Tariq did his best not to smile, but he bowed royally to her. “Mistress Barbara.”
Bebe stomped up the steps and into Evie’s arms. When Isela looked back, Tobias stared at her, his jaw clenched as the muscle jumped with tension. She fought the urge to capitulate. She wasn’t as close to him as she was their youngest brother, Chris, but she had always looked up to him fiercely. She hated putting that look in his eyes.
At last, wordless, he turned and stalked up the stairs. Markus came last, not even bothering to look at her as he passed. Evelia went after him, murmuring something. Beryl paused on the doorstep.
“Bebe will talk to you about what happened,” Isela told Beryl, doing her best to keep the emotion out of her voice. “I should probably… go.”
Beryl didn’t argue. Isela had never felt so cold, standing out in the snow alone. She had almost reached the car when Tariq tilted his chin to get her attention. She turned at footsteps behind her. Her youngest brother Chris hurried down the stairs with a paper bag, his wheat-colored hair bouncing into his face. He bounded forward, sweeping her up into a hug that parted her toes from the cobblestones.
“I almost missed you!” he said. “What the hell was all that about?”
“I put Bebe in mortal danger.”
Chris sighed and set her down. “I doubt that. Tobias got all the worrywart genes from Dad. And Beebs has a knack for getting in over her head.”
She introduced Chris and Tariq. Chris swept forward in a few huge strides and pumped Tariq’s hand enthusiastically before hooking his thumbs in his jeans. He wore a T-shirt and work boots, as oblivious to the cold as he was undaunted by the presence of the centuries-old necromancer before him.
“I’ve been downstairs all day in the flat,” he said. “Fi took the kids to the zoo with Evie and left me to do all the painting. I don’t want her in there with that stuff now. Can’t be good for her or the baby. She felt it move. Did she tell you? It’s like all of a sudden we have a deadline. Like a real one. I think I can get the nursery done by the end of the week. But then we’ve got to get that master bathroom sorted, and I’m still over my head in the kitchen. I wish Dad were here. He knew how to do everything.”
She couldn’t help but smile at her youngest brother’s boisterous stream of consciousness. The baby wasn’t due until June; they would be finished in plenty of time, even with Ofelia on reduced duty. She treasured how plainly he mentioned their father’s absence. That was pure Chris, aching love and practical loss all rolled into simple fact. It wasn’t about the kitchen—Markus was just as good as their father with his hands. With a couple of guys from his crew, he could have the work done in a week.
“I wish Dad were here too, baby bird,” she said.
Chris flushed. Nobody had called him that in years; it had the desired effect of making him grin in that shy, adorable way that reminded her of their childhood.
“Anyway, Dad left me in charge,” she said, “and I say you’re doing great.”
“The hell he did,” Chris muttered, one lanky arm over her shoulder and giving her a squeeze that left her breathless. “He told us to look after you. You’re the one too curious to stay out of trouble.”
Chris had a way of making it sound like neither defect or fault but a quirky trait. Like a crooked tooth or a beauty mark. She hugged him back and felt his spine pop in places. He laughed, squeezing her bicep when they parted. “Look at you, all strong and stuff.”
He handed off the bag and finished popping his back in two sinuous spinal twists. “Mom said you forgot this. Don’t let the others get to you. They’re still getting used to the new order of business. Give them time.”
“I’ve got a lot of that now,” she said ruefully as they parted.
“Hey, get my sister home safe, you got it?” Chris said in imitation of their older brothers before dropping the act. “Nice to meet you, man. I like your sword.”
Isela’s gaze whipped back and forth between them. “You can see?”
Chris shrugged. “We all can.”
“I saw the one you helped the child carve,” Tariq said. “Impressive.”
Chris flushed and looked a bit like a kid himself. “I was wondering, could you teach me a few things… if you’re going to be around for a while?”
Tariq bowed again. “It would be my pleasure, beloved kin of my mistress.”
Chris grinned at Isela and wrinkled his nose. She didn’t need to read his mind to know what his expression meant. She laughed. “Tariq’s got a way with words. And you are my favorite… just don’t tell Toby.”
Chris bumped her shoulder as he passed, closing the distance to Tariq.
The two men clasped hands to seal a fresh agreement. Isela looked between them. Of course they would get along. The same way Gregor and Markus would when they finally decided not to kill each other.
She groaned, rolling her eyes as she sank into the car. “Let the bromance begin.”
Isela leaned her head against the window and let out a long sigh as they pulled into traffic.
“Well, that was quite an adventure,” Tariq said cheerily. “You know, I’ve never actually seen a were transition. I hear it’s wondrous. Perhaps your brother will trust me enough one day. And your mother… In my day, women like her ruled empires and were more ruthless and just than any male. I like your family very much, Issy. They love each other a great deal.”
“Yes.” Isela closed her eyes. “They do love each other.”
“I was including you in that statement.”
She made a noncommittal sound. They cruised alongside the Vltava, and the unobstructed view of the castle struck her as it always did. Majestic and somewhat sinister, it overlooked everything. There was no escaping it.
“We need to talk about your training,” he said. “And not with the blade.”
Isela’s phone buzzed. “Hang on.”
“Issy, this cannot wait,” Tariq murmured as she rooted in her coat for the device. “It is not right that you have no tutelage from either witch or necromancer…”
Tariq raised a brow at the image of the sunny smile from the dishwater blond on the screen.
“Kyle?” Isela picked up, ignoring Tariq’s expression. “What’s up?”
“Something is going down at the Academy.” His brows were locked together. “I don’t know if it’s about Yana…”
Isela frowned. “What about Yana?”
“She asked me to watch Mischa for a couple of days, and it’s been almost a week without a word. I just went to talk to Divya, but she won’t see anyone.”
A chill rolled over Isela. She waved at Tariq, pointing north.
“I’m on my way,” Isela said, disconnecting.
Chapter Thirteen
Azrael drove and the others rode in silence as dawn crested the plateau behind them. The Land Cruiser climbed the rutted road into the foothills with a certain mulish capability, at last winding its way along broken pavement and into a small village. Villagers drifted through the sleepy, mist-laden scene like ghosts. A boy drove a herd of goats toward the fields. Old women in long skirts with elaborately embroidered handkerchiefs covering their gray braids moved slowly in groups, bearing baskets and buckets or wheeling carts behind them. If not for the abundance of rusted-out cars and peeling billboard advertising, he could have been looking at a scene from more than a hundred years ago.
A few eyes trailed them as they slowly made their way into the center of town, but most fell away immediately. These people were used to the supernatural. They felt it on their skin. They might not have known what the three in the Land Cruiser were, but they felt the unnaturalness of their presence and avoided it. Vanka had been here before him, and he knew by reputation that fear was well earned.
Guilt for not seeing to these border territories rose in him. They were his responsibility, his to protect, and he had abandoned them. Since he’d taken over the territory, he’d been stretched thin. He’d been ruthless, focused on the urban areas, taking care of those po
pulations to strengthen his holdings. He’d left the outliers to their own devices, and this was what it had wrought.
Lysippe directed him through town to a ruined central square. They parked before the fragmented remains of a statue whose identity he could no longer recognize. More people were about—young men in groups, smoking cigarettes on corners and watching everything with mistrustful eyes; shopkeepers sweeping their stoops and cleaning their windows for the day.
He climbed out of the car slowly, allowing them to see him, to study him. He kept his hands in view and his face impassive.
They stared now, realizing that the passengers of the Cruiser were not Vanka’s people and emboldened by curiosity. Their faces were a curious mixture of features—epicanthic folds and broad nose, high brows and cheekbones and the occasional tawny head of hair. More than a few redheads, he noted curiously, and the faces here had a general familiarity. He thought if he looked hard enough, he could see descendants of his mother’s people, the nomadic steppe tribes that had once moved in long migrations from the Caspian Sea to the Caucasus Mountains and beyond.
“I’ve got to meet our guide,” Lysippe said, pocketing her phone. “Service is shit here. I’ll be back in ten.”
Be careful, he almost said.
Climbing out of the car to stand at his flank in the position of guard, Gregor saw it on his face anyway. When she was gone, he shook his head, spreading the map out on the warm hood of the car and making a cursory pretense of examining it.
“She’s the first of your Aegis,” Gregor said. “Yet you treat her like a child.”
Azrael bristled at the second mention of his treatment approaching paternalism. He spun but found his anger vanishing when Gregor wasn’t even looking at him but after Lysippe’s retreating form.“I made a promise.”
“And it interferes with her oath to you.” Gregor gazed back at his map. “She’s stood for it long enough, but not forever.”
Azrael gazed into the faces that stared back at him. “I’ll have broken the vow I spoke to the woman without whom I might not be here now.”
Gregor exhaled. “In the hold of a ship, when I decided to die, a man who was not a man told me, ‘You’re looking too far back when you should be looking forward.’”
“When have you ever taken my advice?” Azrael said wryly, a brow lifting.
“All I know is,” Gregor said, “you have to trust that she’s strong enough, that she’s lasted this long, that she will survive without your guardianship.” His voice was iron, confidence in every word. “Or you’ll lose her.”
Something in his tone drew Azrael’s gaze back to him. Again, Azrael saw the battlefield sky in the blue of his eyes, the dark pupils filled with crooked pine trees and even darker soil. “Was that what happened to you?”
Gregor’s gaze shuttered, and he folded the map meticulously. Their attention snapped to a small boy with a deeply freckled, sun-weathered face and a shock of auburn eyebrows. Gregor started forward, but Azrael held up a hand.
“Excuse, sir,” he said in hesitant English to Azrael.
Azrael lowered to a crouch to bring himself to eye level. “How can I help you?”
“My grandmother,” he said, placing each word carefully, “would like to invite you to tea.”
The family flat was above a grocery store that seemed to also sell hardware and the occasional stock animal. Azrael climbed the steps after the boy, quickly scanning the presences in the flat ahead. A young woman and her two children, a teenaged boy, and an older woman, the matriarch. The Grandmother of Invitation, he assumed.
All mortal. No trace of magic, though that could be disguised well enough. Still, there was something else here, a connection he was missing. After so long alive, he had knowledge buried deep enough to make it difficult to recall quickly. He waited for the tumblers to line up in his head with the information and paused at the top of the steps when the boy did.
The boy knocked on the door, calling out in the same dialect Lysippe had used.
Gregor hadn’t liked him going alone, but an order was an order. And someone had to wait for Lysippe.
The door opened to the teenage boy, all sullen and angry with intense freckles and darker, almost brown hair. “Come in… sir.”
An ancient woman’s voice snapped and the boy flushed, his gaze on Azrael’s shoes. “Please.”
Azrael ducked, entering the small, smoky room that was living and family room for at least six people. For all the smoke, it was neatly kept, tidy, a small television in the corner showing Russian game shows. The two children played on the floor with Duplo blocks. A fine-boned young woman came around the corner from the cooking area, set her eyes on him, and retreated backward.
Ruling over her domain from the faded brown easy chair was the matriarch. She filled the chair, though it was impossible to tell how much was her and how much was the layers upon layers of old clothing. With braided wheat-colored hair faded to gray and silver coiled elegantly on her head, she seemed to be as eternal as the mountain and the village itself. She could have been anywhere from an aged 65 to a youthful 103. He scanned her for the kernel of death and found it, still small in the corner of her lung. He reckoned she had another hundred years or so, give or take.
“Welcome to my home, O lord of death,” she said in clear, lightly accented English. “Forgive that I am not able to rise. My body is not what it was.”
“Please.” He shook his head and bowed instead. “You honor me with the invitation. I am not often granted such courtesies.”
“Perhaps you understand why this is?” she said, a touch of humor in her craggy voice. She sucked from the pipe in one hand and glared at the staring boy who had been his guide. “Boy, a seat for the master.”
The boy scrambled to drag a chair from the small dining table. Azrael resisted the urge to help him. The child placed it directly across from the matriarch, adjusted it slightly, and then stepped back like a soldier at parade rest. The matriarch’s eyes fell on him, and though it wasn’t clear how much she actually saw, it was enough for her to nod her prickly chin once in his direction. He seemed to sag with physical relief and retreated to a seat by the television.
“Please,” the matriarch said. “Master.”
“Azrael.” He touched his chest, accepting the seat.
“Olesya.” She imitated the gesture. “I studied in Odessa as a child. It is how I speak English so well.”
Azrael scanned the others present in the room out of habit. When his eyes fell on the large, growing stain of black in one of the young children, it took discipline to school his face to stillness. Olesya’s eyes were waiting for his when they returned to her face.
“So soon then,” she said quietly.
He debated his answer. Most humans didn’t want to know, not really, but the unflinching, rheumy eyes stared into him. “By the end of summer, if not sooner.”
The rattle of a tea service brought his gaze up. He knew without being told that this was the mother. The young woman, balanced the tray delicately as she approached. She set it down on the small table between them, the rich aroma of soaking leaves blending with tobacco and whatever they used to keep the house meticulously clean. She kept her soft gray-green eyes on the tea as she poured, but they did not fill with tears.
“She has lost her father to the mines, two brothers, and finally her husband,” Olesya explained, as though she were not there. “There is nothing else left in her to weep.”
Azrael accepted his cup and thanked her in Ukrainian. It was a guess, but her startled and brief eye contact was his reward. When she asked if he took cream, he heard the tears in her voice that would be shed only in the cover of darkness while her own children slept.
“Will you take my life for the child’s,” Olesya asked.
The young woman looked up, startled. Now her eyes filled.
“That is not the way it works, I’m afraid,” Azrael told them both. “It’s not my power to grant.”
The young woman clut
ched a fist to her narrow chest, fingers squeezing something at the end of a gold chain so tightly her knuckles went white as she looked at her mother-in-law with such raw, unfiltered emotion he had to look away.
“Go, I’m hungry, and you are burning my breakfast,” Olesya barked gruffly, without any bite.
The woman scurried away, prematurely greying hair floating behind her like a cloak.
“I can delay,” Azrael said when she was gone. “A year, maybe more. Would you ask that of me?”
“And what would you take from me in exchange?”
Azrael looked around. This family could afford to lose nothing, but he knew the code for such bargains. He would insult them with charity.
“This scarf.” He fingered the delicately embroidered cloth that had been placed beneath the tea service. “It’s finely made.”
“For your lady,” the woman said knowingly.
Azrael inclined his head.
“It is yours, master of night.”
“Did you do this work?”
“With my own hand.” She nodded. “Long ago, before my eyes— Now Julia, my daughter, does my work. But her hand is not as fine as mine, not yet.”
The tumblers fell into place in his mind, and he knew the startling red hair, deep freckles, and green eyes. The height even, so much like the slouchy teenaged boy in the doorway—another son?
“Yes,” the old woman said. “You know of him then?”
Azrael nodded.
“The one like you, the Red Death, came two months ago,” she said. “She had a job that must be done in the mine. She offered riches, fortunes to any who did the work.”
Her eyes unfocused, distant and aching with loss.
“The mine collapsed,” she said. “All the men were killed. Except one.”
“Your son,” he supplied.
Dancer's Flame (Grace Bloods Book 2) Page 16
