His face hardened. “You risk him, risk tainting his magic.”
“Bull. His magic is stronger when we’re together. Ask him yourself.”
“He needs to focus. Sex is a distraction.”
She couldn’t argue that one, because she was coming to learn that it certainly was—especially the way Sven did it. But she shook her head and drummed up a weak smile, trying to defuse things a little. “By your logic, nobody here should be getting any until the zero date. Good luck selling that idea.”
His expression shifted, but not to one of amusement. Instead, he looked almost wistful. “Can’t you trust me to know what’s right?”
And for a moment, she saw him as he used to be, back when the four of them had sat around the card table as a family, betting chores and pretzels. Back then, she might have gone along with anything he said, thrilled to be included. But that was a long time ago. “Your version of ‘right’ is outdated.”
“Perhaps. But everything I know, everything I’ve experienced in twice as many years, says that you’re talking yourself into this, and that’s going to get you in trouble.” He paused, and for a second she thought she might be getting somewhere. But then he said, “If you two are meant to be together, truly meant, then your feelings will still be the same three months from now. If you take the mark, stay out of his bed, and fight the war, you’ll have the winikin behind you.”
Her stomach knotted into a tight ball, and she didn’t want to look too closely at the reasons why. “But—”
“I’ll support you as Sven’s winikin… but not his lover. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
If she hadn’t been convinced that her and Sven’s relationship was connected in some way with the gods and the war, she might have taken the deal… at least she wanted to think she would have. But it wasn’t; it couldn’t be. So she shook her head. “No deal.” She was going to have to win over the winikin without her father’s support. She headed for the door, saying over her shoulder, “Meeting’s in the training hall in an hour.”
He didn’t call her back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
From the shelter of the cacao grove, Sven watched the winikin file into the training hall. Mac sat on his haunches nearby, with a confused whine ghosting in the back of his throat, not getting why they were hiding from the good guys.
“It’s complicated,” Sven said, because he didn’t think there were enough thought-glyphs in the world to cover what was going on in his head.
He didn’t want to go in there alone and cause a scene, but he hadn’t been able to make himself wait up at the mansion for Cara. And that was a problem—while part of the twitchiness had come from knowing that she was talking to Carlos, the rest came courtesy of a familiar itch that said, Get out, get moving, get some distance. And although for a long time he had embraced that itch, now he wished he could take a damn pill and get rid of it. Or maybe a spray or something. A bug bomb. Whatever.
He didn’t want the restlessness. More, it worried him that he’d awakened that morning from a bright, vivid dream of running through a closely growing rain forest, searching, always searching, though he didn’t know what he sought. Part of the time in the dream he’d been himself, but the rest of the time he’d had four legs and tough-padded feet that flew across the soft earth.
He’d had the same sort of visions in the weeks leading up to Mac’s finding him and the two of them becoming linked through the familiar bond. But he already had a familiar, and that was an exclusive partnership, so these dreams and vision flashes had to be something else. And the only thing he could think was that some part of his coyote magic was coming to the fore, telling him he needed to move on, that a true coyote mage didn’t stay in one place—or with one mate—for long.
But he didn’t want to leave Skywatch, damn it, and he didn’t want to leave Cara. She needed to know he was capable of sticking around.
And he was sticking, damn it, would continue to stick, no matter what it took.
He must have muttered something under his breath, because as the last few stragglers jogged up the stairs to the hall and the door banged shut a final time, Mac cocked his head and rolled an eye back in inquiry.
“We’ll go down there in a minute. I’m just waiting for… There she is,” he said as he spotted Cara coming down the path, stalking stiff legged with her hands jammed in the pockets of her studded jacket. “Uh-oh. I’m guessing things didn’t go so well with Carlos. Come on.”
They slipped out of the cacao grove and angled to intercept her near the picnic area. Up close, Sven caught the snap of anger in her eyes as she glanced at him, then watched her try to shove it behind a calm facade. “Hey, wait up,” he said, catching her wrist and drawing her into the lee of the huge ceiba tree. “Give yourself a minute. You don’t want to go in there looking like that.”
She glared up at him. “Looking like what, exactly? And are we really hiding behind a tree? Seriously?”
“You look like you’re about to rip a chunk out of the first person who crosses you, and I’m pretty sure the goal was to keep this meeting as calm and controlled as possible. As for the tree thing, yeah, but only because it means I can do this.” He drew her into his arms, but when she shot him a don’t even think about kissing me right now glare, he tucked her head beneath his chin, wrapped his arms around her and held on tight. “Give yourself a minute, okay? Just breathe and remember that he’s not going to change.”
She stayed tense for a moment, then exhaled a shuddering breath and relaxed against him. “Damn it, don’t be nice to me. I need to go into this meeting a little pissed off.”
“How about calm, focused, and ready to kick some ass?”
Laughing a little, she sneaked an arm around his waist and squeezed. “Yeah. That’ll work.” She eased away, then looked up at him. “Thanks. You’re not a bad guy to have around.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said lightly, though the comment brought the same sort of clutch he used to get when one of his casual hookups had dropped a not-so-casual remark about him sticking around. Only this time he was the one trying to hem himself in. Stifling the urge to hold on to her too hard, he let her go instead. “Ready to go blow up the hierarchy?”
She groaned. “Don’t say it like that.”
“Sorry.” But as they headed for the training hall, walking side by side but not touching, he took heart from the fact that she looked more resolute than grim, and her eyes held a gleam of step off; I’m in charge. And, damn, that was sexy.
He let her take the lead going up the steps and through the doors, and then on into the main room. It was packed with winikin, some sitting at the round tables, others lounging at the closed-down bar. Pretty much every one of them took one look at her and then another, longer look at him and the big coyote that slunk at his heels.
Some of those looks were friendly enough, but most weren’t. Especially the ones coming from the two guys who’d gotten hurt in the dustup two days earlier. Sasha had patched them up, but they still had some healing to do.
There were mutters of, “Now what?” and, “What’s he doing here?” and, “I heard he’s schtupping her.”
Sven zeroed in on the last commenter, a twenty-something guy who met his glare for about five seconds before looking away. A couple of the guy’s buddies shifted as if looking for a fight, but Sven just raised an eyebrow and kept going through the throng.
His restraint got an approving look from Cara as she reached the place opposite the bar where a couple of risers formed an impromptu stage for meetings and karaoke. There was no sound system, so she stepped up on the stage and gave the room a minute to settle.
Moving around behind her, so he was off the risers and thus not looming, and Mac was more or less out of sight, Sven took up his I’ve got her back position and tried not to picture Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard, because gods knew he’d never admit to having watched it.
Like a good bodyguard, he scanned the cro
wd, trying to figure out where the biggest threat was going to come from. And he found Carlos staring daggers at him from the back of the room.
A pang went through him at the look in the winikin’s eyes, but he locked gazes for a long moment, then sent the other man a nod. Carlos grimaced and looked away, but Sven figured the message was clear enough. He had followed through with his promise to Carlos, and waited to get his sign. Cara’s father didn’t need to know that the sign hadn’t really mattered, though, because despite everything else, he just bloody well felt right when he was with Cara.
Even now, as she held up a hand and waited for the mutters and shuffles to subside, and he stood there knowing that they had a hell of a fight ahead of them, he was exactly where he wanted to be.
It was when they were apart that the doubts—and the visions of being somewhere else—crept in.
“Okay, I’d like to get started,” Cara said, pitching her voice to carry to the far corners of the room, where the radicals had gravitated—Carlos and a few of the old guard on one side, Sebastian and a dozen or so rebels on the other. Sven kept his eyes moving as she continued. “I know there have been some major rumors flying over the past couple of days. Some are true, some aren’t, and most are a mix of the two. I had thought about apologizing that I’m just now calling this meeting, but the thing is, I’m not sorry for the delay. We needed the time to figure out the facts, what we think they mean, and what we’re going to do about them.”
Sebastian called, “And by ‘we,’ do you mean you and the Nightkeepers’ king, or you and lover boy there?” One of his buddies thumped him to shut up, but a couple of the others nodded.
Cara shot him a cool look. “Do you want to tell this, or should I?”
He snorted. “Spin away, boss. Go ahead and tell us how you sent Zane and Lora to live on a nice farm somewhere, like you’d tell a six-year-old when her dog bites someone and gets put down, or how you’re not fucking us over by hooking up with that one.” His chin jerk went in Sven’s direction. “And how it makes total sense for him to be in charge, even though the king said we could damn well lead ourselves, because you think that you might be able to use his magic, and that’s why the hellhound came back after you. Like that makes everything hunky-fucking-dory.”
Sven raised an eyebrow at the extent of the rumors. It seemed that there wouldn’t be much in the way of surprises, then. Just some clarification and—hopefully—redirection.
Nodding to Sebastian, her face set in falsely pleasant lines, Cara said, “If you’re finished?” When he grumbled and subsided, she swept the room with a look before clasping her hands at the small of her back in almost a parade rest. Sven could see that her fingers linked and held and turned white from the pressure. Her voice, though, stayed steady as she said, “Okay, then. Taking it from the top…”
Clearly and concisely, she led her people through the events of the past week, giving them the facts and interpretations, the caveats. She told them more than Sven would have, maybe even more than Dez had intended for her to reveal, but at this point it was probably the only way to go. Given the depths of the rumor mill, whatever she left out would come back to bite her in the ass somehow.
Which meant Sven got far more play than he would’ve liked, and he had to fight not to squirm at times. She glossed over the sex and his push-pull of affection and alluded to their history only in passing, but any idiot could have filled in the gaps, and while a number of the winikin were pains in his ass, none of them were stupid.
He tried not to react as she built her case. Instead, he watched the crowd. And damned if he didn’t see faces smoothing out, then a nod here and there. It started in the middle of the room, where Natalie and JT sat at the intersection between the two cliques, and then edged outward in an almost imperceptible ripple, one that might’ve been invisible to anybody in the thick of things. Sven, though, was on the outside looking in, and he saw it.
Pride trickled through him. She had them. She fucking had them. Or most of them, anyway. As for the holdouts ringing the room… well, they were going to be the wild cards, weren’t they? He just hoped to hell the others would be enough to trump.
Finishing the recitation with a quick rundown of the evidence suggesting that the ancestors—and presumably the gods—had paired her and Sven against the odds and perhaps even the writs, she went on to say, “I won’t claim to be infallible—far from it. I should have handled things differently during the war games, I should have figured out what Zane was up to, and I should have insisted on handling his and Lora’s arrests differently. But I’m determined to learn from my mistakes and put us in the absolute best position to survive. To do that, I need to be partnered up with Sven, and I need your support.”
This time when she paused, there was some shuffling and sidelong looks, but nobody—not even Sebastian—spoke out.
She waited a beat, then said, “Jox put me in charge of you without a vote, and there’s no vote mandated by writ or tradition, but I think we need one, because these are your lives we’re talking about. These are all of our lives. But first… questions?”
For a three-count, the loudest sound in the room was Mac’s breathing. Sven had his eye on Sebastian and his cronies, so it was a surprise when the first question came from the other side of the room. “The nahwal didn’t specifically say that you and the mage should be lovers, and a similar bond could be achieved by your taking back the aj winikin mark. Wouldn’t that be a better way to show your loyalty?”
It was Carlos.
Sven stiffened and Mac gave a low growl, responding to his sudden flash of ire. Cara, though, showed no outward response. She just said, “Over the past four years, the magi have had to rely on their instincts when the prophecies and magic have failed. I may not have magic of my own, but I have good instincts, and they’re telling me that this is right and good. I don’t need to take the aj winikin to prove anything to anyone, except maybe you.” Her voice cooled. “You forced the servant’s mark on me once before. You’re not going to do it again.”
That got a bunch of nods from the rebel side of the room, but Sven got an uh-oh feeling when he saw a few of the other, older winikin shifting in their seats.
“There’s no evidence that you’re supposed to be sleeping with him, is there?” Carlos persisted.
She lifted her chin and met his eyes, but she was talking to all of them when she said, “I’m not sleeping with Sven because of the nahwal or the gods. I’m sleeping with him because I’ve wanted to be with him for a long time now, but only recently became convinced that our being together will in no way be a detriment to the winikin or the war. And I’m sleeping with him because when I was strapped to that altar with the water over my head, he was the person I thought about, the one I wanted to see.”
Sven’s throat lumped as, for the first time since the meeting began, she turned to look at him. And for a moment her eyes were those of the woman he’d woken up with, the one he’d made morning love to. He wanted to tell her what it meant to hear her say that, wanted to give her something in return, but couldn’t.
Her eyes warmed, though, as if he had, and she turned back to the crowd and said simply, “Then there he was. He was there for me when nobody else was.” Her eyes went to Carlos. “If you want to condemn me for putting myself first in this, then that’s certainly your right. But I think you’re wrong. The other magi have shown that there’s room for love and family in their society. I think the same should be true for ours.”
She paused a beat, and then swept the crowd. “Next?”
There was a quiet moment—Sven thought a few people in the middle of the room were teetering on the brink of applause but didn’t dare try it—and then JT said, “Okay, I’ll go.”
“Fire away.”
He asked about the First Father’s resurrection—Sven had a feeling Cara had planted the question, and gave her points for anticipating the need—and that turned things away from their relationship. She fielded two more questions along th
ose lines, ignored a third that tried to circle back around to the bedroom, and went into more detail about the hellhound’s second appearance and what it might—or might not—mean.
And, watching her cool competence and grace under fire, Sven’s brain chewed on an old refrain: I don’t deserve her. But this time it wasn’t because of his restlessness or the knowledge that he couldn’t give her what she needed. Instead, it was because she flat-out awed the shit out of him. She was tough, edgy, and sexy as hell, but with an inner vulnerability that she didn’t mind showing. Yet at other times, she could be an elemental force, immovable and yet flexible, facing down her father on one side and kindling hope on the other. And she did it all without magic, without having been raised into the belief that she was somehow special, better than everyone around her. She did it simply by being her.
Nope, Sven thought with sudden clarity, he didn’t deserve her… but he was damn well going to try to live up to her for the next three—
Dizziness slapped through him with the suddenness of a squall, nearly dragging him to his knees. He stayed on his feet by force of will, not wanting to embarrass either of them by passing the hell out in the middle of her speech, but his vision blurred and brightened, and suddenly he wasn’t in the hall anymore; he was in a rain forest, racing along a narrow game trail with his nose to the ground. Searching, searching. Hot sun. Cool shade. Thirsty but can’t stop now. So close, but where? He glimpsed a cave mouth, heard the sound of water inside, caught the whisper of a hated scent, and felt a low growl rumble in his chest. Enemy!
Adrenaline chased away the vision. The rain forest fragmented, disappeared, and then he was back in the hall. He was still on his feet, thank the gods, and the only one staring at him was Mac. His familiar’s ears were plastered forward, his eyes intent, but he stayed silent.
Magic Unchained Page 29
