All That Bleeds

by Kimberly Frost

  “Just don’t make me too many. I shudder to think how inappropriate I’d become, considering how free I’ve been with my emotions tonight. I’m sorry about that, by the way. I’m normally stronger.”

  “Even the strong have weak moments, and you’ve had to be stronger than most.”

  “Is that so? Everyone has weak moments? When was the last time you wept?”

  He smiled. “It’s been a while, but if I thought you’d be the one comforting me, I might try to remember how it’s done.”

  “Sure you would,” she said with a soft laugh, going into the bathroom. Honestly, she wouldn’t have wanted that. With the exception of seeing the evidence of it on Tobin, Alissa liked Merrick’s strength. “The wet bar’s in the living room. I’ll have one of whatever you made me in your apartment,” she called.

  “A Maiden’s Prayer,” he said, and she heard the door open and close.

  She washed her face and took the pins from her hair. Running a brush through the curls didn’t quite tame them, but the loose waves suited the night. The sleek, razor-sharp angles of her normal hairstyle belonged to Official Alissa, Professional Muse Alissa. Not to the soft Alissa who let herself cry on someone’s shoulder or had drinks with a ventala in the sitting area of her bedroom.

  She curled her lashes and ran a tinted lip balm over her lips, but otherwise left her face bare of makeup. Symbolic, she thought. She’d let him in and wanted to keep letting him in, despite Tobin’s battered appearance and all its dark implications.

  She glanced down at the beautiful dress and considered changing, but she wouldn’t go that far. They were having an old-fashioned nightcap; a quiet, calm end to the roller-coaster day. Wearing lingerie would take away her options.

  She reentered the bedroom and found Merrick setting down a silver tray that held a whiskey decanter, a dish of sliced limes, a pitcher of Maiden’s Prayers, a pair of crystal highball glasses, and a small ice bucket.

  “That was fast,” she said.

  He dropped an ice cube into her glass and poured her drink. Then he unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and removed the medallion, tossing it aside. She took a sip, watching his own image return. Len Mills had nice enough looks, but Merrick’s were better. It was a shallow thought, but she didn’t condemn herself for it. She’d fallen for Merrick over months and years, for his steady pursuit of her and for the way he paid attention to every detail of her life as though what she really wanted and needed mattered to him. It couldn’t be wrong to enjoy the looks of a man who cared that much.

  He made himself a drink and sat back on the couch where they’d been. She started to sit next to him, but he shook his head.

  “No?” she asked.

  His left arm, drink in hand, rested on the armrest. His right extended to her. “Come back,” he said. It was so like that moment in his apartment when he’d held out his hand to her and asked her to stay. She couldn’t then, but now…

  “Sit here, and I’ll tell you about the road trip I took with Lysander to Nebraska.”

  “You and Lysander went to Nebraska?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “You drove there?”

  Again a nod, the continued outstretched hand a tantalizing flame to her moth.

  “Why?” she asked, taking a sip of her drink.

  “If you sit here,” he said, “I’ll tell you.”

  She looked at him through her lashes and smiled. “Will I ever get a story out of you without a bribe?”

  “Probably one day. But not tonight.”

  She lowered herself onto his lap. He leaned back, and her body followed, so she was curled against his chest. His arm snaked around her legs and moved them so they rested on the couch. It was dangerously cozy.

  “So the road trip,” she said, taking another slow swallow.

  “I was sixteen. Lysander was the age of mankind, give or take a century, though he never acted it. His emotional growth’s stunted. I think the concussion he got when he fell from grace must have been a direct blow to the frontal lobe,” Merrick said with a roll of his eyes.

  “He got a car, gave me the keys, and said, ‘Drive us to Omaha.’ To which I said, ‘Why the hell would I want to go to Omaha with you?’ And he said, ‘Because I left some money in Omaha, and I need to retrieve it before I forget where I hid it. I’ll pay you to drive.’ ”

  “How much?” she asked.

  “How much money did he leave in Omaha? Or how much was he offering me to drive him?”

  “Both, of course. That’s why I left the question open-ended.”

  “He didn’t know how much. The ‘money’ was in the form of gold coins—Spanish doubloons, to be exact—and a handful of Peruvian emeralds.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah. He’d been the only survivor of a shipwreck. He didn’t think the fish would have much use for gold coins, but he knew he might.”

  She laughed.

  “That’s how he lives. He’d never steal someone’s wallet or their car, but if he works in a diamond mine, some diamonds go into his pocket. He says, ‘Minerals come from the Earth, and no piece of the Earth really belongs to any one man. Men only rent space here.’ ”

  “I bet his bosses, the landowners, feel differently.”

  Merrick shrugged. “You can’t argue with an archangel.”

  “Why? Would he get violent?”

  “No, he’d just get bored and fly away.”

  She laughed again. “So how much did he offer you and how did the trip go?”

  “He offered me a sack. Of course, after living on the street and barely being able to pay my rent while bartending, I said, ‘How big a sack? What will it be worth?’ He sighed and said, ‘How many gold coins and emeralds do you have now?’ ‘None.’ ‘So then what difference does it make? This will be more.’ ” Merrick smiled.

  “I continued to harass him about it, trying to figure out if I’d be able to afford an Armani suit and an MP3 player, so he finally said, ‘You can have as much as you can carry, and it’ll be worth whatever people who want gold coins and emeralds will pay. Certainly enough to buy bread and clothes. Now drive before I decide to go with the wind instead of you.’ ”

  She smiled. “To go with the wind? Meaning he’d fly?”

  Merrick nodded. “I should’ve let him. Lysander’s a musician, and sometimes he gets on a kick where he decides to be monogamous to one instrument and one composer. For five hundred miles, he played the same Vivaldi song on the violin.”

  She laughed out loud. “I love Vivaldi.”

  “That’s because you’ve never listened to it for eight hours straight. I tried to get the violin away from him, but you can’t fight with an archangel in a moving car. Or in a car that isn’t moving. Lysander said, ‘You can choose the music on the drive home. If you survive.’ I thought he was joking, meaning that if he didn’t kill me before the trip was over. That’s not what he meant.”

  “Oh, no. What then?” she asked, draining her glass.

  “We drove around Omaha and the outskirts until he found the farm he was looking for, and he sent me into a barn, saying, ‘Remember what I taught you, and you’ll make it out.’ ”

  She stared at him. “What was in the barn?”

  “A demon with—I kid you not—a pitchfork.”

  “What was it doing? Baling hay?”

  Merrick laughed. “Feeding on livestock. And humans.”

  “And Lysander sent you in to face it at sixteen?”

  He nodded. “It was a lesser demon, and my training had to end sometime, but it was a bloody mess. I’m fast, but demons are faster and stronger.”

  “You were so young. You managed to kill it by yourself?”

  He nodded.

  “Was he proud of you?”

  “Hard to say. He was sitting on top of the car, eating an orange. When I came out, he tossed me a towel to hold to my side where my kidney was sliced in half. All he said at first was, ‘Good.’ My knees buckled, there was blood pourin
g from the wound, and he put me in the car, adding, ‘You’ve defeated a demon, Merrick. Something few men will ever do. It would be a shame to die in your moment of triumph, so don’t.’ ”

  “Good grief.”

  Merrick grinned. “I sweated through my clothes on the drive to the hospital while the car lurched over every bump in the road. And in a haze of pain and impending death, I heard him say, ‘I dislike driving, Merrick. We’ll stay in Nebraska until you’re well enough to drive yourself back.’ ”

  She shook her head incredulously. “No bags of gold or emeralds. Tricked into facing a demon that almost killed you. How are you still his friend?”

  “Oh, there was gold, and he let me wait until I was recovered to see how many sacks I could carry. Turns out I could carry a lot. And he was true to his word about letting me choose the music on the drive home.”

  She exhaled in exasperation. “How generous of him.”

  Merrick shrugged with a smile. “He also taught me to kill demons, which is a skill that’s served me well. It’s how I met you, remember?”

  Chapter 25

  Alissa had fallen asleep in Merrick’s arms and woke in them. They were in the guest room that adjoined hers. She climbed carefully from the bed so she didn’t wake him.

  She had breakfast and worked all morning, but by one o’clock in the afternoon she knew they couldn’t afford to leave much later, so she slipped into the room to rouse him.

  Dragging him from sleep was more difficult than she expected, but when his eyes opened to slits and saw her, he pulled her head down to his for a kiss, then a slow smile formed.

  “If I’m still dreaming, don’t wake me.” His fingers stroked through her hair to reach the back of her neck.

  She kissed him once more, lightly, but resisted being pulled on top of him. “It’s a long drive to the retreat center, and I need to arrive by five.”

  He rubbed his eyes.

  “Think you can make it?” she teased, touching her fingertip to his forehead and pulling it away, then repeating the gesture a few times until he opened his eyes and cocked a brow.

  “Unless you’d like to be teased in a much more interesting way, I suggest you cut that out.”

  With an expression of mock fear, she took a step back. “Come downstairs when you’ve showered and turned yourself into Len Mills.”

  To avoid distracting him, she left the room and descended for lunch. Merrick, efficient as ever, appeared twenty minutes later, dressed and ready, duffel in hand. She offered him tomato juice and food, but he shook his head.

  “You need to eat something,” she said gently.

  “Unless you’re on the menu, not interested.”

  Outside, he wore his dark sunglasses and sat in the passenger seat with it tilted slightly back. She drove them up the mountain, the sun and slopes breathtaking around every curve. She was looking forward to showing him the retreat center and to taking him on an excursion to her favorite place near it, a cave with glacial blue ice that she’d discovered and loved.

  After a couple hours of uninterrupted silence, he straightened in his seat and retrieved something from his pocket. “Recognize this?”

  “I’m driving in the outside lane of a mountain road where there’s currently no shoulder, and, unlike you, I don’t have superhuman reflexes.”

  “Here,” he said, dropping the small object into her hand and taking the wheel. “I’ll steer. You look.”

  She glanced in the rearview mirror. She hadn’t seen anyone behind them the entire trip. The road was used solely as a route to the retreat center, and most of the guests were probably either already there or not coming until after five.

  She stopped the car and put it into park. She lifted the small carved stone and froze.

  “This is Phaedra’s mark.”

  “Who’s Phaedra?” he asked.

  “A muse. An infamous one.” Alissa brought the stone to her nose and thought she detected the smell of flowers and freshly cut grass. “Where did you get this?”

  “Why is she infamous?”

  “She had an aspirant who turned out to be a witch. This was a couple thousand years ago, so the accounts are speculative. Either Phaedra knew the girl was a witch and worked with her anyway, or the girl concealed that fact until she had what she wanted. They may have been lovers—or not. No one knows for certain. What is known is that the girl used Phaedra’s inspiration to create a spell that raised a demon. Being demonic, it killed villages full of people, including the witch. Phaedra, distraught, couldn’t find a way to stop or bind it, so she walked off a cliff. The other muses she’d summoned to help found her broken body on the rocks.”

  “What happened to the demon?”

  “Eventually it disappeared. No one knows.”

  “Lysander, maybe.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, all young muses learn about Phaedra’s mistakes. Even if she wasn’t aware at first that the girl was a witch, Phaedra should’ve recognized the danger of what the girl explored with the inspiration she was given. It’s a cautionary tale for all muses. We aren’t meant to be led. We must do the leading where our magic is concerned.” She lifted the stone and inhaled. “It smells like something. Flowers and licorice and something cloying?”

  “Demon ash sometimes smells like rotten licorice.”

  She turned it over in her palm and stilled at the sight of the tiny H etched on the bottom. The looping strands formed her mother’s first initial exactly the way her mom had always written it. “Merrick, where did you find this?”

  “I picked it up yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t you show it to me yesterday?”

  “You were late for the party.”

  It was the truth, but not all of it. His face gave away nothing, but intuition told her he held something back. If he’d been human, she would’ve known exactly what questions to ask, but with Merrick, it was like feeling her way down a dark hallway.

  “Don’t make me angry with you.”

  He quirked a brow.

  “Unless I agree to it, don’t conceal things that I have a right to know.”

  “Once I ask you whether you want to know something, you’ll know it. No turning back.”

  “I want you to tell me about this. Everything about it. Where and how and when exactly did you find it? Was it in my house?”

  “No.”

  “James.” She stared into his eyes. “Please tell me,” she said, infusing her voice with persuasive power.

  He exhaled slowly. “You can’t push me with your magic, Alissa. I feel when you try.”

  She rested the side of her head against her seat’s headrest. “If you succumb to the push, it’ll feel good,” she said softly.

  He stared at her mouth for a moment. “You don’t need magic to get what you want from me.”

  “How about a bribe then?” she asked and leaned forward, brushing her lips over his.

  He leaned back and shook his head. “Not for this.” He licked his lips and swallowed. “I didn’t want to tell you because I got it from Dimitri’s safe.”

  “You said you didn’t find anything.”

  “I implied that I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you didn’t want me to.”

  She sat back in her seat, understanding how she’d brought this on herself. “You’re kind to me. You really are. I was wrong though to put you in a position where you had to protect me from the truth. If we’re going to figure out what’s going on, I need to know everything. No matter who’s involved.” She nodded to herself. “Promise me, no more secrets.”

  He shrugged, and she sighed.

  “I know you don’t want to hurt me, but whatever the truth is, in whatever form it comes, I can handle it.”

  “I never doubted that,” he said. “But I came here to be your shield. Let me.”

  She reached out, but stopped before her fingers touched his face. She drew her hand back. “Don’t get carried away by all this. It’ll make it too painfu
l when it’s time for you to leave.”

  “Why do you assume you have to choose between keeping your life here and having whatever you want, including me?”

  “Because that’s reality,” she said. He waited, and she frowned in frustration. “We could never keep it a secret. They’d find out about a real affair, and when they realized, they’d make me leave the Etherlin. My powers would weaken, and I’d lose my dad. I’m barely anchoring him to the world as it is.”

  “Maybe he’d be better away from the memories here.”

  “So he and I should do what? Leave the Etherlin and live in the Varden?”

  “Not the Varden.”

  “But that’s where you live. You’re saying you’d leave the Varden?”

  “Of course. I live there because you live here.”

  It was like a splash of cold water, shocking and unexpected. Could he be telling the truth? Had he really worked so hard to be near her when all she’d ever done was send him letters? Merrick didn’t seem that romantic, but he certainly didn’t seem like the kind of man to exaggerate his feelings either. In fact, he seemed like the kind to deny them altogether.

  His confession should’ve worried her, but instead she felt strangely pleased. “Wow,” she said. “You’re a force with which to be reckoned on so many levels. You really shouldn’t…”

  “What?”

  “Tempt me.”

  “I think that ship has already sailed.” Everything from his wry amusement to the intensity of his gaze made her want to lean close, to kiss and touch and taste him until she’d had her fill, which might be never.

  “Listen…” Her voice trailed off, and she cleared her throat. “I need to become Wreath Muse to save my father’s life.”

  “I didn’t know the Wreath had healing powers.”

  “In my dad’s case, it does. When my mom died, the loss of that muse magic created a downward spiral that was dizzying. His wasn’t normal grief. One day he was an even-keeled, if occasionally eccentric author; the next he was overcome with hallucinations and despair. The Wreath enhanced her magic, making it more potent, so its loss devastated his mind. Whenever I’ve worn the Wreath, he improves. That’s why I need it. With steady exposure to magic fortified by the Wreath, he’ll recover. And it’s not only about him. Becoming Wreath Muse has been my life’s pursuit. It’s my connection to all the generations of North women, to that legacy. They wore the Wreath. It’s what I’m meant to do.”