FoM02 Trammel (3 page)

An accident on his part could wipe out the knowledge and work of generations. He leaned his forehead against the glass and closed his eyes. Maybe they would send him somewhere else, since they couldn’t keep him. He didn’t want to be kept or bartered or passed around, but there were rules even he couldn’t deny. It was his own fault he was alive.

“Don’t make me regret this decision as well, Lindsay,” Cyrus snapped. “It’s a good thing you have developed some backbone. I need Dane, which will leave you with time on your hands. Therefore, this one is yours. I would tell you to keep your hands to yourself, but you’ll do what you want, what with how you’ve been spoiled.
Noah
.”

This one is yours.
When Noah was twelve, this had been all he’d wanted, though in his family—

among his people—it was something done with ceremony and celebration. Here, in Cyrus’s domain, it had devolved to this.
This one is yours.
Noah made himself move, so he wouldn’t seem rude.

“Lindsay will show you to your room.” Cyrus pointed at the pale young man leaning on the doorframe. “The rest of us have larger matters to discuss.”

“Me?” Lindsay looked from Cyrus to Noah and back again. For a moment, Noah was sure he was going to refuse. “But I—” Something stopped him. He closed his mouth, shook his head and held a hand out to Noah. “Let’s see if we can find somewhere you’ll be comfortable.”

Noah looked at the hand—it was slim and soft and white. He couldn’t take it. It was impossibly familiar. The disconnect between his memory and reality nauseated him. He shouldered his duffel bag and headed for the door.

His manners and his family pride made him stop before he crossed the threshold. He turned and gave Cyrus a little bow, the kind his father would have expected.

“For a place in your home, my future is yours.” The words felt like they were being drawn out of him, from his guts and his spine. If you didn’t mean them, or if you didn’t have magic, he wondered, did they feel the same?

“I will keep your fate with mine, for the days you remain with my people,” Cyrus replied, his expression softening slightly.

Noah looked again at the man—barely more than a boy—to whom he’d been given. Lindsay. Lindsay appeared baffled by the exchange.

“Wherever you want me, I’ll stay.” Noah waited for him to lead on.

Dane listened to their footsteps fade before he let himself look at Cyrus. When he heard them reach the next floor, he turned on Cyrus with a hiss like a hot kettle.

“Are you
insane
?” Before he knew it, he was across the room, hands planted in the papers on Cyrus’s desk, his face inches from the old man’s.

“It’s been debated,” Cyrus said calmly. He tugged at the edge of a document trapped under Dane’s hand. “You’re impossible to please, you know. At least for an old man like myself. I thought you wanted to help me, not babysit.”

True. It drove Dane around the twist when he was sent off on one errand or another, leaving Cyrus vulnerable. Worse, the old mage had taken to going here and there alone, with no one but Vivian’s girl, Kristan, to look after him. That Cyrus wanted more of his time should have been a relief.

“You know the answer to that.” Dane pushed away from the desk, sending the papers floating like startled birds. He turned his back on Cyrus and went to look out the window where Noah had been sitting.

The air there was heavy with the smell of blood and burning and pain.

“While I don’t agree with Dane’s phrasing,” Vivian said quietly, “giving someone like Noah to Lindsay is...well, it’s a difficult task to take someone on under the best of circumstances.” Her high heels clicked on the floor as she went to gather the papers Dane had scattered.

“Abram Quinn assures me that the boy isn’t a danger to those around him.” Dane didn’t have to be looking to know the dismissive gesture of Cyrus’s hand. He could hear it cut the air and see it in his mind’s eye. “He carries an artifact from their family to ensure that he won’t get out of control. There is a method to what you call my madness. I’m weary of having to prove it again and again.”

“The kid is a Molotov cocktail,” Dane growled. He’d smelled it the minute he walked in the house, the barely stifled fire of a pyromancer. The artifact that kept Noah’s magic in check—Dane hated relying on artifacts and Lindsay would find it unbearable. Dane knew he was being overprotective. The thing wasn’t going to jump off Noah’s wrist and savage anyone. This was as good a time as any for him to let the habit go.

Dane took a slow breath and let the animal in him slink away to seethe. The human part of him rose to the surface and imposed logic on his churning anger.
You’re mostly angry that Cyrus admits to needing you
at all
, Dane’s rational mind pointed out.
One of these days, you’re going to have to stop getting pissed off
at everything that makes you feel something you don’t want to feel.

“Noah came late to his magic by a great loss,” Cyrus conceded. “It will make his path difficult. But we can use him.”

“And it didn’t occur to you to talk to me before putting a burden like that on Lindsay?” Dane had good reason to be offended.

“I hadn’t yet decided.” When Dane turned around, Cyrus was watching him closely. “If I had given him to you, you would have had to choose between them every moment of the day. Could you have done right by him?”

Dane couldn’t argue that point. Vivian had two already, but Dane had thought Cyrus would still give Noah to her as a first choice. Her apprentices were both well behaved by his reckoning, easy enough to manage. Kristan was canny and ambitious, with an enviable grasp on her magic. Ylli was shy and mostly harmless, all brown feathers and thin limbs. A minor feral, without even shapeshifting to complicate what he was.

“There’s no way I could have taken him.” Vivian stacked Cyrus’s papers on the desk in tidy rows.

“Putting him with a woman would have been too much to ask. Putting him in reach of Kristan would be insanity.”

“He hates women, so you gave him to Lindsay?” That almost made sense, but it seemed crude reasoning.

“He lost his wife.” Cyrus reached out for help and Dane took his hand, supporting him as he stood. “It seemed unnecessarily cruel to ask him to become attached to other women this soon.”

“Who’s to say he won’t become attached to Lindsay?” Dane had to work out whether or not that idea bothered him. It didn’t take until the next thought to decide that he didn’t mind at all. Lindsay could use all the affection he could take. Dane began to see the benefits of the arrangement, as long as Noah wasn’t completely off his rocker. Lindsay needed something of his own. It was time.

“Times have changed, Cyrus.” Vivian brought Cyrus’s cloak over and wrapped it around him. “I told you the young fall in love with anyone these days.” She fastened the cloak pin—a silver ring made to look like a moon with a bronze arrow threaded through it—with practiced motions. “The young and the foolish,”

she added, with a wink at Dane.

“The Quinns are an old family, with old ways.” Cyrus took Vivian’s arm once his cloak was done up.

“You have taught Lindsay well enough.” He looked up at Dane and there was a hint of approval on his lined, birdlike face. “But I need you more than he does now. Noah will teach him our ways and defend him from Moore. Lindsay knows what it is to have a power greater than most, and he knows what it is to be disowned. They will manage, until I have need of them.”

“I still don’t like it.” Dane knew—had known from the beginning—that he didn’t have a hope in hell of changing Cyrus’s mind. That wasn’t going to keep him from speaking out. Yes, it would be good for Lindsay to have something of his own, but did it have to be both damaged
and
volatile?

“I anticipated your displeasure. It’s good how some things never change.” Cyrus laughed quietly. “I need you to go collect some information for me. At least I won’t have to hear you sulking. Kristan has the map. Perhaps she can console you. I have work to do.” He patted Vivian’s hand on his arm and they started for the door. “I would tell you to behave yourself, but that only seems to make things worse.”

“Lindsay will be fine.” Vivian looked over her shoulder and gave Dane a warm smile. “It’s not as bad a choice as you think.”

“You can see the future now?” Cyrus chided her as she opened the door for him.

“Hardly.” Vivian kissed him on the cheek. “I wouldn’t want your job for the world.”

Dane was left to watch them go. Being human helped to keep his temper in check enough that he didn’t break anything in frustration. It wasn’t as though Cyrus had overstepped his bounds. Cyrus hadn’t taken Lindsay away from him, only given Lindsay something of his own.

Dane exhaled slowly. It would be good for Lindsay. That much, he knew to be true. It would make him feel more like part of the family, for one thing, and more like he was necessary. Dane knew how badly Lindsay needed to be more than an inconvenience. Every other danger and painful reminder Noah carried with him could only serve to make Lindsay stronger, even if Lindsay was angry about it after the fact.

When Dane put aside his ego and thought of Lindsay first, and only, the decision wasn’t as bad as it seemed, just as Vivian had suggested. Dane wasn’t going to admit that to Cyrus, though. Cyrus had all but given Lindsay the status of a clan-born mage, putting a Quinn under his care. A pyromancer, no less, and a strong one. Dane’s human mind turned that over and he decided he was pleased.

Dane was going to make sure Lindsay had everything necessary to succeed at this. And once Lindsay did... The idea of having a walking firebomb devoted to protecting Lindsay had a lot of appeal.

As long as it makes him happy
.
Happy and well.
If Lindsay was happy, there wasn’t much that could go wrong in Dane’s world.

Chapter Two

In that instant, Lindsay’s life was turned inside out. Dane disappeared with Kristan as quickly as Noah had arrived, and Lindsay wrestled with the sense that Cyrus had played a trick on him, whisking away the familiar and throwing him into the unknown. For four days, Lindsay did little but watch Noah brooding on the back porch, hoping for a clue as to where to start with this stranger he’d been given.

Lindsay didn’t need a case history to identify the most obvious traumatic event in Noah’s past. Much of the skin Lindsay could see was scarred from terrible burns. But the pain written in the curve of Noah’s spine and the hunch of his shoulders had been there a long time. Lindsay recognized that, on a gut level.

Shame.

Under the scars, Noah’s bones were that of a handsome man, and his eyes were deep blue. The skin that remained unmarked was bronze and smooth; he wasn’t much older than Lindsay. If he smiled at all, he might still have been attractive. Lindsay felt like a carrion bird, circling and watching and waiting for a chance to pick over what was left of him.

As near as Lindsay could tell, Noah didn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time, and those times were few and far between. His bed—the one time Lindsay had checked in before Noah had cleared away the evidence—was a nightmare-snarled knot of sheets stained by Noah’s healing burns. Lindsay could understand why he wouldn’t want to spend any more time there than necessary. What Noah did spend his time doing was drinking and smoking and staring off at the marsh like it held the answers to all his questions.

Every now and then, a cigarette would go up in flames in Noah’s fingers, and Noah would throw it aside, his movements jerky in a way that said he was barely in control of himself—if he had any control at all. Lindsay waited for something more, something that he could use as an excuse to step in, but no opening came.

Noah looked sick by the fifth day, and not in any human way. His skin was flushed, his eyes were bright like he was lit from within and, more and more, his body was wracked with tiny shivers he didn’t seem to notice. Lindsay noticed, though, and he’d had enough.

Stepping out onto the porch, he watched Noah for another minute before saying, “It’s time to go.”

Surprisingly, there was no argument. Noah tucked his flask away in a pocket of the leather jacket he always wore, and pushed himself to his feet. There weren’t any questions, either. Noah put his hands in his jeans pockets, barely masking a wince, and nodded toward the door as if to say Lindsay should lead on.

Lindsay knew where he wanted to go. It was a long walk, but he didn’t want to risk the bus system with Noah. Walking had hazards all its own; Atlantic Avenue was crowded with people looking to spend the money they’d won. Lindsay had worried he’d lose Noah in the thick of it, but Noah stayed one step behind him.

“You don’t seem surprised by any of this,” Lindsay said finally.

“Should I be?” Noah’s voice was thick and strained, scarred like the rest of him. Nothing around them seemed to catch his interest, not the lights, not the people, not the traffic.

“I was.” The magical world he now lived in had seemed completely unfamiliar at first. “This isn’t new to you, then? Cyrus isn’t exactly forthcoming with his information.”

Noah laughed at that, which made him cough. He took a drink from the flask to quiet the hacking, then shook his head.

“Not new, no. I never expected to be here, but none of this is surprising. It is what it is. Or it’s a shadow of what it should be. It’ll do. The days are late and things are falling apart.”

Cyrus probably thought it amusing to give Lindsay someone who spoke in the same sort of cryptic, poetic riddles that drove him mad coming from Cyrus and Ezqel. Perfect. It wasn’t as though Lindsay had expected to be rewarded for the events that had led to them fleeing New York and landing in Atlantic City—and it had felt like landing, despite Cyrus’s claim that he had come to this place to wait for someone, a young woman who would soon come into her magic—but this was starting to feel suspiciously like punishment.

“Throw me a bone, would you?” Lindsay muttered. “I’m trying not to completely fuck you up. Your magic is new. Is there anything else I need to know to keep from screwing up here?”

“You don’t need to worry about anything except making sure I don’t kill anyone. Not that it’s likely to happen.” He pulled his left hand from his pocket and held it out. The wound where his ring finger was missing was raw and ugly and new, barely held closed with half a dozen stitches. Stitches. Not magical healing.