was,” I accused. “You said you recognized me at the attack on Gresham’s house, and still you helped Brandubh trap me. If he’d been successful I’d be with you in that crater right now.”
“We didn’t send the letter, dear—”
“Don’t you dare call me ‘dear’ again,” I seethed.
“All right,” she nodded. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Brandubh sent the letter. He lured you to the crater. We were just there, once again pieces to be maneuvered in his endless games.”
“But you called us into the crater, out into the open from our cover in the passageway. You could have warned us. We could have gotten away if you’d told us what Brandubh planned.”
“You were stuck inside with us the moment you entered the crater, Stella. He planned it all so tediously. Once you arrived you couldn’t trace home. You know that. I saw you try. You were stuck like the rest of us.”
“We could have run back through the tunnel and outside. Traced from there. You could’ve warned me, Bay.” My voice had risen in pitch, in tension, in volume. I neared screeching at her and forced an inhale so as not to lose it completely.
“There was no way out.” She shook her head sadly. “We’ve been under his control for centuries, dea—Stella. When Brandubh sets a trap, it’s exhaustive. He’s powerful and thorough.”
“Yeah, and you’re a traitorous bitch.” I hadn’t thought the thought before it flew from my mouth. I had a lot of pent-up resentment. Obviously.
“You’re right, of course,” Bay mumbled. The set of her shoulders and her overall downtrodden demeanor was so much like my mother’s at that moment my heart lurched in my chest. Bay had been beaten down. Belittled and tortured just like my mother. Another strong, powerful woman reduced to a cowering shell.
I hated Brandubh. I wanted to kill that motherfucker; to break him like he’d broken my family. At the thought of tearing his throat out a redolent memory saturated my senses. I smelled the rusty vitality, tasted the tinny lava of his life force. I wished like hell I’d taken more. I wished I’d taken it all.
We were both silent for a time. Me, as I tried to check my vengeful rage and Bay, as she no doubt battled her own inner demons.
“Where is Eiven?” I asked. “And Stryde. Are you in hiding? Where did you go that day?”
She nodded, glad to change the subject. “We’ve a place to hide for now. It’s not much, but we’re happy to have it. To be free. We’re grateful to you for that, Stella. We can never repay you for helping us finally escape Brandubh.”
My shoulders shrugged under the weight she put behind her words.
I did wonder, though, not just for them but for myself. “Are you afraid he’ll find you? Do you think he can?”
“Aye, I don’t think we’ll ever stop fearing that.”
“What will you do?” I asked. What should I do, I wondered.
“We’re working on wards to camouflage ourselves. Brandubh shielded us for so long we have a good idea how he did it. We still have some old friends left, some powerful friends. We’re close to finding a way.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “Good.” I ran a narrow leaf from a nearby bush through my fingers.
“Eiven and Stryde would like to see you again,” Bay said and darted a nervous glance at me. “We’d like to hear about your life, about you, your mother.”
My mother. Every time I thought about her my teeth snapped together. I breathed hard through my nose, trying to rid myself of the disgust and disappointment and loss I felt at the mention of her. I looked down to discover I’d ripped the leaf in my fingers to shreds.
“I need to get back,” I said. “I…I’m glad you contacted me.”
She smiled then—a real smile that reached her dull eyes. She released a breath I imagine she’d been holding for the length of our meeting.
“Would you come for dinner tomorrow?” She darted another glance at me. “To see Eiven and Stryde. To get to know each other. I never dreamed I had a granddaughter. I’d love to know you, Stella.”
There is very little e
lse she could have said to affect me more. I’d never had a family. Only my mother. I had desperately wanted a father, a granny, an aunt, cousins. Family, like all of the other kids I knew. The little girl inside me jumped and clapped “Yay!” at the idea.
“Yes,” I dared whisper. “Yes.”
Chapter 6
Gresham was waiting in my room when I returned from meeting Bay.
She’d given me instructions to find their new home for the impending dinner. She didn’t ask me not to tell Gresham, but I didn’t mention seeing her, or my plans for the following night. I knew he wanted to capture them. He’d said as much in the crater after they disappeared. Did that mean he wanted to interrogate them? Prosecute them? Worse? I was afraid to ask, and not entirely sure he’d tell me the truth anyway. Things were strange and volatile and I wasn’t certain how I felt about it all. Until I was, I resolved to keep my relationship with the Drakontos dragons close to my chest.
Gresham leaned against my buffet table looking as confident and in control as ever. He smiled when he saw me. That smile. It started off slow and sexy, one side of his lips pulling up into a lascivious smirk. I was a sparrow in the predatory sights of a hawk. He swooped toward me and I couldn’t breathe. Rowan Gresham excited and weakened me all at once.
“I’ve been thinking about our last time together,” he said.
“Have you?” I had, too...despite the myriad other things I had to think about.
“Mmm. I can think of little else.” He ran a finger along my collarbone, and chills tickled down my spine.
“It’s been days since I’ve seen you,” I breathed. “Thought maybe you’d forgotten.”
“Forgotten? No chance of that.” His eyes held such heat, such single-minded intent, that I shivered at their implication. “But I could stand a reminder.”
He backed me up, pushed me against the wall, and pulled my hands over my head. He held my hands in place with one of his and bent to kiss me. My breath hitched as the heat of his mouth competed with the cool brushes of his hair on my skin. In that competition, I was the lucky winner.
He pulled away from me long enough to say, “Hold on,” before clasping me to him and tracing from my room at Sabre Hall.
A flash of light, a surge of cold air, and we were at Gresham’s home, Caraway Manor and grounds. There wasn’t time to be disoriented. Gresham consumed me and kissed me urgently the moment we landed in what I assumed was his bedroom. A gigantic plush bed occupied the space between two floor-to-ceiling windows, and a sitting area was just off the bedroom. It was all very vintage masculine chic—clean lines, rich colors, mahogany accents. The furniture flanked a large fireplace, its mantel supporting an oil painting of Caraway Manor and its grounds.
“Something wrong with my place?” I panted. We stood at the end of his luxuriously masculine platform bed once he finally released me.
“I thought I might need room to maneuver.”
I moaned my approval.
Gresham grabbed the hem of my shirt and pulled it over my head before tossing it aside without another look. He removed his own shirt and wrapped his arms under mine, clasping me to him. He was on fire, his light body hair a sweet abrasion to my charged skin as he moved to kiss my neck and shoulders. I shivered at the feel of his fingers beneath the waistband of my jeans. I took a deep breath, luxuriating in the affectionate foreplay and anticipating his next move.
Gresham guided me back until the backs of my knees met the end of the bed and lay me down. He removed my jeans with precision and then slowly ran his hands up my thighs. “I love to look at you,” he whispered across my mind. He drew back to hold my gaze before devouring every inch of my body. I writhed under his attention, ran my fingers through his thick hair, traced the smooth curves of his ears.
Rowan Gresham made me feel alive, eager, elated…like a woman who knew what she needed from a man, and never failed to get it.
I was still breathless when he climbed between my knees and lifted me by the hips up onto his thighs. He wasn’t as gentle the second time as he was the first and I dimly thought, Aha. This is what they mean when they say ‘until you can’t walk the next day.’
That was the last time I thought coherently. Rowan Gresham had everything under control. I threw my hands above my head, scratching for purchase of the pillow, the top of the mattress, anything.
I held on for life and let go.
Before coming to Thayer, before meeting Rowan Gresham, I’d been with a couple of boys. They were invariably the same: clumsy and over-anxious novices who saw seduction as embarrassing, as a weakness. So many boys I’d known thought girls were nothing but holes to poke their sticks in. Those who’d taken the time and effort to learn how to please a woman, in my limited view, were few and far between. Why didn’t boys realize that having a rep as en fuego in the sack would get them laid so much more often?
Sex with Rowan Gresham was so different from my past experiences it deserved another name.
* * *
“Do you have plans tomorrow night?” Gresham asked as he thrummed his fingers idly on my thigh.
We lay on our backs, recovering, but at his question I turned to face him.
“I do, actually. Why?”
“I want to take you to Aemon. Since he’s known about you from the beginning, and knows a lot about your family’s history, he wants to get to know you. He can also help us with a strategy forward.”
“Oh.” I chewed the inside of my jaw so I didn’t give too much away.
“What are you doing?” A line formed between Gresham’s brows in suspicion.
“Hmm?”
“What are your plans that you can’t meet Aemon tomorrow?”
“Oh. Um, study group,” I lied.
Why did I lie? And what did it say about me that I lay in post-coital bliss with a man I obviously didn’t trust? Yeah, I so didn’t want to go there. I wasn’t ready to tell him about my impending meeting with Bay, Eiven, and Stryde. I was allowed to have secrets. Anyway, Gresham had more secrets than I liked to let myself admit.
“Tuesday, then?” he suggested, though he still eyed me suspiciously.
“Sure. Great,” I said. Anyone who missed my lack of enthusiasm was simply choosing to ignore it.
Chapter 7
The hell am I doing here? I asked myself for the tenth time. I must have turned around half a dozen times along the way. To my grandma’s house.
But I knew what I was doing. I couldn’t fool myself, hard as I tried. The scenario played in my mind over and over. Yes, my newfound grandmother, uncle, and cousin had been accomplices in a trap set for me. But they’d been tortured for centuries; they’d even endured de-winging for not being forthcoming about my existence. And Bay had been so sincere about starting fresh and getting to know me, her granddaughter. I wanted family desperately. Even more so after the acute loss of my mother.
“Stella. How lovely to see you,” Bay said as I approached the dilapidated wood structure. It was so submerged within the trees, so overtaken by dense branches and leaves, that it looked in danger of an immediate takeover on all sides by the forest itself.
Bay sat atop a stool roughly hewn from a log whose cohorts likely fueled the nearby fire. She leaned toward the fire, her knobby fingers turning some sort of large fowl on a pole suspended above the flames.
“We’re still getting used to cooking our food,” she said when she noticed my attention on the spit. “There’s an old wood oven inside, but it heats the house up.”
“Smells delicious,” I said and found my own cut log. “What is it?”
“Turkey. Wild turkey. I made some cornbread, too,” she said, nodding her head at a cast iron skillet placed just outside the flames.
“It’s peaceful out here. This your place?”
“No,” she said, her attention still primarily on the food. “An old friend’s. Anything we had is gone by now. But this cabin’ll do. It’s safe.”
I nodded. “Not many know you’re back, then?”
/> “No. Just a few people we used to know. That we trust.”
“What will you do?” I swallowed past the lump in my throat and cleared my throat. “If someone finds out you’re here…that you’re alive…” I couldn’t finish the thought. We both knew how volatile the situation was.
“Aye, we’ll have to hide for now. There are still many who would recognize us.”
“But you can’t stay here forever. Can’t stay concealed forever. Right? Hiding in the woods after such a long imprisonment can’t be easy. Surely you miss your old lives.”
She lay the pole on its brace and faced me. Her expression was bleak, but not hopeless. A little light still shone in her eyes. Dim, but it was there. “We can do anything when faced with such an alternative,” she said. “And we aren’t unhappy here, dear—er, Stella. We’re free, we can remain in our primary forms now. There’s plenty of game to hunt.” The force of her smile stacked one wrinkle on top of another as she said, “I’ve even begun a garden.”
“She nearly broke our backs clearing a spot for it, but she’s got a garden,” Eiven said good naturedly. He emerged from the cabin carrying three glasses of a cloudy brown liquid. “Care for a beer?” he asked while shoving one in my direction. It was lukewarm and smelled so strongly of hops and yeast my cheeks puckered before I’d even had a drink. I took a small sip at first, and while it was strong, it was undeniably delicious.
“My old recipe. But I didn’t make this batch.” Eiven’s red hair demanded attention. It was coarse and thick and stood straight up from his head like a thousand hot needles. A slightly bulbous nose hung over thin lips and lay a shadow over his narrow chin. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were better described as tracks, for they were physical indicators of the hard road he’d traveled. But despite his difficult history, his eyes still held kindness.
