I folded my arms over my chest.
He spread his hands. “I’d ask if you missed me, but I really doubt you’d say yes, more’s the pity. I’ve actually done the three of you a favor. Maybe you don’t see it yet, but I have. You’d never have found each other this way. Instead it would have all been back and forth between the two boys, and Clarke would have either chosen one of you or you both would have gotten disgusted with her for not making a choice and neither of you would have been with her. This is much less painful for everyone.”
I snorted.
“Don’t agree, Clarke?” said Cunningham.
“You have no idea the pain you’ve caused,” I said. “You’re so selfish you couldn’t see it if you tried.”
“I don’t know why you insist on acting as if I’m the devil incarnate,” said Cunningham. “I like to have fun is all.”
“Yeah, with other people’s bodies,” said Logan. “You treat them like toys.”
Cunningham shrugged. “You are toys.”
Oh, I was really going to enjoy killing this guy, whichever one of us did it. Maybe I should pass onto them the wisdom that Penny Caspian had passed to me when we were hunting Santa. It wasn’t a good idea to get consumed with revenge. The point was for there not to be a Cunningham in the world, it didn’t matter who did it.
“People are not toys,” said Logan.
“Oh, shut up,” said Cunningham, and more compulsion threads shot out to burrow into Logan. Now they were both compelled, but I was still free. “Listen, you three stay in this room, why don’t you? I’ll be back once I’ve figured out what I want to do with you. Oh, do you have cell phones?”
No one said anything.
“Don’t use your damned cell phones,” said Cunningham, sending out more compulsion threads.
He swept out of the room.
* * *
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t fight him,” said Naelen.
Cunningham had been gone for hours. We were still staying in the room, even though I had broken the compulsions and we weren’t obligated to do so any more. I wanted to make sure that we waited until it was likely that Cunningham was asleep, but I was realizing that I really had no idea of how to know when that was. I figured four in the morning was a good bet, though. Pretty much everyone was asleep at four in the morning, unless they were out drinking or something, and Cunningham was alone.
That was what was making me nervous. Why wasn’t he doing anything with us? We were his only source of entertainment. Why leave us here and not do anything with us?
“I told you,” I said, “we’ll stand a better chance against him if we wait until he’s incapacitated.”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” said Naelen. “You left me there under his thrall, and I couldn’t do anything. I can’t stand it if he’s controlling me again. I can’t go back to that.”
“None of us can,” I said. “But we’ve got to play this smart. If that means being compelled to do a few things—”
“Like what?” said Logan. “You eager to be the filling in a Clarke sandwich again?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“So, if he tries anything like that, you’ll stop him?” said Naelen.
“What if he takes you away again, Clarke?” said Logan. “You going to play along with him then?”
“It won’t come to that,” I said. I hoped it wouldn’t.
“You’ve still never told us what happened while you were gone,” Logan said.
“She said it was just because of her, uh… female issues,” Naelen muttered.
“What?” said Logan. “When did she say this?”
“It was only to me,” said Naelen.
“Oh, thanks a hell of a lot,” said Logan. “Thanks for leaving me out.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Why not, if nothing happened?” said Logan. He furrowed his brow. “Wait. Why haven’t you had it again? Clarke, you’re not…”
“No,” I said, wincing. Trust Logan to go there. Naelen had let the conversation pass by without ever a thought of babies or pregnancy or anything like that, but Logan was different. Maybe that was why I had kept it from him. “And Cunningham gave me a birth control shot, so it’s not going to happen.”
“That’s good,” said Logan. “But it still doesn’t explain why you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I just…” I started to pace in front of the door, thinking that maybe now might be a good time to go find Cunningham after all. “I was worried about it. When we were all trapped in there for the first month and a half. Because I was late, and I was sure that I was pregnant. And I didn’t want it to have happened that way, and I didn’t want to be a woman who wasn’t sure who the father of her child was, and…” I rubbed my face. “I don’t like thinking about any of that.”
The guys were both quiet.
I came and sat down again. “I mean, if it did happen, what would we even do?”
They still didn’t say anything.
“I know that running around and saving people, always being in danger, is not the optimal lifestyle for raising children, but someday, I think… maybe I might want kids, and we’re all doing this weird relationship, and—”
“It’ll work out,” Naelen said quietly. “Sometime in the future. The fairly distant future. I mean, Eden and Jocelyn and Brian have kids.”
“But it’s different,” said Logan. “Two women and a man makes it different.”
“Why?” said Naelen.
I didn’t say anything, but I suspected Logan was right.
“Because, they’re all his kids,” said Logan.
“So?” said Naelen.
“So, think about it. What if Clarke got pregnant? You telling me it wouldn’t kill you the whole pregnancy wondering whether it was yours or not? And it’s not like we could just never find out and pretend or something, because half-gargoyle children tend to be somewhat distinctive.”
Naelen chewed on his lip. “And half-dragon children tend to be human for all intents and purposes. The dragon gene is actually recessive, so the human genes are dominant, and most half-dragons can’t shift.” He shrugged at both of us. “But still. It could be fine. I mean, either way, it would be fine.”
“Would it?” I said. “If I had Logan’s baby, wouldn’t you want me to have yours?”
“I don’t know,” said Naelen. “I’ve lived my life assuming that I would never have any kids. You were never part of my plan. This was never part of my plan. If I don’t have any children, I’m fine with that.”
“Well, I think someday I want kids,” I said.
“Okay, there you go, it’s perfect,” said Naelen. “You and Logan have babies and leave me out of it.”
That hurt me somehow. I shook my head at him. “No, that’s not… I don’t want to leave you out of it.”
Naelen shook his head. “This is a stupid time to be talking about this. We need to be focusing on Cunningham. He’ll probably walk back in while we’re in the middle of this stupid hypothetical, and we won’t even be ready for him.”
“If we walks back in, we let him do what he wants,” I said. I lowered my voice in case Cunningham was close by and could overhear. “We are going on the offensive, and we are going to wait until his defenses are down.”
“We are not going to be able to keep this up forever,” said Logan.
“Keep what up?” I said. “Fooling Cunningham? Not if you guys don’t get on board with the plan, we won’t.”
“No,” said Logan. “The three of us. This relationship. This doesn’t work long term. This is a bandaid we put on a bigger problem, and the wound underneath it is bleeding through.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” said Naelen. “It’s working fine. Maybe there are some hiccups here and there, like you and that Sonya person, but that seems to have been smoothed over pretty quickly. Clarke seems to have gotten over it extremely quickly.”
I clenched my jaw. “Wh
at would you rather have had me do? It was within the rules and if Logan’s happy, that’s the most important thing.”
“So, you don’t care if we sleep with other women?” said Naelen.
“I said you could, didn’t I?” My nostrils flared.
“What if one of us gets another woman pregnant?” said Naelen.
I was horrified by that thought. I looked at Logan. “Were you careful?”
“Yes, but it wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t, because I explained to you all about how gargoyle women don’t pair bond, didn’t I? There’s no expectation for a gargoyle man to be part of his children’s lives in gargoyle society. When I was growing up, I didn’t even know who my father was. All my sisters and I had different dads. It was not a thing.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” I said.
“If it wasn’t a gargoyle woman,” said Naelen. “Would you forgive that, Clarke?”
“Why are you asking me this?” I said. “Don’t do that.”
“There’s no way to guarantee that except to be monogamous to you,” said Naelen.
I shut my eyes. “Why are you harping on this?”
“I’m not harping,” he said.
“You’re the one who said this was a stupid thing to be talking about right now,” I said.
He sighed. “You’re right. I don’t know why I brought it up.”
We settled down into chairs around the table. We were quiet.
Seconds ticked by. Minutes.
Logan began tapping his fingers against the table.
Naelen leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
I took the monocle off and tried to figure out some way that I could hook the chain to itself so that I could slip it over my neck. I started to pry one of the links open. I’d loop it through another link and then bend it back closed. I worked on that for some time.
When I finally finished, I looked up to see that both of the guys were staring at me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” said Naelen.
“It’s like being trapped in that room again,” said Logan. “I could never decide if the worst thing about it was what Cunningham kept making us do or if it was the mind-numbing boredom of being locked up with nothing to do.”
“He brought us a television eventually, though,” I said.
“Yeah, what a guy, right?” Naelen laughed bitterly. “Look, you guys, we all know that this three-way thing is not ideal. But we don’t have any other options at this point. After everything we’ve been through together, we need each other. We’re connected. So, we need to be trying to think of ways to overcome our problems, not looking for chinks in the armor to exploit.”
Funny. This was the exact same thing I’d been thinking last night. I nodded. “I agree.”
Logan shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”
“Since we’re being so honest with each other,” I said, “why don’t you guys tell me what really went on between the two of you while I was gone.”
“What? When?” said Logan.
“When Cunningham took me away,” I said. “You guys were left in the room together for a week. What did he make you do?”
The guys both sighed and looked down at the table.
Naelen lifted his gaze to me. “He made us fight.”
“Fight?” I said. “Like physically?”
They both nodded.
“He made you hurt each other?” I furrowed my brow. “But I don’t understand, because after I came back, you two were… like in sync with each other or something.”
“Yeah, Cunningham didn’t think it through,” said Logan. “He thought it would make us more volatile. I think he wanted to push us to the point where we’d actually try to kill each other over you. But it didn’t work out that way at all.”
“Instead, we had to learn to trust each other,” said Naelen. “When he’d leave us, we’d work out all the ways that we could get around any of his compulsions. He’d say things like, ‘Fight until one of you isn’t conscious,’ and to get it over with, we’d signal to each other that one of us would let the other one knock us out. Usually me. Logan has a really hard head. He’s tough to knock out.”
They both laughed.
I shook my head. “I can’t believe you’re laughing about it.”
“We had to surrender to each other,” said Naelen. “We had to work together.”
“When you put your life literally in another person’s hands, it makes you closer,” said Logan.
“Yeah,” said Naelen. “And that’s why it’s okay, why I can let you be with him. Because I trust him with my life.”
“Exactly,” said Logan.
I looked back and forth between them. “Why didn’t you guys tell me this?”
“I don’t know, you were keeping your mouth shut about what Cunningham did to you,” said Naelen. “And besides, it’s not fun to think about.”
“But I thought… well I imagined a lot of awful things,” I said.
“So did we,” said Logan. “You should have been honest with us.”
I twisted my hands together. “Okay, then, total honesty?”
They both sat up straighter.
“He did do something to you, didn’t he?” Naelen breathed.
I shut my eyes, and my breath hitched. “I don’t know,” I whispered.
“How do you not know?” said Logan.
I opened my eyes and both of them had leaned in, their faces twisted and concerned.
“My cycle has never been that late before. And I was really worried that… almost convinced that I was pregnant. I couldn’t figure why…” My eyes stung. “One day, Cunningham touched me. He put his hand on the small of my back and he made this little noise in the back of his throat and then the next day, my period started.”
“That’s it?” said Naelen. “What are you thinking happened?”
“You think he…” Logan’s voice was quiet. “That he made you miscarry.”
I didn’t want to think it, but I couldn’t help it. I bit down on my lip.
“Wait, what?” said Naelen, looking back and forth between us. “Like you were pregnant?”
I still didn’t say anything.
“That’s crazy,” said Naelen. “Because it’s really hard for dragons to conceive. Like super hard. That’s why we have the mating bond in the first place. It’s the biological imperative to make little dragons, because dragons have to try over and over to get it to take, so—”
“So, it was mine,” said Logan, and his voice broke.
“Wait,” said Naelen. “What?” He got out of his chair and his nostrils flared.
Logan looked ill, like he might vomit. He gazed past both of us, not focusing on either of us.
I bowed my head, and then covered it with both of my hands. “I shouldn’t have said anything to either of you,” I told my knees. “Because it was a normal month except for being late. It didn’t feel any different than any other cycle. It wasn’t any more painful than it usually is or heavier or… I mean, maybe it was nothing, that moment. When he did it, I didn’t think anything of it, it was only later…”
Silence.
It ticked on for minutes and minutes. They felt like hours.
I raised my head, looked at both of them.
Logan still looked sick. He was staring at nothing, and his wings were trembling.
Naelen sat back down. He tried to smile at me. “You probably weren’t. I mean, stress can mess with a woman’s cycle, right? And that was a very stressful situation.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I didn’t think about stress.”
Quiet again.
I studied my knuckles.
“Clarke, maybe it’s not worth thinking about,” said Naelen softly. “We can never know, and no matter what, you’re not pregnant now, so…”
Logan turned to him, clenching his jaw and releasing it. “Of course you want to sweep it under the rug. It means nothing to you.”
“Hey,” said Naelen, givin
g his head a small shake, “it could have been mine.”
Logan curled one hand into a fist. He glared at it, not at Naelen.
“Even if it wasn’t,” said Naelen, “even if it was yours, Logan, it doesn’t mean nothing to me.”
We were all quiet again.
“Maybe it was stress,” I said. “Maybe it was just stress.”
Logan nodded. “Maybe,” he murmured.
And then none of us said anything at all.
* * *
Around four o’clock in the morning, I decided that if Cunningham was going to be asleep, he would be asleep then. It wasn’t an ideal situation, however, because we had run out of food in the breakfast room quite some time ago, and besides it had started to get pretty gross after sitting out for hours. Also, I’d stayed up all night. So, I was sleep deprived and hungry, and I didn’t know how much energy I was going to have to unravel magic.
Still, this was better than trying to face Cunningham while he was at full strength. I had to try.
In the darkness, we crept out into the hallway, and we looked to our left and to our right. We had discussed it, and we figured that Cunningham would stay in the air conditioned portions of the house. He liked his creature comforts, and he wasn’t going to be roughing it elsewhere.
Since the fourth floor wing was still destroyed from the dragon attack, that left the attic and the first floor wing. We were on the first floor. We decided to check that first.
We were closest to the kitchen, so we looked in there first.
It was dark and silent except for the hum of the industrial-sized refrigerator in one corner. The kitchen was equipped like some kind of huge restaurant, with a twelve-burner stove, three separate convection ovens, and three enormous stainless steel sinks. The place was clean. Immaculate. Darkness pooled in the corners. We checked them all. No Cunningham.
Then we looked in the dining room. It was pitch black in there. Naelen pushed a little bit of flame down his arm and held it in one hand. He used that torch to look around the room.
Ashes (The Slayer Chronicles Book 3) Page 16
