by Mark Henwick
I jerked my jeans back up. My heart went into overdrive.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Bian said.
“I don’t even want to know about that,” Julie said. “But guys, guess who Agent Ingram just dropped off.”
She stepped out of the way and Keith came in, grinning broadly and managing to look a bit shy at the same time.
Keith. Her husband. My ex-boyfriend.
Julie was part of my House. Whether she knew it yet or not, I knew it.
Keith… Oh, yesss.
My fangs came out, aching with hunger, and I lunged toward him.
Chapter 4
Bian and Pia had me backed up against the wall.
“She’s coming back.”
There was a moment’s confusion, but I knew I had a real problem when I heard them speaking about me instead of to me.
Then I remembered. My guard had been down. Keith had come in and I’d lost it. If it hadn’t been for Bian, I’d have reached him.
Great way to welcome him.
I squeezed my eyes shut and made sure my jaws were clamped closed. The fangs were gone, but I was still getting the throbbing in my jaw. It felt like anything could set them off again.
I wasn’t fighting now. I wasn’t doing anything but breathing and trying not to think of Blood. Which was hard. My body ached for it.
“Amber?”
“Here,” I muttered.
“You’re fine.” Bian was using her Diakon-serious voice. “You’ve had a slip. No big deal.”
“Can’t,” I said. “Can’t bite. Promised Diana. Wait for her. Dangerous.”
“Yeah, and don’t forget, invitation only.”
All of which was a problem.
“What happened?”
That was Jen, her voice sharp with worry.
“She’s passing through crusis. It’s a phase—” Bian began.
“She knows what crusis is,” Pia interrupted. “I’ve explained it to her.”
“Okay. Everyone calm down and back off,” Bian said. She waited. She was putting out pacifics in her pheromones and her voice had the force of command. I could feel the tension dissipate a little. I kept my eyes closed; it felt like it helped. David got the others to sit, and Bian led me to the sofa. Alex and Jen sat on either side of me. More than anything else, that made me feel better. Bian knelt in front of me, still holding my hand.
“You hearing me, Amber?”
“Yeah.”
“Towards the end of a normal crusis, Aspirants get periods of irrationality we call crusis mania. Now, your crusis is all bunched up, unpredictable and—how do I put it—complicated with you being hybrid Were as well.”
I huffed. She wasn’t overstating it. The Were side of me seemed to thrive on letting go and following instinct. The Athanate was all about maintaining control. I was a hybrid that the Athanate told me they’d never seen before. Athanate and Were don’t cross-infuse, yet here I was. I’d successfully changed to wolf and my Athanate fangs had manifested.
Unpredictable? More accurately, they had no idea what I was going to do.
“On top of that, you’re the leader of House Farrell, with an additional set of expectations and urges.”
“Got that,” I muttered.
Pia moved around behind the sofa and her thumbs began to press down into my shoulder muscles, forcing me to loosen up.
“You want to walk me through what happened?” Bian said.
It wasn’t a request. I opened my eyes to look around. Everyone else was gone. It was just my kin, David, Pia and Bian.
“I was feeling great,” I said, “leaning on Alex and just soaking up a good feeling from everyone.”
“You mean literally?” Bian said. “Using eukori?”
I nodded.
“You could reach everyone in the room?”
“Yeah.”
She seemed surprised. “Okay. So, you were all relaxed. Then what happened when Julie and Keith came in?”
“I don’t know exactly. It wasn’t Julie. I just saw Keith and I thought…he’s not House Farrell. He’d be a great addition to the House. Then it felt like a sort of insane jealousy and I had to have him in the House.”
That moment of lost control might cost me Julie. I’d have a hard time convincing Keith to stay now. And that was before I got to start worrying about how Alex was reacting to this.
“Easy,” Pia murmured, sensing my mood and digging the thumbs in even harder. “We excuse people who have lapses when the mania hits. It happens.”
Much as I appreciated the support, Pia was wrong. She meant that Athanate going through crusis in a safe, controlled environment were allowed lapses. I wasn’t in that environment. I had to be out here in the human world, and I couldn’t afford a lapse like that in public.
I had to get myself under control.
Alex’s hand slipped onto my thigh and squeezed gently. A little of the tension eased.
“Let me guess,” Bian said. “You two were an item back in the army?”
I nodded miserably.
Alex squeezed again, and Jen took my hand in hers. My kin were upset, but not more than I was with myself. What if that’d happened outside, on the street?
“Okay,” Bian said. “Let’s look forward. We’ve dealt with the last of the Matlal. You’ve reached a compromise of sorts with the pack. Until Basilikos actually does something major, or something else changes, there’s no immediate call on you. Sounds like an opportunity for recovery time.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Jen said.
Yeah, it was. Unfortunately, my paranoia didn’t think this recovery time was going to last more than a couple of hours.
“Just like Alex needed recovery time to heal his wounds,” Bian was continuing, “it’s the same sort of idea with crusis. You need to rest, you need to sleep, to let the brain deal with all the changes that are going on inside you.”
“Amber’s not sleeping well,” Jen said.
“I bet,” Bian snickered.
“No, it’s not that—”
“I’m fine.” I stopped. “I don’t need a lot of sleep.”
“You need it to integrate the changes, Amber,” Pia said.
“And to keep you sharp.”
“I’m fine,” I said again. “Never been better. My reactions are quicker, all my senses are stronger, my body—”
“Really?” Bian dropped my hand and walked across to the door. The others were in the hall outside. Bian grabbed Julie and pulled her back in.
Julie’s face was still pale with anger at the stunt I’d pulled on Keith.
“I’m sorry—” I started to say, but Bian cut me off.
“Deal with that later,” she said. “Julie, Amber reckons she’s operating at peak performance. What do you think?”
“Tell them,” I said. She was quiet. “Julie?”
Her jaw was set in a hard line and her eyes were unflinching.
“Sorry, Boss. Not only what just happened. You’re off your best. A long way off. Second guessing yourself. Erratic.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe it. “Gimme an example.”
“Last night. No way the kid should have caught you like that. Wouldn’t ever have, back in the unit. Not focusing. It’s as if you’re burning out.”
“That’s not fair. He was just a scared kid, and I was distracted by David calling me. And I’d been breathing in that wacky smoke…”
If I kept talking, I might convince myself. I could see the rest of them, however, weren’t buying it. I shut up.
The trouble was, even if they were right, no matter how much I needed a rest, I couldn’t afford it. And I didn’t want to talk about what happened when I tried to sleep.
I was already a dangerous dilemma for House Altau.
Once I’d committed to becoming Athanate, I’d shot through into the final phase of crusis quicker than they believed possible. Athanate could not give birth. The only way to increase numbers was by infusing humans. The process of infus
ing caused the crusis, which normally lasted months, every Aspirant having to be shepherded through by a skilled Mentor.
If some Athanate variant in me had reduced that period to days, it was an enormous gain for the Athanate. If it reduced the risk of the process failing, it was an even bigger gain.
But now I was also infused with Were.
If I, in turn, infused a human, would they become a hybrid like me or an ordinary Athanate? Would it be quick? Would it be safe?
What if I bit another Athanate? I had to, as House Farrell; all the members of an Athanate House exchanged Blood.
Was this variant Blood I had a huge new opportunity or a dead end?
Diana had said she would run some controlled tests on me. I didn’t trust anyone else to guide me through this, not even Skylur—and certainly not Naryn. Skylur’s newly returned Diakon and I didn’t see eye to eye on—well, anything. Bian and Pia, as skilled as they were, weren’t skilled enough. And Diana had gone missing down in New Mexico, where House Romero might have crossed over from Panethus to Basilikos.
If House Altau couldn’t trust me not to go biting humans, there was one obvious way to deal with it. Lock me up. I’d had enough of that in the army Obs unit, after I was bitten—not to mention my little stint in the psych ward, thanks to Noble.
And Altau didn’t even know the full extent of my problem. In addition to the Athanate and Were, I had a spirit guide, Hana. That made me an Adept as well.
I didn’t know what Athanate thought about hybrid Athanate and Adept. I did know the Adepts’ opinion, which was that this mixture would be as volatile as the rest of it.
Jen and Julie were right. I wasn’t sleeping. I dozed, but every time I sank down toward deep sleep all the monsters in my head came out to play.
I was fifteen when my dad died. He’d been a practical man every bit as much as a great father, and he’d helped me imagine a strongbox in my mind, where I could lock up everything bad that happened to me. Like him dying.
It’d worked from that time on, and I had lots of stuff that went in there. But two years ago, during that night in South America when I was bitten, things had started to happen that didn’t fit so well into the strongbox. That’d been made worse by being used like a magic lightning conductor by Tullah’s dragon spirit guide, Kaothos, when we rescued Jen. And then I’d used Athanate healing powers on Jen without really understanding what I was doing.
All on top of mind tampering that Petersen had used on me when I was being experimented on in the army observation unit, Obs.
If I understood Pia and Bian right, I needed sleep to recover, but now whenever I tried to sleep, the strongbox failed and all my nightmares came out to haunt me.
The rest of the room continued talking, unaware of the circling thoughts in my head.
“So what can we do?” Alex asked. “We’re Amber’s House. That has to count for something. We have to be able to help.”
“You can,” Bian said. She started to count things off on her fingers.
“Biting anyone isn’t a good idea for Amber at the moment. She’s not in control of herself and the sensations would make that worse. So keep Keith away from her, for instance. Anyone who you think might be a good candidate to join the House. Amber would probably agree and Athanate instincts might kick in.”
They were all nodding. I wished they wouldn’t talk as if I wasn’t there.
“Same goes for sex,” Bian said.
“What?” Both Jen and Alex.
“Guys, along with being a really fun thing, sex is important for Athanate. It lights up parts of the mind that bypass controls. Inhibitions get lowered and for new Athanate, there isn’t much distinction between sex and feeding. It could get out of hand real quick.”
Jen and Alex looked shocked, but they didn’t argue.
“Pia, David, if she’s not in bed and asleep,” Bian said, “I want one of you with her at all times. I know you work for Jen now, but you’ll just have to schedule it somehow.”
“This is just a phase, isn’t it?” Jen said. “Diana will come back, and Amber will be all right?”
Bian’s lips pressed together in a thin line. “Diana is the one to fix this,” she said.
Neither Jen nor Alex missed the evasion, but they didn’t say anything.
What if Diana couldn’t fix me? I’d go rogue or turn Basilikos. Either way, I’d made Diana swear to kill me if I did.
The rest of them looked at each other and nodded again. It was like a club I was excluded from.
“Okay, I—”
Bian’s cell bleeped at her and she frowned at a message on the screen.
“It’s Gray,” she said to me. “He wants to meet both of us as soon as we can. I guess that’s going to be when we’re done with Naryn.”
“Naryn?” I said.
She sighed. “Look, even though crusis mania isn’t unusual, we still have to report any incidents. And the pair of you need a meeting to clear the air anyway.”
Great. I wouldn’t have minded Skylur knowing about the mania, and I only wished Diana was here for me to tell. But Naryn would love to have an excuse to lock me up, and/or disband House Farrell. Bian read my face. My relationship with Naryn—or lack thereof—was no secret. “Give me a couple of hours with him first,” she said. “You rest. Chill. When I call, have Pia bring you out to Haven. If you’re still in one piece after Naryn’s finished with you, we can go together and see what Nick wants.”
Chapter 5
Why Jen decided shopping would be a good way to keep me chilled while I waited to go see Naryn, I didn’t know.
Alex had decided he suddenly felt too weak to come out with us, even when Jen said there was plenty of room to lie down in the back of the Cadillac limousine while we were in the mall.
Jen called in to the office and had them rearrange her schedule for the day. Pia’s too. Then she’d switched off her cell. She’d made an effort, and I felt guilty that I was having trouble responding.
I was nervy. The people wandering through the mall seemed threatening in some way I couldn’t quite pin down. I worried because I wasn’t carrying a weapon, and I found myself rubbing my sweaty hands down my jeans.
Julie and Pia walked just behind us. Both of them were discreetly armed. I kept reminding myself I’d trusted Julie with my life more times than I could count. There was no reason to worry. However upset she’d been that I pulled fangs on her husband, she’d managed to put it aside like a pro for the moment.
Keith was another matter. I had spoken to him for a few minutes and apologized, but it was going to take much more to make things better between us.
He’d been angry. Angry that I’d genuinely frightened him. Angry that Julie might be in danger from me. Angry that Julie still felt a commitment to me and Jen.
I wasn’t sure what I could do to fix things with him. But if I didn’t, I couldn’t expect Julie to stay. That thought really hurt.
Sensing my mood, Jen laced her arm through mine and guided me towards a casual clothing shop.
“Not more jeans?” I said. She’d bought me some last week.
“Can’t deny, you’re surely hard on clothes, honey,” she said, exaggerating her twang.
We came out after only ten minutes, so I couldn’t really complain. I even carried our purchases so Julie and Pia could keep their hands free.
“Home?” I asked, turning back hopefully.
“Oh, no.”
I groaned, only partly joking, but I couldn’t manage to be miserable for long. Not with Jen.
Sure enough, within minutes her wicked humor had wriggled its way under my mood until I was laughing. Shopping with her was certainly different. More fun than with anyone else, and after a while I was following her blindly, shopping bags hanging off me like a hat stand, not even bothering to look at the store fronts.
The snickers from Julie and Pia snapped me out of it.
I blinked and saw the dimly-lit, near-naked mannequins that were artistically posed on the walls
like a frozen ballet. We’d just walked into Tenero e Intima, the ritziest, sexiest Italian lingerie shop in the entire state of Colorado.
The kind of lingerie I might like to take a look at alone. Secretly.
But with Jen, and in front of everyone? This was supposed to keep me calm? I gritted my teeth and forced a smile.
No one ever died from embarrassment, said Tara in my head.
We walked out twenty minutes later with me carrying Jen’s distinctive, pink and black Tenero e Intima shopping bag front and center.
For such skimpy little clothes they sure came in big packages. No one would be in any doubt where we’d been.
“What were you laughing about with the cashier?” I asked, nudging her with my hip.
“She was just saying that these would be wasted on a guy. They don’t really appreciate them…”
Oh no.
“Jen. Quiet.”
“…so I just said they weren’t going to be wasted at all.”
She realized I’d stopped and looked up.
We were standing in front of Mom.
“Mrs. Farrell.” Jen recovered first. “Jennifer Kingslund. Jen, please.”
“Yes, of course,” Mom said. They shook hands awkwardly. “Stacy.”
“Um. Look, why don’t you try the coffee at Pietro’s?” Jen nodded at the café across the way. “They do a great macchiato. We’ll take these back to the car, and see you in a little while.”
She left with Julie escorting her. Pia’s eyes met mine and she strolled a few yards away. Close enough to keep an eye on me, far enough to give us some space.
Mom frowned and hugged me. “Does she have to hang around?” she whispered.
One of my sister’s ideas was that I had fallen in with a cult. And yes, just like it would be with a cult, Pia was there because I couldn’t be trusted on my own. The cult theory would get a boost from this. I’d have to find a way to defuse that, obviously without saying ‘actually, I’m a vampire’.
“It’s a security issue, Mom.”
“I guess we could have coffee,” Mom said eventually. “I hoped you’d drop in at home.”