Chapter 9 #4
Rought has settled back in his chair, coffee cupped in his hand, and his seemingly half-asleep gaze fixed on Zaya.
As if he’s not listening to me at all, or at least not focused on me.
Zaya curls her toes under my leg and nibbles at her breakfast, here with me, listening but not staring.
As if she senses that I need just a little space but still want to be touching her.
“The point was … I couldn’t be fully here without you. So I filled my head with projects and degrees.”
“You met Doc Z, brought her home with you …” Rought smirks like a total ass. Apparently, playing both the role of the peacemaker and the shit disturber today. Which makes sense, since Reck isn’t here to do the latter.
The three of us encircling our mate, each offering something different. Balance and …
“No,” I say gruffly, running my hand gently down Zaya’s back. Energy shifts so naturally between her, Rought, and me, just sitting here eating and talking. I presume it was the same when we were teens, though without my beast, I couldn’t sense it the same way then.
It’s never going to be the way it was once meant to be, though. Not without Reck to close our bond.
My degrees might be useless in most other ways, but I understood what Zaya was holding when she confronted Reck at the temporary Outcast clubhouse.
I understood what Disa did to us all when severing our soul bonds.
She couldn’t touch the gryphon or my celestial dragon, but she could and did take both bonds from Reck, his and the cu-sith’s.
Because our older brother had already manifested his beast.
“No?” Zaya echoes. Not upset, but looking for clarification. “Cay indicated that Doc Z followed you back to join the Outcast.”
I don’t want to talk about Zephyr or anyone else I might have fucked during the long years without Zaya. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen to Reck or the cu-sith — especially given that a shifter staying too long in their beast form can lead to a host of issues.
“I was joking,” Rought says, his gaze heavy on me. “Mostly. I’m not … I shouldn’t suggest …”
“It’s fine,” I say gruffly. “I met Zephyr in New York, but didn’t see her for the year or so I was overseas.
When I got back, the Outcast wanted to bring in a dedicated MC medic.
Doc and I had kept in touch, and I knew she had just finished her training.
” I glance at Zaya. “She, ah … we’d fucked a couple of —”
“That’s not part of the story you wanted to tell me, was it?” Zaya asks, gently letting me off the fucking ledge that fucking Rought shoved me onto.
“No.” I glare at Rought for a beat. The asshole just grins back at me.
I huff. “I was researching rare shifter breeds. My own beast led me to the archives at the Shanghai Phrontistery. But, ah, sometimes you get more information from the underground or off-the-books networks. Anyway, the seventh anniversary of your death rolled around, and I found myself in the middle of a foreign city, disconnected from anything I’d ever known, and I decided to get … get lost within it.”
I take a deep breath, then I raise the arm I have wrapped around Zaya to display the tattoo etched across my forearm and up my bicep. The intricate black-inked Asian dragon twines from my wrist upward, its head near my shoulder.
Zaya brushes her fingers along it, and the essence woven within the ink shimmers under her touch. I’ve never seen it do that before. Normally, it’s inert.
“I woke with this tattoo fucking burning up my arm in a trashed room in the middle of the city. With no recollection of how I got there or what the fuck I did the entire three days before. Except …” I swallow, then start with the easy bit. “I could suddenly do this …”
I cup the fingers of my left hand, essence pooling so swiftly in my palm that it actually shocks me. Then, just as suddenly, I’m holding a tiny storm … literally in my hand. Dark cloud and rain and everything.
I blink, then blink again.
“Um,” Rought says cautiously. “That’s new.”
I nod dumbly.
“The tattoo gave you access to the powers of your celestial dragon?” Zaya asks, leaning forward to peer at the tiny storm in my hand. Water — actual rainwater? — is steadily dripping onto my foot and then the floor.
“Right, yes. But not like this.”
Welcome to leveling up, brother, Rought’s voice echoes through my head.
I snap my gaze to meet his. The storm dissipates in my hand.
“Huh,” he says out loud. “You heard that? I wasn’t sure, but it felt like … Zaya might connect us.”
Can you hear me? I ask in my head.
Rought laughs to confirm he can, totally fucking joyful.
“You’d better not fucking read my mind,” I snap.
“Doesn’t seem to work like that,” he says, amused. “Yet.”
You with us, my Marrow? Rought asks Zaya, somehow speaking to both of us at the same time.
My breath gets caught up in my lungs as I wait for her to answer.
I’m here, she whispers through my mind. Rought’s grin confirms that he can also hear her, but …
Can you hear me? I try to direct the question directly to Zaya, not through Rought.
Yes.
“It’s a closed loop, maybe,” Rought says. “I can’t speak telepathically to anyone but Zaya and now you.”
“Through the bond only, but it’s likely a primary ability of the gryphon,” I murmur. “I need to get back to the tower library.”
“That was the story?” Zaya asks. “Just about getting an essence-enhancing tattoo and not remembering?”
I grimace. “No.”
“It’s easier if you just barrel through, brother,” Rought says, grimacing. “Then we should test your air-manipulation abilities before you get buried in books.”
It was the air abilities that the tattoo had enhanced. Before. Before bonding with Zaya. I stop myself from testing them because I do just need to get through my story. That’s what Zaya asked for — something no one else knew.
“The tattoo wasn’t the only new thing I woke up with,” I say, lowering my gaze because I can’t look at either of them.
“There was a … kid … about fourteen, huddled under a bunch of blankets on a broken chair in the corner of the room. I … I thought … I was worried that I’d …
hurt her. That was my first thought. My arm on fire, the obviously luxury room freshly trashed, and a kid totally knocked out. ”
Neither Rought nor Zaya say anything. I take a shuddering breath.
“She woke the moment after I sat up. Her eyes were … she was Asian, but her eyes were purple. The same purple yours were, Zaya, when we first met.”
“Awry,” Zaya murmurs.
“I’d somehow stumbled upon or into an essence brothel.
I don’t know … getting lost in Shanghai …
I don’t know if that was before or after the tattoo, or if I went there for the tattoo and saw the girl …
” I shake my head. “I trashed the entire place. Or it was me and whoever else was trapped there against their will. They fled. The place was entirely empty when I woke. The girl stayed with me. I’d …
I’d apparently told her I could get her away.
Her family sold her when her eyes turned purple. She wasn’t even manifested yet. Just …”
“Worth a lot of money to a lot of groups,” Zaya murmurs.
“I don’t know how the group that ran the brothel, or wherever the fuck we were, could afford her, then just … use her for the sex trade?”
“Some people are attracted to danger,” Zaya says, her voice too steady.
“She was a fucking kid!”
Zaya lays her hand on my forearm.
I take a deep breath. “So, there I was with a traumatized awry kid, who’d probably watched me trash the entire fucking place before passing out, in a fucking city where I had no contacts beyond connections and professors at the Phrontistery.
I couldn’t hunt down whoever had taken her.
I couldn’t hunt down and punish her parents.
I wasn’t even sure I could get her out of the country.
” I scrub a hand over my head. “I already knew I couldn’t bring her here.
Not only was she not a shifter, but she … ”
I glance up at Rought, but he’s not looking at me. His attention is firmly fixed to Zaya. My mate is watching me, not a hint of rebuke in her gaze.
“Too many memories to bring her here …” I huff out a breath. “But … I knew then, after I got the kid situated, I knew I needed to go home.”
“You rescued her,” Rought rasps without looking at me. “Like you couldn’t rescue Zaya. Then it was okay to come back and try to make a life here.”
I squeeze my eyes shut against a flood of hot, painful tears. “I didn’t know it at the time …”
“The girl?” Zaya prompts.
I take a shaky breath. “There was a visiting professor, his bond mate was awry. I just …. I just fucking carried the kid all the way through the city, fucking daring anyone to come at me, to try to take her from me … hoping that someone would so I’d know who it was.
We talked a little, enough for her to fill me in on some details.
Then my professor opened the door to his suite, and his bond mate was taking her out of my arms before I even got half the story out.
I stayed with them, still hoping someone would come for the kid, until I watched them get on a plane.
They dropped everything to get her out of the country, took her home, adopted her.
With the help of the Phrontistery and …”
I fall silent for a bit, replaying the sequence of events in my head.
“Who was it who had held her?” Zaya asks. As if she already knows me, knows what I would do to find out.
“The Mobius Group.”
She nods, not surprised or confused.
“Turns out the Phrontistery had already contacted a mercenary team after a couple of their rare essence-wielders had gone missing. Though I doubt they’d want to be called mercenaries.
An independent armed force of fixers, maybe.
They were happy to expand the parameters of their contract with the school.
I never got real names, though I suppose if I’d stayed with them, like they asked me to after we razed the Mobius fuckers from the city, I might have known.
Apparently, a dragon on the team would have come in handy. ”
Rought chuckles darkly. “That was a risk, brother. Revealing yourself like that.”
I shrug. “Whoever I’d scared enough to flee when I took out the essence brothel had already gotten more than a glimpse of me. Plus, fixers of those sorts want to keep you in their back pocket. Don’t they, Zaya?”
She nods thoughtfully. “The Mobius Group traffics in the rarest of the rare essence-wielders, along with one-of-a-kind stolen goods. Anyone who risks themselves, even when being paid well, to go after them isn’t going to turn around and sell information or even brag.
” She runs her fingers along my tattoo again, elbow to wrist, then threads her fingers through mine. “And the girl?”
“Jing?” I say. “I’m not in direct contact with her. I figured that would have been way too traumatizing. But I check in with the professor and he with me every few months. She’s attending the Aukland Phrontistery. Some kind of empath, I think. In the way that an awry can be some kind of something.”
Zaya hums. “Makes sense.”
“Which part?” I say, my chest aching from dredging all these memories up even in this brief manner.
“That she stayed with you.” Zaya twists so she can meet my gaze. “She could have run, yes? Gone with all the others trapped or working there?”
I nod mutely.
“But you felt safe to her. Even in the middle of a full-blown rampage or even with your beast ascendant … she knew you were the safest choice.”
She touches my cheek, and I realize that I’m crying again. Just a few tears this time, but she wipes them away.
“That might have been us, together, in Shanghai,” she whispers. “We might have been those fixers … so … someone had to fulfill that branch of our destiny. I’m glad it was you. Even if the execution wasn’t ideal.”
I laugh wetly. “Wasn’t ideal …”
She grimaces. “You know what I mean, right?”
“I know what you mean.”
“You believe me, right?”
I believe in you, my Tempest, I whisper into her mind.