Aini clenched the layers of her dress. “That. Is. Illegal.”
Thane threw his head back and sighed. “You’re a crabbit, wee thing.”
He had no idea why she cared so much about the laws and the rules. If he only knew what she was and what would happen if anyone found out, maybe he’d understand and quit taking unnecessary risks. Not that being here wasn’t a risk, but this could be done without drugging people. She almost wished she could tell him about her sixth sense. But no. Everyone viewed sixth-sensers as abominations. Freaks. She’d lose him. And Myles and Neve. Then she’d be alone and Father would be worse off than he already was.
“I’m going to the bar.”
“Wait.” Thane tried to grab her, but she pushed through the crowd toward the bar.
The banned flag wasn’t behind the green and brown liquor bottles anymore, but she could tell it used to be. The countertop was copper like the one in the picture and in the vision imprinted on the brooch. Five hooks marked the mirror above the row of liquor bottles. It was definitely where Father had toasted with that rebel and where he’d received the brooch.
The barkeep, wearing a simple shirt, skirt, and apron, handed the person next to Aini a beer. The froth overflowed onto the keep’s finger, and she licked it off.
“What do you want, then?” the woman asked.
A tattoo showed under her short sleeves. It was a woman with a flowing skirt filled with designs. Very specific designs. Aini gasped. It was a cleverly concealed Saltire. Thane elbowed her and she closed her gaping mouth.
“Cranberry juice, please,” she said.
The keep nodded and jerked her chin at Thane.
Ignoring a blue-eyed girl to his right who grinned like Thane had invented rainbows, he said, “Ben Nevis Ale.”
Drinks in hand, they put their backs against the counter. The juice in Aini’s glass quaked in her shaking hand. Thane’s sleeve brushed her bare arm with each of his breaths. His eyes trained on the dance floor, he moved a feather’s width away. Cold air from the overhead vents rushed down, and she shivered. She was on emotion overload. Worry for Father. Shock at the gall of the keep. Anger and—she hated admitting it to herself—lust toward Thane. She was a total, ridiculous mess.
Muttering something under his breath, Thane faced her. He set his ale on the bar and raked fingers through his hair. “I truly am sorry for snapping at you before.”
She rolled her dress hem between her fingers. She’d hit him, but that was before she’d seen the vision, before she knew Thane was right about suspecting Father’s dark past. But she couldn’t tell him about the vision.
“I know you’re sorry,” she said, not looking up. “It’s not okay. The snapping, I mean. But I get it. I do.”
A shaky smile pulled at one side of his full lips. A dimple was there and gone in a heartbeat. “I think we should dance,” he said.
Her heart snapped like a rubber band, and she slid her juice next to his empty glass before she could spill it. Remembering that Thane was not a good choice was going to be that much more difficult in a dancing, bodies-touching-occasionally situation. “Why?”
“You can’t hide if you want them to see you,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. He didn’t believe there were any of them here anymore—any rebels, he meant. He’d said it himself at the townhouse. But whatever his real reason for wanting to dance, it did work toward her goal. She did need to be seen to get this horror show on the road. The sooner she learned something, the sooner they could leave this awful place and return to the order and familiarity of home. She only needed a clue as to what Father was involved in and how to manage rescuing him.
While he paid the keep, Aini pulled the brooch out of her dress pocket—the only practical thing about this get-up. The gold blinked in the sporadic light as she pinned it on and led Thane to the dance floor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DANCE AS IT ALL GOES DOWN
WITH BODIES BUMPING AGAINST her, Aini moved her hips and hands with the beat, not making eye contact with Thane. Heat crept into her face. Her nerves wouldn’t stop jumping. She stopped for a second, eyeing the beautiful Edinburgh girls with their stylish, messy up-dos and confident dancing. Closing her eyes, she fell into the music.
From the time she could walk, she’d spent hours and hours next to her mother, dancing to her Balinese music. She smiled. She’d forgotten how much she loved letting go, falling, allowing the sound, the beat, to wrap around her and set her adrift in pure feeling.
Thane’s body brushed hers, and she opened her eyes to the black lapel of his jacket, the dark gray of his shirt, and the candle and rain scent of him. The drums pounded around them, seeming to push them together. He stared, and a slow-burning fire spread down Aini’s back and legs.
“You look very bonnie.” His mouth was very, very close to her temple. Delightful chills stretched across her scalp and over her neck.
She forced her gaze to the balcony where a few figures stood utterly still in the middle of more dancing. Could they be the owners of the club? Maybe they knew something about the man who’d given Father the brooch.
The music’s baseline slowed, and the violin shared time with the sounds of an entire orchestra. Thane looked at her lips. His nostrils flared once, a small movement, and suddenly she was breathing too fast.
Thane lifted her arms. She jumped at the touch, but let him put her hands on his shoulders.
“Just to blend in…” he murmured.
She nodded. His eyes strayed to the balcony. His muscles were tight under his clothes. His light, wool jacket was a strange combination of rough and smooth under her skin. His hipbone glanced against her side.
“Where did you learn to dance?” he asked.
The odd people at the balcony faded into the crowd. A guy in blue face paint fell against Aini, and Thane grabbed his shirt and pushed him away. Thane’s arm circled more tightly around her. He was like a big, handsome wall, and considering the raucous group of dancers surrounding them, it wasn’t a bad thing to have the shelter his body provided.
“My mother traveled with a Balinese dance troupe. She always had music on, was always practicing.”
Two men darkened a side door on the first floor. More bouncers. Were they looking this way?
Thane’s hands spanned her lower back, his thumbs pressing lightly into her ribs.
She took one of his hands and turned it over, studying it as they moved slowly with the music. “When did you get your tattoos?”
His chest moved more quickly as she traced a chemical structure that covered the back of his hand and reached along his thumb and first finger. There was a hexagon, a pentagon, and the combinations HO, NH, and NH2.
“Is this what I think it is?” she asked.
Thane’s Adam’s apple drew up and dropped again. She drew a finger across his palm and he cleared his throat.
“Aye. Probably. The chemical structure of serotonin.”
She grinned. “As in, the chemical for happiness?”
Lifting one shoulder, he put his hand on her back. The music’s tempo sped up, crushing them with colorful, minor key melodies and a spine-bruising baseline. Incense soaked the air.
She imagined what the gold stubble on his cheek would feel like under her hand. “I like your tattoos. And I think, after this song, we should find a new place to…hang out.” Maybe the balcony.
“You do? I would’ve thought a rule-follower like yourself would hate my unconventional tattoos.”
He leaned close and tipped his head closer, though his gaze followed first one stranger and then another.
“There’s nothing inherently rebellious about tattoos,” she said. “It’s merely not a cultural norm as of now.”
Please let someone notice the brooch, she wished silently.
He laughed, and his eyebrow reached above the line of his glasses. “You do surprise me, Aini MacGregor.”
The words felt like praise and she couldn’t fight a smile.
His mouth, with its peaked upper lip, was only a breath away. One side drew up into a cocky sort of grin.
Then his eyes locked onto the brooch.
He jerked back a step, and before he could say anything, the chain at his neck brushed her finger. The club and Thane peeled away, and the colors of a vision became pictures.
A garden. Leafy trees. Blue blossoms like a carpet. A pebble path. A blond-haired boy stood near a tall woman. The woman pulled the boy to her, and he grinned, saying something. Mother, his mind echoed. Blue-green happiness and golden contentedness swirled through the boy’s mind.
A man tore into the garden, breaking a branch from a sapling near the path.
He handed a silver necklace to the boy, who took it with wide and innocent eyes. The man tried to put the chain on the boy. The boy shook his head of shaggy hair. His mother held out an arm, stopping the man’s hands from circling the boy’s neck. The man’s mouth opened in a shout. Emotions like a storm of color spun around the boy’s head. He looked up through black lashes at the scarred man. The boy’s eyes weren’t wide and sweet anymore. They were sharp, cold.
The vision embedded in Thane’s necklace shimmered away. The boy—grown now—looked into Aini’s face.
“Aini? Are you all right?”
No, no she wasn’t. “Yes. Sorry. Yes.”
“Let’s get you some water.” Leading her off the dance floor, he pointed at her shoulder. “Did you know that’s a Bethune brooch?”
“Is it?” She hadn’t searched for what clan claimed the motto Graceful. She should’ve. Thane shouldn’t have been more informed than her. “It was in Father’s trunk. In that room.”
At the bar, Aini sipped a glass of water, the cool liquid clearing her head.
Thane downed his ale and paid the barkeep. “Do you know about the Bethunes?”
“I just thought if it belonged to Father and certain people recognized it…”
“The last time kingsmen raided this place with any real success,” Thane said quietly, “they found a few of that clan. Seemed to be running the Dionadair here in Edinburgh.”
Aini set the glass down and liquid splashed over the side. “What happened to them?”
Thane’s eyes went cold as the waters of the Firth of Forth in January. “You really need to ask?”
“Right.”
Someone touched her arm. It was a guy with the beginnings of a beard. He would’ve done better to wait another year before sporting that look. A pudgy man in thick, steel-toed boots stood by him. The liquid in Aini’s stomach iced. They were the men from the balcony—the ones who’d been watching. Suddenly she wasn’t so confident about her plan.
“Come with me,” the first one said, his eyes bright, confident.
Thane made a derisive noise in his throat. “And who exactly are you?”
Neve and Myles appeared, their faces flushed.
Aini put herself between them and the strangers. “First tell me what this is about.”
The second man’s gaze slipped to the brooch. “You know what.”
Aini cleared her throat and tried to stop her heart from beating too quickly. Thane touched her arm, and she gave the men a shaky smile.
“Give us a minute, please,” she said.
They stepped back with a nod.
“Please don’t do this,” Thane said into her ear. “If they’re not rebels, they’re a waste of your time. If they are…these people don’t care about anything but their cause. They’re dangerous.”
Myles butted in. “I don’t know your plan here, but be careful, sweetheart. These people have knives in their fancy boots.” Discreetly, he pointed to the stranger’s feet. Something silver showed at the second man’s ankle. “If you do go with these losers, I’m going with you. We all are.”
Thane nodded.
Myles’s mouth fell open. “Wow. You actually agreed with me.”
“But you’re not going,” Thane said to Aini.
“It’s Aini’s decision,” Neve said. “Not yours.”
Thane nodded tightly, but Aini could tell it was killing him to let her put herself in danger.
“That one guy looks my age,” Aini said. “He can’t be that dangerous.”
“Shows how little you know,” Thane said as he looked over her head at them.
“Number One, you wait here,” Aini said. “Two, watch where he takes me. Three, if I don’t come back in fifteen minutes—”
“No.” Thane said, shaking his head and jabbing a finger. “That’s definitely not what we’re doing.”
Aini may’ve growled. “This may come as a surprise to you, Thane Moray—I know how geniuses are used to getting their way—but I don’t actually need your permission.”
“I can’t stand here and wonder if you’re all right and—”
Aini didn’t stick around for the rest of that statement. She started toward the strangers. “Let’s go, gentlemen.”
Thane slammed a fist on the bar top, rattling bottles and glasses. The keep said something to him that the music covered, and Aini heard Myles and Neve working to calm him down.
The men led Aini to the back of the club and up a wide staircase that led to a large balcony level with its own bar. Black bottles and bone cups made rows against its lighted back wall. Long red booths and sleek tables crowded the area. Past the seating, a hall led to the right, going toward what she could only guess was another interior part of the building. They didn’t go far enough for her to find out. Instead, the two strangers stopped at what appeared to be a blank wall. The younger of the two pushed on the chaotically designed green and black wallpaper, and a door swung away from his hand.
“She’ll want to see your brooch straightaway,” the bearded man said, gesturing toward the hidden room. Then he walked off down the hallway.
“Of course.” Aini headed through the doorway. Her pulse raced and she wiped sweating palms on her dress.
Before the man shut the entrance, leaving Aini on her own, she caught a flash of movement. A glimpse of green hair. One wide brown eye. A tattooed hand.
She sniffed to cover a nervous laugh. Myles, Neve, and Thane had hidden behind one of the red booths out on the balcony.
Inside the hidden room, red velvet-like paper covered the walls. Wrapped in a gold and black striped dress and leggings, a dark-haired young woman sat at a round table cluttered with electronics, and oddly, jewelry. A box near her elbow held a nest of shining things—a blue enameled ring, a silver brooch made in the shape of antlers, and several gold brooches. A beefy guy with pock-marked skin stood next to her, chewing on a drink stirrer. He had hair dark as midnight too, but freckles dotted his nose.
They were familiar somehow.
The woman’s wide mouth puckered, and she looked Aini up and down. “I’m Vera. This is my brother, Dodie. Now where did you get that brooch?” She scooted forward on her chair, her hands clasped on the table.
Aini coughed, her throat dry. “It was…I found it. In an old trunk.”
Vera’s eyebrow lifted.
Aini stared the beautiful woman down.
Smiling a smile that would look perfectly at home on a boa about to squeeze someone to death, Vera pushed away from the table, pulled her dress down a little, and sauntered over. Aini silently named her perfume Too Many Roses.
Vera bent and squinted at the brooch. “De bonnaire.” Her eyes met Aini’s.
Aini stepped back.
“A Bethune brooch,” Vera said. “I’ll give you fifty pounds for it.”
“I don’t want to sell it. I just wanted to know…have you seen it before?”
Turning away, Vera waved a hand in the air. Her nails were short and chipped. Aini chewed the inside of her cheek. Odd for a woman like her to have messy nails. Aini wondered what she did when she wasn’t lounging in a club, buying up black market jewelry.
“There are so many like that,” Vera said. “I’m really just paying you for the gold in it.”
And yet, here she was, meeting Aini
in a private room in a club where rebels used to meet.
“I’ll go then.” Aini shrugged and made for the door, running her damp palms down her sides again.
Vera’s voice went higher, tighter. “Eighty pounds. Last offer.”
“I want to know its provenance. Not its worth on the black market.”
Vera’s eyes widened, but Aini didn’t wait for an answer. The walls were closing in, and that big man—Dodie?—had pulled something out of his waistband. A knife? A gun?
“Take it from her,” Vera said.
Dodie rushed her. His thick fingers ripped the brooch from her dress, tearing the outer layer of white and gold fabric. Not thinking, just doing, she grabbed for the brooch, but Vera pushed her toward the door.
“Out with you, richie. I’ve no use for those who live well on English money.”
Before they opened the door, Aini jerked hard and shoved Dodie. He fell, and the brooch flew from his hand. She leaped for it. Vera shrieked and came at her, ragged nails like claws. Diving for the brooch, Vera raked Aini’s arm. Heat and needles seared Aini’s skin. The door swung open behind her and strong hands wrenched her from the room.
“It’s us, hen,” Thane said into her ear.
Recovered, Dodie charged.
Myles shouted a warning and Neve took Aini’s arm. Thane spun and smashed a boot into Dodie’s stomach as Vera shot from the room. The two men who’d first led Aini through the club came running from the back hallway. Before Vera could get to them, Myles, Neve, and Aini hurtled down the stairs in a series of teeth-clattering leaps.
“Emergency!” Myles shouted into the crowd.
Aini looked over her shoulder. Still on the balcony, Thane had the bearded man in some sort of headlock. The chubby man waved a knife at Thane. He kicked the man’s hand and the knife jumped into the air.
Downstairs, a cluster of girls wearing feathers in their hair separated Vera from Aini, Myles, and Neve. Vera’s pretty face contorted as she made eye contact with Aini, but she didn’t call out.
“This girl’s going to upchuck!” Myles shouted. “Unless you want groceries tossed all over your fab attire, I suggest you move it!”
The Edinburgh Seer: Edinburgh Seer Book One Page 7