2. Darkness in the Blood Master copy MS 5 (12 page)

The summer lady stepped forward. “We’ve come seeking our cousin.” At her gesture, the music stopped. Her entourage once again took up their places behind her. With a flash of his sharp teeth, my green-eyed dance partner went to join her. Despite myself, I strained after him, but Ethan tightened his hold. “Our father grows anxious to have her with him again. We’ve come to bring her home.”

“We’re never going back there,” Nicolas said. “That hasn’t changed.” In jeans and a green hoodie, he looked like the same co-worker I saw almost every day. But when he came to stand within feet of the barefoot, blue-eyed woman, I could see the resemblance. He looked like a cooler, calmer version of the invaders. Winter to their summer, his ice-blond hair shone under the lights. His bearing became almost military in its formality, and for the first time I noticed he wore a slim silver sword against the denim of his hip. Nic, with
a sword?
I remembered the drawing I’d given Erik.

“Nic?” I heard myself say, but he ignored me.

“Where is our fair cousin?” the cat-eyed man asked. “Surely she should be allowed to decide for herself.”

“As if I would allow you within a half mile of my twin,” Nicolas said. His voice was deceptively soft.

“Enough!” Mr. Markov roared. “They are both under my protection.”

“It’s a simple family visit,” the summer lady purred, dragging her nails lightly across Nic’s chest.  “Nothing more.”

“Nothing is ever simple in this family,” Nicolas snapped.

 She smiled, a quick twist of cruelty. “Cousin. Is it too difficult to believe we come bearing our father’s love?”

For just a second, I saw it. The mask slipped and a stranger stood before me. This Nicolas had ice-pale cat-eyes and sharp, bared teeth. His words were frost-rimed steel: “He will never touch her again.” His muscles eased forward until he looked like Abigail before she pounced. “You have until sunrise.” He touched the sword. “Then I’ll come for your blood.”

Markov nodded to Ethan. In seconds, I was moving towards the door. Ethan pushed me past my employer, past a stone-faced Cassandra, who gave me the barest nod, and out into the street. The cold night air flooding my lungs was the sweetest thing I’d ever breathed. More people stood in small groups near the Coffee Shop’s door. Dressed in dark clothes with their backs to me, I didn’t recognize them. Ethan rushed me right past them.

“Wait… Ethan. What’s going on? Who are all those people?”

He didn’t say anything until we were climbing the stairs to my apartment. Even then, his tone was heavy and clipped. “I imagine they’re Markov’s people. To help with clean-up.”

“You mean… witches?”

He nodded at me, very slightly, as he let us in the apartment. He kept holding on to me all the way into the front room. We stood by the window, moonlight our only illumination, until I realized the apartment was completely empty. Logan had the night out with Amberlyn. “How do you feel now?” he asked, the words laced with unvoiced fears.

“Besides embarrassed?” I asked. I leaned into his shoulder. “I have no idea. What the hell was that? I’ve never felt like that before. I would have… my God. I would have done anything he wanted. Gone away with him. I almost did.” His hand on my forearm squeezed tight as a blood pressure cuff.

Abigail brushed against my legs and hissed at me, her fur as bushy as if she’d played in an electrical storm. “Uh-oh,” Ethan said. “She smells the glamour.”

“Yeah,” I reluctantly agreed. “I can still kind of feel it, too. My skin feels a little slimy. I think I want to go try and wash it off.”

His smile was worn. Our foreheads touched. His fingers through my hair were strong and sure, settling on the back of my neck, where they belonged. “It’s ok. You’re ok.” I think he was trying to reassure himself as much as me.

“Yeah.” I locked my own hands around his neck “We’re ok.” After a moment, I let myself sag against his shoulder. “You brought
The Tempest
home from the bookstore the other day.”

“The Shakespeare? Yes.”

“It’s my favorite play by him. When I first saw through their glamour, I thought of Miranda’s speech to Ferdinand.” Ethan looked at me quizzically. “
Oh brave new world, that hath such creatures in it.
” I shivered. “Only I didn’t mean it in a good way.” 

Chapter Twelve:

Stars

I traced the spines of Ethan’s stack of books. I could easily make out the gilt letters of the thickest two: Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and Dante’s
Inferno
. “A little light reading?” I teased, fingers pushing through books.

“Mmm. Well, I read fast. And I have a lot of down time at work.”

“What are you doing in there?” I asked, pulling a slim volume from the middle of the stack. “You’re not cooking, are you?”

“I just got you back from powerful illusionists trying to carry you away,” he said. I heard paper rustling, dishes banging against each other. “We may have figured out the clumsiness thing, but I have no desire to kill you with food poisoning. No, this is takeout. From the Wildwood Grill. I called it in before I left the bookstore.”

“Oooh, Wildwood. I love their burgers.” I flipped through the slim volume.
Practical Demonology
. I raised an eyebrow and slid it back into the stacks. “Did you know that, or was it a lucky guess?” I slipped out another heavier book and held it up to the moonlight.
Meditation: A Beginner’s Guide
. I put it down on the top.

“I might have been told,” he admitted, handing me a plate. As interested as I was in Ethan’s reading habits, not much could compete with a buffalo burger from the Wildwood Grill. I snatched the plate and pulled on his sleeve.

“Come on, let’s eat off the coffee table. I’m starving, and I’m too wiped out to do anything else. We can pretend we’re camping or something.” I shoveled buffalo burger in my mouth like a starving woman. Being glamoured and almost carted off left me ravenous. I couldn’t tell if Ethan was amused or disgusted with my lack of grace. I couldn’t muster the energy to care. “I never get a chance to eat at Wildwood’s. They open too late.”

We hunched over our take out. The sheer curtains made spectral swirls across the wooden floor as they moved through the moonlight. Abigail nudged Ethan’s knee, and he fed her bits of burger. “What?” he demanded, an onion curl halfway to his mouth. “The natives are restless.”

“The natives are fat and spoiled,” I grumbled. But I was the one who couldn’t be bothered to move his massive stack of books off the table. “I forgot that you’ve probably never been camping. That’s rule number one. Don’t feed the wildlife. It might come after you in the night.”

We watched as Abigail leapt onto the sofa and curled herself around her swollen belly. “I’ll remember to watch out for housecat attacks.” He wrapped an onion curl around his pinky finger. “Have you been camping much?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Logan loves it.”

“And you don’t.”

“No way. Bugs and sleeping on the ground. Scary noises in the dark.” I looked at him, this remarkable creature next to me in the darkness. He’d never been camping. He’d never been to school, or gotten in trouble with his parents, or done something dangerous because it felt good. Since meeting me, his life had been consumed with protecting my brother or myself. Then life as he’d known it had changed forever, and we were all still trying to pick up the pieces.

I wondered suddenly what he would look like by fire light, if the sharp contrast between flickering light and dark would make him look less mortal, more ethereal.

A rough palm cupped my jaw. “When you look at me like that,” Ethan said, brushing my lower lip with the pad of his thumb, “it makes me crazy. On almost every level.” He slid my plate from my unresisting hands, even though I was only half finished. I didn’t protest. “I almost lost you tonight.”

“They were working for someone else.” I felt ancient and weighted down. Facing Ethan’s concern took way more energy that it should have. “Someone told them where Nic and Amelie were, in exchange for bringing me to him. Whoever wants me can’t come here himself. So he sent them, the summer people.” Suddenly I couldn’t stand the things I saw in his over bright eyes; fear and love and possession clawed through my abdomen until I doubled over, ashamed and afraid. “I brought them here.” I whispered. “And now no place is safe anymore.”

“No you didn’t.” There was nothing soft about the way he held me. “They came for Amelie. You were just the catalyst. If whoever is stealing gifted Nephilim has to send others in his place, then Whitfield is the safest place you could possibly be.”

“But why?” I wailed. “Why me? Why now? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not now.” Ethan smoothed back my hair, held me closer. “Not tonight, ok? I just got you back. Tomorrow, ok? We’ll worry more tomorrow.”

I snapped my mouth shut as he took our plates to the kitchen. “Ok, but I insist on a distraction.” I ran for my bedroom. “We need supplies. A flashlight, marshmallows, and two dining room chairs.”

He tried to sneak a look into my room. “Are feeling all right? Maybe you should lie down. You did have a pretty nasty experience tonight.”

“No! Really, I’m fine. Just get the stuff.”

“Ok,” he said doubtfully, but he left me alone. After several minutes of rummaging in the cluttered mess under my bed and arranging sheets and candles, I looked over my fake campsite. It was, of course, completely pathetic. An old sheet sagged across two straight-backed chairs in a sad imitation of a tent. But I had managed to find the old plug-in planetarium. Fake stars rolled across my ceiling.

“Come in!” I yelled at last.

He gestured at the slowly spiraling dots of light. “I got the marshmallows. Can I join you?”

I made room for him beside my impromptu candle-fire. I balanced the bag of marshmallows on our knees, which touched. “We’re lucky we have clear skies,” I said, biting the inside of my lip to keep from laughing. He didn’t even crack a smile. In fact, he looked nervous. Really nervous. “Ethan?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

My carpet was white with a kind of black abstract pattern on it. Beyond the tiny circle of candlelight, it looked gray. Everything did, except for Ethan. He slipped a flat rectangular box into my hands. “I keep waiting for the right moment. But then it hit me that maybe there never will be a right moment and I should just, I don’t know. Give it to you. So here. It should fit. I, uh. I’ve been taking measurements…”

The flat rectangular box was a dusky purple color. It could only have come form one place, then. “You went to the Hollow,” I said, running one thumb over its satiny surface. “You had this made? Custom made? For me?” There were only a handful of businesses in the odd little community hidden away just outside the city limits. And only one of them made jewelry. Jacob Eden was a silversmith, as his father had been before him. Like most residents of the Hollow, he was fiercely independent and quite a bit strange, even by Whitfield standards. He only worked when he felt like it or needed money. That made his creations extra valuable. I couldn’t believe I held one in my hands.

“Yes,” he said, watching me anxiously. “I took your old watch out to Jacob’s to use for measurements. It was Jacob’s idea that they be snug. I mean, the overall design was mine, but he modified some things.” He trailed off uncertainly.

“You had Jacob the Silversmith hand-make something for me?” I repeated, staring at the box as if it might bite. 

Ethan was in agony. “Would you just open it already?” He held it between us, and we both stared into the box as if it held something spooky that might escape.

I nudged off the lid. “Oh, Ethan,” I said. My heart felt as heavy as if it had suddenly decided to take up bricklaying. “This… this is some serious jewelry.” I held two long pieces of delicate silver loops and whorls, held together with crystal and silver links. They looked like sun hitting water as it skipped over the limestone rock formations in the mountains. Two silver bracelets, three inches wide, they looked more like intricate wrist cuffs than proper bracelets. Ethan’s hands trembled slightly as he hooked the clasps together. When they were both firmly attached, I just sat staring. I think maybe he misinterpreted my silence because he started babbling.

“You don’t have to wear them if you don’t like them. You can just keep them as a reminder.” He turned an awkward shade of red. “Guys are supposed to be terrible at this kind of thing. I’ve had even less practice than most, so if you don’t like them, I understand.”

I traced the clasps with my fingers. The silver wire formed a loop that resembled an abstract wing right over my pulse point. “They make wings,” I said, still not looking at him. There was one wing for each wrist.

“Yes.” Ethan was acutely uncomfortable now; I could hear it in his voice. “I know that’s not truly what wings look like, but I couldn’t come up with another way to represent them. Like I said, you don’t have to wear them.” He sounded miserable. When I snuck a look at him, tearing myself away from the most amazing gift I’d ever been given, he sat hunched in on himself. “They’re silver, like your eyes. I got one for each wrist. I thought,” his shoulders settled with a defeated sigh. “I thought maybe if you could see them when the Shadows came, you might not be so afraid.” This last in a whisper.

“Oh,” I breathed. I could barely speak. It amazed me, how much he saw. I tried so hard to hide my fears: of the Shadows, of the darkness that lived inside me. He saw all this, and wasn’t afraid. “They’re amazing,” I whispered, launching myself into his lap. “They’re the most amazing present anyone’s ever given me. I’m never ever taking them off.”

“Well.” He looked pleased as he kept me from knocking the both of us over and settled me more evenly in his lap. “That’s good then, right?”

“Yes,” I murmured, tucking myself into the space beneath his chin. “Of course.”

“He asked about you. Jacob.” Ethan was embarrassed again. “He said he needed to know things if he was going to make you something pretty. ‘Women are particular when it comes to presents like that,’ he told me.” Ethan looked bemused, but also a little awed. “Jacob said that the trick of jewelry was knowing it was like saying, ‘I’m making a promise and giving it shape through metal and stone.’”