Chapter Sixteen
I told Cyrus everything, which wasn’t as much as he wanted, but it was all I had.
He listened intently, even though the emotions passing over his face mirrored the initial skepticism I’d felt.
Until he’d called in Noah and sent him to the basement, and the young man returned with a prematurely gray-haired woman in an outfit that the Guardians had sourced for her, just a t-shirt and jeans, but it was new, and she stood taller in it.
“Inese,” I said, recognizing her immediately and rising to greet her.
“This is the woman?” Cyrus asked.
“Yes. Inese Veiss.”
“Lupa,” she bowed her head before remembering that clan Weres didn’t do that. And put her hand on her heart instead, but tentatively, as if she’d almost forgotten the traditional greeting. And then it didn’t matter when I enveloped her in a hug that went on and on, because I didn’t want to let go.
“Are you alright? Do you have everything you need?” I asked when I finally stepped back.
She nodded with tears in her eyes. I wondered how long it had been since she’d had the touch of clan, her clan? Too long, by the look of things.
“Everything but food,’ she said hoarsely, before clearing her throat.
“The Guardians arranged lunch, bringing in sandwiches, but most of us were too flustered to eat them. It’s calmed down a bit since, and the Guardians arranged for dinner before they left for the night, but it was through the hotel—”
“And room service around here is glacial.”
“Well, it... it hasn’t shown up yet. Not that we’re not grateful for all you’ve done—”
“You don’t have anything to be grateful for! You fought today. You deserve a feast!”
I glanced at Cyrus. “We can arrange a feast,” he agreed, his eyes sharp and watchful. As if he was suspecting some trick when there wasn’t one.
“Are all the wounded seen to?” I asked her, feeling guilty that I hadn’t even checked. I’d spent most of the day in a strange sort of fog, but it was starting to clear. And I was being reminded that these people needed everything, and so far, I’d given nothing.
“Yes, the Guardians took some of the most injured to their hospital, on tribal lands out in Humboldt, but most are being tended here. They just need rest and food.” She hesitated. “And to see you. I know you were down earlier, but you and—” She looked past me to Cyrus.
“Cyrus, my mate and the chief of our clan.”
“Cyrus,” she made the traditional gesture once more, more fluidly this time. “It would do everyone good to see you both. Unless… unless you’re going somewhere,” she added nervously, suddenly noticing our attire.
“We’ll be there,” I promised. “Can you sit for a moment and tell Cyrus your story? How you came to be in Tartarus?”
She looked confused, but she nodded readily enough. “Of course, if… it will help.”
But that didn’t turn out to be necessary.
“Sunflowers,” Cyrus said suddenly.
I looked at him. “What?”
But he was staring at Inese. “Your kitchen… it was decorated in sunflowers. You had a trivet, something one of the neighbor children gave you. You used to give them candy every Christmas, and he made it for you in school, painted it like a sunflower, to match your kitchen…”
She blinked at him in surprise, but not in shock, because she wasn’t afraid. He was the
co-leader of her clan, and she had nothing to fear from him. Nothing to fear at all anymore, surrounded by family. “Yes. How did you know?”
He didn’t answer, just turned away and walked over to the expanse of windows, and stood looking out for a long moment. Then he came back, took out a wallet, and handed Noah a credit card. “Get them a feast,” he told him hoarsely. “Take the others to help you and deliver it downstairs.”
“Most of the guys are off getting the supplies you wanted,” Noah said, looking between us. “And it’s gonna be a lot of food. I don’t think there’s enough of us—”
“We have plenty of clan,” I said wryly, looking at Inese. “Do you know anybody who could help?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Make it happen,” Cyrus told Noah, who nodded, although he looked confused.
Yeah, I thought, join the club.
They left, and I made a couple of stiff drinks for Cyrus and me, because we needed them. We sat on the sofa and stared out at the neon for a while. It didn’t seem to help.
“You saw the kitchen,” I finally said.
“Dimly, through the bond. Not as clear as you probably did, like a photo of a photo, but good enough.” He drank whiskey.
“That’s… freaky,” I said, because I had no idea what else to say.
“It’s more than that!” he said savagely. “We’re Weres! We don’t read minds!”
“It’s not true mind-reading,” I protested. “More like you said: pictures, memories, only carried by emotions instead of intellect. Strong ones, and even then, it’s only flashes—”
“Whatever you call it, it’s supposed to be impossible!”
“I don’t know what’s impossible anymore,” I told him honestly.
We sat in silence for a while longer.
I didn’t know what Cyrus was thinking, but I was trying and utterly failing to get a grip on this. “All those people—can we even afford them?” I said after a minute. “I mean, they’re going to need things, a lot of things—”
“As a clan, they have identities again,” Cyrus reminded me.
“They don’t have to hide in fear for their lives, scraping up a living in the dark.
They can get jobs, homes, lives. We’ll help those who want to work get stable; others who need more time can go to Wolf’s Head to bolster the numbers there; and the rest…
Yes, there will be expenses. But that’s the least of our problems.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning this could be a game changer,” he said, sitting forward and nursing his glass.
“We’ve always been secondary to the vamps and mages in most people’s minds.
The only time anybody worries about us is when we ally with one side or the other, adding our weight to theirs to tip the scales of some conflict.
“But we’ve mostly stood apart from both groups, and our help was always temporary.
Like the situation Carales described—aligning for a single purpose, in that case land, and then dropping away again.
We needed our fortresses, our forests, our wilderness areas that nobody else knew, because without them—”
“We would have been annihilated,” I said, watching his face.
“Yes, so we always thought,” he said, turning to look at me.
“But that wasn’t true, was it? With our captains, if they could do what that vampire said, what you did this afternoon—” His expression flooded with a mix of emotions I couldn’t name, even with the bond, maybe because he didn’t fully understand them himself.
“Lia, we’re a match for them—for any of them! ”
“Yeah.” I just looked at him.
Because Cyrus was a smart guy, but he hadn’t been trained as I had in the Corps. I’d already figured out the implications he was only now realizing. And skipped past them, because there was nothing I could do about that. But it wasn’t going to take him long to catch up, and when he did—
I drank more whiskey.
He looked at me for a moment, and I could almost see him putting it together. “And right now, two wars are going on,” he said slowly. “A civil conflict within the Were community and a wider conflagration engulfing most of the supernatural world. And this trait could be useful in both.”
I nodded, knowing what was coming.
“But so far, we’ve been on the peripheries of the wider war,” Cyrus said. “Used to help the Corps secure its headquarters from Black Circle assaults, as we can smell dark magic, especially in the concentrations needed for a bomb or other weapon. But we haven’t been expected to fight—”
“Because no one thinks we can,” I said hoarsely, my throat being on fire as I was draining my glass too fast. “Other than as cannon fodder, and Sebastian won’t stand for that.”
“No, but if he knew about this…”
I didn’t say anything that time. I liked Sebastian and genuinely thought he cared for the Were world as few clan leaders ever had.
They were usually far more self-serving, putting their own or their clan’s interests above all others.
Sebastian was more even-handed, more comprehensive, a true leader of all Weres, not just Arnou.
But right now, that could be a problem.
“He’ll use it,” Cyrus said suddenly. “This power of yours, these people. He will.”
“Of course he will.” I belted back the rest of my drink and half choked. “He already said as much, before knowing all this. How much happier do you think he’ll be to realize he might have a force that could take on a column of vamps, including one with senior masters, and annihilate them?
“Like you said, this is a game-changer.”
“And as you said, bad timing!” Cyrus hissed.
“The only way we’re taken more seriously is if we have a larger part to play in the war!
That means combat, and I don’t think our allies would be averse to using our newfound strength to make us better cannon fodder.
Send us into the thick of things, let us take the risks, the damage, the deaths—
“Let you.”
I saw when it hit him, and immediately knew that, Sebastian or no, brother or no, Cyrus wouldn’t stand for it. He wouldn’t risk me, he just wouldn’t. It was all over his face.
“No one can know about this,” he told me savagely, leaning forward. “No one at all!”
“No one does—”
“What about that vampire? Carales?”
“I told him I was trying to fill in some missing pieces of our history. He didn’t seem too interested.”
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t! And you know how they are—”
“No, I don’t. No one does.” Vamps were nothing if not close-mouthed about themselves and their world. And that went double for this one. Who knew what a creature fifteen hundred or more years old thought about anything? Especially one involved with the Pythian Court.
Their secrets had secrets.
“If he tells anyone—”
“Then he does. If we ask him not to mention it, it only ups the chances.”
“Damn it, Lia! Why did you go up there?”