by A. J. Aalto
“Boy, I’m glad you’re not a Crowned Prince of the Blood,” I said, “'cuz that bullshit wouldn’t fly with me.”
If it were possible to glower prissily, that would be my description of the face he showed me. “Have you ever doubted that I expect your complete devotion, pet?”
“Have you ever doubted that you’re gonna get exactly what I fuckin’ give you?”
For a moment, he blinked unnecessarily at me, twice, slowly, to make a point. The color of his eyes faded from ash grey to shiny chrome. I stared back, unfazed. If I’d had my bubble gum, I’d have blown a big ol’ snappy bubble in his face. I had the Sassmaster 9000 app installed on Marnie 3.0, I tell you what.
“One might be driven quite mad by your interminable insolence, DaySitter,” he said primly.
“Oh, one feels the same about you, Revenant,” I assured him.
He sighed with defeat and kissed my hair. “I am relieved that Carole Jeanne’s travels did not lead her to our doorstep. There was a time that this worry did cross my mind; that perhaps she felt the need to check on us.”
And by “us,” Harry meant himself, of course. She and I had shared a couple of quiet conversations, but I doubted I rated anything so grand as going AWOL. “So where did she go? And why? Did she travel alone? Was anyone else missing?” And could this have had anything to do with Batten? Was she the one responsible for returning his body for burial? Had she just needed a vacation away from the undead? Had the new Queen been a giant pain in the ass and Carole Jeanne had had it up to her eyeballs with Remy’s crap? Why vacation in Russia? Would it be harder to track her there, since revenants weren’t safe to follow into Russian territory? I wondered if Chapel knew who was responsible for offering Batten’s remains.
Harry had caught the full run of my thoughts, and smiled sadly. “All those questions hang in the air without answers at this time, I’m afraid.”
“When did Declan leave the island for France with Malas?”
“Surely, my pet, you’re not suggesting that Carole Jeanne was involved in any shenanigans with House Nazaire?”
“Shenanigans?” I felt my mouth screw up with disgust. “Ew, no. Harry, Malas Nazaire is mostly rotted away. I’m not suggesting she got all humpity on Count Creepy’s boner. That’s disgusting.”
“I meant non-libidinous trickeries.”
“Now that you mention it, maybe. Really, though, it’s Carole Jeanne’s business, not ours. I don’t report my travel itinerary to Felstein every time I get on a damn plane.”
“As the primary DaySitter of a Crowned Prince of the Blood, her whereabouts are a tad more important than your own, dearheart,” he pointed out. “I imagine she put the whole of House Dreppenstedt into a right mopple and caused Wilhelm undue—”
“Collywobbles?” I interrupted.
“Such a sassy tongue you have,” he chided ruefully, his lofty London accent crisp. “I ought to find a better use for it.”
I glanced up to find he was gaze-flirting with me, and my body responded with a rush of longing for him. It had been so long since we’d enjoyed a post-feeding roll in the sack that I was caught completely flat-footed. I knew the next move was mine, and after this long, it was going to be clumsy, but the sly smile playing on Harry’s lips was both forgiving and inviting. My libido had been fairly numbed since—no. I fought that thought off, knowing it would kill the mood that was building. I dropped my hand to the front of Harry’s pants and stroked him through the fabric. His thrice-pierced brow twitched up and his smile widened.
“I need you, Harry,” I breathed as he came in close to kiss me.
I felt his preternatural probing through the Bond as cool fingers, searching the deep recesses of my mind, touching on my feelings, my reservations, my fears, seeking the best approach to pleasure, and finding it with an immortal’s ease. He could have carried me off to bed, but instead, he scooped me up and brought me to my bathroom.
“Uh, Harry?” I said as he propped me on the bathroom countertop. “There’s a comfy bed right back there.”
“And I would be thrilled beyond belief to put it to good use, my only love, however…” His head shook sadly back and forth, then bent to turn on the water in the bath. “You need to scrub up and relax and rid yourself of some worries first. There is someone else weighing heavily on your mind,” he said almost accusingly, “and I should like you to sweep him out of each dusty corner, yes?”
“Well, I know a few ways you could help me with that, y’know.” I showed him a broad wink and elbowed him twice in the solar plexus.
Harry made a long, considering noise, but retrieved a towel and some bath salts from the linen closet. “Your dulcet words are sweet honey in my ear,” he assured me, “and later, I shall spoil you rotten in any way you might choose—”
“Ooo, baby,” I said happily.
“But first, a little self-care and mindfulness. Into the tub with you,” he said.
Self-care. It did sound good. That is what I need tonight. A long soak in the tub, a drink – just one; maybe some of Harry's fancy cognac, nice and mellow and warm – some candles, a fresh hair trimming, my softest PJs. I turned on the taps to fill the claw-foot tub with hot water and a splash of scented oil, Harry bustled about collecting what I might need, and I fetched the scissors and my new facial mud mask from the spa. When Harry was gone, I cracked the bathroom window to let out some steam, turned off the faucet, and added some bath salts, letting them sit and melt while I tended to my hair.
I started cutting my bangs, pulling them down a tad more fiercely than usual, and a sudden noise outside the bathroom window—shuffle, crunch!—caused my head to turn and my hand to jerk. The snip went wild and hacked off almost all of the blue hair at a diagonal. A quick check at the window revealed no pesky Mitch Dunlop lurking, and no other shadows that I could see, including my own mischievous missing half-shadow, which Umayma had called my Fetch.
I couldn’t fix what I’d done to my bangs, so I tried to draw attention away from it by trimming the length of my black and blue ghost hair. It was mostly a disaster. I used my fingertips to dab the mud mask all over my face and applied the little cotton strips the way Ruth had shown me to my forehead, cheeks, and chin. The mask was hot and tingly immediately, but not in an unpleasant way. I couldn’t get the left cheek strip to stay plastered to the mud there, and kept having to press it back into place when it flopped down. I tried to peel it off to try again and it only pulled out my cheek flesh but wouldn’t let go.
“Um, ow?” I said, pulling harder. It wouldn’t come. It was like duct tape. “I think I did something wrong,” I told my reflection.
Maybe the mud needed time to set; it was a rich grey-green now, and when Ruth had taken it off at the salon, it had been a light pewter color. I got into the bath for a brief soak, but I felt impatient. I tried to pull again on the cotton and was rewarded as it came off in my hand; a split second later, the pain came, and I lurched out of the water in a flurry of drips to gape in the mirror at the stripped area. There was a red rash and an angry welt where the gluey junk hadn’t come off without taking a layer of irritated skin with it.
“Spifferific.” I stared at my sticky, muddy, cotton-stripped face and my extremely short blue bangs, sliced on a diagonal. “I guess this is just going to be my face, now.” I turned and fled from my reflection, choosing my bed as a safe haven, where I couldn’t see myself.
I heard the sharp pat of Oxfords on the kitchen floor outside my room. “Darling, we’re out of milk, so I’ll just be stepping out for a little—good heavens!” Harry stopped with a horrified gasp in my bedroom. “Whatever have you done to yourself, my minx?”
I stuffed my pillow on top of my face and groaned into it. “Har-ry!”
“I said self-care, not self-mutilation!”
“Uggggggh,” I growled.
“You’re bald about one temple, dearest.”
“Not totally bald,” I cried, muffled by the pillow. “Just… mostly bald.”
“You’re going to shock me into an early grave. My heart doesn’t need these provocations at my advanced age,” he warned me.
I slapped the pillow off my head and sat straight up, wiping static-clinging hair out of my face. “Your heart doesn’t beat and can’t have any sort of infarction. Besides, you sleep in a damn coffin in the basement; the only difference between that and a grave is the lighting and your PlayStation.”
He pressed one fine hand to his chest with a wince. “I fear, this might be the big one.”
I fired the pillow at him. “Seriously, The Jeffersons?”
He caught it and set it neatly on the bed, eyes twinkling with a sudden shift toward mischief. “I do apologize, my Only One. Allow me to correct my ungentlemanly behavior.” His lips curled slightly. “You look fetching this evening.”
I blinked rapidly and a curl of muddy cotton flopped down in front of my left eye. I was the Dread Pirate Maybelline. “Oh yeah?”
Harry’s eyelashes fluttered with mock innocence and his lips spread, flashing fang. “I’m considering the total abandonment of my chivalry in the face of such an enticing offering.”
I cracked a smile. “You’re a ridiculous creature, Harry.”
“You bring out the worst in me, one might suspect,” he said, gliding closer to the bed and reaching out to swipe the mud strip aside with one finger so he could see both of my eyes. “Shall I shed my velvet and service you now, pet?”
At the mention of velvet, I glanced down; it was only then that I noticed he had changed again, and was wearing his flared equestrian riding jodhpurs. They struck me as the most hilarious thing I’d ever seen; for the first time in months, I felt laughter bubble up from my belly and I didn’t fight it. The absurdity of the moment threw me back onto my bed with full-bodied glee and peals of giggles. The mattress sank slightly as my Cold Company slid onto the bed beside me.
“My trousers are the source of this amusement, I trust?”
Harry needn’t ask; linked as we were through the Bond, Harry could pinpoint with preternatural acuity exactly where my feelings were coming from. I was scrambled, completely scrambled, enjoying a moment of levity, a break in my mourning, and respite from my anger, and all because of his stupid pants.
I looked up at him with tears clouding my vision. Happy tears. “Those are the Duke of Cumberland’s pants, Harry.”
His lips twitched into a faux-moue. “Darling, pants are underwear. These are authentic vintage riding breeches.”
“You wore those on purpose!” I accused, returning to my full-belly laughter. The guilty smile in his eyes confirmed it. “You went all MC Hammer at the Kentucky fuckin' Derby on me.”
He slyly suggested, “Well, the weather isn’t quite pleasant enough, but perhaps I should have chosen to appear this evening in my knickerbockers?”
This elicited a helpless howl of glee and I curled against him happily. “No! Never. Not them!”
“I have some marvelous Hungarian silk—”
“Don’t even say knickerbockers!” I cried. “No more! I can’t even deal.”
“I’ll have you know there isn’t a finer dressed man in the New World,” he fake-huffed, chuckling.
“Yes, Harry,” I nodded against his chest and patted him there. “You’re the dandiest dandy this side of the pond, I’m sure.”
Harry took my patting hand and kissed my fingertips. “Thank you, my dove.” He dropped his tone and the mood shifted subtly between us. “I feel as though perhaps you are finally open to forgiving me for my part in what happened.”
“I want to, Harry. I know you volunteered with good intentions,” I said carefully. “He was sentenced to—” I couldn’t say it, but Harry nodded me through it. “And someone was going to do it. Did you…” I swallowed hard and blinked away fresh tears. “I thought you tried to shield him through the worst of it?”
His voice was hoarse when he insisted, “Of course I did. He was Our Lad, in the end.”
And then Harry was unable to continue; the Bond rose up in me fiercely, insisting I protect him from whatever was causing my companion harm. I wrapped my arms around him and buried his face in the crook of my neck, where the warm scent of my pulse would comfort him most. His nose found my thumping vein and rested there, and his body shuddered once, hard. Muddy as I was, with my ghost hair hacked on an angle and my dignity abandoned, Harry still craved me, his pet, his DaySitter, his Own. His hunger roared back for round two, and though I hadn’t exactly de-stressed, perhaps my Cold Company would take pity on me and we could resume the promising activities we’d begun in the living room.
His head came up abruptly, hair rumpled from the nuzzling. I didn’t hear or sense anything, but of course Harry’s preternatural senses would outpace my own. His grey eyes were wide with what I first took to be distress, which soon softened into delight.
“Heavens, well, the lad certainly doesn’t have the best timing,” Harry said ruefully, “but he’s long overdue, so I suppose I shouldn’t grouse.”
I didn’t have to ask. The look on his face, almost paternal in nature, and the fact that I’d spotted Homer earlier, gave me my answer.
Wes was home.
That cockblocking asshole. I thought, as loudly as I could, Wesley Alexander Wasp Baranuik Strickland, I'm going to punt your balls out your fucking nostrils for this.
Harry let out a single bark of extremely undignified but sympathetic laughter.
Chapter 21
Harry went to the door, and I tried to think of another way to greet Wes besides kneeing him straight in the happy bits. I needn’t have worried; he made a beeline to my bedroom, dropped his bags in a chorus of thumps, and belly-flopped on my bed without even looking at me. I could feel the distinct void that belonged to my immortal baby brother, in addition to his anxious relief and his feeling of coming back to what he believed was his home. Compared to his pre-revenant life on the road and his emotional distance from our family, I suppose my cabin was the closest thing he had to one.
“Care to come in?” I drawled.
“Gee, missed you too,” he mumbled into my mattress, rolling over to half-smile at me, still hiding the scarred left side of his face behind long, heavy bangs. “Nice face, mudwoman. What’s with your hair?”
“It’s the newest style from Paris and Milan. Pretty soon everyone will be wearing it like this, you’ll see,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“Went home for a bit like you suggested,” he said vaguely, but he didn’t look too happy about it. “Then I had to leave.”
“When did you get back?” I said, letting what passed for his conscience do the dirty work for me. “Homer’s been here for days.”
He rolled his eyes grandly. “Ugh. What a tattletale that stupid bird is.”
I didn't answer, and fiddled with one of the cloth and mud strips. I could take up modeling for the Crypt Keeper if this doesn't come off without taking my face with it, I mused.
“I wanted to check some things out, is all,” he said.
I felt my eyes narrow. “That’s annoyingly vague. Check out what things?”
Wes shrugged with only one shoulder. “Personal things. Just a feeling. I’m still checking it out.”
I made a grab for him with my bare hand to Grope him with my Talents and he whooped and rolled backward off the end of the bed. I snort-laughed as his face peeped over the mattress. “Don’t do that!”
“All right, all right,” I said. I aimed the thought I hate a mystery at him.
He grimaced that he’d heard it telepathically. “You’re in the wrong line of business if you don’t dig detecting, Miss Private Investigator.”
“I dig detecting. It's what makes a mystery stop being annoying,” I said easily, leaning back on my pillows. “Not that you'd know anything about that.”
“When I know more,” he said, “I’ll tell you, I promise.”
“So…” I made a face. “Did you talk to Mom about the new and improved you?”
His eyes darted away
from mine and I had my answer. “Didn’t feel like the right time.”
I didn’t need more of an explanation; our mother wasn’t fond of revenants. Apparently, she still had no idea that her youngest, her only son, was undead.
“You need a plan,” I advised. “A goal. Something to keep you busy.”
“I have a plan,” he said, smiling. “A big plan.”
“Uh oh,” I said, not liking the sudden shift in his mood. “Why am I worried?”
“Well, you know how I helped you that one time with the stalker kidnapper guy in N-dot?”
“Don’t call Niagara ‘N-dot’ ever again, Wesley Alexander.”
“And how I helped you get that green snotpixie out of your brain?”
“Harry?” I cried loudly. “Gonna need some of those meringues in here!”
“But you remember the snotpixie, right?” Wes pushed.
“Spriggan.” I sighed. “Where ya going with this?”
“Let me work with you. Like, Baranuik and Baranuik, Private Eyes.”
Oh, Sweet Dark Lady. “I can’t legally hire you, Wes. You’re not an American citizen. Also, you’re not a living human being. Also-also, you're a Strickland now. Or are you doing that hyphenated-name thing, like Baranuik-Strickland? That's gonna fuck up the paperwork if they don't have enough spaces.”
“Unofficially, then. Cash under the table. I’ll apprentice for free, even. Give me a chance.” He clutched his hands under his chin and fluttered his lashes at me. “You know I’m a total dude-witch now.”
I raised a finger in the air. “Dude-witch: not a thing.”
“Warlock?”
“No, Wes. It’s just witch. No genders. Just witch.”
“Right, well, whatever. I can help you. Also, hullo? Telepath!” He mimed dropping a microphone and then shifted into this little kneeling boogie, pistoning his fists and shoulders rhythmically to music only he could hear.