“Hardly nonsense.” Doctor Singh had clean gloves on, scissors and tweezers. “The proof is in his healing. Steve, if you hopped back on the stretcher, this would be easier.”
Steve sat as requested. Despite the dried blood on him, he was healthy and fit. Whole. Safe.
Reaction hit Fay hard. She’d nearly lost him. She still didn’t know what Tarik had planned to do with him. How had he escaped?
She breathed deep, trying to strangle her post-action anxiety.
“None of this is reasonable. All of this is wrong. It is your fault.” Mrs. Jekyll stalked to Fay. Evidently she handled her anxiety aggressively and by laying blame. “It’s gone wrong since Steve took up with you.”
“Grand-mère.” Steve’s tone was a warning and command for silence.
“No! She is magic and you are were. The two do not mix! No! I will not have you polluting our blood. You will not have children with this witch!” Mrs. Jekyll’s voice rose in a shriek.
“Grand-mère.” Steve got off the stretcher. He was tall and lethal, his expression severe.
“Raha, hush.” Mr. Jekyll attempted to intervene.
Mrs. Jekyll shrugged her arm out of his hold. “Go!” She said imperiously to Fay and pointed at the stairs.
Fay was barely holding together as she faced the truth of how nearly she’d lost Steve. How nearly she still could. Not from Mrs. Jekyll’s histrionics, but from the threat of the jackal-were and rogue mage, and the evil, noxious energy they’d created. Fay had been trained to assess threats and act accordingly. On the threat level, Mrs. Jekyll didn’t rate. Her hysterical disapproval was an emotional issue to be dealt with later.
What mattered was learning what had happened to Steve, why and how he’d been kidnapped, and planning their strategy for eliminating the threat to them and to all the weres. This had become so much more than a djinn-inspired test.
Fay plunged forward three steps, caught Steve’s hand and pulled him to her; away from confronting his grandparents. “You’re right, Mrs. Jekyll. I need to go. I need food, a shower, clean clothes. Even sleep. Steve needs the same.”
Steve closed his hand around hers.
“Last stitch.” Doctor Singh had followed Steve. Now he held up the scrap of thread. “You may go.”
“Glad I have your permission, doc,” Steve said sardonically.
“Steve, stay!” his grandmother ordered.
He walked towards the stairs, Fay beside him.
Behind them came a wavering, feminine groan, a sigh, and the rustle of a gentle collapse. When they turned, Mrs. Jekyll had “fainted”.
Doctor Singh rolled his eyes.
The two guards looked uncomfortable.
Faroud was frankly fascinated. He winked at Fay.
“Steve, don’t leave the fort,” his granddad said. “We must talk. Your parents are flying here since we couldn’t trust the portal for transit.”
Fay waited. This was Steve’s family, his call. As much as she disliked the arrogance his grandparents displayed in ordering him around, she knew she didn’t have enough experience of families to judge the nuances. Perhaps this was normal across generations? Perhaps even a sign of caring?
Steve looked at his granddad as the elderly man knelt beside his gracefully reclining wife. Steve’s expression stayed grim. “Grand-Mère ordered my mate to leave the fort. She insulted Fay and our future children.”
Children! Fay squeezed his hand, convulsively. She hadn’t ever considered motherhood. Would their children be leopard-weres? How would the weres treat them if they were mages, like her? Did she want children?
Yes.
Not yet, but one day. Children. She smiled at Steve. Thoughts of children were joyous.
He scowled at his grandmother, still faking unconsciousness. “I’m mad. But Mom, she’s going to raise the roof.”
Just out of Steve’s line of sight, but within Fay’s, Faroud nodded vigorously.
“Words spoken out of an anxious time.” Mr. Jekyll attempted to gloss things over.
Steve was having none of it. “Words spoken out of prejudice and aimed to hurt Fay. Aimed to drive away my mate. Uncle has accepted Fay, and if he hadn’t, I would leave. She is my future. Do you think she could heal me if we weren’t bound more tightly than most couples? If you need proof, there it is. But you shouldn’t need proof. You should welcome Fay because I love her, and for herself. Mom knows that. Dad knows it. They’ll give Fay the welcome family should.”
He paused. “We’ll stay in the fort.”
They walked up the stone stairs, emerging to a ground level, sunlit corridor. Steve led Fay a short distance down it to another set of stairs. They kept climbing. Three flights up, they exited to a carpeted corridor.
“Guest rooms.” Steve opened a door, revealing an impersonal room with a bed, dull shades of gray furnishings and a window that looked out across Alexandria. “Can you do that privacy bubble thing?” He closed the door behind him.
“Done.” She walked into his arms.
She felt his heart pounding faster than normal and knew it wasn’t from climbing the stairs. This was anger and other emotions. He’d drawn a line in the sand for his family and other weres to protect her.
“I’m sorry about my grandparents,” he said. “I didn’t think they’d be this bad. Somehow accepting you has gotten tangled up with relinquishing the Suzerainty. Even for Granddad.” Surprise and then frustration in his voice. “They seem to have forgotten that neither are in their power. They don’t decide your and my relationship.” A squeeze. “And they don’t control Uncle, either. The Suzerainty is based on the power he gives.”
Fay touched his chest, his healed side. All she could do was be there.
“Are you very hurt?” he asked.
“Me?”
“I wasn’t lying to Granddad. Mom and Dad, especially Mom, are going to be mad about your poor reception here. You’re already part of their family.”
“It can’t be that easy. Acceptance isn’t that easy.”
“It is.” He bracketed her face with his large hands. “What was it Uncle said about dream essences, that we’re all part of what we touch in our day, what is important to us? That’s you. You’re part of me, Fay. Just as I’m part of you. That’s where our mate-bond comes from. That’s why loving either of us means accepting both of us, welcoming all that we are and will become.”
“Including children?” She’d meant to sound teasing. Instead, she heard her uncertainty.
So did Steve. “Were, magic or mundane, our children will be loved.”
She kissed him for being there. For saying the right things, even as he spoke from the heart.
He returned the kiss, unbuttoning her shirt as he did so. “You shower first. I need to phone Mom and Dad, let them know we’re okay and find out when they’ll be here. That crazed jackal-were took my phone. It’s a good thing I don’t use it as an organizer. He won’t find anything vital.” Steve crossed to the old-fashioned phone on a table by the bed.
“Do you still need the privacy bubble?”
“No. I just…we need time alone.” He sat on the bed, chest bare, the signs of his struggle on the mountain still visible, for all that he’d healed. His smile was rueful. “I don’t know how to give us that time till we get this thing done.” This thing, the test that had become so much more. Tarik had to be stopped. “Go and shower, sweetheart.” He started dialing a number.
She walked into the bathroom and closed the door, giving him privacy. Still she overheard the beginning of the conversation.
“I’m okay, Dad. Yeah, Mom, we’re both fine.”
Fay stepped into the stream of hot water and washed away hours of travel and the sweat of the rainforest. Her scrapes and grazes stung. She’d been in this state, and worse, before. Fortunately, unlike with weres, healing magic could fix her minor injuries. She set a charm in the flow of the water so that it washed away pain and blood. Bruises blossomed and faded. By the time she finished showering, her skin had
healed.
Just in time. Steve walked into the bathroom, his gaze roaming her body. There was nothing sexual in the look. He was searching for injuries.
“The scrapes were minor and I fixed them.” Fay wrapped a towel around herself, then another around her hair. “The shower’s all yours.”
He’d left his boots in the bedroom. Now he stripped off his jeans. “Mom and Dad’ll be here in an hour and a half. I’ll get us some food, then we have an hour to nap. You said you wanted sleep.”
Not so much sleep, as rest. A time to regroup. But…“We should talk about—” She broke off. Why tell their stories twice? His parents, and his grandparents, would want to know what had happened to them. “All right.”
As she watched, the hot water of the shower ran over his body, rivulets silvering against the dark tan of his skin as he tipped his face to the spray. She walked out of the bathroom before she stepped into the water with him. The shower space was too small for two people.
In the bedroom, she considered her dirty clothes. She could magic new ones, translocating them from her belongings at Steve’s house in Cyprus, or she could hoard her magic, unsure how it would be tested in the next few hours and days.
A knock at the door interrupted her debate.
Great. She was wearing a towel.
“It’s Lilith. I brought clothes.”
Fay hurried the few steps and opened the door.
Lilith held a stack of women and men’s clothes. Her expression was reserved, but not unfriendly. She handed them over. “We keep a supply of clothing. I had to guess sizes. If you make a list, I can send someone out for anything you want.”
“Um, this should be fine.” Fay hadn’t expected a concierge service akin to that of an expensive hotel.
“Ask for help,” Lilith advised, and it was advice. “You need to concentrate on this test Mrs. Jekyll is so stirred up about. And letting people help you makes you more knowable.”
“Less magical?” Fay asked wryly.
“You’re an unknown factor. People need to slot you into a place. You’re Steve’s mate and what else? Ally? Enemy? Distant? Friendly?”
Steve walked out of the bathroom, towel around his waist. “Try hungry. I was going to go for food, but if you could ask the kitchen to send something up, Lilith, that would be good.”
“I’ll send a marshal to collect it.”
“Security duty?” Steve raised an eyebrow.
“Someone kidnapped you via the portal, from the fort. I take that security breach seriously.”
“So do I,” Fay said. She was beginning to feel cool, wrapped insecurely in a damp towel. Or maybe it was a deeper sense of insecurity and betrayal. Everyone was on edge for a reason. At the fort, the weres were accustomed to feeling safe.
It wasn’t quite as bad as the devastation in the Collegium a fortnight ago when they’d discovered a demon haunting the presidential suite, but this was its own kind of evil. People needed places they were safe. The ancient notion of sanctuary met a timeless human need. There had to be somewhere you could rest.
Lilith closed the door behind her, Steve returned to the bathroom, and Fay had her private time: a few minutes before food arrived. She put the clothes on the bed, separating out hers and Steve’s, and pulling hers on, quickly combing her hair and braiding it still wet. But as she moved automatically through the routine of getting dressed, her brain had nothing to distract it. She remembered Steve’s injuries and her own feeling of helpless despair on the mountain.
From what Narelle had said, Tarik intended to challenge Steve. The energy he wielded was outside anything Fay had experienced or heard told of before. It had corroded her magic. If she was better prepared next time, could she hold out for longer? or would she need to use her magic hard and early, unable to trust that it would remain strong under the bombardment of Tarik’s miasma? How much help could she be to Steve?
He walked out of the bathroom, clean shaven, and started dressing.
“What does Tarik want with you?” The question burst out of her. “Narelle said he thinks of himself as the rightful heir to the Suzerainty.”
Steve zipped his trousers. “Does he? Interesting excuse. Uncle will love it.” His tone said the opposite. He reached for Fay as she walked across to get her boots. “If I had to guess, I’d say Tarik has fixated on me as the symbol of what he has to defeat to showcase his power and—if he has delusions of claiming the Suzerainty—proving he’s the better man for the job.” He grimaced. “I’m to be his trophy.”
“Never.”
His caressed her shoulders restlessly, trying to soothe himself or her, or both, with touch. “Just for now, forget him. I need to hold you. We have a few minutes till the food gets here.” He settled them on the bed, spooning her. “Hell. As bad as being kidnapped by the bastard was, escaping down the mountain to find you there…” His voice deepened and vibrated with stress. He shifted even closer.
Fay would have preferred to face him, but as his bigger body cradled hers, warming her all along her back and thighs, she understood the comfort of the position. Her muscles relaxed and so did his. It was a quiet lesson in the power of simply being together. Her heartbeat and her hopefulness steadied.
As much as they needed to eat, the arrival of food was an intrusion. A marshal brought a tray containing spicy grilled lamb, flatbread, salad, baklava and coffee, and Steve took it at the door. A small semi-circle table stood against the wall by the window with two chairs. They ate looking out over Alexandria, able to glimpse the Mediterranean Sea shimmering in the late afternoon sunshine.
“Dad is an international human rights lawyer. His name’s David.” Steve began talking as he ate a second sandwich of folded flatbread and lamb. “He has a dry sense of humor. He’s not a diplomat like Granddad. Dad’s aggressive, but people don’t initially realize it since he pours that energy into protecting the innocent. You should see him in court or negotiating a settlement. He’s ferocious. But in everyday life, Dad’s low-key.
“Mom’s different. She’s in finance and makes a killing. She enjoys finding businesses that need restructuring, and going in and fixing them. She’s loud and social and loyal. She only uses that whole being the daughter of an earl thing if she thinks she can get an advantage over someone she detests. Otherwise, social status is irrelevant to her.”
Perhaps that was meant to reassure Fay.
“They live in London, high in a penthouse that satisfies Dad’s leopard. Near enough to Mom’s pack to satisfy her wolf’s gregariousness. They have all sorts of friends—weres, mages and mundanes—and keep an open house.”
He finished the sandwich.
She ate a baklava. The sticky honey was sweet and faintly flavored with orange water. She asked a safe question, aware that Steve was trying to prepare her, or make her feel better, for meeting his parents. “What’s your mom’s name?”
“Michelle.”
The phone in the room rang.
Steve wiped his fingers, crossed to it, and picked it up. After a moment, he said. “Already?” A pause, a sigh and a wry look at Fay. He spoke into the phone again. “Yeah, why not? The more the crazier.”
Fay heard laughter from the phone before Steve replaced it. “Your parents are here early, I take it?”
“On their way from the airport. And my sister and other grandfather are with them.” He crouched in front of Fay. “My aunts and uncles and cousins are waiting to hear if they should fly in, too.”
“They’re worried about you.”
“Mmm.” Humor lurked in his light brown eyes.
“Aren’t they?”
“Possibly. But mostly, I think they’re curious about you. Remember, I’d warned them away so that we could have time together. Now that they have an excuse, they all want to gatecrash.”
“Oh.” Panic! Mrs. Jekyll had not been a good introduction to his family.
“Would you like to run away?”
She glared at him, catching his laughter. “I’m not used t
o big families.”
“I know.” He rubbed her knuckles. “In a way, though, this is a good time to meet them. That crazy jackal and his pet mage give them something else to concentrate on.”
“Something other than me?”
“And how we interact, what schemes they can lure you into. Some of my cousins…no, we’ve got enough problems right now.” But he smiled, not truly bothered by his cousins.
Fay changed the subject, slightly. “Did you hear Lilith suggest I ask for help?” She waited for his nod, guessing he had heard from the bathroom. “She meant more than clothes, didn’t she?”
He sighed and raked a hand through his hair. “Lilith is an experienced marshal. When the opening for head of security at the fort came up, Granddad appointed her.”
“And your grandmother agreed?” Fay couldn’t see Mrs. Jekyll welcoming the challenge of another woman with authority in her home.
Steve grimaced. “Grand-Mère hasn’t shown you her best side. She can be—is—loving and charming. She’s Granddad’s best asset in dealing with mundanes. But you’re right. She likes to feel in control. Lilith, the way she dresses, she looks like a housekeeper.”
Fay snorted.
“Not a cleaner given a title in lieu of proper payment,” Steve responded to her disbelief. “Maybe I should have said butler. Lilith dresses in black, dresses just a fraction on the dowdy side of smart.” A glance at Fay. “Hell. I overheard Mom and Lilith talking. They crafted the strategy on Lilith getting the head of security position at the fort, and how they’d show Granddad that Lilith could deal with Grand-Mère.”
“Wasn’t that…did that…” Fay struggled to frame her question. “Did your mom helping Lilith manipulate your grandmother feel disloyal to you?”
“Loyalty doesn’t mean indulgence or blind trust. Being aware of the weaknesses or personality quirks of someone you love lets you compensate for them. The fort’s security came first, and then, how to manage it without hurting anyone’s feelings.” He tipped his head to one side, perhaps reading her uncertainty in her face. “What would you have done?”
“Wouldn’t a male candidate have been available for the job Lilith does? I think Mrs. Jekyll deals better with men.”
Djinn Justice (The Collegium Book 2) Page 15
