I was relieved to finally know what really happened all those years ago, and to know that I wasn’t some murderous child.
“It’s a good thing he’s dead, Alex. Because if he wasn’t, I’d buy a plane ticket today and kill him myself.”
“I need something to drink, Ava.”
“Would you like some more tea?”
I sighed. “Nothing would make me happier right now than a shot of single malt.”
“I think we can manage that. We have a Scot in the house, after all.”
Ava raided Patrick’s stash and slid down the wall with two glasses of the good stuff. We sat on the floor with our backs against the wall and discussed what we had and hadn’t learned from the working.
“Weren’t you afraid to cut me?”
“Not really,” she shrugged. “I knew my blood would neutralize that killer quality you apparently possess. I have some pretty powerful stuff running through my veins, too, you know.”
“How did you do that? How did you talk to me…like you were in my head?”
“Through the blood, of course. You were my guide. The mixing of our blood made your eyes, my eyes. I felt the whole thing right alongside you.” She shook her head. “That man was pure evil. I could feel it. I hate to say this about another human being, but he deserved to die, and no one would have blamed you if you’d done it yourself.”
The wound was already starting to heal when I took Ava’s hand and pulled her bandage back.
“Your blood is healing me,” she observed. “I’m sure yours is almost gone by now.”
There was still a very big unanswered question that I asked next with trepidation because I wasn’t up for any more psyche workings. “We did this whole thing to find out how I triggered Greer’s mating instincts.”
Mating. Stupid damn word. Every time it came up, I pictured a dog in heat.
“Yes. That’s still a mystery. I guess your mind had more important things to unblock and resolve, don’t you think, darling?”
She polished off her drink. “That was a pretty powerful potion, obviously. The herbs will stay with you for days and could easily kick in again. In fact, I know they will. Other things will surface, Alex, and I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone when they do.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be with Greer.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
TWENTY-THREE
When I left Den of Oddities and Antiquities, my brain was spinning from all the things I’d learned in the span of a couple of hours. Not only did I now know what Greer was, I also knew what I wasn’t.
To calm the turbulent sea inside my head, I decided to forgo the train and walk the distance from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side. Seventy plus blocks was ambitious, but there were dozens of subway entrances along the way if my feet gave out.
Seven hours from now, Dr. Oxford was scheduled to meet Isabetta Falcone at Battery Park. The plan was for Greer and me to go with him. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that Isabetta was banking on Oxford bringing us along. What she wasn’t banking on was the others tagging along, too.
I was about to cross Thirty-Fourth Street when I heard his voice behind me. “Would it make you feel better if I brought you a lunch box, too?”
“A little far south for you, isn’t it?”
Constantine hitched his arm around mine and escorted me across the busy intersection. “I have a wide range, as you know. Would you like to chat here, or would you prefer to sit down somewhere more private?”
I knew better than to take him up on his offer of privacy. I had no time nor the desire to across the ocean today. The streets of New York would do just fine.
“Do you love her?” I saw no reason to beat around the bush.
He released my arm as if it suddenly felt uncomfortable against his. “Why must a good battle between the sheets always rest on the morals of love?”
I stopped and faced him. “Seriously, Constantine? Have you seen the way she looks at you? I don’t understand men.” My head shook at the callousness that usually accompanied the interpretation of hasty sexual encounters.
“You question my integrity, and yet here you are, orchestrating the love life of Katie Bishop while your own hangs on a very thin thread.”
He was right about me having no business sticking my nose in their relationship. Katie was my friend, but she was also a grown woman with a rock-solid brain. But he was way off base about my love life. Just because Greer had the misguided idea that I was his soul mate, didn’t make it so. In fact, I had a feeling that little delusion would eventually resolve itself.
“You’re right. It’s none of my business,” I agreed. “But if you rip her heart out, I’ll rip yours out. Got that?”
He ran his index finger from the intersection of my brows down to the bridge of my nose. “You are much too young and pretty to have these worry lines.”
“I’m serious, Constantine,” I warned as I grabbed his wrist.
“Of course you are. You’re a smart, powerful woman who just hasn’t figured it all out yet.” His gaze deepened, and his eyes went black and vacant as a shark’s. “But when you do…”
“You scare me when you do that.”
“As I should.” The humanity returned to his face as he straightened up and sucked a lungful of air through his nose. “Now, go home. Eat. Sleep. Fuck. Do whatever you need to do to figure it out.”
I ignored his cryptic comments. I was used to Constantine representing my life as a riddle. I also knew from experience that questioning those riddles would get me nowhere, because he would just blather on and on about how they were mine to figure out.
“Alex,” he said as he turned to leave, “if it’s Greer you’re fucking, good for you. The big fish.”
When I got home, the house was unusually quiet. I heard no noise in the kitchen, and then I remembered it was Sunday, Sophia’s day off.
Bear was lying on his chair in the living room. I was almost past the room when I did a double take. He was still a kitten, but today he looked more like a cat.
“Bear?” He sat in his chair looking very proud of himself. Proud, because he’d managed to double his size overnight.
I looked around the room to see if we’d acquired a second cat while I was gone. I grabbed him off the chair and checked for the one oddly shaped patch of white on his underbelly—it was definitely Bear.
I don’t know why it surprised me so much. A kitten growing into a cat overnight seemed mild in comparison to everything else going on.
A noise came from the library. I put Bear back on his chair and went to see who was in the other room. Greer was standing by the one wall in the room that wasn’t lined with bookcases. He was pinning photographs to it, punching tiny holes in the original wood paneling that would be impossible to replace.
“You’ll ruin that beautiful surface,” I sadly commented as I sat in a chair and witnessed his destruction of the past.
He glanced at me before resuming construction of the makeshift bulletin board.
Most of the pictures were of me. They were the ones I’d found months ago hidden under the desktop panel, the ones he felt compelled to hide until now.
“Why are you doing that?”
He said nothing as he took another photo from the pile. It was a picture of me when I was around six or seven. After pinning it to the wall, he stepped back to get a better view of what he was creating.
“I know what you are.” I continued with our one-sided conversation. “Ava told me, so you can stop lying.”
He paused without looking at me. “I told you once that I’d never lie to you, and I haven’t.”
“Okay. Then you can stop omitting the facts.”
He kept pinning the damn snapshots to the wall, stepping back after each one to examine his work. When there were none left, he sat in the chair next to mine and stared at the giant collage.
I saw it differently now. It wasn’t just a random tacking of memories floati
ng on the wall. It was a timeline of my life from when I was still in my mother’s womb until I disappeared just after my ninth birthday. It began with pictures of my mother, pregnant and smiling at the face behind the camera. The rest of them were of me at various ages. The collage ended with the last photo Ava ever took of me.
Greer had assembled my early life on the wall, all the way up to the point when it was shattered.
“I’m trying to understand where it all derailed,” he began. “I was supposed to be your guardian. Nothing more.”
My mother was pregnant with me when she came here from Ireland. “You were waiting for her, weren’t you?”
He nodded. “Maeve was my charge, my responsibility. When you were born, you became my responsibility as well.”
He rolled a brass thumbtack between his fingers and then threw it into the trash. “Maeve trusted me with the most important thing in her life, and I failed you both.”
I couldn’t stand to see him looking at me like that, like I was being pitied all over again. I was the girl with the dead mother, and now I was the girl who Greer failed.
His face went still as he pulled the thoughts from my head. “Pity? Is that what you think this is?” He got up and walked to the wall. The pictures flew through the air as he ripped them from the thumbtacks. “This is wrong!” he growled.
“What’s wrong with you, Greer?” I growled back.
He glared at me like I’d just popped him in the head. And then he stalked toward me and stopped when his knees touched mine. “Get out of my head!”
“Your head? I’m the one being mind-raped here!”
His breathing went from zero to sixty as he moved backward and hit the edge of the desk. “No more make-believe, Alex. You don’t get to hide anymore.” He stood taller and ran a hand over the top of his head. “We settle this now.”
“Settle what?” I stood up because sitting seemed inappropriate for the discussion we were about to have.
He composed himself and steadied his breathing. I could feel the energy coming off of him like a live wire discharging from a snipped end. Then he came toward me and stopped an arm’s length away.
“Look at me, Alex.” It was a command, not a request. “Now, I want you to think about something.” His eyes softened, and that fluttering in my belly went all haywire again. “I want you to think about yellow dresses, and wedding rings, and…Bergdorf Goodman.”
“Bergdorf Goodman?”
It seemed like a silly request, but then it wasn’t so silly anymore. I stared at the lenses of his eyes and began to see a tiny story play out on the shiny surface. I was standing at the stove flipping bacon—in a yellow dress.
I looked away to shake the hallucination. I didn’t own a yellow dress, and I couldn’t recall ever cooking bacon in Sophia’s kitchen.
“You want the truth, don’t you?” He pulled my face back to his. “Because we’re just getting started.”
I forced myself to look at his eyes again, to remember. I was walking over a bright, shiny floor. The tips of my high heels hit the surface with a metered clacking sound as Sophia and I walked toward the escalator. We’d gone shopping, something we’d never done before.
My eyes closed again as the images broke up and then flashed around my head in a scattered order. I was trying on shoes and Sophia was looking at me with her usual disciplinarian expression.
“What is this, Greer?”
He said nothing as I slipped back into the memory. Sophia and I were eating lunch and she was telling me about her family. An image of her with a skillet in her hand came to mind, and I remembered her telling me about her husband.
“I don’t want to see this.” I turned my back to him. There was much more behind his eyes, and I knew if I continued to recall that missing day, our relationship would change forever.
He placed his hand on my shoulder and ran it down the side of my arm. “We haven’t gotten to the important part yet,” he whispered. “We haven’t gotten to the part where you’ll begin to hate me.”
I could never hate him, and the mere suggestion that something so awful could still be waiting behind his eyes, waiting for me to remember, sent a shudder through me. I thought about whether or not I really needed to know, because the slush pile that was my life was already brimming with garbage. If it was that bad, I figured I would remember on my own, and Greer did have a bad habit of sweating the small things where I was concerned.
“All right.” I turned back around to look in his eyes and a shot of lust slammed through me. It wasn’t the first time he’d had that effect on me, but it was the first time it nearly sent me to my knees.
“Alex!” He grabbed me around the waist as my legs gave out and I started to go down.
As he held me against his chest, I looked back in his eyes. I saw his body moving over mine. He was on top of me and inside of me, and my body was moving with his. Then I was on top of him, thrusting against his rocking hips. I was making love to my…husband.
My eyes flew wide and the air left my lungs. I shoved him away as the memory grew more vivid. “Greer?” I whispered, thinking I’d gotten it wrong, and he would lend a perspective that might make the reality seem like less of a betrayal. “I thought you were my…and you let me believe it.”
He stood silent as I backed away, and the entire farce of a day came roaring back to me. I remembered waking up that morning and Bear climbing my leg. There was blood running down my shin. But instead of turning into an unpredictable assassin, I fell into some absurd fantasy that Greer and I were married. He played right along. Even Sophia went along with the charade.
I got up and headed for the library door.
“Don’t walk away, Alex.”
Without responding, I went to the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of wine. I struggled to uncork it as my fingers trembled with rage. Greer took it from my hands and uncorked it himself. Then he poured us both a glass.
“God, I thought you were more of a man than that.”
“You see, Alex, that’s the problem. You keep comparing me to a man.”
“Well, I won’t make that mistake again.”
He polished off his wine, excusing himself to retrieve the bottle of Scotch from the dining room cabinet.
“You know,” he said angrily as he walked back in, “there’s a small detail you need to remember.” He swigged the liquor straight from the bottle and offered it to me.
“No. I want nothing from you.”
The whiskey sloshed as he pointed at me with his other fingers wrapped around the bottle. “You came on to me. You wouldn’t take no for an answer. Jesus, Alex, you were all over me. Sophia couldn’t even shake it off you.”
“Yeah, remind me to thank her for having my back.”
At least the mystery was solved about how he’d managed to imprint on me, though at the moment he wasn’t acting very attentive. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was the last person he wanted to see. That was just fine with me.
“So, it’s true,” I confirmed.
“What?”
“That you’ve imprinted on me like some animal.”
He stepped back and looked mildly stunned. “Where did you hear that?”
“Leda. I thought she was out of her mind. But given the circumstances and the way you almost ripped Loden’s head off last night, I assume there’s some truth to it.”
He put the bottle down and leaned back against the counter, burying his face in his hands as he rubbed his forehead. “That’s just fucking fantastic,” he growled.
“What? Is it supposed to be a secret? Because everyone seems to know. And what happens now? Am I supposed to just go around blindly worshipping you while you go out and provide for me like a caveman? Feed me—is that what you do?”
He laughed bitterly. “No. Actually, I’m supposed to blindly worship you.”
I felt my cheeks grow hot at the idea of him stumbling over himself to please me. No man had ever shown me that kind of attention, let alone a god like
Greer Sinclair. But the heat passed through me as I felt my freedom slipping away. The air in the room seemed to evaporate as the beginnings of panic spread through me.
“Can’t you just control it?” I blurted out.
“Control it?” He was laughing again, sarcastically punctuating my naïve understanding of what it meant to be an obsessed god. “We don’t control this. It fucking controls us! You don’t get it, do you? I didn’t choose you, Alex.”
I’d been slapped in the face before, and it left less of a sting than his words. Underneath all my layers of aloof disregard for him, if I ever allowed myself the luxury of being loved, there was no one else I wanted more.
“I don’t want you either,” I threw back at him, my defenses up and my heart bruised.
The look on his face was incredulous. “I never said I didn’t want you.”
“Oh, I think you just did.”
My hand went up as he reached for my face. “Don’t you dare touch me, Greer.”
He ignored my warning and kept coming. “I may not have chosen you, but this little coupling has been in play for a long time, Alex. I felt it the moment I touched you in the park last year, like a fucking lightning rod. And you can bet I’ve been fighting it ever since.”
My back hit the edge of the counter as he trapped me in the corner where they intersected. He moved a loose strand of hair out of my eyes with his index finger and continued with his confession. “It felt wrong for a long time. Still does, a little. I was supposed to be your guardian, not your lover.”
My heart felt like it was ready to beat out of my chest. I mean literally crack my bones and burst through my skin. It was the fear of what I’d have to give up if I opened my heart. I’d been alone too long, and I had no idea how to embrace what he was offering.
“Back the fuck off, Greer,” I warned as I shoved past him.
The Blood Thief (The Fitheach Trilogy Book 2) Page 22