Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
EZRA
Diving headlong into a stack of dusty old tomes was every bit as exciting as anything Ezra could have dreamed up as a child.
When he was younger and still living under the oppressive weight of the Redmayne name and his family’s thumb, he escaped to the library, to books, and kept his head down and his mouth shut.
Especially once it became apparent that his brain worked differently than his siblings’, and his autism and ADHD were diagnosed by a staunchly disappointed family doctor.
To his parents’ horror and frustration, Ezra’s deficits weren’t something that could be disciplined out of him, and what they’d taken for laziness, stubbornness, and pure contrariness was merely his mind working in a way they could never relate to—and never tried to understand.
They continued trying to force him to change, through punishment and lectures and repeated groundings.
Even when a mundane human specialist confirmed his diagnoses, and then the numerous practitioners who specialized in mental health spellwork and treatments said there was nothing to fix—his mind was different, not broken—his family never really gave up on the idea that if he only tried hard enough, he could be normal. Like them.
Ezra spent days and weeks, months and years, avoiding his family. Avoiding the frowns his mother sent his way when she thought no one was watching at public events and family gatherings, and the lamenting sighs of his father when he spoke about his sons to company over brandy and cigars.
Ezra was the second-born son, and he took the chance to be the spare with gratitude.
There were no accommodations, no help for him to be found in school or at home when he was still under his family’s control.
What he did learn to help him manage his ADHD he learned on his own, and later he sought out medical professionals that weren’t on his family’s dime.
He took his saved allowance from years of saving pennies and paid cash for medications and therapy, and when he got to college, he took advantage of programs for students like him without means.
It wasn’t perfect but it was better than the nothing he got while living at home.
The fact that he graduated from college was a testament to his ability to get lost in subjects that made him happy and excited, a place of release from the constant censure he endured at home.
Learning about history made him happy, kept a steady supply of happy brain chemicals flowing, and even when he struggled with other subjects like various types of math, his strengths were enough to pull him through to graduation.
Ezra’s failure to change himself disappointed his family.
His desire to control his future disappointed his family.
Everything Ezra did and said disappointed them, and only time, and working on his mental health, helped him see that he was not a failure.
Their disappointments were not his fault, nor his problem.
That epiphany was liberating in all sorts of ways.
Also exhausting, since he had no support system to help boost him along on his journey.
Well, he had a support system of one person, but she was more mentor than friend for most of his time in college.
Black sheep weren’t all that rare in the Redmayne line, at least one every generation, and he was merely embracing that role with far more willingness than previous outcasts. Ezra left as quickly as he could when he reached his majority and he never looked back.
History degree in hand, and nothing but freedom in front of him, Ezra fell into the most fulfilling of careers—curse-breaking wasn’t even a blip on his mental dreamscape as a child, but once he discovered that he had a unique advantage with his dual affinity and education, he didn’t hesitate.
Six years later, he was in a different country, working with a government agency, surrounded by priceless old books and was less than a dozen feet away from a sexy professor who ticked all the boxes for Ezra.
Raum smiled at Lilith, appreciated history and magic, and didn’t complain when Ezra failed to mask adequately.
In fact, Ezra hadn’t even tried to mask around Raum Norsson. At all.
He lifted his head from the book he was leaning over and thought about it for a startling moment.
He was accustomed to dire situations and tense professional settings, but it always left him exhausted and his social well empty, feeling short-tempered and needing space.
His abrupt nature and blunt form of communication was not as much a hindrance working with MERS as it was in the private sector.
Usually, he worked alone, and that was to his advantage, and working with MERS was not that bad, as far as contracts went.
They didn’t try to ingratiate themselves into his life and try to pick apart his brain, or pry at his secrets and his past out of morbid curiosity.
This contract wasn’t even his first MERS case, and each time he worked for the agency the stakes seemed to be higher, the cases even more dangerous, and his secrets stayed that way.
Not that he really had any secrets anymore, not after pulling Monica Blevins back from the edge of oblivion.
He was sure his dual affinity wouldn’t be a secret much longer.
His actions would have been reported in briefings from the medical staff and likely anyone he interacted with while under contract.
Yet this time, with Chase and Harlan, he wasn’t pretending. They already saw him in all his glory in action in the last several days. And Grendel didn’t seem to care all that much, even when he poked at her patience.
Ezra snuck a glance at Norsson as the professor carried a new stack of books to the table, shuffling them around as he organized the books by whatever category he had in his head, every movement the man made enchanting Ezra and distracting him from his task.
The other man appealed to him because most academics tended to be a type of personality that he meshed with easily, merely due to their profession and studies.
Spending a lot of time in your head, and the past, let people develop idiosyncrasies that most people in other careers never did.
Academia could be insular and isolating, and Ezra found it easier to relate to professorial types.
Ezra wondered if Norsson would find him aggravating or annoying the longer they worked together. Or maybe—and the hope was small but bright—the sexy professor would think him not annoying at all and might come to regard Ezra with some fondness and return his fascination.
Ezra dragged his attention back to the book he was reading—it was full of annotated sticky notes covered in thoughts and questions, written in slashes of frenetic energy, leaving the impression of quick insights and lightning epiphanies.
Thankfully the brand of sticky notes was safe for the old paper of the antique book, or Ezra would be peeling them off one by one.
He was as enchanted by the notes as he was by the contents of the book, a niche subject of lesser-known mythological beings and stories from the folklore of various Nordic peoples in the Late Antique and early medieval periods.
That was a rarity, as much of Nordic mythology had been maintained orally and wasn’t written down in any organized manner until at least two hundred years after the arrival of Christianity in Scandinavia.
This library having primary sources of such detail and uniqueness was probably due to the intervention of the longer-lived peoples, like the fae and the sentient undead.
Those that literally lived through such times had the memories and recollections to retain the closest versions of the oldest myths.
He suspected the notes were Nórsson’s, the books his as well, coinciding with his research.
His surname was Scandinavian, and he certainly had the look of it, the quintessential modern-day Viking vibes with his broad shoulders and long hair.
If both his parents were centuries-old as he claimed, it was very likely they were fae themselves, or of significant enough heritage to extend their lifespans, and it was even likelier that they had first-hand knowledge or intimate insight into many of the legends Ezra was reading about.
Guessing which specific species or people of fae took too long—there were many, many fae peoples, some more common than others, and the vast majority were deeply private and generally secretive.
Nothing so far in his reading had come close to resembling the storm skull, though. And yes, he’d named it. It was easier to call it that in the privacy of his head than anything else.
“Anything?” Harlan asked, interrupting Ezra’s internal rambling, the soldier stretching his arms over his head. They’d been at it for a while now, and Ezra noticed his own body complaining at sitting for so long.
Ezra sat back in his chair and shook his head, rolling his shoulders and arching his back a bit. “Plenty of relics mentioned, but nothing close to resembling the storm skull.”
He tested out the name he’d given the artifact, and no one made a face at it or voiced a complaint, and Ezra smiled slightly to himself, head ducking, relieved.
Raum closed a book he was leafing through, a thoughtful expression on his face.
“Perhaps we should look instead for a culture or person who might have been capable of crafting such a relic, or perhaps mention of an Elder fae individual who became the relic. Looking for the artifact itself seems to be a dead end, no pun intended.”
Ezra still snorted in quiet amusement, and Raum flashed a brilliant smile at him.