“Good afternoon,” he said.
“Gregori? What the hell?” Ciera narrowed her eyes and stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. “Are you following me?”
“What?” And to think, it had cheered him up to see her.
She glared at him. “I asked if you were following me. First you show up at the library, then at the soup kitchen—”
“I did explain that,” Gregori said, hanging on to the last shreds of his patience with both hands.
Ciera ignored him. “And now you’re here, right in front of my apartment. I suppose you can explain that too?”
“I can, actually,” he said, neatly dodging a pedestrian who was trying to get around the sudden impediment to the flow of traffic. “This is the most direct route from the monastery to the shelter. I was on my way there when I saw you come out of that building. I assure you, there was nothing sinister about it.”
She bit her lip. “So you’re saying it was just a coincidence. All three times.”
Long nights of broken sleep and the frustration of the last six months finally cracked his customary calm demeanor, and he snapped at her, “The way you deliberately dress to hide your extraordinary beauty, I do not know why you would think anyone would follow you on purpose.”
“Why do you think I do it?” she snapped back, and stomped off in the direction of the soup kitchen. Gregori hesitated, then fell into step with her. They walked on for a few minutes and then both spoke at the same time.
“I apologize,” Gregori said.
“Did you say ‘extraordinary beauty’?” Ciera snuck a look at him out of the corner of her eye. “Seriously?”
“I did. And I assure you, that is not what I am apologizing for.” He ventured a tiny smile. “I have been feeling somewhat frustrated with things, and I am afraid I took it out on you. I am very sorry.”
Ciera blinked. “Really? You always seem so serene.” She shook her head. “I apologize too. I do have reasons for being paranoid, but I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions.”
She stuck one gloved hand into her coat pocket and for a minute Gregori envisioned being maced in the middle of a Minneapolis sidewalk, but when the hand resurfaced, it was holding a bar of chocolate.
“My one remaining vice,” she said. “Would you like to share? Assuming soon-to-be-monks can eat sweets.”
“Thankfully, there is no rule against them that I know of,” Gregori said, taking a piece gratefully. He enjoyed chocolate, but more than that, he appreciated a gesture of truce when he saw one.
They continued their walk for another few blocks in companionable silence. Eventually, Ciera tossed the empty wrapper into a trash can and said, “You’re the quietest person I know. It’s kind of restful.”
Gregori gave her a rueful look. “I have never seen the point in talking when one has nothing to say, although admittedly that does not seem to stop most people.”
“Hardly anyone,” Ciera agreed. “At the library, I sometimes think the students come over and ask me questions they don’t even need the answers to, just because they can’t stand being quiet anymore.”
Gregori chuckled. “I do in fact have one question, if it is not too intrusive. You can tell me if it is none of my business.”
Ciera cocked an eyebrow. “Oh?” He thought she seemed to be bracing herself, although for what, he wasn’t sure.
“The girl with the black eye. I saw her through the kitchen door last week when you were speaking to her, and I wondered if she was okay, or if she needed help.”
Whatever Ciera had expected him to ask her about, this clearly was not it. He could see the minute indications of tension ease in her shoulders and around her generous mouth. It made him wonder what questions he should have been asking instead, although he doubted she would have answered them, whatever they were.
“Tori. That’s her name. She’s actually doing better now. Her dealer got taken out and she finally went into a program.” Ciera smiled, but there was a darkness hiding at the back of her eyes. “Most of these kids don’t get that lucky. You saw her bruises. Teens think they’re so tough, only to find out just how vulnerable they are once they’re on the streets.”
Gregori gave that some thought. “Since many of them come to the soup kitchen, could you not offer them some form of self-defense lessons?”
Ciera shrugged. “The shelter can’t afford it, for one thing. I’ve offered to teach a few moves to some of the kids, but they didn’t take me seriously.”
“Should they have?” he asked, curious.
“I’ve taken a class or two,” she answered, but he got the feeling she was downplaying her abilities. From what he could tell, Ciera took self-deprecation to a whole new level.
“Ah,” he said. “I have been studying one form of martial arts or another since I was a child.” No point in mentioning how long a time that encompassed. “I could teach them a few of the basics, perhaps. If you think it would be allowed.”
“You’re too new there,” Ciera said. “These kids are wary of strangers.”
Gregori pondered some more.
“What if we put on a demonstration together?” he suggested. “You could use some of the moves you learned in your classes to show them how someone smaller and weaker can get away from a more threatening opponent.”
Ciera stared at him. “That’s not a bad idea. You’d be willing to do that?”
“What?” he asked, a tiny curve hovering at the corner of his mouth. “Help you teach the kids how to defend themselves, or allow you to humiliate me in front of a bunch of teenagers?”
She laughed. “Both, I guess. But the humiliation part is kind of a bonus for me.”
“Anything to please milady,” Gregori said, bowing slightly. “I am at your service, always.”
Ciera snorted at him, but she was smiling as they walked into the soup kitchen, so he counted it as a win.
• • •
AFTER they’d served dinner, Gregori came out of the kitchen and helped Ciera shove some of the tables out of the way to create an empty space for the two of them to work in. Ciera had cleared the demonstration with the shelter administrator, although it had apparently taken some fast talking, and if things didn’t go well this first time, there wasn’t likely to be a second.
“No pressure,” Ciera had said with a wry smile, but he saw a fire in her that made him want to do whatever it took to make it a success.
They started out with a few simple attack-and-release demonstrations. Gregori put his arm around Ciera’s neck in a choke hold, and she used one hand to twist his wrist away, then ducked underneath and pulled his arm behind his own back. This got a few people’s attention, and within ten minutes, almost everyone in the room had gathered around them to watch. A few of the girls cheered every time Ciera put Gregori on the floor or turned his attacks against him.
Gregori had no problem with this. After such a long life, especially one with a spiritual inclination, ego became a foolish notion. Of course, it was more impressive to those watching than to him; Ciera had some training and some raw talent, but he could have defeated her with as little effort as it had taken him to wash the dishes earlier. It cost him nothing to pretend otherwise, especially if it helped these teens. And made Ciera happy.
A move he recognized from aikido put him on his back with Ciera’s booted foot on his chest, one arm stretched out in a hold that twisted it uncomfortably for a moment until she used that hand to help him up.
“Hey,” one of the boys from the circle around them said. “That was cool. Could you teach me that one?” A couple of the other kids nodded in agreement, and three of the girls nudged each other until they got brave enough to come forward too. Ciera hid a grin and Gregori winked at her.
They spent the next half hour showing their impromptu class how to do some of the simpler moves, breaking them down into their component parts, twis
ting, turning, and ducking in slow motion. It was all going very well until two of the older boys started clowning around, trying the moves on each other with variable success until the testosterone kicked in and their practice became a little too serious. Gregori started across the room to them as Ciera turned around and yelled, “Hey, chill!”
But before he could get there, Gregori heard an ominous and distinctive cracking sound and one of the boys sat on the floor too fast, cradling his wrist and moaning. The other teen backed off, mortification chasing away the temporary anger.
“Jeez, Benj, I’m sorry! I was just goofing around!”
Ciera stomped over, her face flushed, to pat the breaker on the shoulder before dropping down to join Gregori in examining the breakee on the floor.
“Are you okay, Benji?” she asked, clearly knowing the answer was no.
“Hurts like hell, Ciera,” the kid hissed through clenched teeth. “Guess this self-defense stuff is harder than it looks in the movies.”
“That it is,” Gregori said gravely, thinking to himself, And that is the end of this experiment. Too bad. It had been going so well.
Out loud, he simply said, “Let me take a look at that,” and put his hands as gently as possible on the boy’s wrist. He could feel the place where two ends of bone ground against each other, and he wondered if the boy could be persuaded to go to a hospital for treatment—although whether one would take him without insurance or, likely, a real name was up for question.
“Is it broken?” Ciera asked him. Dismay and guilt warred like twin factions of a marauding army across her open features.
Gregori opened his mouth to answer, but was distracted by the unexpected sensation of heat in his hands where they touched the boy’s bare skin. Warmth grew into fire and an aching twinge he’d barely noticed became a sudden screech of claws across the nerves of his right wrist. He bit down on his lip as he rode out the pain. The boy looked up at him, wide eyes startled as he felt the heat pouring off of Gregori’s fingers.
“Man, you’re hotter than a trash-can fire!” he said, sounding more confused than alarmed.
Gregori just shook his head, beyond speech for the moment as his body did some new trick of its own volition. He knew what this was—a form of energy healing. Iduyan had done such magical healing in the years he had spent with her.
She had explained it as a part of the shaman’s gift: to be able to channel the energy of the universe through his or her own body and into the body of the ill or injured. Anyone could learn to do it on a simple level, much as a mother soothes away a child’s bumps and bruises with a gentle touch and loving intentions. Those with true talent could perform healing on a scope that would seem downright miraculous to the uninformed—one of the reasons she had never revealed her own talent if it could be avoided.
Gregori had always had a minor gift for healing, but it was nothing like what his mother could do. And he’d lost that after his time spent in Brenna’s cave. But this—this was something else altogether.
He should have been able to feel the energy coming into him from the outside, from the universe or the source or the gods or whatever you wanted to call it. Instead, the healing seemed to be using his own energy to fuel itself. That was a bad thing, although apparently it did nothing to affect the positive outcome for his inadvertent patient.
Gregori removed his hands, standing up carefully so as not to reveal how shaken he was. The pain had gone down to a dull throb and was already fading away, but exhaustion had hit him like a freight train.
“It looks like it was just twisted,” he lied. “Put some ice on it and you will be fine in the morning.”
The boy started to argue, then shook out his wrist and blinked. “Huh. You must be right. It feels better already. Whew. ’Cause a broken wrist woulda sucked.”
“Indeed,” Gregori said, his voice as even as he could make it. “Perhaps a little more care next time, gentlemen, and a little less horseplay?”
Both teens nodded, looking relieved as they headed for the door. The crowd around them thinned as everyone drifted out for the night, either through the doorway that led to the shelter or out into the streets.
Ciera looked relieved, too, although concern quickly took its place as she gazed at Gregori more closely.
“Hey,” she said softly. “You’re kind of a funny gray color, and your hands are shaking. Are you all right?” She put out one hand to support him, but he stepped back quickly, not knowing what his body might do if it was still in active healing mode.
He regretted it a moment later, when her expression hardened and her eyes grew shuttered after a momentary flash of hurt. Still, it was for her own good.
Gregori had never experienced anything like this before, but he was quite certain it was some new manifestation of whatever abilities he was developing. The problem was that he had no idea what he was dealing with—or how to control it. A healing gift could be a marvelous thing, but not if it might accidentally harm someone else, or completely drain his own energy and kill him in the process. He had no idea if either of those things were possible. But he knew someone he was fairly sure would.
Up until now, his search for his mother had been based partially on a desire to see her again, and partially on his hope that she might hold some of the answers he needed regarding whatever was happening to him. He had no idea if she was still alive or not.
Now he was beginning to think that his own continued existence might well depend upon whether or not she was. And if he could find her in time.
CHAPTER 6
CIERA watched Gregori from across the library floor. He had put in a request for another stack of odd assorted books, ranging from historical accounts of life in the Canadian provinces—some of which were so obscure she’d had to order them from other libraries—and various tomes on shamanism, mystical healing, and aboriginal myths.
At the moment, he sat, back upright as usual, at a table not too far from her, his brow slightly furrowed as he made notes on a pad in elegant script that resembled calligraphy in its beauty and precision. She knew that because she’d kept every scrap of paper he’d ever given her, every list of books and maps, even the one formal thank-you card he’d given her after his first week there. Not that she had any sentimental attachment to the man—hell, he could barely stand to have her near him, except when they were forced together here or at the soup kitchen. She just liked the way his handwriting looked. That was it.
She didn’t, however, like the way Gregori looked. He still seemed to be a little gray around the edges, his usually golden-hued skin tinged with an ashy undertone. There were dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping, and she thought he’d lost weight. Maybe it was just the routine at the monastery, fasting and staying up all night praying or something, but somehow she doubted it.
Something had happened at the soup kitchen last evening. Something she couldn’t explain and he wouldn’t. But she knew Benji’s wrist had been broken. And then it wasn’t, and Gregori could barely stand up without help. Although he’d made it damned clear he didn’t want hers.
She got it. She did. Although she would have expected better from Gregori, especially since he was at least different from most of the other folks in the room.
Parts of Minnesota were pretty monochromatic, although the bigger cities like St. Paul and Minneapolis were less so than the countryside. Things had gotten a little better since her childhood in the rural Midwest, where the other kids called her a dirty mutt and her own mother had told her how ugly she was because of her broad nose and wide lips. As an adult, Ciera could see that her mother had been projecting her own self-loathing onto her daughter, but unfortunately, the damage was done.
Just yesterday, Gregori had told her he thought she was beautiful, and for a moment, she had almost felt that way, almost believed he meant it. But then he’d recoiled from her when she’d reached out to lend
him a hand, as though she was something nasty he could catch, and she was right back there on the playground, being told by the pretty white girls in their pink dresses that their parents had told them not to play with the black girl.
Not that she was black. That might have been simpler. At least then she would have had a group to belong to. But Ciera’s mother had been African-American and Native American, and probably a few other things. Her father had been Caucasian, a man once entranced by what he’d considered to be a striking beauty and then resentful of the difficulty caused by the presence of a mixed-race wife and child.
He’d lost job after job to men whose families were more conventional in a place where that still mattered, and then his bitterness and drinking had lost him even more. Ciera’s mother had layered on makeup and dyed her hair in an effort to look like someone she wasn’t, her original appearance lost under her brittle faux exterior, too-thin frame, and the prescriptions she took for her “nerves.” By the time Ciera had run away from home at fifteen, tired of being caught in the middle of the never-ending rounds of screaming put-downs and breaking glass, she could barely remember what her mother actually looked like.
It was only recently, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror unexpectedly, that she had realized with a shock that her mother had looked almost exactly like her.
Ciera was many miles and many years away from the person she had been at fifteen, but moments like yesterday, when someone she liked rejected her, still felt as shockingly painful as if she had been slapped across the face.
She gazed at Gregori surreptitiously from behind her monitor and mentally scolded herself for giving a damn one way or the other. She barely knew the guy. Their paths had simply crossed—and recrossed—from a fluke of fate. It was ridiculous that she even cared what he thought, or whether or not there was something wrong with him, just because he was gorgeous and kind and seemed to care about the kids at the soup kitchen.
She was still going to make sure he ate lunch.
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