17 Kaia #3
I twisted my shove into a stumble, let my own fever-loose knees buckle and carry us, and I took him with me the way he’d once taken me, sideways into the lip of the koi pond.
The slick stone caught my heel. We went down together in a graceless tangle and the cold water closed over both of us, waist-deep and full of startled fish and green algae, and the shock of it was the only mercy on offer—it hit my fevered skin like a hand laid flat and I gasped and dragged Tommy down under it with me, both of us soaked to the chest, my fingernails still biting deep into his arm.
“Look at me.” I had his face in my hands now, both of them, under the cover of the splash and the cold, and I pitched it so low the water swallowed it.
“Don’t look at the glass. Tommy. Don’t you dare look at the glass.
You shift on this lawn and they take you both, you take him down with you. Look at me. Only me.”
His eyes came around. The gold held at the rims, trembling, and then—he pulled the wolf back from the edge one degree at a time, his jaw locked so hard the muscle stood out, his pulse hammering under my palms.
“That’s my brother,” he breathed, no joke left anywhere in him, his voice a stripped raw thing under the splashing. “Kaia. That’s Finn. They’ve got my brother.”
“I know.” The grief of it went through me on top of everything else, because of course it was, of course the bleeding unbroken man with the wall for a face was one of his, of course this place had reached out and taken something else from him.
“I know. And the way you get him back is you stay the harmless one. You stay alive. We hold the doors.” I dug my nails in harder, grounding him, grounding myself, the cold water lapping at my chin.
“That’s the job. Patience and breathing. You just said it to me. Say it back.”
A long shudder ran through him. “Patience and breathing,” he rasped.
The lawn had gone still around us. No laughter this time. Cora’s chair was silent, Eli frozen at his wicket, all the potential dormants staring at the two people thrashing in the fishpond with the wary uncertainty of people who’d learned that disruption was dangerous.
I came up out of the water onto my knees, dragging a tangle of soaked hair off my face, and I made my voice carry, flat and clinical.
“Livia.” I didn’t look at the veranda. I could feel Joss on the back of my neck like a heat lamp.
“Log a clumsiness infraction for the guest. Adjustment-period instability, loss of motor control under stimulation. Note that I redirected him from the water hazard and we both went in.” I climbed to my feet on legs that wanted to fold, the wet gray tunic plastered to me, freezing and burning at once.
“I’ll document the incident myself and forward it to the calibration office. ”
It read, to the balcony, as procedure. A Steward managing an unstable asset and filing the paperwork.
To me it was the only lever I had: a documented incident gave me a reason to be in the system tonight, and being in the system gave me a Steward’s clearance, which might get me close enough to the sub-basement logs to find out what they were doing to Finn.
“Yes, Steward,” Livia said, already moving, her gentle face creased with concern—for Tommy, for the poor unstable guest, never for the truth, never for the truth.
The glass corridor stood empty now. The Wardens had hauled Finn through to the lift while the lawn watched two people get wet. He was gone down into the place I’d helped fill for years.
Tommy got his feet under him in the algae and stood, water sheeting off him, and put out a hand to help me from the pond.
I shouldn’t have taken it.
I took it.
His palm closed around mine and the contact went through me like a wire pulled live, and my knees buckled for real this time, the cold water no defense at all against the heat that detonated up my arm from the single point of his skin.
The Heat surged behind my chest and poured down toward my core and pooled there, hollow and squeezing and frantic, and a sound caught in my throat that I bit down before it could clear my teeth.
My breathing came ragged. The potion in tatters and the fever standing wide open in broad daylight under a balcony where a man with weeping eyes was watching me struggle to my feet out of a fishpond.
I looked up at Tommy.
Water ran off his jaw. His own eyes had gold at the rims still, and they widened as he read my face, as he felt down the tether what I could no longer hide, and the unfiltered truth of it broke out of me before I could cage it, straight down the smothered thread between us, raw and ungoverned and absolute—
If you do not get your hands on me somewhere out of sight in the next three minutes, I am going to shift on this lawn.
His grip tightened on mine.
And on the veranda above us, Joss straightened off the railing, the blue light streaming, and his dry cracked voice came down across the suddenly silent courtyard.
“Steward Thorne.” A pause that stretched. “Bring the guest up. Both of you. Now.”