by May Dawson
His tone is flat, matter-of-fact, but for some reason I could swear he just told the other two guys, “Mine.”
At least for a little while.
Maybe Airren hears it the same way, because he stares back at Mycroft, his jaw stiffening. Then he shrugs.
“Sure, I hate it when you’re hangry,” Airren says. “Look after her. Cax and I will be right back.”
Mycroft gives him a look that says don’t hurry. Airren’s eyes roll slightly as he turns toward me.
“See you in a bit, T,” Airren says lightly. He nods to Cax.
Cax’s hand slips down my back, his fingers stroking low over my spine, and I stiffen slightly. But this feels different. Usually, anyone touching me makes me nervous. This time, I’m tense because of the lingering sparks from his touch, and because I wish he would touch me again.
As Mycroft and I head up the stairs, he’s as silent as ever, and I wonder why he wanted me alone.
“I guess I should thank you for magicking me down so I didn’t smash into the pavement.” Imagining myself as a bloody smear on the sidewalk makes me think not just of tonight, but of jumping through the portal from Earth, high above the city street.
This time, I trusted someone and I jumped.
“I’m glad it worked,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if the tech buzz over there would wreck the spell.”
“Excuse me?”
He shrugs one shoulder as he comes to a stop in front of his bedroom door. He pulls the key out from under the collar of his t-shirt.
“You told me to jump out of a window without knowing you could catch me? Now I’m not sorry at all that I smacked you!” In fact, I slap his hard chest with my palm one more time for good measure, although it’s more playful than anything else.
He catches my wrist with his hand. “Watch it. Turn about’s fair play.”
I stare up at him, perplexed. He turns my wrist over to press a kiss to the inside of my wrist. His soft lips, his breath against the vulnerable inside of my wrist, sends a rush of longing through my body.
“I think it will take a while before you’re ready to play rough. So don’t start something you can’t finish, girl.”
I’m standing so near him that I feel the heat come off his body, and there’s a smolder in his dark eyes that is pure lust.
No, not pure lust—there’s affection there too.
“Why a while?” I ask, my tone softer. Although I’m still not pacified, part of me thinks that Mycroft is teasing when he says he wasn’t sure he could catch me. He’s so damn hard to read that I can’t tell.
He strides into the room and I close the door behind us before he turns to face me. The room smells faintly like the two boys, like their aftershave, and like black coffee and old books, and the faint lavender scent of clean laundry.
“I told you that I’d tell you about my brother if you’d tell me about the man who came from Avalon,” he says.
My shoulders dip slightly. “We’ve had a good night. Really? Now?”
“We’ve had a good night? You went toe-to-toe with a murderer.” He crosses his arms, unsmiling as ever, but there’s a light in his eyes that makes me think of pride.
I cock my head to one side. Mycroft always seems matter-of-fact about his magical giftedness, even though I know not everyone could have eased my plummet from a sixth-story window and caught me against his chest. He’s more quietly self-assured than proud.
Oh. Maybe he’s proud of me.
I shrug one shoulder, imitating him, pretending I manage to hold my own against scary people every day. Maybe someday, I’ll feel that way on the inside. Too often, I feel like a rabbit in a world full of wolves.
Mycroft flops onto his bed. He sprawls across the mattress, tucks one muscular arm beneath his head, and crosses one calf over his thigh. He looks comfortable, but the pose also emphasizes the leanness of his waist in contrast to his broad pecs. His t-shirt slides up one side during the flop and he doesn’t bother to pull it down. I try to drag my gaze away from the cut squares of his abs, the tightness of his side, the smoothness of his tan skin.
“I’ll tell you a story,” he says, his eyes on the ceiling. “If it won’t ruin your night.”
“Of course it won’t.” I feel sorry now that I said that. I don’t want to talk about the man who hurt me, but I want to know Mycroft’s story if he wants to tell it to me.
Despite Stelly’s teasing, I’m not going to tell her any of Mycroft’s secrets.
Tentatively, I sit down on the edge of the bed. He throws his other arm out, splayed across the pillow, and the wide expanse of his shoulder looks like an invitation. But I’m not quite sure if that’s how he means it, so I hesitate. His gold-specked brown eyes watch the still white ceiling so intensely that I find myself glancing up too.
“It seems like magic should make life come easy, but that’s not true for everyone. My dad was a vet too, but he couldn’t find work and ended up working at the mines in Tessel. You ever been to Tessel?”
I shook my head. Tessel’s a rough town. I knew that once, but I’d forgotten about it; Tessel was never part of my version of Avalon.
“Airren and Cax grew up differently,” he says. “Cax just wants an adventure. Airren… well, Airren has to have a mission. It might sound like the same thing, but it’s not.”
“I can see that.” I finally settle in against his side, resting my head in the crook of his shoulder.
He tenses slightly as I nestle my head into the space in his shoulder and I’m not sure I’m entirely welcome. Then he wraps his arm around me, resting his hand on my hip. His hard-muscled thigh is against my knees and I’m not quite sure where to put my hands. He reaches across and takes my hand in his, pulling my hand over to rest on his chest. When he breathes, my fingertips rise and fall.
“I joined the Marines first, looking for a way out. I’d started working in the mines when I was fourteen, soon as I was allowed. But I always knew I was meant for something that wasn’t Tessel. That place…” his jaw tightens. “That place sucks the magic up. It’s a black hole.”
“Anyway, I went into the Marines and then I came home and told my little brother all about it. Mirin. His name was Mirin, and he was a good kid—he always went along with what I wanted growing up, and that got him into trouble, but on his own he was—he was just good. Kind to everyone. Light-hearted. We’re opposites.”
I think Mycroft is good, but this is his story to tell, so I press my lips together even as my heart aches for him. He thinks he was the reason his brother joined the Marines.
Ravengers only came through the portals to certain parts of Avalon. They didn’t come here, since Corum doesn’t have a portal. And they didn’t go to Tessel, which is far from the Divide. Tessel is said to be a place where magic is thin and anger is thick. But on the Savage Night, Tessel was a good place to be for once.
He pats my hip absent-mindedly.
“So he and I campaigned to be in the same unit after he finished basic.” He shakes his head. “I was a medic, but he didn’t want to waste time on any more school than he had to. He wanted to get to where I was—we were always close—and he wanted to get busy doing something. So he joined my unit as Infantry.”
“As soon as we found out there were Ravengers coming through the portal, our unit deployed on the streets in Asgraf. We went street by street in two platoons, one evacuating people out through portals to a safer part of Avalon, and one platoon putting down any Ravenger we found.”
“His platoon got pinned down by a flock of Ravengers. Those Ravengers seem stupid, all teeth and claw and no brain, but they strategize. The night was chaos. We had a bunch of wounded civilians. I was keeping my head down, moving from one torn-up kid to another, trying to make sure they were stable enough to make the jump. When they called for a medic for a platoon, I didn’t even know it was my brother’s.”
His shoulder muscles bunch under my cheek, as if his muscles are tensing even though his body is still. The scent of citrus and
leather washes over me, that scent of his aftershave and his body.
“He was still alive when I found him. I did what I was supposed to do. I tried to stabilize him and then he grabbed my arm, my wrist. He looked into my face like he knew he was dying and it was the last time we’d see each other. But I kept my eyes on my work and said, you’ll be all right, brother, just hang in there. I sent him through the portal and I went on to the next Marine. Last thing I ever said to him was a lie.”
“You were doing what you had to do,” I say.
He shakes his head faintly, and his eyes close, his lashes resting on his broad, chiseled cheekbones. “Doing what you’re supposed to do isn’t enough sometimes. You have to think for yourself if you want to be worth anything.”
I want to tell him that I’m sorry for what he’s been through. I want to tell him thank you for telling me something personal, something that it cost him to say. I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to be perfect, and that I think he’s a good man. But I know he wouldn’t like hearing any of that.
I lean up on my elbow and rest my hand against the hard lines of his face, turning it toward me gently. His golden-brown eyes are still tortured when they meet mine.
“You were right when you said it’ll be a long time before I trust anyone like maybe I should,” I say. “But I do trust you, Croft. As much as I’m able.”
He presses my palm to his face, his big hand overlapping mine. “Maybe a little more today than yesterday.”
“A little more today than yesterday,” I promise, and I lean over and press my lips to his forehead.
“I don’t know if you even should,” he muses out loud. His forehead wrinkles slightly under my lips as he frowns.
“I do.” I kiss his cheek, the hollow under his high cheekbone.
He strokes his fingers over the curve of my hip. His touch is light and casual, and I kiss the corner of his lips. I have a feeling there’s a well of passion in Mycroft just below the cool surface, but he’s keeping the well covered. For me. Because it would scare me, and I need to be the one who leads for now.
I settle back on my elbow, a narrow space between us, although I make small circles on his chest with my fingertips. “I think you guessed the first part of the story of the man who came through the portal after me.”
My cheeks flush. What happened that day humiliated me. Telling the story over again seems humiliating too.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said I’d swap. I just want to fix things for you if I can. If he stole your magic…”
“You think he literally stole my magic?” I’ve always thought it was my fear that made my magic unreachable. My fear, combined with the poison of dirtside, had choked out the last tendrils of my magic. “People can do that?”
“There isn’t much that magic can’t do, beside raise the dead and make inanimate things think. Maybe it can right some wrongs, too.”
“Maybe.” I don’t want to get my hopes up. I need to find a way to bring my magic back. I’ll track down the man from Avalon if that’s what it takes.
With these men by my side, I’m sure we can find him, but I don’t know if it will matter.
For a few long seconds, there’s silence in the room. Outside, in the hall, someone calls out a name and I hear laughter and running feet. Then the sounds fade away.
I clear my throat. The noise sounds awkward in the quiet, and I launch into my story before it can stick any more in my throat. “He’d lost everything. His kids, his wife. He thought he was getting some kind of revenge on my father by wiping out his ‘last trace’. I was fifteen. He found me at my foster home when there was no one home, and he followed me in the front door.”
These are all facts; they’re the easy part.
“I tried to fight him off. My magic wouldn’t work. He started to choke me to death, but he changed his mind.” I glance at Mycroft’s face, but it’s impassive, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling. I know Cax would pace, raking his hand through his hair, and that Airren’s hands would tighten into fists. But Mycroft is as cool and quiet as if I were telling him a story of how I went shopping for bread and eggs. It’s comforting, in its own way. I don’t have to manage his feelings while my own heart is thumping wildly out of control.
“There was a noise outside. I was afraid for my foster family, that they would walk in on him and he would kill them. He got up to check, and I got my knife—I was quite the juvenile delinquent I guess—and I didn’t try to run because I didn’t think I would get away. I let him get close and I knifed him in the guts and he ran.”
When magic failed me, pointy steel didn’t.
Mycroft’s eyes widen. “There will be a record somewhere. If he came back through the portal needing medical attention…”
I have to wonder why Mycroft wants to track him down. We can say it’s to investigate and reverse the spell—if there is one—that claimed my magic, but there’s a tightness in his jaw and in his hands that makes me think he has other intentions.
“Maybe,” I say.
“You’re a brave girl now,” he says, his touch skimming my cheek. “And you were brave then.”
“Not brave enough.”
He shakes his head faintly, rejecting my put-down of myself. This time, he leans up on his elbow. “Brave enough.”
“I guess the Marine would know,” I say lightly.
The corners of his eyes crinkle slightly. “As a Marine, I’m an expert on the line between brave and stupid, and just when to cross it.”
“Was jumping out of the window tonight stupid or brave?”
“Brave.”
“Oh really? What if your magic didn’t work?” I ask.
He pretends to stretch, showing off his thick biceps and the lean taper of his waist, and I find myself grinning, the moment lighter. I feel as if some weight has lifted. That’s strange, because the only other times I’ve brushed against telling someone that story, it’s left me feeling dirty, just like that afternoon did.
“You would catch me?” I push his chest gently, feeling his hard pec under my palm. “We both would have been splattered on the sidewalk.”
“You’re a tiny thing,” he says. “I would have had time to improvise.”
“Two seconds? Three? Before…” I move my hands through the air as if one hand is me, flying through a window, and the other hand is the ground rushing up to smack me into mush.
His deep brown eyes catch me. There’s the faintest smile playing at the corner of his lips, and they make me want to lean forward and kiss him.
“I’d catch you,” he promises.
Those tenses are funny. He’s not promising that he would have caught me. He’s promising that he would catch me. Will catch me?
But Mycroft turns away, rolling up to sitting, resting his arms on his knees. He’s brushed as close to cheesy as Mycroft cares to.
“How’s your knee?” he asks, resting his hand on my leg, just below my knee.
“It’s all right.” His fingers resting on my shin make me tense and excited all at once. If his fingers titillate me just on my shin bone, I’m in trouble when it comes to this guy. And then, because my mouth moves a little faster than my brain, I ask, “Do you want to take a look? Make sure it’s all healed?”
He nods. “Sure.”
“I’ll change into a pair of your shorts. I don’t think Stelly’s bringing clothes down for me.” I’m already up and halfway across the room when I realize that I’m talking to him like I’m moving in. I turn around, feeling awkward and apologetic.
“Third drawer down,” he says.
Well then. Okay. I open up his drawer and pull out a pair of gray basketball shorts that are so long, they might not actually be shorts on me.
I change in his bathroom, quickly folding my jeans and laying them on the counter. As I pull on his shorts, my emotions are a jumble. I want him to touch me, but I’m changing in the bathroom; I want him to kiss me, but I don’t know what I’ll do after th
at. And there’s a ticking clock, too, before Airren and Cax join us.
I wouldn’t mind if they really joined us. Cax is right: I like all of them.
That kind of relationship isn’t uncommon in Avalon. But it seems a bit much for the Dark Lord’s daughter to have even one war hero of the Divide in her bed, forget three rough men all loyal to the Crown.
A girl can dream, though.
I feel silly as I walk back out into Mycroft’s bedroom. But I sit on the edge of his bed and bend my knee.
He takes my kneecap in his hands and gently, but firmly, massages the sides of my knee. “It looks good. Barely any swelling. How does it feel?”
“All right,” I tell him. It ached earlier, but now with his hands on me, I can’t feel any pain.
He nods, his eyes still on my knee. His thumbs rest on my kneecap now, his fingers resting lightly on my calf. “Sometimes another injury develops when you favor the first. Everything else feel all right?”
I nod. His fingertips press deeper into my calf, sliding down the hard egg of my calf muscle, and my breath gives slightly at the sensation.
“Your calves feel tense,” he says. “Maybe the muscles are strained from walking with a swollen knee. You’ve gone quite the distance on that injury.”
“I’m tough,” I say.
“You could be a Marine,” he says lightly.
I have to grin at that. “I’m pretty sure the Marines wouldn’t take me.”
“I don’t know about that.” He draws my leg into his lap, running his thumbs up and down my calves. “The Marines would be lucky to have you.”
The steady pressure of his thumbs creates a strange pleasure-pain that relieves the tense muscles and creates a new tension at the same time. My core tightens as his hands work steadily up and down my calves, working out the kinks.
I bite down on my lip and settle down into his bed. I let my head fall onto his pillow. I’m young but not innocent; I expect him to turn this into something else. My head may not be ready, but my body is responding to his thumbs pressing into my calf, just below the inside of my knee, and then sliding down the length of my calf to the top of my ankle. His fingers brush quickly over the inside of my lower leg, returning to the top, and I squirm.
