I do not know how he became our leader, or if that was the correct term for the role he had taken, but this was the first time I had ever questioned it. His judgment was usually without fault. He made the decisions that had kept us out of harm’s way for centuries after we had finally worked out how to get out of the damned cage we found ourselves in. It had been he who had decided we would keep the thing as a haven. However we had ended up in there, it had done the job of keeping our existence secret, and his decisions had always done the same. But now, with her?
“That is not the issue.”
He gave a derisive sniff and turned away. He knew I would be truthful, even if I was being vague, and I was ready for his contemptuous response.
Of course I felt the same. That I could keep my head despite that seemed to be the only way we were going to discover the truth behind her sudden appearance and what threat, if any, she posed. He walked over to my bookcases, absently fingering the spines of some of the titles there.
“Then what is the issue?”
I looked to Amos again. He had closed his eyes but was clearly listening. Typical of him not to back me up. He seemed far less affected than Silas, but then, he had not touched the mark.
“What’s the issue, Rhett?”
Silas was becoming angry. None of us needed that, not locked in there as we were. Amos sat up. “Calm yourself. Rhett is right. I sense no threat, you felt nothing but your lust for her, and he hears few lies of any significance, but that does not mean there is no danger in approaching her.”
“Yet he went to her regardless. After I had stated that I would—”
“I went because you would have found yourself balls deep given the chance and discovered nothing.” He snarled at me. It made no difference to me whether he snarled, agreed, or attacked. Those were the facts. I only ever deal in facts. “Silas, it was for all our safety.”
He paused, turning to face me and our eyes met. “What did you discover?”
“That she is more honest than I expected.” It was the truth. I sensed no malice in her. “But there was dishonesty, as can also be expected. It was inconsequential. That does not mean that there is no threat, Silas. What if she is an agent? What if she is a test? Have you considered nothing but your need to get your dick wet?”
He was still furious, but at least he was listening. It was a start. Before he could comment, I went on.
“I have spoken to the cat. He will leave an opportunity for you to safely approach her tomorrow. You will have to watch and wait. Choose your meeting location very carefully, but you will have a chance to speak with her tomorrow and gain whatever information you can. I think it is safer for us to be within sight of one another from now on. If there is a threat, we are more likely to escape it if we are together.”
Amos lowered the corners of his mouth and tilted his head in what I assumed was acceptance of the soundness of my reasoning. Silas merely glared. With no response forthcoming, I approached the bookcase. He did not move, so I reached around him and plucked a book from the shelf.
“Do what you will, Silas, but that is how I will approach the matter. I will be nearby. I will be there to assist should anything untoward happen, and you may thank me for it later.”
He turned and stalked from the room, and I watched him go before sitting in my favourite chair and opening the book. I had no intention of reading. It was just a prop I used to stop the other two from speaking to me when I would rather they were silent. Amos took the hint and closed his eyes again.
Silas seemed to think that this was easy for me. That keeping my distance that morning had been as simple as walking by and bidding her good day, but that was far from the case. I had been foolish enough to get too close. I had smelled her, almost touched her, and every fibre of my body had ached to hold her closer.
All that had stopped me had been the risk to them, my brothers but for lack of blood. I hated what that girl was reducing us to, but could find no way around being in contact with her.
She meant something. To all of us.
I was not comfortable with it. Not in the slightest, but the damn girl was in my head and I seemed unable to get her out. And that was without touching her. Amos had kissed her. Silas had located and touched her mark, whatever that was. What they were going through, I could hardly imagine. Amos seemed almost at ease with the whole scenario, which was usual, but still. It was far from ideal that we, being what we are, should be in such a compromised position.
Another thing that set me on edge was the feline. He seemed to think he was to be revered. Naturally, I treated him with the respect due anyone who was pledged to help us, but there was something I did not trust. He was never entirely honest. Always holding something back. I had told myself that was their nature. They are aloof creatures at best, with little allegiance to anyone save their master. And we had no idea who his master was.
He had lied outright when questioned and declined to reveal the truth when pressed. He had, however, insisted he had a way of bringing the girl out to a public place, to allow Silas to speak with her without there being the risk of him touching her mark again. While he thought it would help him, I suspected it would cause further harm. He was compromised enough.
“You worry.”
The book was an insufficient shield against Amos. If he had something to say, he would, indeed, say it. It didn’t happen often, so I glanced at him over the top of the tome.
“Of course I worry. Why do you not? He is not himself, Amos. None of us have been ourselves since we met her.”
“You said you hadn’t touched her.”
“I have not. Will not. But she still affects me. Whatever you must be experiencing I cannot begin to fathom. This is bad enough.”
He shrugged, accepting my statement. “I say we give in to the desire and see where it takes us. Perhaps Silas is right. Maybe, just maybe, she has the answer and fighting this need is only prolonging our agony?”
“Answers to what?”
“Our purpose.”
“We have no purpose. We simply exist.”
He laughed. The sound grated my already fraying nerves. “You expect me to swallow that bullshit, Rhett? We have purpose. Our talents would be a waste if not. She is the answer to our questions. I feel it in my bones.”
“They are not your bones.”
“They’re mine as long as I wear them. We took these forms as they came most naturally to us, therefore, they’re our bones. I like mine. Learn to love yours.”
There it was again. He had accused me of hating myself many times throughout our known existence. The truth was, I did not fully understand what I was, so I struggled with having any feeling toward myself.
I did not hate myself. I did not love myself. I simply was, and so were they, and we existed in our little prison waiting for guidance. It never came.
“I cannot love what I do not know.”
“You know what you are. You don’t accept it, is all.”
He was beginning to lose his patience. I could hear it in his voice. A tension. An underlying anger that was entirely out of character for Amos. “You are as we are. We’re all the same, Rhett. You have your gifts, we have ours, but the base power is the same. What we lack is purpose. Perhaps she is here to give us that? Maybe she is a test. Maybe she holds the reward for the eternity we have spent locked in this can.”
“We shall find out tomorrow. The cat will lead her to Silas. He will ask the questions, she will give the answers. I plan to be close enough to hear them speak. That way I can tell if she spins him lies and interrupt before she sucks him in.”
He sat up and looked at me in amazement. “You’ve really given this a lot of thought.”
“I have no wish to be imprisoned again because we were presented with a weakness that we could not overcome. We escaped this place. I will not be caught so easily a second time.”
I was fortunate not to be as weakened as they were by her. I intended to have her, as they did. Everything in me cra
ved her, for reasons I could not explain.
But I would ensure our safety first. It would be on my terms. We had come too far to risk capture. I would not have any of us become some human’s plaything. We had too many gifts. We were too powerful to allow one corrupt being access to something that could cause such destruction.
“And Silas?”
“Whatever power her mark holds, it is corrupting him. We will have answers tomorrow. Until then, he can stew. I understand that he is in pain, Amos, but I will not be spoken to with such disrespect. He is better than that. I am better than that.”
He nodded and rose, moving toward Silas’s room. “I’ll check on him.”
I nodded. When he had disappeared into the room, I turned and replaced the book on the shelf.
I was missing something. The wealth of knowledge on those shelves and not one of the tomes held the answer I sought. It would have been so much easier if they had.
13
I inched the shorts over my thighs, gritting my teeth against the burning pain. The scratches on the right had barely healed. They were hot and wet. The swelling was bad enough to make my shorts feel tight.
I was painfully aware of how it looked, but the friction of any fabric over them was enough to make me cry out in pain. I’d given up on any skirts or leggings and had chosen the baggiest shorts I owned. So not very.
Dressed at last, I grabbed my bag and slipped on flip flops before heading down to the hotel lobby. My focus was getting these to heal and stop hurting, so I skipped breakfast and went directly over to the palace gardens. Fresh air would help the wounds to heal was my reasoning. I was probably wrong, but it beat being stuck in that hotel room any longer. I couldn’t stand another minute in there.
Despite how early it was, it was warm. That had brought people out much sooner than I’d anticipated, and the gardens were busy. The pain in my thigh was making walking so difficult I had to stop by the time I made it to the pond. I sat at the water’s edge, watching the swans glide through the still pool, feeling horribly sorry for myself.
I felt so tired. I couldn’t explain it. The feeling hit me like a wall, and I hugged my knees, being careful not to catch the raw wounds on my thigh.
It was supposed to have been a nice, quiet week leading up to the final, not the stressful mess I was facing. I probably should have gone to the hospital straight after the cat attack and had it checked out, but I think I’d been in shock. Judging by the heat coming from the mangled mess, it was infected. If it was, I could probably look forward to a holy hell of a fever setting in, not to mention the medication I’d need and the impact it’d have on my ability to function normally.
The final would be off the cards, meaning I’d be forced to forfeit. Meaning the whole week with its near-death experience, cat attack, and hot guy head fuck had been a complete waste of my time. Fabulous.
“Hello, Maia.”
I physically jumped at the sound of my name and closed my eyes. Which one was it? Rhett the stalker, or Amos? No, not Amos. The voice wasn’t deep enough.
He sat down on my right without invitation, his arm only a breath away from mine. Painfully aware of his proximity to my throbbing leg, I shuffled away, hissing when my arm caught my thigh.
“What happened?”
I finally turned my head and swallowed hard. It was neither Rhett, nor Amos.
It was the fucking masseuse. My head swam, and I think I lost focus a bit, because he kind of blurred out into a black smudge. That only served to piss me off even more.
“Look, mate. This is going from weird to weirder. I don’t know who you people are, or what you fucking want, but to have three blokes looking like you lot following me about will eventually trigger a warning. Even in my thick head. Fuck off, or I’ll scream.”
He carried on as if I hadn’t said a word. “Those wounds. What happened?”
I could feel bile rising in my throat. I was never sick. Whatever that cat had given me through its filthy claws was bad. “Cat.” I could only manage the one word before I was forced to swallow the acidic vomit that had crept into my mouth. “A cat.”
My head started to pound. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to get up. To get away from him. I may have been slow on the uptake.
Flattered by Amos. Oddly intrigued by Rhett. Shit. I’d even considered trying to find this one after he’d run his hands all over me then offered me sex in my hotel room. Shame brought another wave of nausea and I gagged.
My balance was well off, my blood sugar was probably in my boots, and I staggered forward toward the water. My stalker grabbed me by the upper arm and pulled me back, guiding me away from the pond.
“Listen to me.”
I could barely see, was struggling to walk, and was only just holding down another eruption of bile. I didn’t have much choice.
Seven steps later, I was lowered onto a bench. My thigh screamed when it brushed the arm of the seat, and I held in a little whimper. If he noticed or cared, he didn’t say so. He didn’t bother sitting down, but crouched in front of me as I leaned forward, breathing slowly to avoid vomiting everywhere.
“You’re sick, Maia. You should’ve been to a doctor. Let me help you.”
“If you want to help, phone me an ambulance and move away.” I was whining. I didn’t care. I felt like shit and would’ve happily hacked off my leg at that point. If I could see straight.
“Tell me what you want, Maia. Let me help you.”
There was a dark command to his voice that I didn’t want to ignore. In my confusion, pain, and desperation, I told him exactly what I wanted.
“I want this pain to go away. I want to stop feeling sick. I want to know what the fuck is going on. And I want that fucking cat thrown to the bottom of that pond. I want it dead.”
What there was in that list for him to find amusing, I don’t know, but he chuckled. The sound made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. And he lay one hand on my knee. “I can handle three of the four.”
When he touched me, I swear I felt a pickle of electricity. I’m certain I heard a low groan come from him, but when I looked up at him, his face was expressionless. He watched me, head cocked to one side, as if waiting for me to say something.
I should have been grateful; the pain, the headache, the blurred vision, everything had gone. Everything except him. Instead, I completely freaked out and vomited between his legs. Served him right. I told him to move away. If he was disgusted, he showed no sign. He simply looked down at the yellow mess, then back to me.
Lifting one hand, he presented a bottle of water and three of the cinnamon sugar waffles I’d eaten the day before. “You should eat.”
They’d appeared out of thin air. I knew I should scream. I knew I should run. I should do something other than accept the food and drink, thank him, and take a bite while staring at him. But I was confused and hungry. So, I ate. And they were just as good as they were yesterday.
“I do have an explanation. For everything. I need you to trust me, Maia. Can you do that?”
He was holding me in a hard stare. It was weird. He was the masseuse. He absolutely was the one I’d taken myself into the bathroom and gotten off thinking about. But he wasn’t trying to please me anymore. He was trying to persuade me to do what he wanted.
I nodded my head and carried on eating.
“When I met you on Monday, something happened to me. My friends have been trying to work out what it was, but in speaking to you, they’ve been somewhat affected, too. Now we all have this affliction and we have no way of knowing how to make it go away.”
The more he said, the less it made sense. So I kept eating.
“My friends, Rhett and Amos, need your help, Maia.”
And there it was. They were all in it together. I sucked some stray cinnamon sugar from my thumb and lowered the napkin wrapped waffles to my knee.
“How did you do that?”
I still hadn’t looked at my thigh, but I knew whatever was wrong with it had been f
ixed. It wasn’t pulsing. It didn’t feel swollen. I could flex the muscle without feeling sick.
“You wanted it to go away. It went away.”
“What did you do?” I think it came out as a whisper.
“What you wished.”
Despite the seriousness of his tone, and the look in his eyes, I pursed my lips and frowned. I wasn’t going to say it. I’d been fucked with enough for one week.
Sliding along the bench, I escaped him and got to my feet. I felt amazing. The pain was gone, my head was clear, and the waffles were hitting the spot.
“Well, that’s just brill. Thanks for your help. And the waffles. Particularly the waffles.”
I took another large bite of the warm, squishy, sugary treat and turned to walk away when he grabbed my wrist. “Maia, please.”
Now that was desperation.
I spun to snap a protest and was more than a little bit surprised when his lips met mine. The low groan that came from him startled me and I tugged away. It was only brief contact, but when I stepped away, I noticed him lick the transferred sugar from his lips and saw something else in his eyes. I don’t mind admitting it startled me, just a bit.
“I have to go.”
He dropped my wrist and let me leave. I didn’t look back. I didn’t follow the footpaths through the gardens as I fled back to my hotel. Whatever just happened was freaky and I just needed to get away.
I kept the waffles. I was starving, but everything else about him made me nervous. He’d touched me. Everywhere! He’d gotten rid of that mess by…what? Magic? Yeah, my weird week was fucking with my head. I was out.
I went straight to the bar, despite that being the second most dangerous place in London as far as I was concerned, and ordered three shots of tequila. Why tequila? Well, its vile and I hoped the taste would take the edge off.
I was wrong.
My paranoia built the longer I was there. The barman watched me as though he was ready to call security. I didn’t blame him. I was knocking back shots and glancing around, marking all the exits like a crazy person. He wasn’t to know I was planning an escape route if the cat walked in. Or Amos. Or Rhett. I refused to think about the third.
Trickster’s Hunt Page 8