One hand buried in her hair, the other slipped down over her hip before coming back up. It disappeared under her t-shirt, his fingers brushing against skin that was suddenly more sensitive than it had ever been before. She moaned against his lips as those fingers played with the bumps of her spine, as they learned the hills and valleys that created the curves of her body.
Nothing else mattered in that moment. Just his touch. She never thought she could give herself completely to anyone. There would always be something between her and anyone who dared to get close enough to break down her barriers. She always had to be in control, always had to be the one who could say what happened and when. But Cei’s touch tore those barriers down; he took away everything that could possibly stand between the two of them.
He was the one who could make everything all right. She could feel it.
If only she could trust it.
As his fingers began to slowly move around the curve of her ribs, she wrapped her hand around his wrist. She didn’t have to say anything. Just her touch…that’s all it took.
He laid her on the mattress beside him, his lips lingering for a moment longer before he pulled back an inch or two.
“Get some sleep,” he whispered.
He started to pull away, but she grabbed his arm again, snuggling into his chest despite her pain, despite her lingering need. It was just that touch. That was what her soul craved.
Chapter 23
Gwen slept a dreamless sleep the rest of that long night. When she woke, she was alone, the smell of Cei on the pillow, the blanket, on her skin. She reveled in it for a moment, pressing her face into the pillow as she breathed in that scent.
She didn’t want to get up. She realized that everyone had probably left for the day. An ordinary Friday for most of them. They would still expect her to get out of bed, to show some degree of respectability. And she would…just, in a minute.
She could still feel his hands on her back, could taste his lips on hers. A soft smile slipped across her lips, a smile like nothing she had never expressed before. Was this what happiness felt like? Was this what it was like to find that one person who really got you, who really understood what it was you wanted, what you needed?
But even as she thought it, that sober voice of reality began to whisper in the back of her mind.
How do you know he feels the same way as you? You wake a boy in the middle of the night and climb into his bed, how do you know he understands what’s happening? How do you know he’s not living out some fantasy about some other girl? How do you know he even cares that it’s your body he’s touching?
Sober wasn’t the right word. Wet blanket was a little better, but still didn’t quite describe that damn voice.
She climbed out of the bed, done playing the lovelorn schoolgirl.
A shower wasn’t possible with the bandage on her shoulder. She peeled it off carefully, wondering if she’d be able to get a fresh one on by herself. Theresa had changed it out last night and left extra supplies in Gwen’s room, but it was a little complicated because of the angle of the wound.
As she removed the last of the bandage in front of the mirror in the bathroom, she saw the wound for the first time. As she had suspected, it was quite round, as though a large rock had gone through her shoulder. But it looked fairly shallow, too. That had to be good, right? Maybe it would heal faster that way? She touched the jagged edges of the wound, expecting pain to flare. But it didn’t. It was sore, but not nearly as painful as she had expected.
She lingered in the shower, taking pleasure in the everyday things. If she was going insane, she should enjoy these things before she couldn’t.
She felt pretty good after she dressed. Almost back to her old self. And hungry. She bounded down the stairs, two at a time, thinking about the blueberry muffins Theresa promised to save her last night. It wasn’t until she reached the bottom of the stairs that she heard the low rumble of voices.
Someone was home.
She went into the living room, expecting to find Theresa there with a sick twin, or watching soap operas. She seemed like the soap opera kind of person. But there was no one there.
She glanced into the kitchen, but there was no one there, either.
An uncertainty made her desire for blueberry muffins dwindle. She moved under the stairs, headed to the back of the house. As she did, the voices grew louder.
Tony. She recognized his distinctive voice immediately. And Theresa. They were discussing something in low tones, the words indistinguishable even as Gwen moved closer to the door.
Tony had classes early in the morning. He should have left hours ago.
“We have to tell her.”
Cei. That was Cei’s voice.
“I know you think that’s the best solution…” Theresa began to say.
“She knows we’re lying to her,” Cei interrupted. “She’s a smart girl.”
“So was the last one. And the one before that.”
Tony.
“Gwen is different. She’s manifesting.”
There was silence for a moment. Then Tony cleared his throat.
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“The tree protected her from Branwen. It couldn’t have done that if she’s not manifesting.”
“There were no signs.”
“Sometimes there aren’t.”
Again silence fell. Gwen moved closer to the door, her hand raised as though she intended to knock. She felt wrong listening to their conversation this way. But she couldn’t make herself walk away. They were talking about her. Cei was talking about her.
“She has a right to know.”
“She will know,” Theresa said. “We just have to be careful about how we tell her. That girl has been through so much in her young life. We can’t just spring something like this on her without warning.”
“She thinks she’s going insane!”
Cei’s voice was raised in a way Gwen had never heard before. He was upset. Angry, even. It caused a shiver of pleasure to rush down her spine to think he would care enough about her to get that emotional.
“She’ll believe it when we tell her.”
“I think he’s right,” Tony said. “I think she has a right to know who she is. Who her parents are.”
“She’s too young,” Theresa argued.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Silence fell again. Gwen stepped back, her hand pressed against her mouth.
They knew who her parents were? How was that even possible?
“We have to talk to Paul,” Theresa said. “It’s up to him when and how we tell her.”
“Paul is overprotective,” Cei said dismissively. “If we left it up to him, she would never learn the truth.”
“Not true,” Theresa said. “Paul—”
Gwen didn’t stop to hear Theresa’s defense of Paul. She ran upstairs, grabbed her overnight bag from under her bed, and slipped out the back door.
They were lying to her. All of them.
Paul knew who her parents were and he lied to her. Directly to her face—well, over the phone, but it felt the same.
They knew. They knew everything. They were arrogant enough to think they could hide it from her, as though they could control her future. But that wasn’t going to happen. Only she controlled her life; only she decided what she knew and what she didn’t. Only she decided who she trusted and who she didn’t.
And it was pretty obvious she couldn’t trust anyone.
Chapter 24
She had three thousand dollars in her overnight case, hidden in the lining. She’d saved it from summer jobs, from odd jobs she’d done for her foster parents’ neighbors. It was her going to Columbia money. But maybe it was time to get out of Texas. A little early, a little differently than she had planned, but time.
She took the public bus to the Greyhound station. There were people hanging around outside, including one guy who whistled as she walked past. She gave him a brief nod, having learned a long ti
me ago that this would have the opposite effect than most people expected. These guys wanted a negative response, not a positive.
True to form, the guy settled down against the wall, purposely ignoring her as she walked past.
“Where are you headed?”
“California,” Gwen told the counter guy, saying the first thing that popped into her head.
“Don’t have a bus headed west until Saturday,” he said.
“What about Connecticut?”
The man glanced at his computer screen. “We have a bus leaving for Dallas in fifteen minutes.”
“Dallas, then.”
“ID.”
Gwen bit her lip. “I don’t have any ID.”
The man looked up, really seeming to see her for the first time. “Can’t travel without ID. New regulations.”
“Not even to Dallas?”
“Not without ID.”
“But I need to get out of town. Can’t you make an exception?”
“And lose this cushy job?” The man shook his head. “Go home, kid. Whatever’s going on there can’t be as bad as what could happen to a cute kid like you on her own.”
“You have no idea.”
She grabbed her bag and walked back out of the small building. There was a convenience store across the parking lot. She went there and walked among the shelves, pretending to be looking for something, as she struggled to get her thoughts together. ID. The only ID she had was the plastic placard they gave her at school. She didn’t even know where her birth certificate was or if she could get the necessary documents together to get a state ID.
Definitely not without calling Paul.
She couldn’t even run away effectively.
She decided to head up to the university. She wasn’t sure why she chose that destination, but it felt better to have a destination in mind.
The walk was significant. She stopped a few blocks away to rest on one of the bus stop benches, identical to the one that strange woman—what had Cei called her? Branwen?—had destroyed with her car the day before.
What had he meant, manifesting? Manifesting what?
She leaned forward, rested her face in her hands as her mind began to wander over the conversation she’d overheard again. All those things they’d said, she didn’t understand the basis for most of it. What did they want to tell her? Why? And who were the others, the ones they kept throwing at Cei as cautionary tales?
Their conversation had sounded so much like the one Cei had with Rhein the day before. But Rhein had been on Cei’s side of the argument. Not then, of course, but on the side Cei seemed to be on today. Rhein thought she should know, too.
What did all these people—people she’d only known for two or three weeks—know about her that she didn’t know about herself?
It didn’t make sense.
“We seem to be running into each other a lot lately.”
Gwen looked up to find a smiling Bran standing over her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I live across the street,” he said, gesturing to a large apartment complex. “What are you doing here?”
“Resting.” She sat up a little straighter, her shoulder offering a little tweak of pain in reward for the movement. “I walked from 50th Street.”
“Long ways.” Bran gestured at the bench beside her. “Mind if I join you?”
She slid over a little, made room.
“Are you running away?” he asked, gesturing to her overnight case as he settled beside her.
“Sort of.”
“Really?” His eyebrows rose provocatively. “Trouble in paradise?”
“What paradise?”
He groaned. “That’s not good. Home is supposed to be where the heart is and all that stuff.”
“Not always.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
He nodded. “I can respect that.” He leaned forward a little before twisting his head so he could see her better. “It can be tough, being an orphan.”
Gwen began to nod until it hit her that she had never told him anything about her home situation. “How did you—”
“I know a lot about you, Gwen.”
“But I never told you about my home life.”
“You didn’t have to.” Bran sat up again, pressing a hand into her thigh as though in an attempt to keep her where she was. “I’ve known about you since before you came to this great state of Texas. I knew you when you were nothing but a group of zygotes in your mother’s belly.”
Gwen stiffened as she tried to move her leg and found that he was holding it tight enough that she had little wiggle room. She began to struggle, but he just pushed his hand harder against her thigh with bruising weight.
“Don’t make a scene,” he said, low enough that only she could hear him. “I won’t hurt you.”
“How do I know that?”
“You don’t, I suppose. They haven’t told you who you are yet.” He smiled, the twist of his lips reminding her of someone as it had done once before. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to be the one to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Tell you exactly who I am and why you and I were always destined to meet.”
She relaxed her thigh as she looked away, giving him the false sense that she was giving up when she was really searching for someone in the crowd that was moving around him who might actually help her. But, like with the teenagers at the bus stop, no one seemed to notice.
“You’re not going to find anyone to help you, dear Gwenydd. They stopped being aware of you the moment I touched you.”
“Why?”
“Because I am a god, my dear.”
Gwen’s neck wound screamed as she turned too quickly to look at him. “What do you mean, a god?”
“I am Bendigeidfran, lord of Annwn.”
Gwen shook her head. “You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”
“How about Bran of the Welsh Underworld?”
“The Underworld? The Bran of the Battle of Trees?”
A tightness came into Bran’s eyes. “Why is that everyone always remembers that, but they don’t remember any of my great battles? I was a great warrior in my time, I’ll have you know.”
“I’m sure. Beating up little girls.”
“You, my love,” he said, moving close enough to her that she could smell his heated breath, “are not a little girl.”
“And you can’t be Bran. That battle took place during the Iron Age, millennia ago.”
“Doesn’t Druantia teach you anything in that history class of hers?” He seemed somewhat exasperated. “Gods are immortal.”
“Gods don’t exist.”
“If that were true, neither would you.”
Gwen shifted her leg, testing him. He responded immediately, his grip tightening once more.
“You’re insane.”
“No. Neither of us is insane, dear Gwenydd. Immortal, occasionally immoral, but not insane.”
“If you’re a god, why are you hanging out at the university?”
“Waiting for you.”
“How could you have known I would come there? I didn’t even know I would be coming there until the day before it happened.”
“I’m a god. I have my sources.”
He smiled that smile again, and she suddenly understood why it looked so familiar. It was the same soft smile that woman—Branwen—had on her perfect features each time she attacked.
“What do you want with me?”
“To let you know that you won’t succeed.” He leaned close to her again, his lips close to her ear. “You see, dear Gwenydd, I always win. That battle, Cad Goddeu, was just the beginning of a bigger battle between the Sons of Don and myself. I might have lost the battle, but I won the war.”
“How?”
“I cursed them.” He smiled, a more genuine smile this time. It was almost a handsome smile. “I cursed them to live their eternal lives in Annwn.
They’re there now, their souls being tortured by my demons.” Laughter slipped from his lips in a single, deep chuckle. “It’s beautiful, really, watching the sons of light succumbing to the pets of darkness.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
He sat back a little, his gaze moving over a family that walked just a few feet in front of them, the child crying over a lost ice cream cone. He reached over and flicked the child’s ear, causing him to stop crying as he looked around himself for the cause of the brief snip of pain.
Bran laughed. “I love doing stuff like that.”
“Are you always this scattered?”
He glanced at her. “Are you always this singularly focused?”
“Yes.”
Gwen shifted her leg again. Again his grip tightened.
“You are the child of a goddess of light. Or, at least, a goddess made by one of the Sons of Don.”
“A goddess.”
“A goddess and a human father.”
SONS of DON Page 15
