Water, Circle, Moon
Page 19
Laine didn’t even bother searching inside herself for a twinge of jealousy. She felt none, and none was needed. The thought of Arren as a gawky teen charmed her. “So far, sounds like situation normal.”
“Yes. Except that after the movie she invited me home and up to her room. Her parents asleep, et cetera. I do remember feeling immensely privileged, extremely excited, and rather sick to my stomach.”
Laine gnawed her lip and smiled slightly. Though Arren’s tone of voice was light and ironic, laughing at the clumsy, horny boy he’d been, if she laughed with him this delicate moment would break. “So, this sophisticated older woman was seducing you?”
“Apparently she was. Things were progressing well, I thought—hadn’t thrown up or tripped over my tongue—until we both ended up on her bed, most of our clothes off, and I started to shift.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “But . . . there was no water, no river, no other cabyll ushtey!” A thought struck. “She was a normal human, right?”
“Oh yes. Not a drop of magic in that one. The change caught me—both of us—completely unaware. I had no inkling anything like that was going to happen.”
“You knew nothing of what you were?”
“I’d gleaned only the barest hints about legendary water horses, and those mostly from the village lads.” His look soured, and he sighed deeply. “No idea I might be one.” His voice turned introspective. “Children often believe they’ve been stolen from their rightful families, don’t they? How does a kid know if he’s normal or not?” Unconsciously he drew closer to her. She allowed herself to settle beside him companionably under the cover, a safe few inches between their naked bodies. A few inches that stretched like miles right now.
“What did it feel like? The . . . the shift?”
“Bloody odd, as you might imagine. A kind of twisting or stretching inside me, pain that was somehow pleasure in my limbs. Weird as all hell.” His body twisted awkwardly beside her as if to demonstrate. “It’s been almost fifteen years, and I still feel it like an itch that can’t be scratched, a drug that can’t be taken. It was the excitement of being alone with a female that did it—and the fact that I was born to cabyll parents—and it got out of control very quickly. I could feel myself losing it, my brain just shutting down, my body changing. I tried to run, and got out of her bed at least.”
“Did you shift to horse form?” Her voice was incredulous.
He rubbed his eyes. “Not . . . exactly.” He managed a hollow laugh. “I must have looked awful, sort of a hybrid man-animal there in her home, crashing around like a rabid beast. I remember hearing her scream. She bolted for her door, and I managed to make things even worse by trying to stop her. I found out later I’d dislocated her shoulder and broken a couple of her ribs.”
Laine watched the memories lay age across his features, like a leaden brush painting helpless regret and pain. She could picture the girl, hysterical and shrieking, fighting the monster she’d invited into her bed.
“Then her parents ran in, in their pajamas. Things went downhill from there.”
She couldn’t help it. She rolled to him and took him in her arms, wrapping her legs around him too, in an embrace that was entirely non-sexual. Almost entirely. He embraced her back as if starved for touch and let out a heavy sigh. Laine felt tears prickle the back of her eyes, and squeezed them back. He needed her to listen, not weep for his past pain.
Into her shoulder he said, “Her father chased me out with a fireplace poker, getting in a few good whacks, and I found myself stumbling along the road, naked, mostly back in human form, till I ended up in a ditch, hiding like a bloody felon. The McCowans called my parents, fortunately, and not the police. I imagine they were thinking of their daughter’s reputation, not mine. When I saw Mum and Dad’s car, I didn’t know what to do. I was a freak, a monster, a creature out of nightmares. I honestly wished I were dead.”
She stroked his hair, murmuring words of comfort into his ear. At least she hoped her sympathy would comfort him, suspecting that it would not. Could not. Distraction was all she could offer. The horror, and the sheer teenage humiliation, Arren must have felt took her heart and wrung it hard.
He let himself be wrapped in her, and managed to draw her even closer, his warm breath stirring her hair as he lightly kissed her forehead. It was so like that first innocent kiss, in the garden, that she felt a helpless flood of sadness.
Selfishly Laine calculated the chances of taming this suffering beast, loving him into comfort and salvation . . . could she hope to do it? She was only a woman, more ignorant even than he in the ways of the cabyll ushtey.
A thought popped into her head. She had to ask. “So . . . since then, you, uh, that is, have you had . . . ”
“Lovers?” He gave a gentle rasp of a chuckle. “Yes. Being a proper gentleman, I won’t go into any details, but as time passed, I managed to get over the . . . trauma, I guess you’d call it, and let myself get interested in the fairer sex again.”
“Fairer sex, give me a break. I won’t share my details if you won’t share yours.”
“Deal. I made sure, though, that the women I spent time with were nobody I found terribly exciting. No one I’d risk falling in love with. Respected friends, companions for a while, but nothing more than that.”
Which made another thought pop insidiously into Laine’s head. Don’t ask . . .
Don’t ask Arren, but ask herself. She was falling in love with him, but it was more than that. She was stepping across a line—hell, she was galloping across it as fast as he’d allow—and that line was the barrier between the ordinary world and the world of the water horses.
Without love, being cabyll ushtey meant dominance or submission, acceptance or expulsion, life or death. Was she willing to risk that life, without love?
No. Not even for a man like Arren.
Could this man—this creature—love her? Would he risk his changeable body and suffering heart for her? Or was she a woman who got respect but nothing more? She heard herself growl. She said, “Arren . . . I don’t want respect.” Wait, yes, she did. She was a woman, not an animal. “I don’t want just respect. What I mean is . . . ”
He cupped her chin and drew her face up to meet his, silencing her. He kissed her slowly, his lips lingering against hers until that electric hum grew and clamored in her blood, almost deafening her.
“Oh, Laine. And I want more than companionship. A lot more. But I must know . . . Do you think you could love me, despite what I am?”
“I think I’m already halfway there.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The love they made was sweet, slow and satisfying, at least physically. The burning passion from before wasn’t there, but Laine felt, oddly, as if her body were just one thin, taut string on a vast instrument, plucked and emitting a single pure, clear note. And that instrument, which held many more strings, held the promise of a thrilling resonance when it was tuned up and played at maximum volume.
Arren opened up as they lay together afterward, cuddled close. The compassion she felt toward him outweighed the desire her body still felt, and she listened to him in fascination.
He told her all the things he had learned, too late, from Albert and Catherine Tyrell, his adoptive parents. The long-suffering couple had stuffed their shaking, sick, naked boy into the back of their car and got him home as fast as they could. Albert had muttered savagely, as he drove, about truth and honesty—I told you this would happen—to his wife; she hissed retorts Arren hadn’t been able to hear. But he’d been able to deduce that his upbringing had been a constant source of conflict between them for years.
They’d locked him in his room for the night, something he’d begged them to do. Catherine had wanted to sit him down at the kitchen table and make him eat something, but Albert had mercifully ordered him upstairs. He’d thrown himself on his bed in exhaustion, unable to stay awake to hear the continuing argument. In the morning they had all sat down in a parody of civilization over a hot breakfast.
“I was so hungry I could hardly hold my fork,” Arren told her. “After a few mouthfuls, I had to run to the loo and be sick. After that I felt better.”
After sausages, eggs, and toast had been consumed—and kept down—Albert Tyrell had sat back, clutched his teacup in a grip of death and told his boy everything.
“He told me that my birth parents, whom the Tyrells knew were cabyll ushtey, had been captured by farmers and killed, orphaning me as a toddler.” He paused, and his face went blank.
“My mother, running from them in her horse form, was driven into a pit trap, where she was skewered on the spikes at its bottom. Her shrieks lured my father in, as was planned. They were both chained in that pit, their throats slit to bleed them out. Then they were burned on a pyre of yew wood. Yew is poisonous to horses, did you know that?”
He was staring at the ceiling, his fists clenched.
“Dear God.” Laine closed her eyes, her voice thick with unshed tears. Her heart was lurching unsteadily. “They didn’t want there to be any doubt, did they?”
“I have no idea if what the farmers did was necessary. Is a cabyll that hard to eliminate?”
Laine immediately thought of Jaird. She couldn’t imagine anything short of a nuclear bomb killing that one.
“For some reason they drew the line at slaughtering a child. I survived.” He rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t witness my parents’ deaths, fortunately, and I have only the vaguest memories of my time with them. I’m glad of that.”
Albert and Catherine Tyrell, being two of the few people in the area unafraid of the legendary creatures, had taken the orphaned boy in and given him their name, with the understanding among the local folk that the lad was to be raised strictly as human. Any tendency toward shapeshifting he might exhibit would immediately and relentlessly be suppressed.
The couple, anxious to please neighbors they’d known all their lives, had complied. It was hard. After two years of enduring the county’s veiled hostility, they had sold their home and moved to a quiet cottage in the Lake Country, where nobody knew them. The active child, unaware of his past and otherwise normal, fit in well at his new school.
But secrecy and denial could only take them so far. Sooner or later, a cabyll ushtey had to change. And change he did . . . but only that one time.
“I vowed never to do it again. And I never have.” Arren’s voice was almost desperate in its tension, and Laine knew the vow had been born of fear. Not for himself, but for the innocent, normal humans among whom he lived.
Gently, she said, “This is what I’ve been talking about, Arren. Look what that promise has done to you. A cabyll has to change. You must, or go insane, right? You told me that, remember? Plus, you aren’t an ignorant kid any more, and you have friends to help you.”
He barked out a laugh and hugged her, pulling her on top of him with delightful ease. She let herself drape across him like a cat on a lap, soaking him in, and began to nuzzle his neck. “Stop it, you wicked girl,” he growled. “You’re absolutely marvelous, you know. What have you been doing in Canada all my life? You should have been here—”
A tentative knock sounded at the door. Three soft raps, as if whoever it was didn’t want to be there.
Arren’s growl turned serious. “Damn,” he said. “You expecting visitors?”
She shook her head and rolled off his chest to her feet, grabbing for her clothes. It had better not be Innis, she thought in exasperation. But then Innis wouldn’t knock, he’d just barge in. “Who is it?”
“It’s Arabella. I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s someone downstairs to see you.”
Laine grimaced a gesture meaning “I haven’t a clue” at Arren and shrugged her way into a shirt. She opened the door.
There stood Mrs. Griffin, wringing her hands. “It’s a woman, dear . . . she appears to be a little . . . ” Arabella made a vague whirling gesture with both hands, interpreted by Laine as crazy. “She says she’s your mother.”
The three of them sat primly at a corner table in the dining room, having tea.
It was a wonderful tea, thought Laine wistfully; too bad she couldn’t enjoy it. Cream-filled buns, cucumber sandwiches, lemon tarts . . . Arren had no trouble scarfing it all down, possibly because his stomach didn’t hurt.
His mother hadn’t turned up out of nowhere, poised and ready to ruin everything.
Laine’s insides had started to cramp as soon as she absorbed Arabella’s announcement. What the hell was Bethea doing here? She couldn’t get on an airplane without being half-looped, yet here she sat, looking stone-cold sober for the first time in memory.
Laine and Arren had dressed and hurried down to find Bethea Summerhill sitting like a lost child in an overstuffed chair in the lounge. She looked very thin and small. She was wearing a long-sleeved sweater in a shade of golden cream, faded jeans, and sandals revealing a pedicure in need of refreshing. When she saw Laine and Arren together, her huge gray eyes widened, then narrowed in some internal calculation, and she’d seemed to shrink into the velvet upholstery. Soon, thought Laine, she’d disappear altogether.
Which might not be a bad thing.
Fortunately, the few other people in the dining room soon finished their meals and left, and the wait staff was leaving them alone. Arabella Griffin was nowhere to be seen.
Bethea’s hand shook as she lifted her cup to her lips. She steadied it with the other hand and sipped. She was alternating tea and ice water and not touching the food, claiming jet lag.
She looked hollow, scoured out, and Laine felt a pang of real worry. This wasn’t just an impromptu trip to see her daughter and the newly found Innis, that was for damned sure.
Bethea’s sleeve fell back as she pulled nervously at a strand of her blond hair, and Laine noticed a needle mark in the soft crook of her left elbow. She felt sick. Mother couldn’t be getting onto the hard stuff, could she? Even she couldn’t be that self-destructive.
Bethea must have seen her daughter’s shocked look, for she immediately adjusted her sweater’s sleeve lower to hide the telltale bruise.
Her voice sounded tired and sad as she said, “Elaine, it’s not what you think.” When Mother was serious, she called her daughter Elaine. When she was furious, she called her Rachel Elaine. So things could be worse. “How do you suppose I got here? Do you think I don’t know what I am? I’m dry—right now—but only because I have a friend who knew what to do. She got me what I needed to sober up, which included an IV drip for a while.” She took another shaky sip of tea and very carefully replaced the delicate cup in its saucer. “The IV was for vitamins and hydration, nothing more.” She ran a hand across her brow, which showed a thin sheen of sweat.
Arren was finding his fingernails very interesting, studiously not hearing what Laine’s mother was admitting.
It must have taken a lot of courage for Bethea to do what she’d done. “Are you going to be okay?” asked Laine in a very small voice.
Bethea had to blink back tears. She nodded, looked down at her cup for a while, then, gathering herself, sat up straight and fixed her daughter with what Laine recognized immediately as The Look. The one mothers everywhere gave their misbehaving children. Instinctively Laine found herself stammering, “I’m sorry I took off like that. I, I know you didn’t want me to come here—”
Bethea gave a genteel snort, a glint of anger in her bloodshot eyes. “An understatement. You have no idea what you’re getting into.”
Laine bristled, her chin firming up. “I’m already in it up to my eyeballs. And I’m glad you’re here—now I can ask all the questions I’ve been needing to ask ever since . . . ever. My whole life.”
Bethea’s chin didn’t waver, but the tendons in the backs of her hands were stretched tight as she gripped her cup. By now the tea was cold; she made a face and set the cup down. When she looked at Laine, her eyes held a stubbornness she had never seen before. Even sick and shaky in the midst of withdrawal, Mother was going to be hard to handle.
Okay, hardball it was. “You mean my father? That Jaird Fallon? The one you never managed to tell me about? Yes, I’ve met him. And seen more of him than I ever imagined.” Immediately she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. She should have told Arren first. She cast him a guilty look, but he was looking at Bethea.
Bethea’s nostrils flared. “Seen. I think I understand.” She cast a doubting look at Arren. Arren, without missing a beat, gazed blandly back and gave her a cheery smile. Don’t mind me, I’m part of the furniture. She curled her lip, looked away from him and said, “But if you think you’re the only one who has seen things she doesn’t like, you are mistaken.”
Her supercilious attitude was more than Laine could take. She leaned forward and hissed, “Don’t you try to cast blame back onto me. Jaird showed me his horse shape. I know what he is and I know what he’s been doing.” She paused for breath. “And are you aware that Innis is a shapechanger too?”
At this Bethea blanched even paler and leaned back as if Laine had shoved her. Immediately Laine regretted her hurtful impulse, but it was too late to pull back the words. Besides, damn it, her mother needed to stop lying, stop pretending all was well in her safe suburban universe with her tame, adoring husband.
Bethea rallied like a fighter. “I . . . suspected it. It was only a matter of time. I couldn’t stop either of you from coming here. It’s as if you were compelled. I blame Jaird.” She shivered convulsively and closed her eyes. “May he rot in hell.”
“I thought you knew about Innis.” Laine tried to imagine how she’d feel if she were a mother. The protective instinct kicked in naturally, didn’t it? Bethea must have some, right? “You knew who Innis’s father was, after all. I thought everyone was in on it but me.”
Bethea’s eyes were still closed, and she sagged in her chair. Laine found the urge to berate her mother for her cheating had waned.