Chapter 19 #2
At one point, Kinnek and Zeddira started talking about whether Zeddira would be allowed to have a look at the cola ash dude in the bunker. I hadn’t gotten a look at him since he’d been taken down there. Not that I wanted to look at him, at all.
Lueris flawlessly picked up any lags in the conversation so that Inkiri sat beside me, mostly silent and concerned with making sure I had food I liked on my plate.
We sat there for maybe an hour before a heavy hand landed on my shoulder.
“You,” Vergis said, the one word sounding like an accusation and a mild curse at the same time, which was a lot of heavy lifting for a single pronoun. Vergis could’ve been a voice actor.
“Huh?”
“We’re doing the thing that you asked me to do with you, because you asked me to do it with you earlier, remember? That thing you asked me to do?” Vergis was already dragging me to my feet.
“Uhm, okay? Ink, you good here?”
Inkiri clicked and stuffed another piece of homemade vinné into my mouth before I could leave.
“Very much so, Sadir. Do the thing with Vergis.”
“Well, you make that sound dirtier than it needs to be,” Vergis mumbled, but he was already marching me toward the house.
It didn’t escape my notice that several of the bagua closer to the gazebo were tracking him with their eyes.
Lissir was sitting at that end of the garden as well, deep in conversation and making googly eyes at a bagu who was about as broad as Fellisse.
“What thing are we doing?” I asked when we were in the kitchen.
Charles sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and a bowl of stew with some bread on the side.
Vergis put a hand on his hip. “How did you get out of this?” he asked his father.
Charles looked up, unimpressed. “Well, I’m the human hangu-na no one pays too much attention to, kid. What’s gotten into you two?”
“That mischievous ass has been throwing me at those…at those bagua.”
Charles looked at me, but I shook my head. “Not me. I’ll take the blame for him needing earplugs, but even that was more Ink than me.”
Vergis groaned. “Don’t remind me. Lissir is the ass in question. As if everyone is as much of a flirt as he is.”
I cocked my head. “The three guys in the living room looked more like they were throwing themselves at you though.”
Vergis glared at me.
Charles sighed and turned back to his screen. “Make good choices, and tell me if you settle on one or however many of them so I can show them my flamethrower and explain to them why I might be moved to use it.”
“Dad, are you for real? I think now is when you’re supposed to show them your flamethrower!”
I looked from one of them to the other. “We’re talking about the actual flamethrower, right?”
“Yeah, Princess, just like I will show you one of my actual knives if you don’t stop making light of this.
I have been…used. For my looks.” Vergis made the last sound dirty.
“On top of that, I’m not supposed to show those bagua my knives, Lissir says.
What in the actual fuck kind of logic even is that? ”
Charles narrowed his eyes at his son. “Huh. Showing people your knives is not a love language, son.”
I almost burst out laughing, but I held it back. Barely.
“This is serious!” Vergis turned on me. “How can you be such a hypocrite when you wanted nothing to do with your one true mate when he first brought you back from the store?”
“Bought you like a mail-order bride, did he?” Charles scooped up some of his stew with a piece of bread.
I managed to keep a straight face when I said, “Yup, and the terms of service said I’m unreturnable, especially after someone flashed their knives at me.”
“Mm-hmm.” Charles grinned while he kept finishing his stew.
Vergis fumed. “You two are both horrible.” Vergis stole a piece of bread from his dad as if that was the ultimate act of defiance.
I shrugged and peeked at the screen of Charles’s computer.
It showed what I assumed was the bunker.
The Koa Esher was sitting at a metal table and eating food someone had brought him.
That was…kind of sad. I didn’t want to think about how we’d all had dinner under the fairy lights, and how the cola ash in the bunker was eating alone, by himself, in the dark.
I looked at Vergis. “You dragged me with you to do a thing. What are we doing?”
Charles looked up at us. “Huh. You two’re sneaking off while the party is still in full swing. So unsociable.”
“Well, we can’t stay here.” Vergis waved toward the backyard. “They’ll probably come into the kitchen at some point to look for me. Come on.”
“Good choices,” Charles called after us.
Vergis grumbled. “Not with the twink, thank you very much.”
“Now I’m feeling used,” I said, but I followed him up the stairs anyway. “Where are we even going?”
“The roof.”
“What, your pigeon murder roof?”
Vergis snorted. “One: It’s nice up there. Two: The roof is pretty substantial, and the noise of certain people fucking like rabbits doesn’t carry that far up.”
“And now I’m feeling judged. Or are you still jealous? You know, I’m kind of sorry, but it’s not like I can change anything about me and Inkiri. I wouldn’t even if I could, if I’m being perfectly honest.”
I would not have told Vergis this a month ago, but while we’d never be braiding each other’s hair, we were…
friendly now. Ish. He wasn’t so bad, once you got past his moods and sarcasm, and the fact that he always needed an extra clothes basket for all his knives and other weapons when we got ready to soak.
“Didn’t experience enough awkwardness for the day and needed some more, did you? We are not talking about something that never happened, because it only makes you more annoyingly likable. Now move your butt, unless you’re feeling too sore.”
I followed Vergis up the stairs. After all, I did feel some camaraderie here about not enjoying the dinner conversation.
Vergis opened the door to the guest room Nokim and Fellisse were in, which was really just a kind of studio for Kinnek, but set up like an office apart from the easel in one corner.
There was a desk by the window and an old couch that was the kind of brown that never fit in anywhere, and Kinnek’s supply of paints and brushes was on a shelf that ran the length of the wall, along with more books.
The guys had their bedding rolled up against another wall, and their backpacks sat neatly next to the couch.
On the way to the hallway, there was a more unusual art piece, and not one Kinnek had made.
I was just a gold-painted frame around a rectangle of wall that had been preserved when the rest of it had been painted over in light mauve.
In the frame was a child’s stick drawing.
One stick person had large horns, the child stick person had small, stubby horns, and the human had a beard.
Vergis noticed me looking at what could only be his childhood artwork.
“Not a word,” he said.
I shrugged, but decided not to tell him that how Kinnek had immortalized his son’s first attempts with paint made me kind of jealous.
I decided to change the subject, even if Vergis’s childhood art had never been the subject to begin with. “I haven’t seen your dad paint since we got here.”
Vergis headed for a ladder fastened to the shelf. It was one of those library ladders that you could move along a metal railing to get to the top shelves, but when I looked up, there was a hatch in the ceiling by the exterior wall, and the ladder functioned as an access point for that as well.
“He does creative bursts, then nothing for a while, then painting nonstop again. That’s why Dad put the couch in here.
Kinnek would just sleep in a chair or on the floor sometimes when he was in the middle of doing art, and Dad didn’t like that.
” Vergis loped up the rungs easily and slid the deadbolt back. “Come on.”
I looked at the door, then up at Vergis.
I didn’t mind heights—at least, I didn’t think I did—and since it was this or tense dinner conversation with Zeddira, who was apparently trying to seduce me while the brother I was actually mated to was right there, I followed Vergis up the ladder, far less gracefully.
I stopped on the ladder when I was far enough up to get a good look around the roof. “Wow.” I managed the rest of the way and turned on the spot. “This is nice.”
There was Astroturf up here, and a hammock hung between the solar panel mount and some pipe thing that was probably there for an important reason.
There was more camping gear, but because I didn’t know anything about surviving in the outdoors, I only recognized chairs and one of those really substantial yoga mats you used for sleeping on.
There was also a telescope pointed at the distant sky.
“You can have the hammock.” Vergis dropped into one of the chairs.
“Can we look through the telescope? I always wanted a telescope. Can I have a look?” It was one of the big ones, and I cautiously pointed at it, too scared I’d break it if I touched it.
Vergis sighed. “Yeah. Moon’s almost full. You can look at that. Nokim was very excited about seeing all the craters up there and hearing about how we gave them names.”
“You’ve been coming up here with Nokim?” I bumped him in the shoulder. That was a bit weird since Vergis was about as solid as Inkiri so he didn’t move at all, but hey, I was trying. “Way to go.”
Vergis growled. “It’s not like that. Anyway, it’s none of your business.” He went to the telescope and fumbled with it, looked up, fumbled some more, then stepped back. “Here, gaze your pretty green eyes out. You can adjust it here and here.”
“Oh, cool. Thank you so much.”
“Yeah, whatever.” He walked back to the chair and plopped into it.
I looked through the telescope. Vergis had set it up perfectly to show me the moon, so luminous it was almost blinding, crisp and beautiful.
It looked like it always had in pictures on the news, but this was different.
It was like finally making bread yourself after only ever getting the bland type from the store before.
“This is really cool. Have you always been interested in astronomy?”
“Daddy is. And then Dad—Kinnek—had this idea that it would help me know my place in the universe if I learned about it.”
I looked up from the telescope. “Did you ever go to school? I mean, you couldn’t have here, but with magic, is there something that made it possible?”
“Mm-hmm. What you’d call a glamour. Yeah, that exists, but it’s not really good for prolonged exposure.
It makes it so humans don’t really notice you and forget about you more than anything.
Those two uber-dads downstairs took it upon themselves to homeschool me.
Now they’re on my case for not being home often enough and living a nomadic lifestyle between worlds.
They’d probably love it if I found myself a set of several bagua to move in with me and help around the house. Fucking empty nester syndrome.”
I looked back at the moon. “My parents handed me off to the next best au pair as soon as I was weaned, basically, and I can’t really say we grew any closer during the apocalypse. I think you got lucky with those two.”
That shut Vergis up for a solid minute. It got so quiet that I looked up again to check if he was still there. He was looking at me like he’d never really seen me before. After a moment, he fished for a bag by the leg of the chair.
“So I guess we’re jealous together.” He pulled a small plastic baggy out, and I recognized the dried white flowers in there from my first trip to Aer. He waved it at me. “Wanna get high together?”
I looked over at where the roof ended. There was no railing, and the balustrade only went up to my hips.
Vergis rolled his eyes. “I promise I’ll tie you to the hammock the moment you mention flying, Princess.”
I scratched the back of my head. “Okay, fine, but just one, and you make sure I don’t do anything stupid.”
“Dude, remember how I valiantly saved you from a bloodworm when we were high together the last time?”
I snorted and sat in the chair next to his. “We were not high together. It was just you being high and me being there. I’d almost been eaten—”
“Again, that happens to you a lot.”
“Whatever. Give me that.” I snatched the little baggy from him. The flowers actually looked candied, not just dried. After some last-minute consideration, I popped one into my mouth and started chewing. It tasted like violet and candies. It couldn’t possibly be all that bad.