Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A freshly showered, shirtless Rime sits on the couch, skillfully tapping away on his phone.
“I’m updating Avery and Aaron,” he says with a quick glance up at Leo and me.
As I toss my coat over the back of a dining-room chair, I hear the shower running in the bathroom down the hall. Sounds like Topaz is home, too.
On the way here, Leo told me that Rime and Topaz followed Brier’s team to a basement apartment on Magnolia Street, just a short jaunt from Beta Rho Nu.
“I’ve got five crows scouting them,” Rime tells me now.
“Scouting them? How does that work?” I perch on the edge of the recliner. “They can’t tell you where Brier’s team goes, can they?”
“No, but they can lead us to them.”
Oh. “But what if one of Brier’s cronies is a bird weaver too?” Or any other kind of animal that can scout and follow.
Leo sits on the couch’s armrest and tosses a sharp look at Rime.
With a smirk, Rime takes his t-shirt from the cushion beside him and makes quite a show of putting it on.
Muscles in his arms, stomach, and chest contract and flex as he stretches the tee over his head and down his torso.
A striptease in reverse, performed for no other reason than to annoy his ‘friend.’
I watch, of course. But I don’t get the vapors.
And if the little performance was intended to make Leo feel insecure, I don’t think it worked. Without missing a beat, he answers my question, “They would have to know we exist in order to follow us.”
“And that’s the goal, right?” I cross my legs and rest my chin on my palm. “Lie low, keep an eye on them, and find the macguffin before they even know it’s here?”
“Exactly.”
“Assuming I didn’t blow it by looking right at her.”
Rime finger-combs his damp hair. “They would know by now that some humans can see them.”
I’m shocked he’s reassuring me. And even more shocked he isn’t flipping out over me being here right now.
“Did you recognize any of them?” I ask. “Do you know what kind of weavers they are?”
“Only one,” Leo replies. “River. He’s from our clan.”
“River the Wolf?”
Rime blinks at me, surprised, perhaps, that I remembered this detail. Leo nods, apparently not surprised at all.
Rime explains, “Because of him, we couldn’t get close enough to see if the other two had any telltale features. Fangs, claws, slitted pupils—”
“Because he could smell you?” I guess.
He nods. “We don’t know for sure that’s his gift, but it is with most wolf weavers.”
What other gifts could wolves offer? Good hearing? The ability to rally a devoted pack?
Flesh-tearing jowls?
I dare to ask Rime, “Are you still planning to get a gun?”
“Yes, a ghrá.”
My stomach sinks despite the gentle, patient tone of his answer. “How?”
“I’m—what is it you say?—exploring options.”
I shoot Leo a pleading look, but his only reply is a sympathetic shrug.
It’s not like he’s the boss of Rime, especially when it comes to the fighting side of this mission.
He has to defer to the militiaman on these matters, just as Rime has to defer to him on the research.
It’s probably killing them both to be so cooperative.
Leo rises, eyes on me. “Do you want something to eat or drink?”
“I had a big dinner, but a drink would be nice.”
He waves me toward the kitchen, but Rime halts us both with the firm declaration, “The couch is yours tonight, Betts.”
“Uh, right,” I say. By on the couch, he means, not in Leo’s bed. “Of course. Thank you.”
Rime doesn’t have to worry. I might’ve suffered a momentary lapse in judgement last night in Leo’s car, but I’ve got my head on straight now. Stay safe, stay on target, and don’t be ‘a hindrance to the mission.’
Except, the moment we round the corner into the kitchen, every cell in my body screams at me to fall into Leo’s arms. For a beat too long we stand there, gazing at one another, him with his arms crossed and me shrinking into my sweater.
And both of us breathing like we’ve climbed twenty flights of stairs.
He moistens his lips, drawing my eyes to them, then mercifully, he turns to the fridge. “Um, I have ginger ale, orange juice, and cabernet sauvignon.”
“Cabernet?”
“Topaz.”
“Ah.” A squeaky laugh puffs out of me. Because I’m unraveling. “Could I have some?” For the love of god, please?
“Sure.” He reaches for the bottle atop the fridge and takes two glasses out of the cabinet.
“That’s quite the generous pour,” I remark as he fills the tumblers well past the halfway mark.
He shrugs as he hands me a glass. “It’s been an eventful couple of nights.”
Couple of? Heat overspreads my face. Is he referring to what happened in his car? He doesn’t seem angry about it. Doesn’t feel angry about it.
But he does feel frustrated.
We both sip. The wine is dry, but good. “Peppery,” I say, as though I’m some sort of wine connoisseur.
One corner of Leo’s mouth tugs up before he takes another sip. “So are you going to tell me what you were talking about when you said you freaked Liv out?”
“I didn’t tell her,” I rush to say. “I mean about you and Nàdar and all that.”
“There’s no rule saying you can’t.”
“Oh. There isn’t? Then why do I feel like there is?”
“Only you can answer that.”
Yeah, maybe it’s a rule I made, not the fae. But I’m not about to do the psychoanalysis required to understand why.
The wine sloshes as I swirl it in my glass. “Okay, I’ll tell you what happened with Liv, but you have to promise not to get mad.”
Leo’s smile is slow. “You’re clairsentient, Betts. If I get mad, you’re going to feel it, no matter how I act on the outside.”
Well, crap. Then I suppose I might as well come out with it. “I did some hedge riding. Alone. And Liv found me and had to pull me out.”
Leo blows out a breath and drags a hand through his hair. “How hard did she have to work to get you out?”
“I… I don’t know,” I stammer, rattled by his spiking anger. Or maybe that was his blood pressure. “Hard enough to really upset her?”
Jaw ticking, he takes my glass from my hand. “Come on.” Toting both drinks, he leads me around the corner and into his room.
Rime’s voice echoes down the hall, “Anything you two need to do, you can do—”
Leo firmly shuts the door.
“Sit,” he orders me, pointing to the foot of the bed.
For a moment I freeze, braced for Rime to storm our fortress. But Leo doesn’t appear the least bit concerned. Maybe faeries have better manners than humans when it comes to privacy.
Once my shoes are off and I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed, Leo hands me back my drink. Half-leaning, half-sitting on his dresser, he folds an arm across his chest, takes a sip of his wine, and asks, “Why?”
“Why did I hedge ride?” When he nods, I answer in a rush, “Because of what happened with the snowdrops and the holly. And what Jean said.”
“What Jean said about your power?”
“Yeah, and that whole ‘in your blood’ thing. That’s why I did the meditation. I was hoping maybe my ancestors had some answers because, you know, blood as in bloodline.”
I recognize the moment all my blather comes together for Leo. His chin lifts and his brows rise. “And did you get any? Answers, I mean.” He drops onto the bed beside me, forcing me to spin on my rear end to face him.
“Not really. I just found myself in the same place I was when we did the ritual at Avery’s.”
His eyes widen. “The river?”
I take a generous gulp of wine and relate what happened during the meditation. Patiently, Leo listens, taking in every detail. When I finish, he considers the man who joined me by the rock. “Was there anything about him that looked or felt familiar?”
I shake my head.
“And he talked to you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t remember what he said, or even what language he used.” It was his emotions that spoke to me, not his words.
“What about his clothes?” Leo asks, like a detective trying to profile a suspect. “Could you get an idea, maybe, of the time period you were in based on what he was wearing?”
A nervous little laugh tumbles out of my mouth. There’s no dating my ancestor by her lover’s outfit. It spans the ages.
“Betts?”
I meet his eyes and bite my lip.
“Oh,” he says.
“Yeah. Oh.”
A crooked smile tugs at his mouth.
I groan between giggles, “God, I hope that wasn’t my great-great-great-grandfather I saw naked.”
Leo’s smile erupts into a laugh.
“Stop!” I give him a playful swat on the arm. “It’s embarrassing.” I cool myself with another sip of wine. “Well, not embarrassing, really. Just weird. I had him completely wrapped around my finger. It’s like I was some sort of siren or something.”
Leo stops chuckling and blinks at me. “You said you could tell how he was feeling.”
“Yeah, I didn’t have to think about it, I just knew he was sad and lost and that I could fix it.”
Leo’s eyes narrow. “Fix it how?”
Seriously? He’s jealous of a dude in a vision? “How do you think?”
He rises and crosses the room to set his empty glass on the dresser, even though his nightstand is closer. When he turns his attention back to me, his expression is neutral. “The fact that you were swimming isn’t that weird, you know.”
“It’s not? I hate swimming. You know that.”
“Yeah, but water is the element of emotion.”
“So?”
He has his thinking face on, eyes distant, bottom lip between his teeth. “Tell me again why you hate it.”
Just imagining going for a dip has my heart pounding. “When I’m in water any deeper than my knees, I feel completely overwhelmed. Like I’m just waiting for some huge wave to knock me over and drown me.”
He shoots me a meaningful look through his lashes. “You feel like you’re drowning.”
“Yeeeesss.”
“Betts—” He’s waiting for me to make some sort of connection. One, judging by the shine of his eyes, he’s just made.
I mimic him, “Leo—”
He smiles. “What does it feel like when you pick up too many emotions? Or when they’re too intense?”
For a split second, the world freezes.
Stunned, I breathe, “I feel like I’m drowning.”
“Water and emotions have the same energetic frequency,” he explains. “Water overwhelms you because emotions do. Because you’re clairsentient.”
“Holy shit.” I knock back the rest of my wine.