Bloodkin (Jaseth of Jaelshead)

by Ashford, Cathy

  “Hell, I hate being gay at times like this. It’s just not fair!” she moaned. The girls had had a massive head start with their drinking and Lolitha was slurring her words ever so slightly. Mantilly had gone to sit with the boys and she was whispering in Dunkerle’s ear, who periodically had to remove his spectacles and wipe them clear of steam. And Sallagh… Well, Sallagh seemed intent on giving the birthday boy a gift of her own.

  “I, uh, have to go to the bathroom.” I stood abruptly and eased my way over Sallagh, who trailed her fingernails down my leg as I passed. Oh hell, please don’t let me have an erection. Please.

  I possibly did, but the cut of my robe was very forgiving. Anna and Charlie were still talking at the bar, and Charlie watched me expressionless as I walked past on the way to relieving myself. That was odd. In fact, that was very odd, but I didn’t pause – now I was standing the pressure on my full bladder was almost unbearable.

  On the way back from the bathroom I noticed Anna had gone to sit with the others at the booth, and as I went to go join them Charlie stepped in front of me and blocked my way.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” His face was dark with fury, and I took a step back, surprised more than anything by the force of his question and the wholly uncharacteristic anger. Charlie had never been angry at me before.

  “I, uh, tell you what?” I countered lamely.

  “What happened on Samhain, you idiot!” He had never called me names before, well, only nice ones.

  “Anna told you?”

  “She most certainly did! Why, Jas? Why didn’t you tell me?” Something else crept into his voice. Sadness? Guilt maybe? I realised suddenly that his anger wasn’t directed at me.

  “Anna, she… She asked me not to. Oh hell, I’m sorry Charlie. It wasn’t that big a deal,” I said when he sniffed. Seriously, my Mentor was almost crying?

  “It was a big deal!” he exclaimed. “You could have been killed! I’m your effing Mentor and you could have been killed! I failed you, Jaseth. Do you understand that? I should never have taken you to that place and I should have looked after you, like I’m supposed to. It’s my job and I failed!” he groaned.

  Oh sweet Lilbecz. If a crying girl was hard to deal with, Charlie’s miserable self-recriminations were terrifying.

  “Shit Charlie, seriously, it’s fine.”

  “But you couldn’t even tell me!” The look on his face was pure woe. I couldn’t handle it. I reached out and tentatively patted him on the arm.

  “Anna asked me not to. And it was fine and we’re alright and we won’t let it happen again. Come on, let’s go to the bar, it’s my birthday!” I said brightly, trying to distract him, but he groaned again and rubbed his forehead in dismay.

  “And now I’m ruining your birthday! I’m the worst Mentor ever.”

  Right, it was clearly time to take the firm approach. “That’s bollocks Charlie, you’re a brilliant Mentor and you know it. You’re the best. Now let’s go get some of that tequila you’re always going on about.” That seemed to work because he smiled hesitantly.

  “Oh yes, you’ll like tequila. Best thing to come out of Yhull since… Since I don’t know what. I am sorry, Jas. I will try harder.” I didn’t want to think about Charlie trying to be a better Mentor, that was too overwhelming, so I towed him to the bar.

  Behind the counter, Aliakh had taken over for a while so the waitress could take a break. She grinned when Charlie ordered the tequila. It was a thick amber liquid, and Aliakh poured two shots into tiny glasses and laid slices of lemon on the top, setting a salt–shaker beside them on the bar.

  “Excellent choice. This has been imported directly from Yhull.” She waved me away when I went to pull out my coin-purse. “Anna is taking care of it all tonight, boyo. It seems she’s grown rather fond of you.”

  Now that was a surprise. The tall violet-eyed woman, even when at her most relaxed, was always slightly removed and aloof, always watchful. Even though I saw her most weekends, and she was always gentle with me, I only detected fondness for Aliakh, Fiona and Charlie. Even Jeetz failed to rouse any sort of warmth in her, but perhaps that was because he plainly disapproved of her occupation. Therefore, I thought, maybe this whole birthday thing was an apology of sorts for the Samhain incident. Somehow, Lolitha and I had found ourselves in the middle of one of her professional deals and maybe she felt guilty. An unpleasant thought niggled at me. I had assumed the whole thing had simply been a case of wrong place, wrong time, but Anna had said she had a personal interest in killing the two men. Maybe, and this was the unpleasant bit, she had used us as bait.

  Oh no, no, I told myself sternly. That was far too much like paranoia to be true. She had been Charlie’s friend for as long as I had been alive – she had been a Mentor herself, she wouldn’t do anything to put us in harm’s way, would she?

  Yes, but she is the most ruthless woman in the entire city, a little voice told me, she is the head of Lya Vassalion, maybe…

  Stop it! I thought, and concentrated on Charlie showing me how to drink the tequila. You licked the soft bit of your hand between the thumb and first finger and sprinkled salt on it. Then, holding the lemon in your hand, you licked the salt off, downed the shot, then sucked on the lemon. How hard could it be? Right. Salt, tequila, lemon. The lemon was already in my mouth before my brain could register the punch of the strong liquor.

  “Ooh shit,” I gasped and spat out the wedge of lemon. Charlie giggled as his lips puckered and one of his eyes twitched involuntarily. “What, you like this stuff?” I demanded, eyes watering.

  “Give it a second!” Charlie licked the last of the salt from his hand. Sure enough, my stomach slowly unclenched and a warm fire spread through my insides. Hmm, not bad.

  Sallagh and Lolitha had come over to us, giggling about something and stumbling slightly. There was an ease between them that, two weeks ago, I would have never thought possible.

  “Oh, tequila, brilliant! Have you ever drunk tequila before, Loli?” Sallagh used Lolitha’s hated nickname, but to my surprise, she didn’t seem to mind. Whatever Emma had done, it had worked like magic. I chuckled quietly to myself, of course it actually kind of had been magic.

  “Hullo girls, tequila?” Aliakh leaned back and called through the door to the kitchen. “Coco, can you come out here, please?” Coco appeared in the doorway, a winsome girl of medium height with long, curly dark hair and dewy brown eyes. “Coco dear, these are my friends, please entertain them while I duck out to the desk for a second.” Coco smiled shyly at Lolitha who blushed furiously. Charlie gave me a massive wink.

  “I think I’ll leave you kids to it then,” and he went to sit at the booth with the other Mentors.

  “Um, how does this work?” asked Lolitha, as Coco poured the next round for us.

  “Easy! Okay Jaseth, lick my neck.”

  Wait, what?

  “Right here.” Sallagh lifted her hair back and pointed to a spot that was very close to the swell of her breast. Oh hell, okay, I can do this. I complied quickly, trying not to breathe in too much of her scent or look too closely at the top of her dress. It was very low-cut. Shit.

  “Good,” she told me and sprinkled salt on the damp patch I had left. She took a slice of lemon and placed it in her teeth, rind side facing in, and handed me the shot glass. I saw what I had to do. Without hesitation I licked the salt from her neck, drank the tequila in one go, then took the lemon from her lips.

  As I bit down on the sour fruit she grinned at me. “That’s how me and my friends do it when we used to go down to the Docks.”

  I lifted my eyebrows in appreciation – this Sallagh was not nearly as posh as she made out to be. The mental image of her and her friends licking salt off each other and biting lemons from each other’s lips was definitely one I was going to save for later. She impatiently motioned for me to hold the lemon for her and licked my neck before sprinkling salt from the shaker.

  “Cheers Jaseth!” she cried, licking the salt off my neck, her t
ongue grinding the grains from my skin. She drank her shot in one go, then took her sweet time taking the lemon from my mouth, touching her lips to mine as she bit down.

  This was possibly the coolest thing anyone had ever done to me. Wow.

  Lolitha was trying to have a conversation with Coco. “So, is your name really Coco?”

  “Nah, it’s Caelioque, but Coco is cuter, don’t you think?” She batted her eyelashes at Lolitha, who was still blushing.

  “Um, yeah. And do you work here?”

  “Yeah! Well not work here, work here, I’m just one of the waitresses. Myn Aliakh won’t let me do anything else, seeing as I’m just seventeen, and her friend Myn Anna thinks I’m Nea’thi-Blood so I’ll be going to the Academy when I’m old enough. Do you want one?” Coco indicated the tequila and, drunk as she was, Lolitha could only nod. Coco offered her neck for Lolitha to lick and Sallagh and I cheered her on as she drank the tequila and bit the lemon from Coco’s lips.

  We all did another shot each, then Sallagh pulled me away to an empty booth. Lolitha gave me a brief pleading look as we left, but I gave her the thumbs up, and I saw Coco shyly reach for her hand.

  “Heh, good old Loli, do you know she’s never even kissed a girl before?” I didn’t know, though I probably could have guessed, it was unlikely there were many options for a lesbian in a quiet mountain village like Lallisol. I didn’t tell Sallagh that before that first night at the Thistle, I had never kissed a girl before either.

  “Um, you and ‘Litha seem to be getting on better. What did Emma do to you?”

  Sallagh’s face paled for a second. “Oh gawd, Jaseth, it was so awful, I had no idea. And she’s such a good sort, that Loli, I can’t even remember why I disliked her so much. Emma tells me I was secretly jealous, but it didn’t feel like that… Anyway…” Sallagh was clearly not in the mood for talking and she snuggled into me in the back of the booth. This was not at all how I expected the evening to go, but as she turned her head up to face mine and twined her fingers through my hair to pull my head down to hers, everything – the dancers, the music, the Samhain incident – was forgotten.

  The other important thing that happened in November, of course, was the arrival of Lux.

  ot long after my birthday, Charlie and I went for a mid-week dinner down at the Shivering Thistle. Alan and Steven had moved out of the Hall into some apartments in the Quarter that Myn Eve had helped them find. Soon after that we had some new Journeymen move in – two guys from Hầiờ who had just come to Lille from Vesterg, and a girl named Odette who had just left Жanờ for the first time. It had to be said that these new Journyemen hadn’t quite got the hang of cooking for Humans yet, and when Charlie and I had smelled the acrid, burning smell wafting down from the kitchen when we got home from the Academy, we thought it wise to escape for the evening into town.

  Anna was not conducting any business when we got to the Thistle, so one of her guards waved us up after we ordered our food from O’Malley. I could tell at once that something was wrong. Anna was pacing up and down, flapping a piece of paper in her hand and muttering furiously. Jeetz was sitting quietly by the fire, his hands folded over his ample belly, and Fiona and Aliakh were making soothing noises, not that they appeared to help.

  Anna pounced on Charlie as soon as he walked through the archway. “Did you know about this?” she demanded, thrusting the letter under his nose.

  “Know what? Hang on, let me read it.” He took the piece of paper and scanned it quickly.

  “Well?” Anna snatched it back.

  “This is… Isn’t she a bit young?”

  “Damn right she’s a bit young! She’s far too young! She’s only eighteen!”

  I felt a bit affronted by her tone. It was only a couple of weeks before that I had been only eighteen. What was too young about being eighteen?

  “And she’s refusing to have a Mentor and go to the Academy!”

  “Yes, well, that is certainly unconventional,” Charlie offered.

  “Unconventional?!” Anna almost screeched. “It’s worse than unconventional! How the hell will she know anything?”

  Charlie tried to placate her, placing a gentle hand on her arm to halt her frantic pacing. “Well Journeymen don’t go to the Academy—”

  “But she’s not a bloody Journeyman! She’s an eighteen-year-old Mingle!”

  Something twigged in my memory and I realised I knew who they were talking about.

  Anna – big scary Anna who killed men just by looking at them – was close to tears. “She’ll come here and I’ll have to look after her and I can’t look after a child. I just can’t.”

  Charlie led her to a chair and as she sat she whispered, “Oh Ϛaioћ, I just don’t know what to do.”

  O’Malley appeared in the archway with our dinners and gave the group of us an appraising look. “You’ll be needing more wine then?”

  “Oh, ah, yes please Myr O’Malley, that would be good,” Charlie told him. Anna didn’t even look up. I tucked into my meal, trying not to be too obtrusive in listening to what Anna and Charlie were saying.

  “So when did the letter arrive?”

  “This afternoon. She said she was leaving straight away, so she’ll be here soon. She’s probably already Outside by now,” Anna muttered wearily.

  “They could have stopped her, you know, in the Enclave.”

  Anna shook her head. “They should have stopped her, but when she wrote this she was already in Hầлжớњ, and she… Lux is wilful, far too much so, she wouldn’t have let anyone stop her.”

  There, I had a name. Lux.

  “I have been corresponding with her for the last few years…”

  Now it was Charlie’s turn to look surprised. “Really? You never said.”

  Anna nodded glumly. “I fear I may have encouraged her. Oh hell Ϛaioћ, what am I to do?”

  Charlie made soothing noises. “It will be okay Aӣấ, we’ll sort it out when she arrives. Here.” O’Malley had returned with wine and Charlie poured her a generous glass.

  When I finished my meal Charlie gave me a look. Anna seemed, quite uncharacteristically, intent on getting drunk, and for the first time up in the private lounge I felt as if I was intruding. So I made some noises about having homework to do and made my escape, leaving Charlie to deal with whatever it was in that letter that had made Anna so upset.

  The next Saturday night we all sat down and had a nice dinner in the common room with the new Journeymen. Their cooking skills had begun to improve and we had plenty of wine, so as the wind howled and the rain beat against the windows of the Hall, we all managed to relax and enjoy ourselves.

  Sallagh kept close to me. Ever since my birthday we were kind of a ‘thing’, although we’d only shared kisses. Charlie had warned me off getting too physical, although I was dying to do so, as apparently sex between two untrained Nea’thi-Bloods could be “fiery”. He mentioned something about waiting until we’d had proper sex education. Whatever that was, it sounded uncomfortable, but I hoped we’d get it soon – sweet kisses and holding hands was pretty awesome, sure, but I was getting more than a little frustrated. Lolitha had gotten a hell of a time from Telgeth, who had spied her making out with Coco in a dark corner of the Gilded Rose the night of my birthday. She was understandably reluctant to talk about the other girl, and Telgeth finally gave up teasing her.

  That night, when we had finished our dinners and Myn Eve refused to give us any more wine from the Hall’s cellars, we took the new Journeymen down to the Shivering Thistle. The weather outside was brutal, the rain was even sleety in patches. Luckily the hoods of our Nea’thi-weave robes kept most of the moisture off, and even Sallagh had taken to wearing one after Samhain. The different style suited her, draping suggestively about her slender frame and belted in slightly at her slim waist. Now she looked more grown up, and like a proper resident of the Quarter, rather than just some stuck-up girl who had come down from her mansion on the hills for a little sightseeing.

  The
atmosphere inside the Thistle was warm and a bit steamy as the fires dried off the slightly soggy patrons. Odette clung to Charlie who, gentleman that he was, had offered his arm to the young woman. She was barely more than a girl, really, and had a passing resemblance to Anna, with the same colouring and upturned violet eyes. Maybe that was why Charlie was being so friendly towards her, maybe he was just being nice, it was hard to say.

  We consumed a few drinks and watched the musicians. The travelling group of Nea’thi-Bloods from Allyon had indeed been given the residency for the winter, and now every time I heard them I tried listening to the Nea’thi lyrics, seeing if I could pick up any words I recognised from the vocabulary that our lecturers were adding to slowly each day. They had a wide repertoire, but one of my favourites – and one of theirs too, given they played it most nights we were there – was a traditional Nea’thi song the vocalist introduced as “Πiл Ớừ Фade”.

  When the song finished we all clapped and cheered, and as it marked the end of a short break for the musicians, Charlie took Lolitha, Jimmy, Telgeth, Thomas and me up to the private lounge. Odette had whined in apprehension as Charlie stood to go, so he escorted her up the stairs to meet his other friends too.

  Charlie hadn’t mentioned Anna or the letter he had received, and I decided that I didn’t really want to know. I figured that Charlie would tell me in his own time if he wanted to, I had learned that patience was the best way to get him to confide in me.

  Odette stared wide-eyed at the guards when they nodded at us as we passed, though they did look more closely at Odette but were apparently satisfied that she was no threat to their mistress. Her voice even shook a little as she fumbled the formal words introducing herself to Anna, Fiona, Jeetz and, to my surprise, Hanniash. “Um, hello, my name is Odлeρoћжầ Жấњфớρờθ and I’m from Жanờ and, um, you can call me Odette.”

  To see a fifty-year-old High Priestess in a tavern on a Saturday night was not something I had ever expected to witness, but it was beginning to be obvious that this really was a place for surprises.