“But there’s a mark. Perhaps another spell will remove the mark.”
“Come, man,” Addam said, embarrassed. “It’s fine.”
“But it will scar, Lord Saint John.”
“It will,” Max said, in a voice that dripped with fake concern. “Behind his ear, too.”
I grabbed the collar of Max’s t-shirt and yanked him away from the group. Over my shoulder, I said, “Is there a shower by that pool over there?”
Addam blinked.
“We’ll meet you over there,” I said.
I dragged Max to, and then around, the corner of a nearby maintenance shed. When we were out of sight of the others, I pinned him against the stucco wall with a forearm.
“Matthias,” I said.
“You’re mad at me,” he whispered.
“Did you tell Addam that we were involved?”
Max lowered his eyes so far that the lids nearly closed. “We . . . talked. He might have gotten the wrong impression.”
“I can assure you that lying to me, right now, right here, is the wrong, wrong tactic. You are seventeen years old. We will not become involved. Your behavior toward Addam is unacceptable.”
“I—”
“We will not have this conversation again,” I told him.
I released pressure and swept back, causing him to stumble; and then waited out his sullen silence until he was forced to look at me. I said, “Until I say otherwise, stay by Ciaran. He’ll keep you out of trouble. Go.”
Max’s face scrunched up in misery. Without another word, he turned and walked back to the others. There were pollen stains up and down the back of his pants.
I sighed and rubbed at my eyes. Tough love was more Brand’s style, but I could manage it in a pinch.
The pool was crystal-blue water locked in by a half acre of black, porous stone. Attached to the outside of a three-room pool cabana was a large shower area. A servant was already waiting for us, in that mysterious way that good servants do. Addam asked for three sets of clean clothes and a platter of crackers and cheese. Max and Ciaran had been sent inside, so Addam asked them to be fed as well. The servant squinted at our shoulders and waist, perhaps for measurements, and hurried off.
“Shall we share the shower?” Addam asked me. Only he said it like he was saying, Shall we share a shower AGAIN, which had Brand’s head snapping up. I hid a flush by pulling my soiled shirt over my head.
“Would you like to go first?” Addam offered Brand.
I saw the wheels turning in Brand’s head. “It’s big enough for all of us.”
Addam shrugged, like it was nothing. Most Atlanteans had no taboos about nudity; and from what I’d observed, Addam had even less.
Brand went over to the shower and fiddled with the faucets. Water shot from six separate showerheads, scattering like marbles against the peach-colored stone.
“This is okay, Hero?” Addam whispered.
“I just want a shower,” I said.
“But he’s testing me, yes? This is a form of competition?”
“It really is,” I said. “But not for my attentions. I told you, it’s not like that with Brand and me.”
“I see,” Addam said. He unbuttoned his pants and let them slither down to his feet. It was too graceful to have been anything but practiced.
Addam laughed at my expression and walked over to the shower. Brand was already under the water. His back was to us, and puffy clouds of steam slid up his heavily-exercised body. When he heard Addam approach, he turned and stretched his arms upward to bring his front into the best definition.
The trap was sprung.
I couldn’t see Addam’s face, but his shoulders actually sank as he caught sight of Brand’s endowment. Addam turned and gave me such a comic expression that I started laughing.
“Again,” I reminded him, loud enough for Brand to hear, “not a competition for my attentions.”
I got undressed, spooling my torn and bloodied clothing into an untidy pile. The only items I kept for later use were my warded boots and coat. As I stepped into the rain shower, Brand threw a bar of soap at my head. I whispered a cantrip that gave my hand added friction and caught it without a fumble. Brand sniffed his approval and went back to shampooing his hair.
I picked my own corner of the bath, standing under one of the rainforest heads. The steam and hot water began to soften the muscles in my often-reinjured shoulder. Grimacing, I reached up to knead it. Brand knocked my hand away and began to do it himself. He’d once spent six weeks training with a professional massage therapist as a birthday gift for me.
“I’m not making a move,” Brand said to Addam. “He has a bad shoulder.”
Addam said, “What’s the best way to help it?”
They started to talk about my bad shoulder and the best way to unknot it without worsening the injury. I decided to let them bond, because it felt too good to complain.
When Brand’s hands finally fell away, I reached for one of the shampoo bottles in an elevated niche. Through a cover of suds, I peeked at both of them. Addam was combing his loosely-braided hair with curled fingers. Brand had tilted his face toward the high-pressure stream. He was standing at an angle, and the scars down his back were pale against his pinkening skin.
Emotion lodged in my throat. All of his worst injuries had been because of me.
Brand turned around quick enough to catch my expression. “Stop with the look,” he said.
“What look?”
“Like you’re about to burst into song or hug me.” Brand glared at Addam. “He wasn’t like this when you left. I told you not to break him.”
“You have my word, he did not burst into song once while we were together,” Addam said.
Brand crossed his arms over his chest and kept staring at Addam. He said, finally, “Rune likes you.”
I opened my mouth. Brand pointed at me. He said, “Addam, you don’t have to hide how you feel about him. It’s not a contest. But just know—he’s mine to watch. That will never change. Whatever happens between you is going to include me.”
“I can accept that,” Addam said.
“Too fucking right you can, and it wasn’t a question.”
“He is very lucky to have you,” Addam said diplomatically.
“Your mouth to God’s ear. Okay. You’re done here. Give us some time alone.”
Addam only laughed and bowed. He shook water droplets from his hair and moved up the stone steps. Grabbing a towel from a stack the servant had left, he wrapped it around his waist and vanished into the pool house.
“That was a little abrupt,” I said.
“My manners are completely misunderstood.”
“Why do we need time alone? You’re not going to yell at me, are you?”
Wrinkles appeared around his eyes. His controlled, unhappy expression. “Do you want to talk about what Rurik did to you?”
Despite the edited version I’d told him on the walk back, I should have known Brand would catch on. He read more into my pauses than most people would from a handwritten note.
“It was all in my head,” I told him. “That’s it. I promise. He . . . They were just bad memories. Rurik made me relive bad memories. He made me think it was happening again. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Brand’s blue eyes got bluer, glowing with a sheen. “Rune. Fuck. I promised myself that I would never, never let anything like that happen to you again. You—Rune, you—you can’t do this to me again. You can’t leave me behind like this again. Do you have any idea how hard it was to stay behind? I should have been there.”
I could have gone through all the reasons why we made the decisions we did, or all the reasons I hated putting him in harm’s way, but it wasn’t what he needed to hear.
He must have seen some of the hesitancy on my face, because his own, against expectation, softened. “Rune,” he said. “You understand that being a Companion isn’t just a job, right? Just because we call ourselves partners now, the Companion part of me doesn’t go awa
y. I can’t turn it off like a light switch. It’s not a choice; it’s not a lifestyle; it’s my purpose.”
“You’re right, it’s not a choice. You never had a choice. You—”
“Don’t tell me what I fucking did or didn’t have,” Brand said. “Do you remember the first time I protected you?”
I felt my forehead crease.
He said, “That motherfucking stableboy, what’s his name? Gregor. He liked to bully you when you were a kid, real clever-like, so that he couldn’t be called to task for it. He tried to make you feel small because he felt small. . . . Remember that time we rode on the beach, and Gregor made some shitty comment about you needing to ride a pony instead of a horse? That look on your face killed me—you’d been so, so proud that you’d finally just learned to ride a horse like a grown-up, and Gregor knew that, and used it to hurt you. He made you feel less than you were. So I broke his nose. And it felt so fucking good to be a hero to you.”
I blinked a few times. More than a few times. “That wasn’t the first time. You’ve always protected me. You’ve always been my hero. You ate my broccoli. You told my father that you were the one to run out on the ice when the pool froze over. You made me drink my stupid juice when I was sick. Always. You’ve always been there, and I don’t know why I deserve it. Because of my DNA? Because of whom my father was? Because—”
Brand grabbed the sides of my face. He stared in my eyes and said, firmly, “Rune of Sun House, I believe that you are meant for great things. I truly, truly do. Your story has barely begun. It is my honor to be along for what has been, and is, and will be one hell of a ride. So don’t leave me on the bench again. That’s all I wanted to say.”
He gave me a rare smile, untouched by anything except pleasure, and leaned forward to kiss my forehead. Then he shoved me back to my side of the shower.
I ran my palms over my eyes. “We just covered a lot of ground, didn’t we?”
“Fucking emotions. What’s next on our to-do list?”
“We search rooms and question people. Did you know Max told Addam that he and I were involved?”
Brand shrugged and said, “I told Addam I’d kill him if you got hurt.”
“Well, okay, and now I have another point to make entirely.”
“Finish up, princess,” he said, throwing a bottle of conditioner at my gut. “Let’s just do the job and go the hell home.”
Ella’s small suite was on the second floor.
The compound’s majordomo was waiting at attention in the hallway, dressed conservatively in a charcoal suit and navy blue tie. When I tried to step toward the door, he slipped in front of it. “My lords,” he said.
“McAllister,” Addam replied, frowning.
“I was told you requested I meet you here,” McAllister said. “If it’s not too presumptuous, may I know why?”
“Seeing as how you just blocked my boy from walking in the room,” Brand said, “I’m guessing you’ve got a clue.”
Color rose under the man’s collar, mottling his lower jaw. “Lady Saint Nicholas’s room is locked, Lord Saint Nicholas.”
“And now we approach the portion of this conversation devoted to the past tense of is,” Brand said. “Step aside.”
“I’m afraid we have strict protocol in place for accessing a scion’s personal space,” McAllister said, continuing to speak only to Addam—or, rather, a spot in the middle of Addam’s forehead. “Perhaps if I knew you were here with your mother’s authority?”
I transmuted my sabre into a hilt and shot out the lock. Sparks jumped and landed on McAllister’s sleeve. He slapped at them with a cry. The door creaked open.
“Deal with him,” Brand told Addam, and pushed past everyone.
The bedroom was a narrow space, narrower than even the width of Half House. It made sense, given how many family members each of the four courts supported. Space would be at a premium.
Ella had decorated in searing shades of pink and purple. The bedspread was crowded with stuffed animals and fuzzy throws; a waist-high Victorian dollhouse overwhelmed an entire corner; and a box of condoms poked out of a nightstand drawer that had been slammed shut crooked on its tracks.
“Are we tearing the room apart?” Brand asked.
“Let’s keep it intact for now,” I said. “There’re only so many places she could hide anything.”
“Intact like the door lock?” Brand asked. When I shot him a look, he held up his hands. “No, it was very cinematic.”
We began to search—or at least Brand and I searched, while Addam, who’d ordered McAllister to stay out of the room, watched with mounting apprehension. I had to remind myself that it was his sister we were investigating.
The only locked object was a hope chest, stenciled with unicorns. The flimsy lock vaporized under the force of my firebolt. I opened it and unpacked a stack of photo albums. Brand began to flip through them.
The first photo album detailed Ella’s infancy. The second aged her until her early teens. The third book hinted at a young woman’s interest in men of status—all were of Addam or Addam’s older brother Christian, or other male Moral Certainties scions. Most of them looked bored or boorishly polite. There was more than one expression of exasperation at the camera flash.
In the back of that third album, Ella had hidden a photo in the cover flap. It was of her and Michael Saint Talbot at a carnival. Ella was kissing Michael on the cheek; Michael was looking away from the camera with a frown. A balloon bobbed out of sight, trailing a curling blue streamer.
“Not exactly a smoking gun,” I said. “But it proves what we already suspect. There’s a connection between them.”
“But it doesn’t mean that she and Michael were behind what happened,” Addam said. He met my eyes. “I’m not being naïve. I just need to be sure. What they did to me is nothing. Summoning something like Rurik? They’d be executed for that, Rune.”
“I know,” I said, not unkindly. “We won’t act until we’re sure. I promise.”
“We need to get a look at Michael’s room,” Brand said. “Let’s—”
“He’s not here?” Geoffrey Saint Talbot pushed past McAllister. His forehead and cheek were covered in hash marks of dried blood.
When no one answered, he said, “Did I beat him here? He’s supposed to be here! We’re . . . we’re meeting. We . . .”
He trailed off. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy. He looked at me and said, “I need help. Please help me.”
We hurried to the rooms that Geoffrey shared with Michael. As we went, McAllister insisted, and not for the first time, “I would know if another scion was here! We take their arrivals very seriously!”
“Look,” Brand said in exasperation. “A hundred scions with the right spells could have wiped your fucking nose without you knowing. Just stay quiet and let us do our job.”
“Wait!” I shouted as Geoffrey reached for the closed door. I grabbed his sleeve and jerked it back. He was in a panic, though; he grabbed out with his other arm, trying to get by me.
Brand snagged his collar and threw him behind us.
“There’s a ward on it,” I said, pointing to a small, clay octagon that had been affixed to the molding. “Does that belong there?”
“I’ve never seen that before,” McAllister said.
“Is that a . . . domestic ward? Some type of stasis, I think,” Addam said, peering at the carved glyphs.
“I think it is,” I said grimly.
“But why?” Addam asked.
I had a very bad feeling about this. I had a similar ward in my own home. It was a domestic ward, like Addam said. Used to trap odors.
I turned my sabre hilt around and thumped it against the ward. The clay cracked and fell away, and its magic faded out like radio static.
“Stay back,” I said, and reached for the handle.
“Sure,” Brand said. “Just do me a favor first and go to bodyguard school for fifteen fucking years.” He shouldered me aside and opened the door at an angle. Nothing
lashed out at us, except for the smell.
“Geoffrey, stay out here,” I said.
“What is that?” Geoffrey demanded in a shaking voice while holding his hand in front of his nose. “What is that?”
Brand and I exchanged a look. We stepped into the suite together.
Inside, the drapes were drawn, but sunlight was filament-bright along the edges of them. The plush beige carpeting was speckled with gore that radiated out from Michael Saint Talbot’s torn body.
He was in the middle of a summoning circle made of flexible copper strips nailed into the floor. Michael’s body was so badly desecrated by bites and claw marks that he was recognizable only by one eye and his sandy hair.
In the doorway behind me, Geoffrey started making low, choking noises. I said, “McAllister, take Lord Saint Talbot somewhere close by. Get him a drink. We’ll be along shortly.”
“I can’t leave him,” Geoffrey moaned.
“You can,” I said. “Go and calm down, Geoffrey. I need you calm so you can tell us how you got your little brother killed.”
It was a merciless bull’s-eye. Geoff’s face caved on itself. He started to cry “I never, I never wanted, I never wanted,” so I stepped up to him in a quick motion that made him stumble back. “Go with McAllister. But if you try to leave, Geoff, so help me, I will hunt you down.”
“I never wanted . . .” he repeated.
His whole body started shaking. McAllister wrapped Geoff’s arm in a surprisingly firm grip and began to pull him down the corridor. The majordomo had a small two-way radio in his other hand, and began speaking instructions into it.
Addam gave me a lost look, not sure who he should follow. I said, “You go with them.”
“No. No, I want to stay with you. This is all because of me.”
Brand went over and poked a finger in Addam’s chest. “This is not because of you. This was done to you. We don’t need you standing there, wringing your hands; we need help searching the place. Can you handle it?”
Addam pressed his lips together, nodded, and stepped over the threshold. He gagged a little, and squeezed his eyes shut. I didn’t blame him. I was taking shallow breaths myself.
“Let’s look for summoning paraphernalia,” I said.
The Last Sun Page 27