by Kim Harrison
My heart clenched, but kneeling beside the fire as I was, I didn’t question why he’d called me that. “Go to sleep, Al,” I said, my own sorrow rising.
“You want to be prince of the elves or not?” Al said, wavering where he sat. “Royalty always conversed with demons before they were wed. It’s tradition. It’s how I tricked Ceri into loving me. You’re not married, are you? On the side, perhaps? In Montana?”
Trent grimaced. “I need to think up a good name. I promise when I get a good name that no one can think of, I will. Why don’t you rest for a minute?”
Al delicately belched, and sighing heavily, he leaned back into the shadows until his black eyes glowed from the dark. “Capital idea. Good idea. Clever, clever elf. We will wait. You pick out a name, then call me.”
The fire snapped, and then from the cot came a long, rattling snore. Trent cautiously tried to take the bottle from Al, giving up when it began to glow. Leaving it in Al’s grip, he turned to me and shrugged. “I think he’s out.”
“I am so sorry.” Embarrassed, I got up from the fire and began to collect the stuff that Al had popped in from his kitchen. “I had no idea he’d feel the curse, much less come and see what I was doing.”
Trent handed me the bag of sand. “He probably has never dealt with grief,” he said, and I set it with the rest.
“Too much of it, rather. He was married once. Only the demons who knew how to love survived the making of the ever-after.”
Shocked, Trent looked from me to Al and back again. “I didn’t know that.”
A long snore came from behind the curtain, and a soft mumble. Trent sat down in his chair, clearly reluctant to leave Al here alone. “Do you think he can resurrect Ceri? I’ve tried.”
My chest hurt, and I sat in the chair next to him where we could both watch the fire and Al both. “No. I’ve tried several times, too. Pierce as well. They’ve moved on. I’m happy for them, but it hurts.” I hadn’t been able to summon my father or Kisten, either.
Trent was rubbing his new pinkie with his thumb in introspection. “Quen will be hurting for a long time. That’s why I insisted he go with the girls. And as a buffer for Ellasbeth.”
Hearing more in that statement than he was saying, I turned to him. “How about you?”
“Me?” He looked at the bottle in Al’s grip, then topped off his glass with the bottle on the hearth between us. “I’m not the one Ceri loved,” he said, but I could hear his regret. I waved off his offer to refill my untouched glass, and when I remained silent, he added, “I liked her, but I didn’t love her. She was . . . too proud to love me. Distant.”
“And you need someone more earthy,” I said, only half kidding.
Al snorted. There was a clunk, and the wine bottle rolled out from behind the curtain. It sloshed to a halt at Trent’s foot, and he reached for it. “A little spontaneity would be nice,” he said, touching my foot by accident when he set Al’s bottle next to ours. “I already miss her and her elegant demands and flashing indignity. You couldn’t tell the woman no.”
“Not that . . .” Al mumbled in his sleep. “He’s going to need that later . . .”
“I’m angry at her unnecessary death. It hurts seeing Quen grieve and know it’s partially my fault,” Trent added, his jaw tight and his gaze unfocused. The scent of cinnamon was rising, mixing with the scent of burnt amber and woodsmoke. It almost made the burnt amber smell nice. “I’m sorry for this,” Trent said softly. “I’m sorry for everything.”
This wasn’t like Trent at all, but I wasn’t surprised to see it. I was upset about Ceri and Pierce, but I hadn’t been planning on a life with either of them as Trent had with Ceri—in some disjointed, separate fashion. Alone. He had always planned on being alone, but never this apart. Even with Ellasbeth, he would be alone. I felt bad for him. It wasn’t fair. None of it.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, shifting to look at him. There wasn’t much space between us, but it seemed uncrossable.
“Maybe someday I’ll believe you,” he said, his brow furrowed in the firelight. “Rachel, I asked you here tonight for more than getting my fingers back.”
Panic slid through me. “What?”
He grimaced, clearly annoyed that Al was snoring in the corner. “We could’ve done this anywhere, but I wanted you to see me, to see this,” he said, gesturing at the room. “I wanted you to know where I came from, what I am under the choices I make.”
My heart pounded. “What did you do?” I asked, terrified, almost.
Exhaling, he looked at his watch, the crystal catching the light to make time vanish. Then he scared me even more when he drank his glass dry and filled it again. “I made a big mistake by not telling you why I thought the slavers were the better choice.”
“I know,” I interrupted, and his brow furrowed.
“By the Goddess, will you shut up?” he said, and from behind the curtain, Al mumbled something. A little rocking horse with wings popped into existence, crashing into the ceiling before falling to the floor to quiver and go still.
“Listen to me,” he said, and I swallowed my words. “The Rosewood babies are going to start dying next week,” he said, and my breath caught. “If nothing changes, by this time next month, you and Lee will again be the only survivors of the Rosewood syndrome.”
“But you fixed them!” I said, appalled.
“Yes and no,” Trent said after he topped his glass off again. “I had to fix their genome to ensure Ku’Sox would hold to his end of the bargain and not harm Lucy, but I worked in a small error that wouldn’t express itself until it was replicated sufficiently. I couldn’t risk that he would get his way if he killed me.”
Horrified, I stared at him. He met my gaze levelly. “You killed them. The babies,” I whispered, and he shook his head.
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean, ‘not yet’?” Feeling betrayed, I stood. “Trent, they are all someone’s child!” I exclaimed, and Al snorted in his sleep, mumbling.
Trent looked up, agitated. “I mean, not yet. Rachel, the world isn’t ready for them.”
I cocked my hip, the fire warm behind me. “When is the world ever ready for change, Trent? When?”
Setting his glass down, Trent eyed me, bitter resignation behind his frustration. “What will happen if they live? HAPA knows they exist. The only reason you survived was because you can defend yourself. You want me to give the children to the demons to raise?”
He stood, and I dropped back as he began to pace. “Or perhaps you want me to hide them and their families? I could do it. But you know the demons will find them, and one by one, a demon wanting to see the sun and escape the ever-after will either steal them outright or take over their bodies.” Eyes flashing, he pointed at me, his hand wrapped around a wineglass. “I will not allow a parent to love a child who is murdering his pets and performing ghastly magic, not wanting to believe that their child died five years ago and they are raising a five-thousand-year-old sadistic demon until their child’s neural pathways are developed enough to work the lines. They are not meant to be.” Frustrated, he turned to the window, taking an angry drink, the firelight flickering on him.
From the cot, not a sound escaped, but I didn’t care if Al was listening. “But they are here,” I said softly, grasping his arm so he would look at me. “Trent. They are.”
Trent shook his head even as he met my eyes. “I thought you might say that. If it was up to me, I’d choose the hard path with the easy ending, not the easy path with the hard end.”
I drew back. “What do you mean, it’s not up to you?”
Taking a last drink, Trent set his empty glass on the windowsill. Exhaling, he scrubbed his face with a hand, hesitating to look at his five perfect fingers. “What would you choose?”
The fervent emotion in his gaze as his eyes met mine scared me. “Me?”
“I want you to decide,” he said, looking a little unsteady. “Not because it impacts your species, but because I want you
there with me.”
My heart pounded. I didn’t know what he meant. He wanted me there with him?
Stumbling slightly, he went to sit on the raised hearth, snagging a new bottle on the way. “If you make the decision, you have to be there to help me with the fallout,” he said, working the corkscrew with a professional flair. “Either they die naturally, or I continue the cure and the twenty-year battle to hide them until they can defend themselves.”
The cork came out with a pop, and he looked at his glass, halfway across the room on the sill.
Shocked, I stared at him. He wanted me to decide? He wanted me . . . to make a decision that he would have to live by?
Giving up, he drank right from the bottle. “I don’t want to be alone anymore, Rachel,” he said. “And if you make the choice, you have to help me see it through.”
“I want them to live,” I said softly, and he slumped, his disgust obvious when his bottle clinked against the floor. “What, you asked my opinion, and that’s it. You’re not going back now that it wasn’t anything you wanted to hear.”
“No.” Trent eyed me sourly. “It would be easier the other way.”
Smirking, I crossed the room and sat down beside him. Taking the bottle he handed me, I poured a swallow in my glass. “If it was easy—”
“Everyone would do it,” he finished, clinking his bottle to my glass and downing a swig.
“What about Ellasbeth?” I said, my expansive mood hesitating.
Trent didn’t look at me. “What about her?”
I thought of the distasteful woman, on a plane to the West Coast right now, but she’d be back, worming her way into elven politics. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting married to her?”
Drawing away, he looked sideways at me. The fire was warm on our backs, and his focus was starting to go distant. “This is a business arrangement. Nothing more.”
“Well, that’s what I thought,” I said quickly, and from behind the curtain, Al started to snore. “But she doesn’t like me.”
“So?”
I thought about that for a moment. “You are drunk,” I said as he tried to get the bottle to balance on the rim of its base.
His eyes came to mine. “I am not,” he said, and I caught it as it began to tip. “But I will be before the night ends.”
I took another sip, actually tasting it this time. I’d have a migraine in about an hour, but I didn’t care. “You know, the last time we shared a bottle, you wiped the top off,” Trent said.
“Red pop?” I guessed, smiling at a memory, and he nodded.
“You remember. Are the rings gone?”
I swung the bottle between my knees, and my gaze slid to Al snoring behind the curtain. “Al and I destroyed them,” I said. “Melted them so they couldn’t be reinvoked. You have a problem with that?”
Trent shook his head and reached for the bottle. “No. It was nice being able to reach your thoughts, though. You have nice thoughts.”
A smile curved my lips up, and I leaned away so I could see him better. “You are drunk.”
“I am not drunk.” He shifted closer, and I didn’t mind. “I’m bored out of my mind.”
I took another sip. “This is good,” I said, and he acknowledged it gracefully. “I know what you mean about the quiet,” I went on. “Jenks’s kids are scattering. He’ll be down to six kids by fall. Ivy is spending most of her time with Nina. I’m starting to think about finding a new apartment somewhere with Jenks.”
“Really?”
I shrugged and passed the bottle to him. “I don’t know. I like it at the church, but things have changed. If I wasn’t there, Ivy might ask Nina to move in. One vampire in the church is okay, two is asking for trouble. Even for a demon.”
Trent set the bottle aside, almost out of his reach. “You don’t think you could handle it?”
Thinking about what Cormel had said, I shrugged. “Oh, sure, but people talk.”
“They do, don’t they,” Trent said around a sigh, and my thoughts turned to Ellasbeth. Seriously? He could do better than that. “Nick was too scruffy for you, even when he wasn’t a demon toady,” he said then, surprising me. “Marshal didn’t have enough chutzpah to keep up with the elegance you’re capable of. Pierce was a first-generation model in a six-g world—novel, but really how far would you get before the software crashed the system? Kisten . . .” Trent’s fingers shifted in agitation. “Kisten was an interesting choice.”
The reminder of Pierce hurt, but it felt good to think of him and smile. “You’re critiquing my ex-boyfriends?”
He made a small noise of agreement. “I like people. Most of the time I can figure them out. You don’t make any sense. What are you looking for, Rachel?”
Drawing my knees up, I rocked back and forth before the fire. “I don’t know. Someone smart, powerful, who doesn’t take crap from anyone. Who are you looking for?”
Trent raised a hand in protest, scooting an inch or two from me. “No, no, no. I’m not going to play this game.”
“Hey, you started it. Give. Just pretend we’re in camp.”
“Someone funny, capable, sexy.”
To balance out his strict life. “I didn’t bring looks into it. How like a man.”
Trent chuckled. “This is my list, not yours. Someone who won’t see lovers in the shadows when I’m late for an appointment. Someone who can break a schedule and a nail and not worry about it, but still look good in a dress and not be late for everything.”
I looked across the room, seeing nothing. “I want someone who will let me do my job without talking me out of it. Maybe give me a gun for my birthday once in a while.”
“Someone not afraid of the money, the press,” Trent said. “Someone who won’t get caught in the trap that money makes.”
“Someone who can do his own magic so he could survive the mess of my life,” I finished, getting depressed.
“You live in a church, I live in a prison.” Trent became silent.
“It would never work between us,” I said, thinking we had strayed onto dangerous ground.
From the cot, Al snorted in his sleep, mumbled about pie, and went silent.
“You’re great to work with, Rachel, but we have nothing in common.”
Reassured, I let go of my knees and stretched them out, palms on the warm hearth beside me. “That’s what I’m saying. You live in a big house, I live in a church.” And yet I am sitting in his little playhouse drinking wine.
“We don’t know any of the same people.”
I reached across him for the wine, stretching as I thought of the mayor, the demons, Rynn Cormel. “We don’t go in the same circles at all,” I said as I leaned back and took a swallow. But I had fit in at the casino boat and his parties.
“People would talk,” he said softly, and I set the empty bottle down. The firelight had turned his hair as red as mine. “Which is a shame. I like working closely with you. God, why is it so hard to tell you that? I compliment people all the time on their work ethics. Rachel, I like working with you. You’re fast and inventive, and not always looking for direction.”
This was going somewhere I wasn’t sure I liked. “Trent,” I started, glancing at the curtain when Al choked on his own spit and then began to snore again.
“No, let me finish,” he said, a hand going firmly down on the stone between us. “Do you know how tiring it gets? ‘Mr. Kalamack, should we do this, or that? Have you weighed all the factors, Mr. Kalamack?’ Even Quen hesitates, and it drives me batty.”
“Sorry.”
“You, on the other hand, just go and do what you think needs to be done. If I can’t keep up, you don’t care. I like that. I’m glad you’re going to help me with the Rosewood demons.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering if he had any more of that wine stashed somewhere. “That’s what you say now, but wait until they start playing with the ley lines.”
“My God, you have beautiful hair in the firelight,” he said softly, and I blinked. “It
’s like your thoughts, all cinnamon and wild untamed. I’ve always liked your hair.”
I froze when he reached out and touched it, my breath slipping from me when his fingers grazed my neck. Slowly I reached up and took his hand, bringing it down. “Okay, we need to get you inside, Mr. Kalamack,” I said, thinking that he had had way too much to be comfortable saying what he was, doing what he was. “Come on, stand up. I’ll stay here with Al so he doesn’t steal the picture of your mom.”
I stood, still holding his hand and gently pulling him up with me. A part of me wanted this, but the smarter, wiser part knew it was a mistake.
“I am not drunk,” Trent said firmly, standing before me without a waver to his stance. “I don’t need to be drunk to say you have nice hair.”
A flutter lifted through me, and I shoved it away.
“And I do not want to go back to my apartments,” he said. “I want to go for coffee. Al isn’t going to wake up.” His eyes were on mine, and my heart pounded when he let them drop to my lips. “I am not drunk.”
“I wouldn’t care if you were.”
Trent’s arms were around me, and they felt right. “No, I want you to know that I do not need to be drunk to kiss you.”
“Um . . .” I started, heart pounding more when he leaned in, slowly, hesitantly, stopping just shy of my lips. All I had to do was lift my chin. Breath held, I did.
With a gentle pressure, our lips met. His hands slipped more firmly about me, and I held myself back, not afraid, but wanting to feel everything slowly as I leaned in, tasting the wine on him, feeling the warmth of his body pressing into mine, breathing in our scents that were mingling and changing with the warmth. My hands rose to find his hair, and I relaxed into him as the silky strands brushed through my fingers. I wanted more, and I leaned into him as our lips moved against each other.
I pushed him off balance, and he took a step back, our lips parting even as he pulled me to him closer yet as I stumbled forward into him. The rush of the kiss pounded through me, and I stared at him, breathless, seeing in his eyes that he was not drunk. He was stone-cold sober, and it scared me. “Why did you do that?” I whispered.