FoM02 Trammel

by Anah Crow

  Dane purred and licked the hollow under his ear. “Maybe.” His voice had a raw, predatory edge to it.

  “Even when you don’t smell like you, you do.” He pulled Lindsay out of the way of oblivious tourists passing around them, into the alcove, and trapped Lindsay against him with both arms. “Good.”

  He snuffled in Lindsay’s hair with another growl. There was no telling when he’d be done making sure Lindsay was all his all over again. Sometimes it was brief, a kiss and a snuggle. Other times, Lindsay ended up more than a little disheveled and—if the circumstances were right—quite a bit ravished. Putting Dane in hunting mode had its benefits.

  Lindsay wriggled in Dane’s arms, turning to face him. He wanted real kisses, a reward for making it as far as he had. Farther than he’d ever gotten before. Dane’s teeth were sharp against his lips, but that only made the kisses more intense.

  Dane’s next growl was louder and deeper, a rumble that went right through Lindsay. He spun them both around, pushing Lindsay up against the wall, one hand in his hair, the other working up under his shirt.

  Dane’s teeth were sharp and slick on Lindsay’s throat as he kissed his way down. He never asked Lindsay to hide them, or asked if they were hidden. It was up to Lindsay to maintain decorum. The ability to become less feral hadn’t changed Dane at all.

  No one could hear them, but Lindsay swallowed down his moan anyway, and tangled his fingers in Dane’s hair, dragging him back up for a kiss on the mouth. As much as he would’ve liked to win their game, losing had its own rewards.

  Something popped in Lindsay’s ear, and a puff of air blew their hair in all directions. “Training?” The voice on the wind was arch and as chilly as the wisp of breeze that tickled past Lindsay’s cheek. Cyrus. The wind could find him from time to time, if Lindsay weren’t careful. He wasn’t sure how—Cyrus couldn’t, from what he could tell. Just the wind.

  He slumped against the wall and fought down the annoyance that bubbled up inside him. “I failed.

  Again.”

  “Are you sure you’re trying to succeed?” the wind wondered. “No matter. We will find out how successful you are when it is not you alone who fails. Come now.”

  For all the years that Noah could remember, up until the day he’d married Elle, he’d prayed, wished, hoped, and done anything he could think of to get one thing. Magic. It ran like water in his family. It ran like water from some artesian well that went so far back into the past that the magic would never run out.

  But he’d been born dry. Drier than the dead.

  Now, he was drowning, drenched in magic, leaking tears and flames at random. He was out of his depth here in a new country, in a house that had never known magic until the last few months.

  Behind him, the old man and the woman were talking. Cyrus and Vivian. He’d known who they were long before he was sent to this listing house in the salt marshes. His family knew everyone of consequence, by reputation. By the nature of their magic.

  Cyrus can handle him. Cyrus follows the old ways.

  They’d sent him down and across the border to Cyrus, with his wounds still raw and his magic still wild.

  It made sense. Noah’s mother and brother couldn’t fully heal him, so there was no reason to keep him close. Cyrus had need of another mage in the house, and was willing to take Noah when even his blood relatives were waiting for him to take everything up in flames. He should count himself lucky he wasn’t somewhere in the Amazon right now. Noah knew his father’s pride and how much it cost Abram Quinn to go begging for someone to take his first-born in.

  Cyrus and the woman were talking about him, and he didn’t care to listen. Listening would make him angry. Anger would make him burn, would feed his gnawing fire and put everyone at risk. Feeling anything would, he thought. It was better not to take his chances here, without Rose to slip in between his thoughts and carry away the worst of them.

  Noah watched the wind in the gray salt grass and the birds in the gray salt sky, and felt nothing as much as he could. It was hard, knowing they were deciding what to do with him like he was a stray dog. He really needed a drink. Another drink to make him care even less.

  Abram didn’t allow drink in the house, but Noah had started as soon as his father and brother had left him at the airport. It had worked when he’d left the first time—before Elle had picked him up and made something of him—and it worked now. Not quite as well, but nothing worked like it should anymore, so Noah couldn’t complain.

  Part of him wondered if he was really here to learn, when it would be safer for anyone and everyone to have him put down. Cyrus could do it, and quickly. Without his reasons for living—his mother and his siblings—there in front of him every day, the thought that someone ought to finish him off loomed large in his mind.

  Noah wouldn’t be the first mage to meet that end, by someone’s swift and painless hand. Not even the first in his family. He’d wished for it without fail, up until some morning when he began to falter in that resolve. Weak.

  He clenched his fist to feel the pain in the half-healed wound there. He could do this. If he redeemed himself a little, he could go home someday when Cyrus could spare him and see his mother and his sisters.

  At least, after the baby, Rose might come.

  The door creaked open and two sets of footsteps followed, one lighter than the other.

  Noah turned to look enough to decide whether or not he should be worried. The first one through the door was a wisp of long hair and wide eyes, almost obliterated by the massive presence of the feral coming behind. Dane. Noah had known he would be here. He wondered what the big creature would think of him.

  He didn’t know what he thought of being in the house of mages his father considered to be stronger—or at least more resilient—than the Quinns.

  “My apologies for interrupting your...training.” Cyrus didn’t sound sorry, nor did it sound like training had been happening. So, that was how it was. Noah turned back to the window.

  “You know we were finished.” The voice was too light to be Dane.

  The creak of a suffering chair and a leonine grumble was definitely the feral. Over the years, a number of ferals had made themselves known to the Quinns. Rose had a way with them, even before she came into her magic, and some had trusted Noah’s mother to heal them. Noah knew better than to think that human form meant human ways.

  “I can never quite tell,” Cyrus said sharply. “It seems I forget there are more things to do than to keep all of us safe. But someone has to remember.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Vivian said. She sounded on the verge of laughing. She made Noah’s skin crawl, with her bright voice and her mild temper. “Neither has Dane. We just have a different perspective.”

  “Something that is the bane of my existence. If either of you had my vantage point, you wouldn’t take things so lightly. There is work to be done. Sooner than later. And apparently I must maintain the niceties all the while.” Cyrus meant him, Noah knew. Taking him in. “I have no time for it. Neither does Vivian.”

  “Neither do I. I sure as hell don’t want another one,” Dane rumbled. “I told you not to give me the one I have.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Cyrus’s voice was icy. “I regret daily my failure to take your desires into consideration. All of them.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the little one put in, sounding more amused than offended, “I think your decision worked out rather well.” The voice was definitely male, but young and full of sharp edges.

  Noah should have known he wouldn’t be left to learn from the old mage. It was better that he didn’t.

  An accident on his part could wipe out the knowledge and work of generations. He leaned his forehead against the glass and closed his eyes. Maybe they would send him somewhere else, since they couldn’t keep him. He didn’t want to be kept or bartered or passed around, but there were rules even he couldn’t deny. It was his own fault he was alive.

  “Don’t make me regret t
his decision as well, Lindsay,” Cyrus snapped. “It’s a good thing you have developed some backbone. I need Dane, which will leave you with time on your hands. Therefore, this one is yours. I would tell you to keep your hands to yourself, but you’ll do what you want, what with how you’ve been spoiled. Noah.”

  This one is yours. When Noah was twelve, this had been all he’d wanted, though in his family—

  among his people—it was something done with ceremony and celebration. Here, in Cyrus’s domain, it had devolved to this. This one is yours. Noah made himself move, so he wouldn’t seem rude.

  “Lindsay will show you to your room.” Cyrus pointed at the pale young man leaning on the doorframe. “The rest of us have larger matters to discuss.”

  “Me?” Lindsay looked from Cyrus to Noah and back again. For a moment, Noah was sure he was going to refuse. “But I—” Something stopped him. He closed his mouth, shook his head and held a hand out to Noah. “Let’s see if we can find somewhere you’ll be comfortable.”

  Noah looked at the hand—it was slim and soft and white. He couldn’t take it. It was impossibly familiar. The disconnect between his memory and reality nauseated him. He shouldered his duffel bag and headed for the door.

  His manners and his family pride made him stop before he crossed the threshold. He turned and gave Cyrus a little bow, the kind his father would have expected.

  “For a place in your home, my future is yours.” The words felt like they were being drawn out of him, from his guts and his spine. If you didn’t mean them, or if you didn’t have magic, he wondered, did they feel the same?

  “I will keep your fate with mine, for the days you remain with my people,” Cyrus replied, his expression softening slightly.

  Noah looked again at the man—barely more than a boy—to whom he’d been given. Lindsay. Lindsay appeared baffled by the exchange.

  “Wherever you want me, I’ll stay.” Noah waited for him to lead on.

  Dane listened to their footsteps fade before he let himself look at Cyrus. When he heard them reach the next floor, he turned on Cyrus with a hiss like a hot kettle.

  “Are you insane?” Before he knew it, he was across the room, hands planted in the papers on Cyrus’s desk, his face inches from the old man’s.

  “It’s been debated,” Cyrus said calmly. He tugged at the edge of a document trapped under Dane’s hand. “You’re impossible to please, you know. At least for an old man like myself. I thought you wanted to help me, not babysit.”

  True. It drove Dane around the twist when he was sent off on one errand or another, leaving Cyrus vulnerable. Worse, the old mage had taken to going here and there alone, with no one but Vivian’s girl, Kristan, to look after him. That Cyrus wanted more of his time should have been a relief.

  “You know the answer to that.” Dane pushed away from the desk, sending the papers floating like startled birds. He turned his back on Cyrus and went to look out the window where Noah had been sitting.

  The air there was heavy with the smell of blood and burning and pain.

  “While I don’t agree with Dane’s phrasing,” Vivian said quietly, “giving someone like Noah to Lindsay is...well, it’s a difficult task to take someone on under the best of circumstances.” Her high heels clicked on the floor as she went to gather the papers Dane had scattered.

  “Abram Quinn assures me that the boy isn’t a danger to those around him.” Dane didn’t have to be looking to know the dismissive gesture of Cyrus’s hand. He could hear it cut the air and see it in his mind’s eye. “He carries an artifact from their family to ensure that he won’t get out of control. There is a method to what you call my madness. I’m weary of having to prove it again and again.”

  “The kid is a Molotov cocktail,” Dane growled. He’d smelled it the minute he walked in the house, the barely stifled fire of a pyromancer. The artifact that kept Noah’s magic in check—Dane hated relying on artifacts and Lindsay would find it unbearable. Dane knew he was being overprotective. The thing wasn’t going to jump off Noah’s wrist and savage anyone. This was as good a time as any for him to let the habit go.

  Dane took a slow breath and let the animal in him slink away to seethe. The human part of him rose to the surface and imposed logic on his churning anger. You’re mostly angry that Cyrus admits to needing you at all, Dane’s rational mind pointed out. One of these days, you’re going to have to stop getting pissed off at everything that makes you feel something you don’t want to feel.

  “Noah came late to his magic by a great loss,” Cyrus conceded. “It will make his path difficult. But we can use him.”

  “And it didn’t occur to you to talk to me before putting a burden like that on Lindsay?” Dane had good reason to be offended.

  “I hadn’t yet decided.” When Dane turned around, Cyrus was watching him closely. “If I had given him to you, you would have had to choose between them every moment of the day. Could you have done right by him?”

  Dane couldn’t argue that point. Vivian had two already, but Dane had thought Cyrus would still give Noah to her as a first choice. Her apprentices were both well behaved by his reckoning, easy enough to manage. Kristan was canny and ambitious, with an enviable grasp on her magic. Ylli was shy and mostly harmless, all brown feathers and thin limbs. A minor feral, without even shapeshifting to complicate what he was.

  “There’s no way I could have taken him.” Vivian stacked Cyrus’s papers on the desk in tidy rows.

  “Putting him with a woman would have been too much to ask. Putting him in reach of Kristan would be insanity.”

  “He hates women, so you gave him to Lindsay?” That almost made sense, but it seemed crude reasoning.

  “He lost his wife.” Cyrus reached out for help and Dane took his hand, supporting him as he stood. “It seemed unnecessarily cruel to ask him to become attached to other women this soon.”

  “Who’s to say he won’t become attached to Lindsay?” Dane had to work out whether or not that idea bothered him. It didn’t take until the next thought to decide that he didn’t mind at all. Lindsay could use all the affection he could take. Dane began to see the benefits of the arrangement, as long as Noah wasn’t completely off his rocker. Lindsay needed something of his own. It was time.

  “Times have changed, Cyrus.” Vivian brought Cyrus’s cloak over and wrapped it around him. “I told you the young fall in love with anyone these days.” She fastened the cloak pin—a silver ring made to look like a moon with a bronze arrow threaded through it—with practiced motions. “The young and the foolish,”

  she added, with a wink at Dane.

  “The Quinns are an old family, with old ways.” Cyrus took Vivian’s arm once his cloak was done up.

  “You have taught Lindsay well enough.” He looked up at Dane and there was a hint of approval on his lined, birdlike face. “But I need you more than he does now. Noah will teach him our ways and defend him from Moore. Lindsay knows what it is to have a power greater than most, and he knows what it is to be disowned. They will manage, until I have need of them.”

  “I still don’t like it.” Dane knew—had known from the beginning—that he didn’t have a hope in hell of changing Cyrus’s mind. That wasn’t going to keep him from speaking out. Yes, it would be good for Lindsay to have something of his own, but did it have to be both damaged and volatile?

  “I anticipated your displeasure. It’s good how some things never change.” Cyrus laughed quietly. “I need you to go collect some information for me. At least I won’t have to hear you sulking. Kristan has the map. Perhaps she can console you. I have work to do.” He patted Vivian’s hand on his arm and they started for the door. “I would tell you to behave yourself, but that only seems to make things worse.”

  “Lindsay will be fine.” Vivian looked over her shoulder and gave Dane a warm smile. “It’s not as bad a choice as you think.”

  “You can see the future now?” Cyrus chided her as she opened the door for him.

  “Hardly
.” Vivian kissed him on the cheek. “I wouldn’t want your job for the world.”

  Dane was left to watch them go. Being human helped to keep his temper in check enough that he didn’t break anything in frustration. It wasn’t as though Cyrus had overstepped his bounds. Cyrus hadn’t taken Lindsay away from him, only given Lindsay something of his own.

  Dane exhaled slowly. It would be good for Lindsay. That much, he knew to be true. It would make him feel more like part of the family, for one thing, and more like he was necessary. Dane knew how badly Lindsay needed to be more than an inconvenience. Every other danger and painful reminder Noah carried with him could only serve to make Lindsay stronger, even if Lindsay was angry about it after the fact.

  When Dane put aside his ego and thought of Lindsay first, and only, the decision wasn’t as bad as it seemed, just as Vivian had suggested. Dane wasn’t going to admit that to Cyrus, though. Cyrus had all but given Lindsay the status of a clan-born mage, putting a Quinn under his care. A pyromancer, no less, and a strong one. Dane’s human mind turned that over and he decided he was pleased.

  Dane was going to make sure Lindsay had everything necessary to succeed at this. And once Lindsay did... The idea of having a walking firebomb devoted to protecting Lindsay had a lot of appeal.

  As long as it makes him happy . Happy and well. If Lindsay was happy, there wasn’t much that could go wrong in Dane’s world.

  Chapter Two

  In that instant, Lindsay’s life was turned inside out. Dane disappeared with Kristan as quickly as Noah had arrived, and Lindsay wrestled with the sense that Cyrus had played a trick on him, whisking away the familiar and throwing him into the unknown. For four days, Lindsay did little but watch Noah brooding on the back porch, hoping for a clue as to where to start with this stranger he’d been given.

  Lindsay didn’t need a case history to identify the most obvious traumatic event in Noah’s past. Much of the skin Lindsay could see was scarred from terrible burns. But the pain written in the curve of Noah’s spine and the hunch of his shoulders had been there a long time. Lindsay recognized that, on a gut level.