ThirteenNights (6 page)

Brick buildings and ivory columns greeted Tai and Annie as
they made their way through Harvard Yard to find Sander Xenos. The light
jackets they brought from Washington, DC looked out of place among the down
coats and sheepskins of the Harvard students in the nippy Boston weather.
Warrior trained, they barely felt the chill. They had no trouble navigating
their way to Robinson Hall on Quincy Street, the home of Harvard’s history
department. Once they were inside, a student pointed the way to the appropriate
office, but Sander Xenos was nowhere to be found. After several inquiries with
the departmental secretary, they discerned that Sander was not on campus, was
not expected to be there, and she was not sure when he’d return. He was there
for research, and had no teaching obligations.

Popping into a café, Tai opened his laptop, performed his
magic, and fifteen minutes later had a home address and directions to a
nondescript modern apartment building that overlooked the Charles River. They
waited to enter behind a tenant so as not to have to call up. Trying to explain
Tai on the apartment intercom would have been an exercise in futility. If their
appearances were as similar as Phoebe insisted, better to have Sander see him
for himself. On the top floor, they found his door, rang the bell and waited.
They rang again, then a third time. Nothing. Tai quickly picked the lock and
dragged Annie inside.

“Why are we doing this? We protect, this is wrong,” she
whispered, even though they were already inside and no one could hear them.

He squeezed her hand. “I want to learn something about him,
help me prepare to meet him.”

She nodded but her body remained tense. “I’m not sure how
much you’ll learn from this place. Aside from the packed bookshelves and old
maps hung on the walls, the place feels sterile.” It was a typical rental with
blah, beige carpets, walls, cabinets and bathroom tiles. “He’s not really
planning on immigrating here.”

“Books can be pretty revealing. You take the shelves by the
couch. I’ll check the ones over the gas fireplace.” He patted her butt, coaxing
her to get started.

Volume after volume of mythology—Greek, North American,
Asian, Norse—he had scores of books on each pantheon from all time periods.
Modern, older, and others that looked almost ancient. Some humans suspected
that myths had a basis in reality, that a supernatural world coexisted with their
own. Did his father?

“Tai, I’ve got all his books. He’s written a mountain’s
worth about fertility rates, culture and family structure among various tribes,
ancient peoples all over the world. He really might be able to help.”

“I also think he may be a myth hunter.” Humans who looked
for evidence of their existence. Almost every pantheon had a public relations
team who monitored the media and went into action to keep the existence of
supernatural beings a secret. “Whether he’s dangerous or intellectually curious
is something we’ll determine when we speak to him.” Tai might want to change
the rules but he also knew that neither the humans nor the pantheons were quite
ready for that secret to be out yet. “I’m heading into his bedroom to see if I
can find his computer. I want to hack his calendar.”

“You have no shame.”

“It’s why you like me.”

The computer had no password protections, anywhere. It
opened right up, his email password was saved. Tai slid right in, found nothing
and let a groan of frustration that had Annie scurrying in to check on him. The
clock around their future ticked faster and louder. The need to find his
father, who was proving to be an untraceable Luddite, clawed at his gut. He
needed answers, a strategy, and time was running out if he was going to keep
his Amazon, his child and prevent a death sentence. Once the baby was born,
there would be no way to hide what he’d done.

“Why don’t we park ourselves at the Quill and Parchment? If
he is a myth hunter, that would explain his frequent visits. Our clubs and pubs
do have a distinct odor. Some humans learn to detect it.”

He nodded, not having a better idea.

At the pub, they discovered another reason why Sander Xenos
might spend a lot of time here—it probably felt like home. Tempered lighting, a
polished wooden bar, darts in the corner, ales and bitters by the pint, fish
and chips, ploughman’s lunch and shepherd’s pie on the menu and a collector’s assemblage
of scotch whisky lined up on the shelves—a quintessential British pub. They
found Clio, the pub’s muse proprietress, behind the bar. Since they were new in
town, pantheon etiquette required they make themselves known to her. They also
asked about Sander.

Clio cocked her head in thought, her gaze locked onto Tai.
“You’re a game-changer,” she whispered, eyes gone wide.

“How do you know?”

“Game-changers have different textured threads on the Fates’
loom. I can feel it on you. Will the person you seek feed this change?”

“We think so.”
I hope so.

“He looks like you. Settle yourselves at a table. If he
comes in, I’ll make sure you meet.”

“Is he a myth hunter?” Annie jumped into the conversation.

“Yes, but his motives are mixed. If you need to reveal your
true origins but determine him a danger, I have several siren patrons I can
call who can voice the memory away.”

They both nodded and found a table in the corner with full
view of the establishment, including the door.

Twelve games of hangman, eleven stolen kisses, ten arm
wrestles, nine footsie matches, eight pints of beer, seven trips to the
bathroom, six rounds of darts, five bowls of peanuts, four bacon burgers, three
Scrabble contests, two cheesecake wedges and a tumbler of Glenfiddich later,
the pub’s inhabitants who had slowly streamed in throughout the night started
to exit. The clock read ten thirty, half an hour to go before closing. English
pub to the letter. Clio had trained her clientele well.

“Another game of hangman?” Annie suggested without
enthusiasm. It seemed his Amazon had a secret love of word games, but even she
had her limits. When this was over, he’d fill their house with them.

The clock spluttered to 10:35, 10:40. Annie looked at him,
compassion in her eyes. Her hand reached across the table to squeeze his. “I’m
sorry, babe. We can try tomorrow. Just help me think of something to say to
Marta. She’s been calling every other hour and I’ve been letting it go to voice
mail.”

“Text her. Tell her you’re busy bonking your brains out and
to leave you to it.” Unable to resist, he leaned toward her to land a kiss on
those luscious lips, showing her just how much he appreciated her support. In
mid-liplock, Clio interrupted. “Look who just walked in.”

He turned his head, his hands remained tangled around
Annie’s fingers.

“Wow, it’s like fast-forwarding you a few decades,” Annie
said, vocalizing his thoughts. “You’re only going to get sexier when you age.”

“Another reason to stay with me. Let’s do this.” His gut
heaving, he stood to face Alexander Xenos, who dropped his scotch glass when
Tai approached him.

“Who are you?” Lines rippled across his forehead as he
leaned back against the bar to steady himself.

“Your son.”

Sander pushed his hair back off his face. Still thick and
lush like Tai’s wilder, less-styled tresses, but with elegant streaks of gray
at his temples. “Bloody hell of a way to tell a man.”

“I’m shocked myself. If I could have done it differently, I
would have, but…” He pulled Annie to his side, desperate for her scent and
warmth. “We need your help or our unborn child will be taken from us at
birth…as I was taken when my mother tried to bring me to you.”

Sander’s eyebrow flipped up in a perfect Mr. Spock
imitation. “Clio, another Talisker. I’ll meet you at your table. You’ve got
some ‘splaining to do, Lucy.”

“Your dad has one geeky sense of humor, he may be all
right.” Annie pitched her voice low, knowing Tai’s hearing could pick it up.
“I’ll text Marta and get us a round of drinks. I think your father’s going to
need quite a few. He’s already downed the last one.” It took an enormous
quantity of alcohol to inebriate one of the warrior races and it had no impact
on their fetus. Annie and Tai had not even come close to their limits.

“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? I assume you have a
mother with whom I consorted in my early years.” Sander was already halfway
through the drink Annie brought him.

“Her name’s Phoebe. You met at an historian’s conference in
London, thirty-one years ago.”

“I remember the conference. Her name wasn’t Phoebe.”

“You may know her as P.S. Cassidy.”

“Cassie? I tried to get back in touch.” He drained the scotch
glass. “She cut me off, said she wanted nothing to do with me. I never saw her
again at another conference. As if she knew which ones I was attending and
avoided them.”

“You never married?” Annie asked.

Sander shook his head and waved Clio over with another
drink. A soul-deep sadness softened his eyes. His body hunched over as if in
pain. “There was something different about her, otherworldly.”

Tai glanced at Annie, who nodded in response. “She’s an
Amazon, a supernatural being.”

“I think I knew that,” Sander whispered. “My obsession with
mythology, trying to answer the question of whether or not supes existed
accelerated after I met Cassie, uh, Phoebe. Blimey, I can’t get my head around
this.” His accent descended from clipped, proper English to a more cockney
rhythm.

“Maybe we could meet up tomorrow, talk this through. After a
good night’s sleep,” Annie offered.

“Flipping good idea.” Sander wiped his brow.

“Meet us back here tomorrow when it opens at eleven,” Tai
instructed.

After Sander left, Clio tapped into the pantheon network and
had him followed. The tail would watch over him, make sure he didn’t escape.
They didn’t always wipe knowledge from humans but Sander had not yet proved his
trustworthiness.

* * * * *

Annie dragged a wound-up Tai to their new hotel, given the
state of their room this morning. She stripped them both and ushered him to the
bed. Tai pulled her close, locked her in the steel cage of his arms and nuzzled
her head and neck gently. The tenseness of his body told the tale of the emotional
churning the past few days inflicted. Like most male warriors, he did not
verbalize his emotions. Unlike them, he let her know in other ways how deeply
he felt. Right now, as they subtly declared war on the warriors’ way of life,
she needed the words.

“Why do you want me the way you do?” she asked.

“For all my rebelliousness, I
am
a Gargarean warrior
as you are an Amazon.” He gave her a quick kiss on the head and held her
impossibly closer. “How could I not fall for someone as strong as you with the
courage to be gentle, to love, to be different? You’re everything I ever wanted
but never believed I’d find.”

After a nip to her lips, he let her go and pulled a
pillowcase off the pillow, then carefully ripped it into five ties and handed
them to her. To be tied up and blindfolded, to give oneself to such
vulnerability was an act of total trust and it hit her in the gut. This went
beyond words, beyond touches—he was giving her all that he was and trusting her
to take care of him. His courage touched her heart, made her strong.

With a kiss she accepted them. The image of Tai at her
sexual mercy had her core clenching in anticipation, the reality even better.
All that hard, lean muscle offered up for her pleasure, the memory of those
black eyes gone midnight with passion focused completely on her before she
covered them up—a willing sacrifice to the gods of love and war. The battle
would begin soon. Tonight was about love and she was going to show him just how
much she loved him.

She kissed and licked every ounce of skin exposed to her,
taking time out for all-consuming kisses that branded his mouth with hers. With
her tongue, teeth and fingers, she caressed every mark of his tattooing,
memorizing each of his victories. She nipped with gusto along the corded muscles
that rippled across his chest, his arms and his stomach.

Drunk on the salty male taste and scent of him, she settled
at his cock and decided to make him squirm. Flicks of her tongue on the crest,
whispers of kisses along the engorged vein, and finger tickles of the sac had
him bucking and groaning, straining the fragile ties.

“You’re only showing me your mean streak now,” he rasped.

“I like the way your muscles bunch when you’re reaching for
more.” She nibbled at the tender skin where thigh met groin.

“Damn it, Annie. You’re killing me.”

“I wouldn’t want that, now, would I?” She took him in her
mouth, his moan of pleasure scorched down her spine, an aphrodisiac racing
through her blood. When he came close to the edge, she mounted him, wanting to
ride out the explosion. Even though her instinct was to take him hard, she kept
the rhythm gentle. That mix of tenderness and ferocity was simply how they were
together, a blending of human, warrior and empathy. Tai allowed that part of
her to surface, embraced it with gusto, and she never wanted to give it up.

When his thrusts accelerated, she abandoned any pretense of
civility. The ride turned wild, ferocious, warrior, until they both detonated
into oblivion. Annie returned to earth in Tai’s arms, the ties ripped to
shreds, more determined than ever to keep her half-human warrior.

Sander was waiting for them, soda in front of him on a
corner table, when Annie and Tai arrived at the Quill and Parchment carrying an
overstuffed bag. “I just want to be sure I’ve got this down. Thirty years ago,
I had a wild week with an Amazon warrior masquerading as a history professor,
and you’re the result.”

“No masquerade. Phoebe’s not only an Amazon scholar whose
job is to maintain the records of the race, she earns income as a history
professor,” Annie said.

“You’re an Amazon warrior as well.” A shrewd intelligence
shown from Sander’s eyes—a sharpness which had been buried last night under the
surprise and the scotch.

She nodded and continued. “What’s rare is an Amazon-human
coupling. Many humans cannot satisfy our carnal needs so we tend to have our
flings with our own kind.”

Curiosity drew lines across his forehead and had his
eyebrows scrunch low over his nose. “Do you know why Phoebe dallied with me?”
Her real name now seemed to come easily to his lips.

“Your mind. Her intellect is not widely appreciated amongst
the warrior races. For a human, you’re in excellent shape,” Annie said with a
smile, touching Sander’s arm lightly. Although she hadn’t admitted this before,
she liked Tai’s intelligence, the way his mind thought through and around every
situation—it challenged her, excited her, she could spend a lifetime engaging
with it.

“And your research.” Tai jumped in. “The warrior races face
extinction. Infertility accelerates every generation and our Elders are in
denial. She needed proof to club them over the head with, and hoped you could
provide it. But it wasn’t enough. Her findings were squelched.” Tai placed the
bag on the table. “Our hope was you could look through this and find ways to
strengthen it. Provide us with additional irrefutable evidence that we could
take to our Councils.”

“Why do you need this? Why did Phoebe never inform me that I
had fathered a child? I had tried to get in touch but all my attempts were cut
off. How have supernatural beings remained hidden? I have so many queries.”
Turning his discomfort into a series of research questions, Sander seemed to
pull himself together—using what he knew to handle the shock that they’d thrown
at him.

They quickly detailed the warrior rites and rituals that
prevented them from creating their own family, the impossibility of escape from
the reach of the Elders and what happened when Phoebe tried. Sander’s eyes
softened, his body hunched as if drained of energy when he grasped that Phoebe
had attempted to contact him, to bring Tai to him. Exploiting the moment, Tai
pushed the bag of research toward Sander, the cheap plastic crackled against
the table. “Help us to stay together and raise our child.”

Sander expelled a breath, then reached for the bag, dug out
the contents and arranged the materials systematically in piles on the table.
He took reading glasses out of his jacket pocket, put them on, then opened the
top document. He skimmed page after page, almost supernatural in speed. Humans
who mastered their skills could come close to the supes, and Alexander Xenos
excelled in his discipline. Annie sat on Tai’s lap, pressed close against him.
The tick-tock of the grandfather clock a drumbeat in her ears, a warning that
their time was running out. She buried herself into Tai’s warmth, not wanting
to lose a precious second of nearness, the sound of his heartbeat, the tattoo
of his pulse against her lips.

Putting the papers aside, Sander stood and paced in front of
the table. “To fully analyze this would take me a few weeks, but at first
glance, the work is first-rate. Her evidence is ironclad—there is a rapid trend
toward infertility—her recommendations, which are based on my research, are
spot-on. They are the only chance your race has to survive. I’ve gathered more
evidence that supports these recommendations but it’s not different from what
you have here, only more of it. Since none of my data comes from supernatural
peoples, it would be easy for your Council to discount it again, just like they
did with Phoebe’s original paper.”

“You can’t help us then?” Tai’s hand caressed along Annie’s
thigh and then tangled in hers. He needed touch as much as she did.

“No, I’m sorry. I can’t add anything that will make a
difference. May I make copies of these to take with me?”

Annie glanced at Tai, lids heavy, skin stretched tight
across his bones—disappointment woven through concern. “The public can’t know
about us. What do you want with it?” she managed to ask, her chest constricted
in frustration.

A flush crawled up Sander’s cheeks, he glanced down, to
break eye contact.

“We’ll keep the papers but we can give you Phoebe’s direct
contact information—it wouldn’t be rerouted by pantheon authority,” Annie said,
compassion lowering the cadence of her voice. “I think she’d welcome hearing
from you again.”

“What will you two do?”

“Don’t know but we still have a few months before the
pregnancy shows,” Tai said.

“Can you show the research to someone else, someone with enough
clout to make your Elders change their minds or overrule them?” Sander looked
at his feet, shuffled a bit, and blew out a breath. “If I can be of more help,
please, call me. I would like to know you better, Tai, and if you succeed, to
know my grandchild as he or she grows.”

Unable to stop herself, Annie hugged him and allowed the
contact to coax out some of the soul-deep sadness inside Alexander Xenos. “If
we do figure this out, we’ll expect your visit for the winter solstice every
year.”

“With a suitcase full of gifts.” Sander gave Tai his hand
but the warrior pulled his father into a bear hug.

“All my life, I’ve wanted to know you. We’ll find a way.”

Arm in arm, Annie led Tai to the street into a cab to the
airport where they caught the first flight home to DC. Bone-weary and unable to
think through the fatigue, their automatic pilot took them to Annie’s house.
Naked in bed, they held each other for hours, touching, stroking and sharing
long, wet, consuming kisses. Periodically, Tai slipped inside her, and they’d
love each other with slow, tantalizing thrusts. It wasn’t about mating or
owning or carnal desire, just the ultimate pleasure of being with the one you
love, connected on every level until the lines between them blurred. He was
hers and she was his.

In the morning, Annie awoke to a chill of cold air splashing
across her body. Someone pulled off the blanket. When had Tai become a bed hog,
she wondered, her brain drugged by sleep.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a shrewish, angry
voice said. Marta had arrived.