by Mary Martel
From under the table, Quinton reached over and placed his hand on my knee. His fingers curled around my leg and he gave it a gentle squeeze. I looked at him to see his eyes were surveying the room and the men seated around the table. He was taking in their facial expressions, measuring their moods, and trying to read them. I wasn't even going to try. I knew none of them trusted Rain, and I knew a lot of them were angry with Quinton. And they were all worried about me.
I covered Quinton's hand with my own and held on tightly. He did look at me then.
"Are you doing okay?" He asked quietly.
I nodded in response even though it might have been a lie. My emotions were too all over the place for me to get a read on them. I thought I was okay, but just minutes before I had been silently crying and having a mini break down. Quinton was probably worried I would start crying again, and then he wouldn't know what to do with me, and that wasn't something I could blame him for. But, one minute I was upset and angry, then next I was subdued and normal, then the next, I was in tears. There was too much going on for me to take it all in and put it back out in a healthy way. I was failing miserably at handling myself. Quinton asking if I was doing okay was proof of that, and I didn't like that it was so obvious that I wasn't doing okay. He wouldn't have asked otherwise.
Despite what I was feeling, I said, "I'm fine."
"Liar," he shot back quietly. I appreciated him keeping his voice down because I really didn't want to have this conversation in front of everyone. Then I would have to deal with them all asking me what was wrong, and if I was okay, and then I would have to explain myself and my crazy emotions in front of everyone, and I had had enough embarrassment for one night, thank you very much.
I nodded my head in agreement, and Quinton's eyebrows raised in surprise. I guess I was harder to deal with than I realized sometimes, and more often than not, stubborn.
Tyson started the conversation ball rolling while Quinton was still looking at me in surprise.
"After all this time, what are you doing here, Rain?" Tyson asked the older man.
I didn't like the way the conversation was starting out. It sounded almost accusatory, and I didn't think Rain had done anything wrong to be accused of. Yet. I felt he should have been given the benefit of the doubt here, but I was seeing that the guys clearly weren't thinking along the same lines as I was.
"I came to see my daughter," Rain said in a bored voice. "Why the hell else would I have shown up here? I sure didn't come to see the lot of you."
Okay, so maybe I could understand the attitude the others were throwing off, Rain seemed to be just a tad difficult to deal with. I couldn't really complain, because he'd been nothing but nice to me so far.
"How did you know to find Quint in his dreams?" Dash asked, and he eyed the man, who was most definitely my bio dad, with shrewd eyes. "How did you know he'd be receptive to you?"
"I could feel both he and Ariel looking for me," Rain said. "I have spells up to protect me while I am asleep, and I also have spells in place, inked into my skin, to keep people from being able to locate me. The spells are something my family has kept secret amongst ourselves for generations, and I don't think I know of another practitioner who could break through them."
Did he mean that his family, our family, had the knowledge and the capacity to do spells that not even the Council was aware of or could handle? That was intriguing news. And would explain why the Council had no knowledge of Rain, if they weren't the lying schmucks I imagined them to be.
"Why is your family any different from the rest?" Julian asked. "I'm not trying to be a dick or condescending here, I just don't know why you think you're so special and different that your family is capable of casting spells that no one else would be capable of breaking through. Not even the Council is without fail or impenetrable. They may be more powerful than most, but they have their faults just like anyone else, even though it's highly unlikely you'd ever hear one of them admit to it."
"You sound awfully arrogant," Tyson said. "And, I guess I just don't understand why. If you are the man who wrote those letters to Vivian, and I think we are all in agreement that you are, in fact, that man and Ariel's biological father. Then, I don't understand how you can sit there and in arrogance and speak of spells that protect you that others aren't capable of like you're some big, bad witch, when you, according to those letters, have been looking for your daughter for years and hadn't, up until an hour ago, actually been in her presence." Tyson gestured across the table with his hand at where Rain sat beside me. "There you sit next to your daughter, and you are only there because she's been looking for you, and you felt her, and because Uncle Quint has been looking for you, and you felt him as well. If they hadn't been looking for you, then who knows how many more years you'd be out there without a clue as to where she was, and, yet, there you sit with all the confidence in the world. I guess, I just don't get it."
Tyson sat back in his seat with a smug smirk as he folded his arms over his chest. I imagined his long legs stretched out underneath the table, crossed at the ankles, perfectly relaxed as he was.
Rain leaned forward and placed his forearms on the table. The corner of one side of his mouth curled up in the semblance of a half-smile, a cruel half-smile. Cruel because his eyes were no longer dead, but heated, and they were blazing with fire. An inferno of rage swam in Rain's green eyes, and he aimed it all in Tyson's direction.
"You think I only just found out where she was staying?" Rain asked. He shook his head and his shaggy hair hung in front of face, covering his forehead and part of one of his eyes. If it bothered him, he didn't show it, and he didn't bother to reach up and brush it back away from his face. "I knew she and Vivian had been living with Marcus Cole. He told me so himself when I first contacted him over the summer. I was getting my affairs in order, getting everything ready, so I could take Ariel away and take care of Vivian. Marcus had assured me she was fine and safe with him at his house. Then I felt Vivian’s spirit come to me in a dream, and I knew something had gone wrong, and I had to find out what. I went to see Marcus and he told me she was gone, just gone, and he had thought she'd run off with some man richer than he was and had left Ariel behind for him to take care of. I knew this couldn't have been true, Viv would never have left my child behind, because then she'd have lost the only thing she had to bargain with when I finally caught up to her. Ariel was the only thing keeping her safe, and she and I both knew it. Something happened to her, and I’m betting it wasn't voluntary. So, tell me, boys, what happened to my dear sister, and why do I get the feeling she's no longer alive and breathing and walking the earth like any other living person? And don’t tell me it’s because I just told you her spirit came to me in dream so she had to be dead."
Rain ended his little speech, no longer wearing a half smile, but a full blown one. The swirl of angry heat had vacated his eyes, and they were back to being cold, dead things that probably gave some people the chills simply by looking into them. They didn't give me chills.
The room was as silent as the inside of a tomb, but I felt the pressure growing, their unease rising.
No one wanted to tell Rain that his sister was dead, because he was a wild card and seemed to be a bit unstable, and there was no telling how he'd react to the news. On the one hand, if we were going by his written words in the letters, he hated his sister with a passion that was just a touch frightening. On the other hand, he sat there and talked about her as if she were any other person, and not a woman who'd kidnapped his child and done horrible, unspeakable things to her.
I didn't understand him, but I knew we needed to be cautious with this topic so he didn't do something unforgivable in the eyes of my coven.
"She was hurting Ariel," Quinton said without hesitation and my head swung around so fast my hair whipped around and slapped me in the face.
"Quint-" I tried to stop him.
"She tried to drown her in the bathtub." Quinton said bluntly, and the pressure in the room grew to the
point it was finally uncomfortable, and my skin prickled and my stomach tightened in knots. "We got there just in the nick of time. I pulled her off of Ariel and Julian got her out of the tub. She postured, and tried to tell us all to get out so she could go back to mistreating our girl, but we weren't about to leave her there with that beast. Julian was taking Ariel out of there when Vivian tried to attack her one last time. I blocked her way and pushed her back. Unfortunately, she slipped and fell and hit her head on the corner of the counter. She went down hard and didn't get back up again. It was an accident, and not any one of us are sorry about it."
"Quinton," I choked out. I couldn't believe he'd said all that so bluntly and in front of Rain. We weren't supposed to share that with anyone. It was our secret, all of ours to keep, and to never share with an outsider where it could eventually come back to hurt any of us. We hadn't agreed to it verbally, but it had been implied; it was one secret we were supposed to take to our graves. And Quinton had just shared with an outsider. Yeah, that outsider was my father, but none of us really knew him well enough to know if we could trust him, yet.
"What have you done?" Dash whispered in a voice that vibrated with anger. "How dare you share our secrets with another, someone who isn't us? You had no right to tell him that. No right."
"I agree with Dash," Abel said, and I only knew it was Abel because I had glanced towards the opposite end of the table when Dash had started speaking. "You should have asked the rest of us first if we were okay with him knowing before you decided to share."
"Really?" Quinton asked sarcastically, and my head snapped back around to look at him. He was leaning forward in his seat and glaring hostilely at everyone around the table, myself included. I thought about prying his hand off of my leg, but left it where it was because I didn't think it was worth fighting about, and it also let me know that he wasn't upset with me, because if he was then he wouldn't still be touching me.
"I'm the one who’s responsible for her death because I'm the one who pushed her," Quinton growled. "That shit is on me, it's all on me. If I say that I trust Rain with this information that could hurt me, then the rest of you need to trust in my judgement. I've been taking care of all of you for years now, fucking years, even before some of your parents had died, I was taking care of you. You have never questioned my judgement as much as you have in the last few months. I get it, we have Ariel now, and things are different because we have a girl. But, honestly, what the fuck? When did all of you stop believing in me or trusting me? When did that happen, I honestly want to know."
"Calm down," Damien said snidely. "Not everything is about you and you damn well know it. You're lashing out and acting like a jackass. We were all there in that basement, none of us are innocent, and we're all okay with that or we wouldn't have stuck around after Ariel ran off. But we stuck around to watch the dirt settle over her body, and not a single one of us said a word in complaint or argued about the decisions you'd made. We supported you then, and we support you now. Stop acting like you're being singled out, and stop acting like a jackass."
Several of the guys hummed in either approval or agreement and I knew things were only going to get worse and disintegrate from here on out. I had witnessed a fist fight between two of them before, and had no desire to see another one any time soon.
I turned in my chair and did something I had been aching to do since I first laid eyes on the man who'd been half way responsible for my being born. I reached out to him. So as not to spook him, I didn't touch his face, but his arm instead. I laid my hand upon the fabric of the black trench coat he wore, resting it gently on his forearm, almost hovering, barely touching.
His entire body visibly stiffened, and he turned those brutal eyes on me.
"What are you doing?" He asked in a careful voice.
"The only person responsible for Vivian's death is Vivian," I said in a shaky voice. It wasn't the words I was speaking that left my voice shaky, but the man I was touching who did it. I couldn't believe after all this time that he was actually sitting here before me, and that I could reach out and physically touch him, he was that close to me. It seemed surreal, yet here we were, and I had my hand on his arm; he felt very real to me in that moment.
"If you need someone else to blame, then I suggest you blame me because, if not for me, none of the others would have been there, put in that position to defend me against the only mother I ever knew. It's not their fault she's dead. Please, don't hold it against them."
Rain leaned into me in what I was sure looked like a threatening manner to the others, because I heard more than one chair scrape against the floor as they were pushed back so the guys could stand.
I removed my hand from his arm and swallowed thickly. The look in his eyes nearly brought me to tears. How they could go from empty to damn near bursting in the blink of an eye was an incredible mystery to me.
"She was not your mother," he whispered fiercely.
"I do not remember anyone before her," I whispered back just as fiercely.
He nodded, once, briskly. And, that too, looked painful.
"That may be so," he agreed. "You were very young when you were taken from us, but, I assure you, she was very real at one time, and she loved you more than anything on this earth."
The words came out low and dark, clogged with gravel, and sounded like they'd been ripped from his throat painfully. His eyes shined with an unholy light that held the promise of nightmarish things and, this time, it was him who reached out for me.
In a blur of speed I was incapable of tracking with my eyes, his large hand moved towards my face, only slowing when it reached my skin. He traced his thumb across the scar on my cheek and his burning eyes followed in its wake.
"I cannot give you back your mother," he whispered. "But I can give you back as much of her as I have left."
"What does that mean?" I asked in a hushed voice. I wanted to tell him I'd take anything he wanted to give me, just so long as he never left me again.
"Photographs, stories, jewelry, her journal," he said. "Anything that I have of hers is now yours whenever you are ready to receive it. She wrote to you in her journal, from the moment she found out she was pregnant and going to be a mother, she started writing letters to her child. There are videos as well, if you want to see them."
I wanted everything he had to give me. Every word she'd ever written, I wanted to read. I wanted to watch every home-made video that he had with her in it, and I would likely watch them more than once, until I had every aspect of her face and mannerisms memorized. I wanted it all. And, inside my chest, my heart squeezed in painful regret for all that I had lost at the actions of a crazy, jealous psychopath.
"I'd like that," I croaked.
"Not tonight," Quinton said.
Rain and I moved back away from each other quickly, and we both turned sharply to glare at him. He'd interrupted our moment, and I was unhappy with him. I wanted to hear more about my mother and the happy family that I had once been a part of, but now remembered nothing about.
Quinton held up his hands with his palms out facing us in surrender, as if to say he meant us no harm, and was trying for innocent. Normally, Quinton would fail spectacularly at looking innocent because he was just so far from the sentiment that it was downright laughable to think of him as such. I didn't laugh at him or call his gesture of innocence as ridiculous as I would have thought it to be. His eyes held such a look of raw, tender love that my breath caught in my throat and tears stung my eyes.
Did Quinton love me? I couldn't be entirely sure, but I thought the look in his eyes meant that yes, he most certainly did love me.
"Baby," he said in a quiet, sweet voice that I'd only ever heard him use with me before. "Rain doesn't have those things on his person right now. He'd have to go and get them or take you to wherever they are and, right now, you're in no position to be running off anywhere on any sort of adventure. You need to take a shower and get the blood out of your hair. Dash might have been able to ge
t a good deal of it out with the washcloth but there's still some there, stuck to your scalp and very visible due to your hair color. It's also crusted to the back of your neck and probably further on down your back, too. Which means it's probably stuck your clothes to your skin in places back there. You'll need to shower to wash it all off, it's not the kind of mess you can clean off with a rag in the sink. And, that bump you've got on your head is pretty serious. Christ, you were wobbling around on your feet not moments ago, and let’s not forget the fact you blacked out in the back yard after hitting your head. What you need is rest and food. You can run off with your dad tomorrow, just so long as you come back, that is. But tonight, I'd feel better if you showered, ate something, then laid down and took it easy. I'm not saying you need to sleep, but the guys got you a tv for your room, so if you don't want to watch something downstairs with the rest of us maybe you can lay down and watch something in your room. Either way, I'd like for you to take it easy for the rest of the night."
I scowled at him, already forgetting the tender look of love he'd given me just moments before. Rain was here, and I had been waiting for this moment. Like hell I'd just lay down and go to bed like the good girl he wanted me to be. He had to be joking, right?
He wasn't joking.
I started to argue with him but stopped when Rain jumped in as the voice of reason and won me over.
"Baby girl," he said in a voice that was almost as sweet as Quinton's had been, but was deeper and full of gravel. "He's right. You lost a lot of blood, and it makes me sick to my stomach to see it still clinging to parts of your head. A shower will do you some good, and it will make this old man feel a whole lot better. As long as I'm looking at you and seeing the blood on your hair like that, I'm going to be worrying about you keeling over again. Shit, girl, when you went down like that I damn near had a heart attack. It almost killed me to think I'd finally got you back just to have to watch you hurt yourself and bleed all over the place."