by Jean Lee
Darra snorts. “Go piss on a bone.”
“I’ll have you know I did that very thing shortly before coming in and took extra care to shake myself out. I know my etiquette, unlike some people with dreadful haircuts.” He stares pointedly down at Liam’s bare feet and tisks. “Savage. Always come shod to a fancy dinner, like this.” And he THUMPS his big black boot on the end of the glass table, sending bits of piss-smelling mud splattering across his half of the table. Alas, Liam’s heart gets the brunt of it.
Father’s face lengthens and flattens to something green and gruesome. A toad comes to mind. “You have some nerve showing your face around us.”
Yet Lady Artair studies him with interest, especially when he drinks Liam’s bloody veli without hesitation. “Let’s not be hasty, my love. Dorjan is, after all, the only princeborn known to awaken his bestial form before ten years of age. Tell me,” she snaps her fingers, and a servant refills his glass, “how fares your twin sister, Cate?”
Vincent shoots upright, blinking madly. “Cate? Is she here?” He staggers from his chair, combing his hair with his fingers, to cross towards the windows. “CATE!”
Dorjan gives him a wry look, then answers Mother, “I wouldn’t know, since the price you put on my head has kept me sequestered in this little cranny of the world.”
“I do hope you’ll remove that bounty, Father,” Liam says with folded hands, “considering I am now very much awake as well as alive. I’d be happy to swear before a gathering of Houses that the House of Durant had no part in cursing me to the living decay. Perhaps I could do that very thing after the wedding tomorrow.”
Father stews for a moment. A few strands of muscle are caught between his teeth. “I suppose,” he muses while sucking his bloody fingers, “under the promise that when Dorjan finds his sister, he brings her to us.”
Keller drags his forked bit of heart through the extra blood on his plate, eyes fixed upon Dorjan. Mother and Father have never hidden their hopes to marry Cate to Keller. Whether or not Keller wanted the match, Liam cannot say, not with that mask of a face.
Dorjan’s feelings, however, are abundantly clear. “You could promise me Aether’s Forge itself, and I still wouldn’t give you Cate.”
Vincent stumbles over and shoves his face right into Dorjan’s. “Yer absolutely right. She’s waaaay too good for any of ’em.” He waves his blood dagger at Liam’s parents, setting Mother’s eyes ablaze and Father’s mouth open to croak. “Now me, I’ll treat her like a queeee—”
“Shut up!” Darra hisses while Keller yanks Vincent by the collar hard enough to send him to the ground. He then kicks him in the neck with his polished dress shoe.
“Keller.” Liam throws the name onto the table with disdain and means it. “That was uncalled for.”
“Never mind him, darling. Vincent needs a good whipping every now and then, or he’ll do something really stupid.”
Liam can’t hide the shock on his face. To hear one’s sibling be not only complicit but encouraging…Keller and Liam sparred and fought often, but never like this. They both endured black days under their parents. Had Darra never known such a time? Perhaps not. Lord Aleron certainly looks shaken by Vincent’s treatment under another “noble” house.
Keller takes a few deep breaths to steady himself. He steps over Vincent, and says, “Arlen’s upstairs. Wanna see him?”
Mother raises a ringed hand to block Father’s mouth before he can even croak a no. Her eyes take in Dorjan’s surprise and suspicion. “Yes, Keller, why don’t you escort him up. Our bride and groom could use a little peace.”
Dorjan downs his bloody veli and tosses the glass at Liam. He belches and gasps, “I got it! The roses, Liam’s face—Darra’s a Phantom of the Opera fan! Brilliant. Liam can spin about in a cape and mask, Darra can look all pale and tragic, and I can belt a song or three for your processional, let’s see…”
Keller jerks Dorjan out of the room before he can howl a single note.
42
Doctor Jimmy Keller
Charlotte flies to her seat by the bay window just before there is a knock on the door. “Door’s open.”
Keller and Dorjan walk into Charlotte’s quarters and see a clean floor, quiet fire, open windows for the chilly night air. Arlen reads whatever page of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea he flipped to as he leapt onto the couch during Charlotte’s rushed workings with Rose House. A few rugs are still rolled up, but the floorboards solidly cover the dining room ceiling. “Can You See the Real Me” scratchily starts on the record player Charlotte pulled out of her memories from a Bismarck library.
Immediately, Keller’s shoulders relax. “I was hoping you’d think up some music.”
Dorjan nods at Charlotte. Charlotte tosses a Tootsie Pop to Dorjan, and he snatches it midair as he approaches Arlen with swift steps. “You all right?”
“Fine.” Arlen snaps the book shut. “Though I hope you will not mind, Keller, if I would like to prolong the pleasure of your company as long as possible.”
Keller sticks his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “Hide yourself in the Pits, the forest, wherever. We have all the time in the world, you and I.”
Those words chill Charlotte’s spine, especially when Keller’s gaze floats from Arlen to her.
Arlen stands. “Come along, Dorjan. We have a few rocks to dig up.”
Dorjan’s green eye flashes worry Charlotte’s way. “But—”
But Arlen’s already out the bathroom door and in the corridor, waiting.
“’S’ok, Dorjan.” Charlotte takes her own noisy sweet time unwrapping her pop as Keller settles in on the opposite end of the bay window. She sticks the pop in her mouth and holds it in her teeth like a cigar.
Dorjan looks down at the Tootsie Pop in his hand, back at her. “O-kay,” his voice slides hesitantly with his feet out the door.
For a good long minute, Charlotte sucks her lollipop as Keller sits in silence, head in hand, staring out the window. They let the song fill the empty space of conversation, and Charlotte finds herself staring out the window, too. For all the roses set up out front, the air’s only wet and stale, as if the flowers of Arlen’s Garden hate what’s going on, too. Clouds may blanket the sky, yet way out on the eastern half of River Vine there are six stars weaving in and out of each other in some sort of infinity loop. Ember wouldn’t like that, nor would the other scouts, probably, wherever they were. “Wonder how far out the scouts went this time.”
Keller stares at the looping stars but says nothing about them. “How far do they usually go?”
“Well this place is in the middle of farmland and farm towns. There’s no, you know, big city with thousands of people for a ton of miles.”
Keller sighs into his hand before letting it fall onto his lap. His whole body calms, and the lack of tension in him only makes her tense right up instead. Even his smell loses its typical bleachy edge, giving way to something warmer…that coffee-like smell, delicious and inviting, and stop liking it, Charlie!
“Another challenge then,” he says more to himself than her. “May I?” He points to the bowl of Tootsie Pops. Charlotte holds the bowl out to him. He selects a root beer, and says, “Tell me: what did it feel like, pulling the blood dagger out of Liam’s body?”
There’s only so many places a topic like that can go, Charlie. Bob and weave, girl, bob and weave. “Well I didn’t know he was alive, for one thing. I just knew I was in a freaky house with mighty morphing fairy rangers who’d stolen my sister out of existence. I needed a weapon that’d do some good. If that dagger took out one freak, then I figured it had to be good on others.”
“Strange your other siblings would let you go alone on such a venture.”
“Huh?”
“So, no other siblings, then. Interesting.”
DAMMIT! “What, that I had one sibling and that’s it?”
“Younger sibling too, I’ll bet.” Keller sucks the pop, eyes feeling out Charlotte’s face, muscles, fingers, scalp, sens
es. “Protective instinct like yours is a nature more than a nurture, so I’m warranting a parent in some sort of protective vocation—civil service, law enforcement. But you’ve also a chip on your shoulder the size of Greenland, so I’m wagering either that protector was protecting everyone but you, or…no, you narrowed your eyes at that. The parent couldn’t protect you anymore. Something happened, and someone new came along that did a number on you.”
Silence. Charlotte’s face goes smooth and dead as a morning after Uncle Mattie. “Impressive, Sherlock.” Charlotte slides off the bay window seat and to the record player on her desk. She flips the vinyl to play “Doctor Jimmy,” a nasty song befitting a boy happy to share Tootsie Pops one minute and beat the shit out of a friend the next. “Real impressive.”
“I gotta know you somehow. It’s not like you’re being open with me.”
“Not opening my brain to be thumbed through like some book, you mean.”
“You do realize that no other human’s been known to do that before.”
Charlotte drops the needle and looks up. Those ice-blue eyes are still frozen to her, dropping ice under her shirt to make her shiver. He spins the sucker slowly in the center of his kissy-face lips. She crunches good and hard on her sucker and tosses the stick into the fire. “Soooo, what’re you thinking? I come from a line of Velidevour-magic-blockers?”
“I’m thinking,” Keller throws his candy out the window and moves with a predator’s slow prowl across the floor, “there are too many special pieces of you that I cannot fit together on my own. I’m thinking you are worth learning about for as long as it takes to make those pieces fit.” Charlotte’s boxed in before she knows it, cursing herself she didn’t abandon the record player, debating a leap out the window, thinking about anything besides Keller’s powerful body stalking closer, his eyes coldly hypnotic, his hand shockingly warm as it slips over the baby-new skin of Charlotte’s palm. “I’m thinking a girl like you comes once in a millennium, and I don’t dare waste the chance this wedding gives us.” His voice slips even lower, his face even closer, and Charlotte has nowhere to step, nowhere to move away, and his scent, that damn inviting scent of him sets her nerves alight like mad. “I’m thinking you’re the bravest, craziest girl to fight with beings whose power cannot be comprehended by the human mind, all for the sake of a boy.”
Not some boy, his BROTHER. The Voice in Charlotte’s heart shakes her out of the hypnotic gaze with the question, Why is he talking about Liam like that? And suddenly Charlotte’s senses aren’t obsessing over coffee smells but the feel of his other hand on her hip, the glacial press of him into her into the wall.
Dammit, he’s got me cornered. You idiot, Charlie, we gotta rope-a-dope out of this corner NOW. House, I need your help!
“I’m thinking,” Keller whispers, his root beer breath sharp to Charlotte’s nose, “that I wish I could have been the boy you woke up, so I could have been the one holding your hand underground.”
And Charlotte wonders, she does, for a second, if it were that simple. That were the two brothers switched, and Charlotte had woken Keller and spent the past few days with him, that they would have connected over music and sick humor, would have fought side by side to protect…
And that’s when all the sweet talks and hypnotic holds really shatter.
This guy would never have protected an innocent from anything. One who beats his friends in a heartbeat isn’t going to give a shit about a scared little human child like Jennifer Blair.
Charlotte shakes her head. “But you weren’t.”
The wall behind her pops open like a trap door, and she tumbles onto the library’s upper level. The room is occupied only by the noise adrift from the lower door to the dining room. The clean air helps Charlotte shake the rest of that Keller-lull from her system, and she stands firm, feet at 2 and 8, loose fists at her sides. “Now you gotta go back to your folks.”
Keller doesn’t move. Light from Charlotte’s quarters shines all around him, erasing his features, transforming him into a shadow.
In a doorway.
Music from her room floats around his shoulders.
You say she's a virgin
But I'm gonna be the first in
Her fellah's gonna kill me?
Oh fucking will he
Charlotte’s heart catches, and it’s all the Voice can do to keep it from stopping entirely.
“You and I, we could create something no breed of magic has ever seen.” Keller’s blackened hand reaches out to her.
Create? You and I create—oh my GOD he means— “Let me rephrase that,” Charlotte grips the railing behind her with ten white knuckles. She will vault over this if she has to– she will run to the lake and let Captain sea-scream this, this boy into oblivion. She sends her words at Keller like a volley of arrows. “Get your ass out of here before Rose House crushes every fucking bone in your body.”
What is it?
I'll take it
Who is she?
I'll rape it
Keller takes one step closer to Charlotte. Another. He raises his hands in a surrender, but Charlotte can see nothing’s changed on his face. The coffee smell’s gone bitter, hard, spoiled as the bleach washes over it all, a toxic clean. “Of course. We’ve got aaaall the time in the world, too.” He winks and continues on the library’s walkway towards the spiral staircase, whistling “Doctor Jimmy” as he goes.
Charlotte lunges through Rose House’s trap door and slams it shut.
43
We Are Not Toys
Liam’s ears catch Charlotte’s door opening and closing despite Darra changing chairs so she can sit next to the clean side of his face. She purrs into his right ear about Brazil, Japan, Russia—she’s a wealth of knowledge on the world’s social centers, where human hearts are easy to come by without humanity’s notice. What country gave its heart to Liam’s plate? A man yearning for family, maybe, or to fly. A woman wanting nothing else but the most beautiful face, or to escape the world and become a cat. Such are the little dreams that beat through their veins alongside the blood, inspiring the will to live on. And then, their dreams were smelled out, hunted, and harvested. They died, just for dreaming.
And Darra talks as if this is perfectly fine.
No small wonder, then, his parents chose her over the other princeborns of their generation.
Though Brutus Aleron is still unsure. “I must admit, your proposal surprised me a good deal, Treasa,” he twitters. “I thought you disapproved of my children.”
“A woman’s grief, I assure you,” she says, and eases back in her chair, body teasingly limp. “It is impossible to look at Darra and not see my sweet sister, Donna. Isn’t that so, dear?” Her eyes are sharp crescents upon her husband.
Lord Artair harrumphs in agreement. His bloodshot eye twitches. “And don’t you worry about Vincent. He may be wild”—the groan from Vincent still on the floor sounds as much— “but he’s also strong-willed and ambitious.”
“Indeed. With the right mate, he will no doubt bring pride to your house.” Treasa plucks a nearby rose and holds it close to her face, lost in its petals.
“I already know the right mate.” Vincent’s hand slaps the table. With a grunt he pulls himself up, a mess of tussled hair and bruises. “And I ain’t letting that dog out of here until he tells me where she is.”
“He’s not going to tell you,” Darra says with a roll of her eyes. “Not when you’re drunk.”
“And he doesn’t know,” Liam adds. “He’s not seen her for centuries.”
“Said that, did he?” Father’s fat fingers drum the table. “And you took his word for it."
Liam’s neck hairs—what’s left of them—begin to bristle. “He’s no cause to lie to me.”
“He has every cause. You’re an Artair. His father Fiacra is a sop unable to lead the House of Durant.”
“The trauma of the twins, perhaps. Their mother, as I understand it, aged dramatically with their birth to the point of disabil
ity.” Mother sits with her chin on her thumbs, fingertips pressed together. “The potential of those two, it still…fascinates.”
Liam stands to hide the shiver Mother’s words send coursing down his neck. They all look at him like there are no shivers, for such talk, it is normal. Damnably normal. “I need some tea. Vincent, you coming?”
Not Darra. Vincent.
And his name strikes a chord, even through Vincent’s stupor. “A’right.”
Liam steps into the reception hall and sees Darra’s servants in the kitchen wiping glasses. He cannot help but be impressed. Fogging a human’s mind to suit their dreams for a little while is easy, but to maintain it for several hours, let alone days, takes a lot of stamina.
“I think it’s a little late for a stag party, darling.” Darra caresses his shoulders from behind. She’s radiant beneath the matching scarlet arch with the golden room behind her, raven hair lustrous and soft. Her pout only brings more attention to her full lips. Lips, hair, body—he knew those all very, very well.
Her mind, however…in all their time together, did she ever share a truly personal thought?
Charlotte collapses by the fire. She cannot stop shaking, hugging herself but still so damn cold from the icy tendrils of Keller’s words scraping at her insides. The speakers give an empty sound of a spinning record completed, needle on its center.
She still doesn’t move when several stones of the fireplace shift into a trapdoor and ladder for Arlen and Dorjan to climb down from their hiding place on the 3rd floor. “Charlotte, that eavesdrop move with the House is brilliant! How…” Dorjan’s voice fades behind her while Arlen kneels in front of her, scoops her up. A growl rumbles in his throat instead, vicious and heated. “What’d he do in the library?”