He pressed down, and I met him hungrily, tongues pressing together, lips locked. His hands were all over me, and mine were just as hungry as my mouth. I relished in the feel of his bare skin, unmarked, proof he was safe.
Hands pressed my legs open, one of my knees propped over his shoulder while he pinned the other against the bedding, leaving me spread wide. “Hold on,” he chuckled, lips brushing my cheeks as his breath teased my flesh.
The first touch of his tongue was a gentle probing against the ring of muscle, but soon it grew bolder and in no time, I was burning, pressing against his mouth and moaning for more. By the state of his erection dragging against the bedding as he worked, he was little better, even though I’d yet to touch him.
“I don’t have any condoms. Do you have any left?” He panted, pulling back to lick the underside of my erection.
“In the drawer,” I panted, arching as he licked again. “Right there. You left them.”
Lube and condoms. He couldn’t get them fast enough. As soon as he was ready I arched again, lifting myself in offering. He pushed inside, hard and so sweet.
He pulled on me as he thrust, and I gripped his shoulders with everything I had, crying out and clinging. When we came, it was only minutes apart, me first and Lane following soon after. I painted his stomach, and could barely keep my eyes open as he sorted us out afterwards.
Limp, exhausted, I opened an eye and watched him wash my spend off his stomach. He smirked at me, running a finger through the mess and popping it into his mouth. “Mm,” he teased. The heat in his eyes was in contrast with the sweetness of his smile.
“Next time,” I promised around a yawn, “I’ll do the cleaning.”
He kissed my forehead and stretched out next to me when he finished. I rolled into him, and we both managed to get some sleep.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was a long flight, and an even longer drive out into the plains. My house was on an old back road, tucked away from pretty much anything but rolling, flat land. Sitting in the back of the car next to Lane, who had taken the middle despite it just being the two of us, I stared out the window and dreaded the end of the drive.
“Quiet out here,” Lane commented. I tried to smile back, but my lip barely twitched.
“I expect his family was looking for quiet, Mr. Hunter.”
Letting that answer stand, I leaned back against Lane, taking comfort in his warmth. Aaron and his partner, Jane, had met us at the airport. They had made arrangements to be our chauffeurs with the agent we were driving out to meet, the one who had somehow managed to trick Morgan all these years. I didn’t think anyone could blame me for my doubts, or for how very little I wanted to be there.
When they pulled down the long dirt driveway, I sank back, blinking away the tears before they could come. I hated it here. Hated it so much, even though I couldn’t make myself sell it.
The black car pulled up next to the sloping veranda, but neither of our escorts moved to exit.
“We’ll wait here,” Jane told us. “Take your time. Mr. Grace is already inside.”
It was like a bad horror movie. Returning to the scene of the original crime, and entering the old haunted home without any idea who or what waited.
We got out, walked to the steps, but from there I was frozen. Lane took my hand, his comfort coming through as clearly as his unease. I latched onto that, clinging to his hand as strongly as my mind clung to his. I hadn’t ever expected to stand here again.
“Okay,” I breathed.
The lifeless walls closed around us when we walked inside, the old wooden boards creaking with our steps. Everything was as I had left it. The air was stale, the blinds pulled, and it still tasted like death after all these years. The bits and pieces of missing furniture added to the effect—the kitchen without a table, the living room with only one old chair, the other gone along with the couch.
“Thank you for meeting me, Mr. Garder, Mr. Hunter.”
I jerked away from the back door, turned. I knew that voice, knew who to expect even before I finished turning.
Mr. Grace. Ethan Grace. Fain Joyce.
How? How him?
I stared and he looked back, but he didn’t wear the cruel smirk I was accustomed to from him, or the leering sneer. His face, devoid of those expressions, was almost foreign.
“Fain.”
“Ethan. Please.” He pressed his lips together, then sighed. “I’m sorry, Brett. Sorrier than you might think. I’ve been undercover with Morgan’s group for ten years. As sick as the man is, we’ve never had enough to move on until now, with your boss.”
Because torture and murder didn’t matter, just as Gramp had always said. It was only the breaking of that invisible barrier between normal and mage that made you a target for our law-keepers.
“Are you still with him, then? Undercover?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I slipped away after watching Morgan kill your boss.”
I jerked back, felt bile rise in my throat and gagged on it. Lane grabbed me by the shoulder, pulling me against him and glaring past me.
“You watched him. You apparently watched him torture Brett, too. For years. And then watched a normal human get murdered at your feet.”
“Should I have died, then, and not reported back what happened? Then he’d be still running loose, possibly without our forces moving in.”
“Moving in? He is causing chaos in our town, and not one person is stopping him!”
“We will. You have to be patient.”
“Patience? Like yours? You’d stand there and watch him kill, and would have watched him murder Brett, too!”
“I’m in no danger of being killed.” I cut in, hating myself for seeing what Fain—Ethan—was saying. Of course, he couldn’t do anything. It was just like Gramp had always said. “At least now Morgan will be punished.”
Lane was shocked silent, his anger and hurt broiling under his skin. He wanted to vent that on Ethan, let the man know how wrong he felt the man had been. Lane was a man who wanted to right wrongs, and who was too good for words. I was just cold, the very walls closing in with the grip of the mausoleum this entire property had become.
“Cocky, don’t you think, for a man so out of his depth,” Ethen commented.
“No,” I sighed, trying not to look at the cellar door. “I wish I was.”
Ethan was staring at me, and I hated having those eyes, familiar and foreign all at once, on me. Even worse were the words he spoke. “We lost your family centuries ago. You brought them back on radar after you started seeing Morgan.”
Lane gave my shoulder a squeeze, reminding me he was there. That I wasn’t alone. Concern, his touch told me, care, and a lot of nerves twisted around the mess like a tangled skein of yarn.
“Why were we on any radar?” There wasn’t enough air. Couldn’t be. I reached for Lane’s hand, tangling my fingers in his and clinging to him with both my tangible and intangible senses.
Being alone is death, Gramp’s words came back to me. Gramp was so close, here. Gram, too. I was only steps from the door down to the cellar. I just had to turn my head and I would see it, painted white and latched.
Bodies, they had said. Over half a dozen. And Gram’s own ghost in my memory, staying down there and starving, joining them in death. Had she known about them then? Had that been part of her madness, maybe even why she chose to die there?
“Yours was an old clan. You must know that?”
An old clan. Old, all right, but not in the way he seemed to think. “Gramp never said anything. There were only ever five of us, though. Me, Dad, Gram, Gramp, and Geoff.”
“No.” I stared, and Ethan met my gaze head-on. “Your father was dead before you were born. You were raised by your great-grandfather, his mother, and his son.”
Great-grandfather. Great-great-grandmother. It made a terrible sense. They had been so old. Gram had been bones in skin. Dad, who we called Dad, had been younger, but then anyone would have seemed younger.
It had always just been us, so how could we really judge age outside of what we saw on television? No school outside of Gramp’s lessons, almost no contact outside the ranch’s walls.
“Why?” I asked, hardly noticing the word leaving me.
“In the old days, it was believed that family bones protected the household. They would be buried in the yard to keep watch. Enemies, however, were to be buried in the bones of the home. It locked them inside. Kept them from protecting their own families.” I stared, and so did Lane, both of us shaken. “Yours is a very, very old family.”
“Why was I never told?” I asked.
“If you weren’t, why did you bury your brother there?”
“Because that was what Geoff did with Gramp. That was what Gramp did with Dad—who I thought … was Dad.” I shook my head. “Why didn’t he pass this on to me? Why wasn’t I told anything?”
“He probably did pass it down. To your brother. With what you are, he’d want you kept out of the killings and feuds. Your brother must have taken on the family mantle.”
“Feuds?” I burst out. “There were three of us! Two, after Gramp—there were no feuds! We were alone!”
“And, in the end, there was just you. With a cellar full of bodies.”
I was shaking. Couldn’t help it.
“There were no feuds,” I argued back. “I would have known. They were stupid. Reckless. I don’t know where those bodies came from, but no one was trying to kill us!”
But how could I honestly say that, when no one had ever bothered telling me anything?
“We never killed your family. They weren’t even on our record until you showed up next to Morgan. That brought you all back out of extinction.”
Extinction. I choked on a hollow laugh. “Why didn’t whoever killed them kill me, too, then?”
The cold sympathy I read in his face made me grit my teeth. “You took no part,” he told me. “They would have read that. Sometimes the other side will take all out anyway, but it’s considered cowardly to attack the uninvolved. When a son is left out there is usually a good reason. It sends up a flag. Different.”
“So now I don’t even know why they are gone, or who did this.”
The sense of loss with that was hard to understand. Knowing at least part of the why had taken control away, given me a target for concern. Now, there was just an empty, aching question. Lane, his father, their words hadn’t been enough to take that away. Now, hearing it from the mouth itself, there was nothing I could do but accept.
“I can give you the who, but you won’t like it.”
“Tell me. Please.”
And, as with everything, it all came back to Morgan and his community.
“Before we lost your family, they had a different name. It was back in the old country. The last recorded head of your family was Aldred Sigel, born 1712. Vanished between 1723 and 1724, in England. Aldred must have changed his surname to Garder when he crossed the ocean. How or when he crossed, we have no idea, but we came here and searched your house after your first visit home following your getting together with Langseth.”
I remembered that trip. I’d taken my day off and jumped in my car, driving back to the ranch and sitting halfway down the driveway for hours. I never went inside, not that year or the next. Only old charms on the property kept it from completely rotting away as the cold and damp ate away at the land.
Sigel, though. I’d never heard that name.
“Langseth, you see, had a blood feud with the Sigels. It began in the fifteen hundreds, and continued until your ancestor vanished. Dead, it had been assumed.” He shrugged. “It is how things go, so no one questioned it. Likely, though, he was like you.”
Like me. Left alive, because of a fluke in genetics. And Morgan, a descendent of the ones who had taken my family apart until it was down to one.
“So, we lost. Morgan … did he know?”
“We followed the traces. We hadn’t paid enough attention when your family members initially died, since he was a madman by all accounts, but Langseth is the acting head of his family. He was the last of the Langseths, as he told you, and entrenched in the old ways.”
He looked me dead in the eye, and I had to look away. The horror yawned inside me. I’d been in Morgan’s arms, in his bed, and planned to live my life with him. He’d found me at the Stampede—had it even been a chance meeting? Had he already known me, and gone there after learning where I’d fled? Ethan’s words weren’t lost on me. Morgan had known. Morgan had…
“He killed them. So the feud hadn’t been over yet, not to him. Did he do it himself?”
It had never been the Faded. All those years in fear, and so many of them spent with the true horror.
“He often sent people to take out enemies. He never cared about getting his hands dirty, you know that. He was the one who went the last time, though. He left for months, and didn’t take anyone. He said it was a matter of family honor. He kept in contact, but that was it.”
Then he was the one who killed Gramp, and then Geoff. He ended the feud. Family honor, indeed.
Because he could. He all too easily could. Not my father, his death had been too long ago, but Gramp, Geoff?
“Yes. The same way the grandfather who raised him had killed yours.”
Death and more death. A long line of retribution and vengeance, that was our history. A cellar full of bodies, and a yard full of my family’s own.
“Why?”
“A jilted marriage, and a murder, centuries ago. Pride.”
I wanted to be sick. I wanted out of there, to get as far away from this death-house and the horror of what I was hearing. It was a long, drawn-out torture. Maybe Gram had had it right, years ago, when she gave up.
“Is there anything more?” Lane asked, stepping in when I obviously couldn’t.
“He needed to know.” Like that absolved him.
“We’re done, then.”
There was a coldness in his tone I wasn’t used to from him, but I didn’t care. I clung to him, the only good thing in this hell.
“Thank you,” I managed, my throat dry and my eyes anything but.
“C’mon.”
Lane led me out, and I vowed to myself that I would never be back there. I let my eyes rest on the cellar door as I turned, wondered about the bodies, then chased the thoughts away and closed my eyes. Lane led me out, slowing down and taking care, never asking me to look where we were going.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I sat on the plane in silence, Lane’s hand in mine, and stared out the window for the entire trip. My mind wouldn’t leave the discoveries alone, no matter how badly I wanted to ignore it all. It continued cycling through everything on through the drive home.
I was still dwelling on it when Lane and I turned in at my place. Corey was at work, so it was just the two of us. Tired as we were, we just threw on sweats and stretched out together, not bothering for more.
“I’m sorry, Brett,” he whispered behind me, his arm wrapped around my waist.
“I’m sorry, too.”
“I promise, he won’t win.”
I pressed back against Lane’s strength, taking comfort from his firm certainty in what he was saying.
“I love you.”
His arms tightened, and he buried his face in my curls, lips pressed to the back of my head. “I love you, too. So much.”
I’d spent the plane ride going over everything in my mind, and now that it was just us I found the questions easier to ask.
“You never doubted the Faded had no part in Geoff or…” I swallowed, fighting the waves of memory. “In their deaths. How were you so sure?”
He sighed against my skin. “I think, yeah, four hundred years ago? Back then, maybe they’d have done it. Da taught us about the Faded when we hit our teens. They are devoted to non-interference so long as normal humans aren’t hurt or dragged into our world.”
“But they both put themselves out there as mages.” Or, at least, Geoff had. I had no
idea what my father had truly done, if anything.
Lane, kind as ever, never called me on it. “I have a cousin on my mother’s side, down in the States. She’s married to a regular human, and they have two kids.”
I stiffened, and he hugged me close. “How long?” I asked.
“Their eldest is older than me,” he answered. “They were married before my parents. I’ve never met them, but Ma writes them.”
“I really don’t know anything.”
“No one wanted you to.”
And that was the worst of it. Even after all his years of warnings and veiled threats, my grandfather, great-grandfather, had never really been honest. He’d left me half blind, believing myself a curse and accepting a lie that our rulers had been directly responsible for the deaths of our small family.
“It was never the Faded.”
“No, but you can’t thank them for that, either.” Lane’s words were hard, but true.
No, they hadn’t killed my great-grandfather or my brother, but neither had they stepped in to help. I could blame Gramp there, maybe, but they’d also left the madman that was Morgan. They’d known he was a sadistic murderer, and had even put a spy in his ranks, but they’d accepted him as a troubling but untouchable allowance in their system up until he actually broke a rule.
What kind of governing was that?
I couldn’t use magic. My energies were locked within me, usable only to help heal or to spy on others’ emotions if they allowed my touch. This made me a danger to our society. I was a weakness.
If I were any other throwback, I’d be welcomed by the government. The Faded wouldn’t care what I was, and neither would my family have. Others might look at me with fear, but that would be it.
Those like Morgan, who gathered followers and preached of changing the system, they were fine until they either made their move or broke one of the old, abstract rules still answerable to all.
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