Feral (21 page)

Beside the concern
for my own repute, I worried about his cousins as well.  If things ended badly, in more ways than one, everyone would be affected.  To what ends were they willing to play the noble?  Would they follow me if I left?  Would they die protecting me?

I couldn’t take that chance. 
Keeping my distance was safer.

I
needed to chase him from my bed before things went too far.

Rolling to his side, Icarus looped his arm around my wa
ist and tugged me toward him.  I quickly withdrew, motioning to rise from the bed.  Just as quickly, he denied my retreat.

“
Thaleia?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to stay here tonight.”

“I can behave, Thale.  I think I’ve just proven myself.  We both know I could’ve gone much farther.  But I didn’t.  I stopped.”

“
It shouldn’t have even gone that far,” I stressed.  “It was a mistake.”

“
I know,” Icarus agreed.  “I know it was.  I’m sorry.”  He was truly repentant, his pale eyes clouded with shame.  “I know you have a lot on your mind.  It wasn’t right for me to take advantage.”

“I wasn’t exactly protesting
,” I murmured dismissively.  Resigning my attempt to evade any further advances, I fell onto my back with a huff.  “But we’re not in the same place.  And I do have a lot on my mind.  Icarus, what would you do if Alec
did
go to New York to get help?  What if they came for me?”

“
That’s a last case scenario.  If Alec wants the full amount promised to him, the buyer won’t hear a thing until he’s ready to deliver.  Normally, he would hide the girls somewhere until he has the cash in hand, or the exchange is ready to be made.  But it’s a moot point because he’ll never have access to you.  Besides, we’ve a little time on this to catch him still.  He wasn’t supposed to deliver you until after your graduation.”

“How do you know all this?”
I asked, effectively sidetracked from my previous concerns.  Marcus hadn’t gone this deeply into detail that night with my parents.  This was all news to me.  “And what does graduation have to do with anything?”

“The buyer wanted a refined companion.  Plus it was easier all around if you were of age before you left your parents.  Less involvement on the lawful end.”

Ok.  That much I knew.  “You didn’t answer the first question.”

Icarus sighed resignedly. 
“We didn’t just let Marcus go that night, Thaleia.  We questioned him further after he left your parent’s house.  They’d heard enough.  There was no need to worry them more than they already were.”

“But you let him go afterward, right?”

“Oh my Goooooddd— shut uuuuuuppp already!” Crispin moaned petulantly from the floor below.  “Trying to sleep here.  Some people have school tomorrow.”

“And some people need to get up early and drive people to school,” Lucius added, “because some people got themselves suspended.”

“Some people would do it again,” Bacchus confessed.  I wondered fleetingly what had sent them over the edge.  They refused to tell me what was said to cause their scuffle.

“In a heartbeat,” Caius
seconded.

“Some people,” the i
mp chimed in, “just don’t feel like listening to other people making out all night.”

“Word,”
agreed Max.

Mortified, my face flushed red. 
“I think you should go.”

ΑΒΩ

Morning came too early.  Even the shower did little to wash away the grogginess and regret generated by last night’s events.  I dressed perfunctorily, paying little attention to my wardrobe and descended the stairs with unease, averse to the ribbing that will surely occur.

It surprised
me to find the twins awake and mobile.  They’d taken advantage of their suspension by sleeping in all week.  Once Icarus’s ire passed, he didn’t dwell on things.

Lucius was busy arranging a single file line of bacon onto a paper plate to reheat it in the microwave.  I had prepared it
the previous night so that I’d have less to do in the morning.

I pulled the eggs from the fridge and began cracking them into a large glass bowl.  We went through an
eighteen-egg carton in a sitting, so we only ate eggs on Fridays.  Wednesday was pancakes, and Monday I’d made french toast, which I prepared Sunday night.  Tuesdays and Thursdays the boys had to fend for themselves.  In other words, they ate cereal.

At least, that was the planned menu for the week.
  This was subject to change at my convenience, of course.  Hence, I could deduce the reasoning for the boy’s prolonged silence this morning.  In essence, and the literal sense, I was the hand feeding them.

“Milk
?” Lucius asked curiously, watching as I added some to the raw eggs.  He was the most adept in the kitchen, and frankly, the most interested.  The others had no desire to cook, which worked out for me because I hated to clean up.  We were a match made in heaven.

“It makes them fluffier and moist,” I explained.
  “Don’t add salt while cooking them.  It makes them dry and rubbery.”

“Oh…well how do you know how much
milk to put in?”

“I don’t.  I just eye it.  A tablespoon for two eggs, I guess.  So about a half cup for eighteen.  But it’s not an exact science. 
We’re not feeding the Waldorf Astoria.”

“Contrary, our senses are more precise,” the imp interjected
, idly twirling a ringlet around her finger.  “Too much of one thing and not enough of the other could ruin the whole dish.”

“We’re talking about scrambled eggs, Hailey,” Max said quickly, to my defense.  I think his concern was equally divided between my feelings and the procurement of his breakfast.

“She could spit in them and you would eat it,” she sniffed, and left the room.  She and I had no miraculous bonding over the past week.  Our attitude toward one another was tolerable at best, and that was bordering on the ‘barely’ end of the spectrum.

Max shrugged, blithely.  “It’s true.  I would.”

“Dude, that’s so disgusting!” Crispin exclaimed, his nose wrinkled in revulsion.  “You’re not serious, are you?”

“Well I wouldn’t eat
your
spit.”

“It’s saliva, Runt,” Caius said.  “You’re gonna get some on you when you french kiss a girl someday.
  When you’re tangling tongues it’s kind of to avoid it.”

“Still nasty.”

“That’s because you haven’t hit puberty yet,” Lucius scoffed.  “Grow some hair on your boys and then remind us how disgusting kissing and saliva is.”

Crispin open
ed his mouth to retort, but glancing in my direction, he flushed and clamped his mouth shut. “I’ve kissed a girl,” he said instead, his chest swollen with pride.

“Oh yeah?”
said Bacchus, grinning widely.  Mocking smirks filled the room.

“Yeah,” said Crispin,
fighting his own smile.  “She was wearing Hershey’s lips gloss.  I wanted to vomit the rest of the day.”

By the time the laughter died down,
I had finished cooking the eggs.  I was dividing them among the six extended dishes when Icarus joined the party.  Reaching around me, he pressed a light kiss on my cheek, took the pan from my hands and took over divvying the eggs.

Evidentially, last night’s attempt to discourage
him from pursuing me was in vain.  It didn’t help that my reaction to his entrance was opposing to my qualms over getting involved with him.  There was no concealing my attraction to him.  It was perceptible every time I flushed with color.

“Sit
.  Eat,” he ordered.  “You overslept.  You’ll be late for school.”

He pushed a plate in my direction with the tip of his finger. 
Grabbing a fork from the drawer, I speared a mass of egg and stuffed it in my mouth, chasing it with a healthy bite of bacon, scoffing my food down before he could press further misplaced attentions upon me.

“Hungry?”

Flushing again, I nodded and averted my eyes to my plate.

“Good.  Save your appetite for dinner tonight.  I’m taking you to the Inn.”

I made a noise of protest around my mouthful of eggs and bacon, my eyebrows furrowing until a small v appeared in the center.

“I believe we had a deal,
Thaleia.”

Swallowing
, I nearly choked.  My mouth went dry and the eggs stuck in my throat.  “A deal?  You were supposed to chase Mike off!” I graveled hoarsely.  “And a fat lot of good it did!  He waylaid me in the hall at school the next day!”

“
It was an oversight,” Icarus dismissed.  “Which has then since been corrected.  Has he bothered you at all this week?  I can place a call to Mr. Fleiss this morning.”

“No, but—”

Mercilessly, Icarus shrugged.  “Deal’s a deal.”

Dropping my fork to the counter, I left in a huff. 
This was coercion.

“The twins will be taking you to school today,” Icarus called after me.  “I need Max and Lucius elsewhere
while I run some errands.”

Elsewhere like hunting down Alec, a kidnapper and m
urderer.  And he was worried about taking me to dinner at some schmancy pants restaurant.  Was I the only one thinking clearly?  Was I the only one who could see that entering a relationship with him would be wrong on so many levels?  There were too many factors working against us.  Age.  Personality.  Fate to name a few.  He was setting himself up for disappointment.  Begging for failure.

Pushing my arms through the sleeves of my coat, I slung my backpack over my shoulder and
left to wait in the Jeep.  I was studying for my calculus test when the wonder twins joined me several minutes later.  Considering they couldn’t come into the school because of their suspension, Bacchus was prepared for the weather, but Caius was seriously underdressed in sweatpants, sans shirt and shoes.

“You’re gonna
catch pneumonia,” I pointed out.

“We don’t
get sick,” Caius disclosed.  “And I’ll be shifting anyhow.  I’m watching the rear of the school in the woods.  Bacchus’ll be taking the front.”

“You’re not su
pposed to be on school grounds.”

“I’ll be watching
the front entrance from the jeep.”

“Don’t you think this is a little extreme?
” I asked, snapping my textbook closed.  “Do you think this guy’s actually going to try and abduct me from school while I’m surrounded by eighteen hundred people?”

“It depends on how desperate
he is,” Bacchus answered.  “He’ll be looking for vulnerabilities wherever he can.  All it takes is a slip up from one of us…”  Leaving the end of his sentence hanging in midair, Bacchus pulled to a stop in the rear parking lot.

“
We screwed up with Dougherty,” Caius said seriously, “We won’t do it again.  Not on our watch.”  Tousling my hair, he slipped from the jeep and loped off into the woods, his bronze body disappearing into the thick of trees.

“Icarus couldn’t really have expected you to keep Mike from
harassing me,” I said doubtfully.  Granted, our classrooms were clustered within the senior hall, it was still a large school, and a vast area to patrol while trying to make it to your next period on time.

Bacchus lifted one shoulder in dismissal. 
“It was a test of sorts.”

“One that was guaranteed to fail.”

“We
can’t
fail.  That was Icarus’s point.  Caius and I fuck around too much.”  Shifting into drive, he pulled to the front of the lot and parked off to the side, where he could watch discreetly from the jeep. “We can’t expect to protect you if we’re behaving like kids.”

Outside, our classmates filed
off the buses and into the school, laughing and chattering over the day ahead of them.  I envied them for their blindness of the unknown.  Their biggest worry was their trig assignment or counting down the days until Christmas vacation.

Contemplatively,
Bacchus turned toward the window.  His breath fogged the glass beside him in a crystalline haze.   “He’s mad about you, you know.”

“Icarus?  He’s too old for me.  My mom would have a coronary.”

“You’re immortal, Thale.  When Icarus is a hundred, you’ll be ninety.  It doesn’t sound so illogical then, does it?”

“It doesn’t matter.  It would be stupid to start a relationship when everything around us is so
effed up.  Someone will end up hurt.”

“
You can’t stop what’s not in your control.  He’s attracted to you.  And you’re certainly attracted to him.  I think your feelings are going to evolve whether you want them to or not.”

“Bacchus, I don’t mean to open a can of worms, but you don’t seem overly pleased with the notion, yet you’re sitting here encouraging me to
be with him.  Are you saying this because he’s your alpha?”

“You think he’s strong-arming me to stay away from
you?”