Chapter Two #2
Lara Raith cut a stunning figure, like always.
She was a woman who looked like a magnificent thirty, though I knew she was at least a century old.
She wore black riding boots, blue jeans that she made look amazing, and a simple white T-shirt that was dating out of its class, like me.
Her raven-dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail that fell past her shoulders, and silver glinted at her pale throat and upon her ears.
She smiled and nodded at the nearest people in the crowd outside of the pub.
They smiled back, even if they did it nervously.
I knew how they felt.
Lara’s summer-sky-blue eyes fell on me, and her smile widened as she walked toward me. I went forward to meet her about halfway between our guards.
“Harry,” she said, and extended her hand.
“Hey, Lara,” I said. I took her cool fingers in mine, and my body’s engines revved, somewhere in the background.
They weren’t important. I bowed over her hand, almost brushing her fingers with my lips, but not quite.
Then I stepped forward, capturing her hand under my arm, and she fell into step beside me smoothly as we approached the pub.
The sun cast our shadows out in front of us, hers slim and straight, and mine long, wide, and looming.
I felt her fingers tighten slightly on my duster’s sleeve and stroke it thoughtfully. “Isn’t that terribly hot?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She looked up at me for a moment, lips pursed, began to say something, and then seemed to think better of it. She fell quiet, nodding to those we passed like a queen.
I suppose she was one, of sorts.
We went down the steps to the sunken entrance. I opened the door, and we went into McAnally’s.
It was my favorite pub. The thirteen ceiling fans spread throughout the barroom were still now.
Thirteen wooden columns carved with figures from the Grimm fairy tales, the unvarnished ones, supported a fairly low ceiling.
Thirteen stools stood along the winding bar, and thirteen tables were spread throughout the room.
The layout of the place was intended to disperse and disrupt negative magical energies, and it had always felt like being home.
Behind the bar, Mac himself was tending to a woodstove and a charcoal grill, both being vented by battery-powered fans blowing up into their hoods.
The bar and all the tables but one were filled, and that one in the far corner, set a bit away from everyone else.
“Look at all the witnesses,” I muttered.
“Depending on how it goes, I suppose they could always be innocent bystanders,” Lara said, the corner of her mouth quirked.
“Heh,” I said, a little surge of something that wasn’t quite so heavy flickering through my chest. I walked her to the table, nodding to a couple of folks I knew, studying a lot of faces I didn’t.
The alliance between the White Court of vampires and the Winter Court of the Fae was big news.
The marriage I’d been threatened with was a part of that alliance.
I think it was mostly a PR thing. That was the whole reason for the series of dates Mab had required—we were showing the flag for the new alliance.
I held out a chair for Lara, got her settled, then took off my duster, looking around the room for any potential hostile gazes.
Jokes aside, I didn’t have any illusions about innocent bystanders.
The proper people to witness Lara and me together had been carefully curated—and some of them would probably be representing beings who didn’t like me very much.
A lot of eyes dropped as my gaze swept around the room.
Damn. What did my face look like?
“Mac,” Lara called. “Coffee?”
“Ungh,” Mac said agreeably, without looking back.
An old wooden sign hanging up behind the bar read, in plain lettering, Tips Appreciated.
It was an artifact I’d stolen from the vault of Lord Hades himself.
The working of its power was so subtle that I would never have felt it if I hadn’t known what to look for, but it was doing its job. Things would be peaceful here.
“You look like hell,” Lara said frankly.
“No,” I said. “I’ve been there. Looks different than this.”
“Worse?” she said. “Or better?”
“Oh, way better,” I said, and told the corners of my mouth to turn up a little.
She studied my face carefully. “You haven’t been sleeping, have you?”
“It’s all been so exciting,” I said in a dull tone.
“It must be difficult to be in Chicago,” she said. “Have you considered leaving for a while?”
I arched an eyebrow at her.
Her mouth quirked at the corner again. “No. Of course not.”
“A lot of people got a lot more hurt than I did,” I said. “I’m looking out for some of them.”
“Are you?” Lara asked. She put her hands flat on the table and chose her words carefully. “I know you want to. You’re a protector. That’s who you are. But you clearly aren’t your usual self.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Harry,” she said. “I know that when you see people with empty cups, it’s your instinct to fill them.” She studied my face. “Can you do that if your own cup is empty?”
I was quiet for a long moment.
“Coffee up,” Mac said from across the room.
I pushed myself slowly to my feet, walked across the room, got the two cups, and carried them, and fixings, back to Lara.
I put my cup down in front of me and set hers gently in front of her. I sat down, took the cup in both hands, lifted it to my mouth, and inhaled. Glorious. Plain old coffee-flavored coffee.
“I have to try,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” Lara said. “There are plenty of people who aren’t trying.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why I have to try.”
She added cream to her coffee, and broke and emptied a plastic stick of honey into it. She stirred it gently, without clinking. Every movement was precise and orderly and controlled and beautiful. It would have been very, very easy to watch her and not think about anything else.
“Let me help you,” she said.
“Help me with what?”
“Let me help you protect them,” she said. “What do your people need?”
I sipped my coffee slowly and set it back down just as carefully.
In my experience, you always have to get really, really careful when the monsters offer to help.
I wanted to tell her to go jump in the lake. That was my first, angry reaction.
But that wouldn’t have done my people any good.
“Beds,” I said quietly. “They’re sleeping on foam pads and air mattresses. They’re surviving. I want them to live.”
“What else?” she asked.
“A doctor. Antibiotics. A supply of insulin. I’ve got a diabetic who is running low, and there’s none to be found. Some kind of painkiller. There’s not many of those, either, and I’ve got casualties from the battle. They only get enough to get a little sleep and spend their awake time…making do.”
She nodded, and I could see her taking mental notes. “Anything else?”
“More hours in the day,” I said wearily. “I need more time.”
“Oh,” she said gently. “Yes. I know that one. When I have a solution, I’ll let you know.”
I nodded. We both took a sip of coffee, and she studied my features carefully, without speaking. She didn’t seem uncomfortable in the silence. There was an aura of patience around her that I’d only really felt among older, much older, beings.
“I’ve tried to track Justine,” I said finally.
Justine was my brother Thomas’s woman, had been since I’d known him.
She was carrying his child and had been possessed by a spiritual entity that had blackmailed him into attempting an assassination on Etri, king of the svartalves.
He’d barely survived it, and now he was stuck in stasis out on my spooky island—and Justine was missing.
Lara frowned. “Oh?”
I nodded. “The thing possessing her destroyed anything easy that I might have used to do it. Hair, nail clippings, that kind of thing. It was very thorough.”
“Then how did you manage an attempt?”
“Goodman Grey swiped a lock of her hair just in case. Sent it to me with my invoice.”
Lara smiled faintly. “The man is nefariously professional.”
“I used the lock,” I said. “But she must have shaved her head. I barely latched onto anything, and it was a long way off. I think she’s in Europe.”
“That agrees with what I’ve been able to find out,” Lara agreed. “She’s been sighted in Romania.” She swallowed. “How is Thomas?”
Thomas was her half brother, the same as he was mine, though through different parents.
“I went out to the island two days ago. He’s still…
asleep. What he went through was bad enough that his mind isn’t ready to deal with it yet.
He’s safe, and his body is healing. The island is keeping his Hunger from doing him any further harm. ”
Lara exhaled. “Like a medically induced coma.”
I nodded tiredly. “Yeah. Exactly like that. I’ve been doing some research, trying to figure out how to keep his Hunger from starting in on him again. It’s…slow work.”
Lara’s expression looked gently pained. “I believe it.”
I’d spoken more words all at once in the past few moments than I had in the previous week.
I felt exhausted. I fell into silence again as we sipped coffee.
Again, that patient stillness just radiated out from her.
The rest of my dander that had been riled up settled down, and I just felt sad and weary.
“Why?” I asked her, moments later.
“Why help you?” she asked.
I grunted in the affirmative.
She took a moment to consider her answer.
“I could tell you it was because I simply want to help you, but you wouldn’t believe that.
You’d consider it a manipulation. I could tell you that it was because it would look good for the alliance, and that would be the truth.
But it also wouldn’t be the whole truth, and you’d sense that.
I could tell you that it’s because the possibility exists that I might be feeding on you in the future, and I don’t want to poison myself with so much pain and despair, and there would be a certain amount of truth in that.
I could tell you it was because you are effectively holding my brother prisoner, as well as keeping him from dying, and I want to put you at your ease, and that would be part of the truth as well.
And I could tell you that it’s clear that you are recovering from brutal losses in the battle, and that I need you operating to the fullness of your abilities to save my brother, and that also would contain truth.
” She shook her head. “There are always dangers to cultivating the kind of reputation I have made for myself. The answer is, ‘it’s complicated,’ Harry.
But among all the pressures and crosscurrents of interest, I do want to help you. ”
“Yeah. But why?” I asked.
She smiled faintly. “Why do you want to help them?”
“Because I can,” I said. “Because it’s right.”
“I would take it as a personal favor if you would consider this possibility,” she said.
“What?”
She met my dark eyes with her very blue ones for a daring moment. “That, just occasionally,” she said, “I think so, too.”