Chapter Thirteen
Remy led me out of the bar to another elevator, where he scanned his fingerprint on a button labeled “R.”
“How’d you know something was wrong?” I asked as we zoomed up. “Thought you had to see a necromancer.”
“I did.” No emotion colored Remy’s tone. “Aaron texted me that Lorelei was hunting you, so I rescheduled my meeting.”
The elevator doors opened, revealing a wall of dense fog. Remy’s secret hotel roof had been shrouded by something similar. I reached out and an electrical zap had me snatching my hand back.
“Ouch!” I snapped, shaking my hand.
A smile touched Remy’s mouth. “This is one of my few real homes, so it’s guarded by more than a fingerprint scan.”
“A warning would have been nice,” I said as I continued to shake my hand. At least this wasn’t bad enough to alarm the Beast.
Remy’s faint smile widened. “You seem to learn by experience versus instruction.”
I snorted. “What a nice way to say ‘you never listen anyway.’”
“I thought so, too,” he teased.
For a moment, his smile made me forget how dangerous and dysfunctional tonight had been. Then I snapped back to reality.
“What does ‘céile’ mean?”
Remy’s smile vanished, and he touched the fog. It parted like a curtain being yanked back. “Come.”
The fog turned into a short tunnel made entirely of shelved books. Like the aquarium in the bar, they seemed to defy gravity. I resisted the urge to run my fingers along their spines as I passed by them. Maybe they were booby-trapped, too.
The tunnel opened into a room at least four stories high.
Each wall was lined with more bookshelves while stained-glass windows dappled the area with subtle colors.
The chairs and couches appeared to be made entirely of stained glass, too.
Glass butterfly wings rose up behind the couches while glass mushroom stems acted as furniture legs and glass flower stems held up the tables.
Add that to all the bright, glowing moths flitting from one book spine to another, and this entire space looked like something from a fever dream.
“Is this real?” I asked. “Or are those Mindcrusher drinks entering stage two of messing me up?”
Remy stood in the middle of that visual feast, looking like a work of art himself. “It’s real. This is my true library, not the one you saw at my Baltimore hotel.”
“It’s…” I spread my hands out, trying and failing to find a word to describe it.
He smiled. “The furniture and the moths were a gift from the Tuatha Dé Danann. The glass can never break, and the moths eat dust while the fluttering of their wings prevents rot.”
I’d never get used to Remy’s world, where even furniture and insects were made of magic.
“What are the Tuatha Dé Danann? More sorcerers?”
Remy flicked a switch on the wall. Fire sprang up in the hearth behind him, adding another layer of light.
“A race of powerful, mystical rulers that folklore eventually referred to as faeries,” he said. “They’ve also been called elves or the sidhe, but they’re both more than that and neither. Only grains of truth are found in stories and legend.”
“And a ‘céile’ is?” I pressed, my arched brow saying I wasn’t so drunk that that had slipped by me.
He shrugged. “The Gaelic translation is ‘partner.’ It lets my people know I’ll be sharing my powers with you, which puts you on a similar level as Mandal in my life.”
I was surprised. “You shared power with him, too?”
Another shrug. “I can’t have my chief advisor die of old age on me, can I?”
I walked farther into the room, only now noticing the portrait above the hearth.
It was of a breathtaking woman with warm brown skin and silky raven hair.
Her sari was scarlet and gold, and an intricate gold-and-ruby hairpiece dropped onto her forehead between her eyebrows.
Her sable-eyed gaze seemed to challenge anyone who dared to look upon her, and her red lips parted in a confident smile.
Remy saw where I was looking. “My grandmother, Anjuli Mandal Byrne, but everyone called her Juli.”
I shook my head. “Saying she’s beautiful doesn’t begin to do it justice.” It was obvious where Remy had gotten his looks from, not that I told him that. He was arrogant enough already. “Wait, her maiden name was Mandal?” It finally clicked. “So, you and Nikesh Mandal are related?”
“Distant cousins.” A hard smile touched Remy’s mouth.
“Though Brendan couldn’t admit that Juli was his wife for much of their lives.
Interracial marriage was either illegal or reviled to the point of violence in her native Nepal, his native Ireland, and America, where they eventually had my father.
They were only truly safe among non-humans, since skin color is insignificant to the other races. ”
God. Racism sucked. I’d experienced some of its nastiness secondhand because my former stepmother was Black and my dad was white. I couldn’t imagine all the horrors that Brendan and Juli had been through. “That’s terrible. When did Juli die?”
All traces of his smile faded. “Over sixty years ago.”
And Remy was well over two hundred, so Juli must have lived a long life. “What about your parents? Are they still alive?”
“No,” he said with such finality I changed the subject.
“So, Lorelei is a siren, and sirens like to drown humans.”
“Sirens obtain power from drowning humans,” Remy corrected, sitting on the couch that looked like peacock feathers carved from glass. I was almost nervous when he leaned back, but he’d said the glass was unbreakable. “But I don’t allow that on my territory unless the human deserves it.”
“What constitutes ‘deserves’?” I asked in a sharper tone.
He gave me a pointed look. “Sirens are almost exclusively beautiful women, so it’s the same behavior that has doubtless brought out the Beast to protect you before, too.”
I shuddered, remembering the intruder the Beast had eaten. Yeah, sirens probably didn’t lack for “deserving” offenders to drown, if self-defense was the only requirement Remy gave them.
A chime reverberated through the room. “Ah, they’re here,” Remy said, crossing back into the tunnel made of books.
“Who’s here?” I called out after him.
“Our test subjects” was his reply.
“What?”
He didn’t answer. He only came back with several people trailing behind him. They all looked wary, but one also looked a bit familiar. Was that the guy who’d turned into a dog?
“You know the incident that took place at the bar,” Remy said to them. “My future céile, Raine, has had limited contact with our world. Thus, she was startled at Foster’s transformation. I want to acclimate her with other hybrids to prevent this from reoccurring, so if you all wouldn’t mind…”
I had a second to see relief spread across their expressions before it, and most of their clothing, dropped.
I sucked in a gasp. I was no longer looking at four men and three women.
I was now staring at a cerulean-scaled snake that was so big it could eat me whole without even a burp.
It was next to that Egyptian hieroglyph creature that had a man’s body and the fully feathered head of a large falcon.
Two Mothman-type creatures with black wings, red eyes, and humanoid bodies stood next to a woman with horns now rising majestically from her head, while the other woman was now a dark brown seal.
And of course, there was the dog with long, pointy ears.
I suddenly felt Remy’s body like a wall behind me.
I’d taken several steps backward without realizing it.
The Beast turned my vision into splashes of color that haloed the creatures in blues, grays, purples, and ribbons of red.
But the Beast wasn’t trying to break out, and none of their auras were a fraction as violent as Remy’s.
I pushed the Beast down. It wasn’t hard this time. It had fed from the pain and death of the theater victims, and since I was in no danger, it wasn’t worried about protecting its host.
“Go on, Raine.” Remy’s deep voice cocooned me like a warm embrace. “Get close to them. They won’t bite.”
Why would I want to do that? Wait, Remy had said they were test subjects. My reaction to the dog-man’s transformation had provided the perfect cover for me to sniff-test different creatures, and Remy had even given me two of the same species as a control group.
I approached the seal first. Had I read in folklore that her species were called selkies? “This is all so new for me,” I said, which was true. “Do you mind if I touch you?”
I’m asking a seal this, I belatedly realized. I must still be drunk. It wasn’t like she could answer me—
The seal waved a flipper as if to say, Go ahead.
Guess she could answer me. I stroked her head and tried not to be obvious when I also inhaled. Hmm, saltwater and honey.
The dog—or had Lorelei called him a jackal?
—came up to me next, giving my hand a friendly butt with his head.
I petted him while inhaling, too. Sycamore and fig.
Then I shook hands with the stag-horned woman.
Evergreens. I shook the falcon-headed guy’s hand, too.
Apricots. The two Mothman-looking creatures each extended a wing to me, and I touched their feathers.
Toasted hazelnuts. I even touched the huge snake despite it bringing back bad memories. Agave.
“Thank you,” I said when I was done. “This was helpful.”
Remy nodded at them. They changed back into their human forms, putting on their discarded clothing without any awkwardness at their nudity. Modesty must not be a high priority for people who could literally shed their own bodies.
“Well?” Remy said once he’d seen them all out.
“It’s confirmed, I can smell their magic. At least, that’s what I assume since the two Mothman guys smelled exactly the same, plus the jackal-man didn’t smell like dog and the seal didn’t smell fishy. And before you ask, no, none of them smelled like Brendan’s third attacker, either.”