Mara #2
He just looks at me. The grin slips off his face, and what’s under it is startled, almost shy, as if no one’s thanked him in a long time.
Then he gathers it back up into a smile, real this time, and bows his head, slow and formal.
“Gratitude. From a lioness.” He clears his throat and turns toward the far wall, like he’d rather I hadn’t caught that on him at all.
I look back to Aaron, and he’s already smiling at me. “I’m glad you came with me, baby.” He takes my hand again. “You’re my other half. You catch me everywhere I fall short.”
I squeeze his fingers. “I’m your partner.”
“You both know time runs different in here, right?” Kade’s gone back to the shelves, pulling books down and pushing them back in. “The longer we stand around, the more of it burns off out there.”
Aaron frowns. “What?”
“When the dark magic left, the witches started aging. They’d traded everything they had for the kind of youth that doesn’t end, and then it just ended on them.
” She shrugs. “What do you think they did to try and slow it down? Bent the realm itself. It didn’t save them, but it left the time in here running slow. ”
“Slow by how much?” Aaron presses.
Kade stops searching long enough to look at him. “A day in the Glen is two days on Wintermoon.”
Josiah’s head comes up. “Then my Layla will wake.” The grin thins. “And she will not be pleased to find me gone.”
“Which is exactly why we need to get the fuck out of here.” Kade says it without turning around. “Soon.”
Aaron groans and pushes off into the room to search it, and Kade keeps at the shelves. Josiah doesn’t move. He stays where he is, watching me with that grin, and my lion shifts under it, restless and unsure.
“He adores you, you know.” He says it low, just for me, and heat crawls up my neck. I find something across the room to look at instead of him.
“I can smell the longing in him.” He doesn’t let me off the hook. “He aches for a life with you. A family. To be a father.”
My ears twitch toward him on their own, my tail swaying slow behind me. My lion stirs at the words, wanting what he’s naming as badly as Aaron does.
“I know that ache.” There’s no performance in it now.
“It’s a strange thing to put words to, coming from a man.
It doesn’t sit in the heart. It sits deeper than that, working itself into you until the wanting is part of whatever we carry where the blood should be.
” He tips his head toward Aaron. “He’s doing every bit of this for you, beautiful lioness—all that wanting—and I’d give anything for him to have it.
It’s what I fight hardest for, and what I’ll never have.
Vampires don’t procreate. I won’t bring another child into the world for as long as I’m in it. ”
My ears fall, and I open my mouth to say something, though I don’t know what—but he’s already adjusting his tie, looking around the room.
“I’m not alone, though. I have the family I crave already—my Layla, my Joseph, the whole of Wintermoon at my back.
” He points at me and grins. “‘Guard the ones you love even on the nights they’ll never learn you did.’” His grin sharpens.
“That one’s not from my Healthy Habits. I made it up myself. ”
He pushes off the wall. “Aaron doesn’t know how to look for the enemy.” His red eyes slide toward the dark doorway at the end of the room. “I do.” He dips his head to me, polite as anything, and walks off through it, into the study where Aaron and Kade have gone.
I follow Josiah in, and the room stops me at the door.
I’ve never stood in it, but I know it—I saw it once, through the mirror Aaron conjured the first time he showed me his father.
I recognize the shelves, the leather sofa, the low fire that had burned behind Eric’s shoulder while his too-warm voice put my lion on edge.
My lion loathed him on sight, and she hasn’t changed her mind.
It’s darker now than it was through the glass.
The shades are drawn, the hearth empty, and the only light is a gray seep at the edges of the windows, nowhere near enough to lift the shadow.
His scent still hangs here—sandalwood, and under it no coffee, no warmth, just smoke.
Cold smoke, what’s left when a fire’s been dead a long time.
Josiah trails his fingers along the back of the leather sofa as he passes it. “Eric. You loved your own beauty more than you ever cared to be good.” His head tilts. “I wonder what a man like that does, in the end, to keep it.”
“There’s nothing in here.” Kade doesn’t look up from the desk she’s bent over.
“Ah.” Josiah lifts a finger. “But there is.”
Kade rounds on him, glaring. Josiah snaps his fingers in answer, and fire leaps up in the empty grate, sudden and bright, gold spilling across the room.
“Tell me, do you know the tale of Dorian Gray?” he asks, to no one in particular.
“Who gives a fuck about some human gothic story?” Kade snaps.
“I do.” He moves deeper into the room, fingers trailing along Eric’s old books.
“A beautiful young man, terrified of growing old, of losing the one thing he prized in himself. So he made sure he never lost it. He stayed flawless, lovely, untouched, while every cruelty he committed bled into a portrait of him locked away in the dark. He sinned all he liked and never aged. By the end, the painting held everything he really was—and that was what killed him.” He lifts his hand from the books and turns to me.
“Eric sounds a great deal like Dorian to me. I always liked Mr. Gray—his charm, his wit, that bottomless ambition. There’s an evil a man can respect, and his was it. ”
He points to the far wall, and I follow it to a painting I’d missed in the gloom—Eric, full-length, in a heavy gold frame.
It’s no reproduction. He stands the way men stood for these a century gone, half-turned, chin lifted, a pale cravat knotted high at his throat and a black coat going dark into the shadow at his feet.
The varnish is cracked, the clothes stiff and long out of style, the whole thing out of the same dead century as the tale he just told.
“Eric belongs to the same century as that story.” Josiah turns to where Kade and Aaron have gone quiet over the desk.
“And I’m older than him. I was already what I am while he was still a young man with his whole life stretched out ahead of him.
I know exactly how old Eric is—and the both of you are still digging through his drawers. ”
Aaron straightens, an old book open in his hands, and crosses to the painting slow. He looks from it to Josiah and back, and I watch the pieces land.
“You’re right, Aaron.” Josiah doesn’t look away from him. “The answers you came here for are in this room. You’re only looking in the wrong corners of it.”
“If your beautiful Layla wakes up and wrecks something out there because we sat in here playing art history too long,” Kade says, not lifting her head, “I will personally put you and her both under for fifty years of slumber.”
And then everything stops.
They come up at the windows, all around the room—points of light blooming behind the drawn shades, low and sick, yellow-green. More of them by the moment. My tail snaps straight up. My lion surges forward, snarling, quicker to call it danger than I am.
“What is that?” My voice comes out thin.
“Fuck.” Kade’s already moving.
My eyes cut to her, fear sliding through me. “The spider warlock. There’s more of them?”
“They turn into whatever they feel.” Kade sets her back to the wall, scanning the windows. “So it might not be a spider this time. Could be something else, something worse.”
Josiah doesn’t pull back from the windows.
If anything he leans toward them, his face open and far away.
“Their darkness—I can feel it from here. I understand it. They only want to feed on us so they can feel something again. I went two hundred years feeling nothing at all. We should talk to them. We could help them understand it, make peace with the pain they’re in—“
“Jo.” Kade rounds on him. “Shut the fuck up and help me get us out of here. We’re not lecturing them on their feelings. We’re gone before they get their hands on us.”
The window nearest us bursts inward. I throw an arm up with a hiss, but Aaron’s faster—his magic flares out of him in a dome of blue-gold, curving over me. The glass meant for my skin shatters against the shield and rains down harmless at my feet.
Something pours through the broken frame and spills across the floor in heavy, boneless loops.
From the chest up it’s a man—another warlock, his gray skin sloughing loose, his eyes filmed yellow.
Below that he’s all snake, a thick scaled coil dragging the rest of him in.
His mouth splits and a forked tongue tastes the air. Then he throws his head back and roars.
Josiah steps forward and lifts a hand, pleasant as ever. “Hi. I’m Josiah. I’m here to help.”
“Oh, Mother Fate.” Kade drags a hand down her face. “I am in hell.”