Chapter 51
A True Lirai
Her mouth was full of cotton. So was her head. At least the hideous laughter was gone, and so was the cold, and everything except the need to pee—of course—and a deep emptiness in her midsection.
It had been a while since she’d actually felt hungry.
Liv pushed herself up, braced on her elbows. There was a dark shadow near the window, and she might have been frightened—at the very least, unnerved—if she didn’t immediately know what it was.
Or, more precisely, who. The oneiros gleamed; Liv managed to prop herself semi-upright, her head a bowling ball balanced on a dried cornstalk, and rubbed at her eyes as soon as her hands were free.
“Ugh.” Her voice had been dragged through a gravel pit, the rest of her felt the same.
“Do you usually get a hangover after a night like that?”
“It was your first.” Erik, his arms folded, barely moved, just turned his head slightly to show he was listening. “Most lirai scream and throw up after theirs. You got the full package.”
“Is that what it’s called?” She tested her arms, her legs. Everything seemed in working order, and she supposed her bladder was working too because it hadn’t opened the floodgates, so to speak. “God. I never felt this bad even in college, and that’s saying something.”
“Sara came. She had to give you a sedative.” Erik’s tone was dead level. “They were waiting for us to bring you out, you know.”
Was that what happened? She didn’t want to ask. Liv slid her feet free of blankets, dangled them off the bed. Next came standing up. She’d been doing it since she was a toddler; it should be no damn problem at all. “Lucky me.”
He let her stagger to the bathroom under her own power, thank God.
She even took the time to brush her teeth, since her mouth tasted like something dead in a swamp.
Several liquid ounces lighter and much more clear-headed, she swept open the door to the bedroom again and almost couldn’t see him in the deep shadows, despite the necklace’s soft glow.
Maybe it was camouflage, or that eerie stillness. Sorcery.
Or maybe he was just part of the furniture now.
An appliance, an appurtenance like the rest of this luxurious, pampering deathtrap.
“I don’t like it very much here.” She didn’t even have to ask who’d put her in pajamas.
Getting dressed while knocked out was kind of par for the course nowadays.
“But I suppose you’d say it doesn’t matter. ”
“I’d say at least you’re safe here.” Erik still didn’t move. “But…”
The pause brought Liv up short. She didn’t need breakfast—or maybe it was dinner, an unanswerable question like how many walls really made a prison cell—for her brain to work, really.
Although she might have liked a stack of pancakes. Still, her stomach did a slow roll as well as gurgled, and good luck eating anything now. “But you don’t think so.”
“They came right for you, Liv. Even Dakshi noticed. And you were screaming.” Now he moved, shoulders rolling as if settling his weapons, stretching his neck to one side, then the other. Just like Daniel’s preparations; maybe it was a guy thing. “About him.”
Is that what happened? She shuddered. “Is that usual?”
“No.” He all but bit the end of the word off.
She’d never seen this man truly angry before.
It was partly gratifying, partly terrifying, and all new.
She didn’t need those new senses—ESP or whatever crap the weird rainbow fire had done to her—to feel it.
No, his rage circled the room like a restless panther, just looking for something to sink tooth or claw into.
New wasn’t the word for those senses, though. The longer this went on, the more inevitable getting knocked unconscious and carried off by monster hunters seemed. It had all been there from the beginning; even Gramma Poe wouldn’t be surprised.
You got a bit of intuition to you, just like your mama.
“My mother was killed by a monster,” Liv heard herself say, dully.
“My father died in a car accident when I was six, and when I was ten my mother… well, I spent the night at my grandmother’s.
I shouldn’t have, it was a school night.
But Mom said yes when I asked, and I’ve always thought she maybe…
” She shuddered, and could barely believe she was telling someone else the whole awful tale.
“Anyway, everything was locked up. All the security dowels in the windows and the patio door, too. It should have been impossible. Unless the… the killer had a key, they said, or unless he came down the chimney.” Liv didn’t want to say the next part; it curdled in her throat, hot and bitter. “She was torn apart.”
She wasn’t telling the story correctly, God knew. Who could explain finding their mother in bite-size bloody bits spread over a living room of to-order furniture you’d helped her put together? My little mechanic, Mom used to call her. Make a list, check it twice, huh Livvie?
The pajamas did nothing against the cold.
Oh, it was nice and toasty in this padded jail cell, and so warm she really didn’t need the blankets.
Still, Liv shivered. “I lived with my grandparents after that,” she continued, inadequately.
“Mom was… it tore her into pieces, Erik. You know of anything that does that?”
He turned, slow and fluid, eyes mere gleams in the dimness, answering the oneiros’s glow. The window behind him was full of falling snow.
She was beginning to hate winter.
“Some things,” Erik said, quietly. “Let me guess. Your mom was special.”
“Oh yeah.” Every little girl’s mother was special, though.
“She knew things before they happened, sometimes. She could tell where lost stuff had ended up most of the time. Gramma joked about it until Mom was killed, then all she ever said was don’t let anyone know what you know. Words to live by, right?”
“And you had bad dreams. All your life.” Again, he didn’t sound surprised. The tone of quiet, flat confirmation was either comforting, or terrifying as all hell.
“Yeah. So did Mom.” Liv found she was hugging herself again, cupping elbows in her palms, tense as a violin string. “Nightmares like your mother, Gramma said.”
“She might’ve been a potential, Liv. Or not. Sometimes psychics aren’t lirai, they’re just tuned in.”
“That makes it even worse.” In fact, it made Liv guilty as fuck, because she’d asked to go to Gramma Poe’s. I hate school, she’d moaned. Don’t make me.
A therapist would call it survivor’s guilt, the result of trauma, and adult Liv—not to mention her psych degree—knew no eight-year-old was responsible for a parent’s murder. Irrational as it was, though, the shame, the sin wouldn’t go away.
Ever.
“I know.” And the way he said it almost seemed like Erik did, in fact, know. “Because you can’t help but wonder if the thing was after you.”
Oh, God. He understood far more than she gave him credit for. An uncomfortable feeling, to say the least. “Maybe you should just let them have me, Erik.”
Tiny blue lights flashed deep in his pupils, clearly visible in the gloom. “That’s not an option.”
“Who are you really trying to save?” It felt eerily inevitable to be standing in a dark bedroom having this lunatic conversation with an armed monster hunter twice her size, too.
Go figure.
“Spoken like a true lirai.” At least the tight, taut misery was gone from his voice. He even sounded a little amused, if you listened closely.
If you knew him.
“I mean it, Erik,” she persisted. “Who? Me or yourself? Or maybe Jake. You knew him a lot longer.”
“Jake’s probably dead.”
“Great.” They kept bugging her to eat, but with conversations like this, no wonder she couldn’t even choke down dry toast for breakfast. “Another corpse I’m responsible for.”
“Not you, Liv.” A quiet, patient correction. “Him.”
“I used to think it was funny. The way you say him and it’s immediately… I know you’re not talking about the mailman. So to speak.” She was doing the nervous-babbling thing; it didn’t help that she… did she?
Yes, she liked Erik. It might have just been trauma bonding, but so long as Liv was telling some home truths tonight, she might as well admit a few to herself. “Jake said it the same way. So did Ignatius.”
“Looks like he’s very interested in you, beautiful.” Erik went still again. Yet the fury returned, teasing at her skin with prickly wirebrush strokes. “I don’t have to tell you that’s a bad sign.”
“And I’m supposed to fall into bed with one of you strapping young lads to get it all sorted out?” The oneiros flashed; Liv squeezed herself even more tightly. Mika would have heard the sarcasm in her bestie’s tone and known to duck for cover.
Was Mika all right? Were her friends going about their lives, blissfully unaware of mad gods and monsters in the dark?
Christ, I hope so.
“I told you, not until you want to.” Erik made a single restless movement, more sensed than seen. “But they’re right. Lady Sara is taking care of trainees and examinations; that’s work you’d like even less than city sweeps.”
Lady Sara. “Great.” She knew it was possible that either of the lirai had ever been this scared, this uncertain; still, her overworked imagination just couldn’t serve up a mental image, for once. “Just tossing me out the window is sounding better all the time.”
“Please don’t joke about that.”
Who’s joking? “Humor helps me get a handle on things, you know.”
“I know.” The tiny blue glimmers in his eyes had vanished, and now he was just a big male-shaped patch of deep shadow. “But please, Liv, don’t.”
The way he said it threatened to make her hands shake even more, so Liv hugged herself tighter, like a penitent schoolgirl in the principal’s office. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“What do I have to do, then, Erik?” She was a half-step away from unloading on him, Liv realized, simply because she was scared. “Because I’ve gotta tell you, I’m fresh out of ideas. Not that I had too many to begin with ever since I got kidnapped.”
No, she had to issue yet another correction. This feeling wasn’t simply scared. It was a feeling somewhere past terrified, all the more frightening because of its inexpressible depth.
“I don’t have ideas either, Liv. My job’s to keep you alive. Or die in your place, if need be. That’s all.”
“Well, that’s a shitty job description.” Her voice rose; she couldn’t help herself.
There was a faint creak of leather. Maybe he’d shrugged, spreading his hands, maybe it was just an uneasy shifting of his weight. “It’s all I’ve got.”
“So what do we do? I mean me-and-you, Erik, because I have to say I don’t trust anyone here.”
“You should trust them more than me.”
“Don’t say shit like that, all right? Just…
oh, for God’s sake.” She groped for patience, found none.
She was either petrified out of her head or boiling with irritation for weeks now, with no middle ground.
The whipsawing back and forth could give anyone ulcers—or give an otherwise reasonable person a complete goddamn nervous breakdown.
There was no telling what she might have said next if a sudden chill hadn’t slid down her back, icy claws trailing over shrinking, goose-pimpled skin.
Erik’s chin rose. He cocked his head, listening.
“You feel that too?” she whispered, stupidly.
“Of course.” And he nodded, as if he’d expected it. Maybe he even had. “Do you really trust me, Liv?”
I swear to God, I’m gonna… No threat or obscenity seemed even halfway strong enough. “If you tell me not to one more time—”
For once, he interrupted her. “No, not that. I just don’t want you where anyone can find you, and it’ll be easier if you’re not fighting me.”
“Would it matter? If I fought, I mean.”
“I’m trying, Liv.”
He didn’t say for what, but she knew—he was attempting, in his own way, to be decent.
“I know.” And, because she was silly and stupid and Stockholm-syndromed to the max, Liv exhaled, hard, and dropped her trembling hands. She forced her chin up, and tried her best Mika-on-a-mission impression. “Well, where are we going?”
The shivering sensation sharpened, and a swift needle-pain lanced her temples. Liv was saved the trouble of crying out or flinching, because Erik blurred across empty space and she was scooped up, once more, as if she weighed nothing.
“Last place anyone’ll look for a lirai during an attack,” he said. “Hold tight.”