Fury's Kiss (27 page)

“That’s impossible.”

“That’s what I always thought, but it can be done. And the old copper cookware—you know, the ones that had that lovely patina?”

“I guess,” I said, because I cooked about once a decade.

“Well, they’re bright and shiny now,” she said sourly. “At least they were the last time I was allowed into my own kitchen, which was about an hour ago, so God knows what’s been done in—”

“Who are they?’”

“You said it,” she grimaced. “Vampires.”

“But whose?”

“Whose do you think?”

Damn.

“I’ll talk to Ray,” I told her. “I know his people probably need somewhere to crash until I get this mess sorted out, but I never told him they could—”

“They aren’t Ray’s,” Claire said, looking at me funny.

“Whose then?”

She put her hands, both of which were back to normal, I was relieved to see, on her hips. “Did you or did you not tell Louis-Cesare that I needed domestic help?”

“I…Not in so many words, no.”

“Well, he interpreted it that way. They showed up a couple hours ago and took over. So far, they’ve done the laundry, mowed the yard, cleaned the house to within an inch of its life—despite my telling them that the spell would just return everything to the way it was, anyway—shampooed the cats and replanted my marigolds!”

“Your marigolds?”

“They said the lines weren’t straight enough!” She looked pissed. No one gets points for telling a Virgo that she doesn’t know how to keep house.

“Why didn’t you just dismiss them?” I asked.

“Oh, now why didn’t I think of that? Because they wouldn’t let me! That vampire sent them to you and you’re the only one who can tell them to go. And that’s exactly what you’re going to do! And then you’re going to march yourself back up here and get a bath—”

“I’m doing nothing of the—”

“—and then you’re going to get dressed and unpack that ridiculous bag and come downstairs again and
we’re all going to have a nice meal, okay?
”

“No, it’s not okay. It’s not safe—”

“Bullshit.”
Claire swearing was odd enough to shut me up. “We lived together for almost two years, didn’t we?”

“Yes, but—”

“And how many times did something like last night happen?”

“Once is enough! And it also happened a month ago—”

“And what
else
happened a month ago?”

“What are you—”

“Damn it, Dory!” Her eyes had focused on my bag, which was still on the floor, and she leaned over and jerked something out. “You’ve got it on you!”

“Of course I’ve got it on me,” I said, wrestling her for my little blue bottle. “What did you expect after—”

“I expected you to take a moment and wonder if this wasn’t the problem!” Claire said, and threw it viciously at the wall.

It didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces, but only because the glass was so thick. It did, however, stick halfway into the wall and stay there. I turned my eyes from the new hallway decoration and back to Claire, who was practically incandescent.

“My abilities draw out your power, release it, destroy it!” she told me angrily. “That’s what a null
is
. But the wine isn’t a null.”

“Well, it’s doing something.”

“Yes! Yes, it is! It stops your fits, but it
doesn’t remove the cause
. It’s like closing the valve on a steam engine. It might keep the steam from escaping, but it doesn’t do anything about the
pressure
.”

I’d been about to say something, but at that I stopped. And just stared at her for a moment. “That’s what you think is happening?”

“I don’t know,” she said, exasperated. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Nobody knows what that stuff does when ingested by a dhampir. All we know is that it brings out latent magical abilities in humans. But you’re not human.”

“But you believe it’s been putting a kind of stopper in my fits.”

She shoved frazzled red hair off her forehead. “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? You drink it, and it stops your fits, because it shuts off any escape valve for that part of you. But it doesn’t do anything to let off the pressure. So it just keeps building and building. And sooner or later—”

“Pow.”

“Very much pow.”

I nodded. “Thank you,” I told her, and meant it. I pried the bottle out of the wall.

“What are you doing?”

“Even if you’re right, it can still be useful in emergencies,” I told her, shoving it back in my pack.

“But…where are you going?” she demanded, as I started for the stairs again.

“The same place I was going before. Away.”

“But I’ve just explained—”

“That the wine doesn’t work, not over the long haul.”

“Dory!” She grabbed for my arm again, but this time I was ready, and spun out of her reach. “Damn it, get back here!”

“I
can’t
.”

She reached for me again, but I grabbed her this time, pushing her into the wall face-first. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, but she didn’t look too happy. Of course, neither was I.

“It’s getting worse, all right,” I told her harshly. “Let’s face it. You can’t control me anymore. And the wine is a stopgap at best. Meaning I’m not—”

I broke off because my back suddenly hit the wall. On the other side of the corridor. Which was a surprise, since I didn’t recall moving.

“You know what’s not safe?” Claire demanded furiously, stalking toward me. “
I
am not safe. You’re not the only one dealing with pressure right now. I’m under it all day, every day, with no end in sight! And no matter what I try to tell anyone, they never—”

She cut off abruptly, and looked away. “What is it?” I demanded.

She didn’t say anything.

“Claire—”

“No,” she said, looking back at me, her eyes shuttered. “You have enough problems of your own. I can’t solve them for you, but I can keep from piling any more on.”

“But I can help—”

Red hair tossed. “How? I thought you were leaving.”

I just looked at her, because Claire never stayed mad
for long. And this proved to be no exception. She deflated suddenly, looking miserable. “You won’t like it.”

“If it has you looking like that, I already don’t like it.”

“No, I mean—” She stopped, and licked her lips. And then she stiffened her shoulders and met my eyes squarely. And dropped the bombshell.

“Æsubrand hasn’t been seen in almost a week.”

I blinked. Okay, if anything could distract me from my own private hell, that was it. Æsubrand was a little bit of hell all on his own.

And, as irony would have it, he was also soon to be Claire’s cousin by marriage. It seemed that the fey family she was about to marry into was almost as messed up as mine. In fact, it might just take the prize, since none of my relatives were actively trying to kill each other.

Well, not at the moment.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t true for Claire. Her father-in-law was Caedmon, king of the Blarestri, one of the three main divisions of the Light Fey. He had a sister, Efridís, who had been married off to the Svarestri king, the leader of one of the other great houses, to seal a treaty or something. I wasn’t real clear on the details. What I was clear on was that she’d had a son, who had turned out to be a homicidal son of a bitch.

He was also ambitious as hell, to the point that merely inheriting one throne wasn’t good enough for him. Oh, no. Æsubrand wanted two. Specifically, he wanted Caedmon’s, which he’d had a claim to—right up until Heidar, aka Caedmon Jr., met a certain redheaded half dragon. And they had a son.

Heidar hadn’t been a problem for Æsubrand, because Blarestri law required its kings to have a majority of fey blood and his mother had been plain old human. But Claire, who was more than fifty percent fey, had tipped their son straight into the line of succession. And the line of fire.

Aiden’s existence had seriously messed up his cousin’s fey-unifying, dynasty-building, Æsubrand-glorifying plans, and he hadn’t taken it well. As in, he’d tried to kill Claire while she was still pregnant, and when that didn’t
work, he’d gone after baby Aiden. But—lucky me—I’d managed to get in his way not once, but twice. Not that I’d been the only reason he failed, or even the main one, but for some reason, he seemed to blame me.

One of these days, I was going to have to work on my people skills.

“You think he’s here?” I asked, because that was just all we needed.

“Caedmon doesn’t know,” Claire said distractedly, running a hand through already messy curls. “But he didn’t seem…He said he’d be more inclined to think that Æsubrand was back here if it didn’t look like he was.”

I tried to parse that, and failed utterly. “Come again?”

“You know his mother’s ability with glamourie?”

I nodded. Most fey could change their appearance to some degree, even without the potions they sometimes sold to us. But Efridís was said to be especially gifted, to the point of even being able to fool her fellow fey. She’d used her skills to impersonate her darling boy, helping him break out of the fey version of jail, last time I’d heard.

And then I finally realized what Claire was saying. “You think she’d be covering for him.”

“
Caedmon
thinks so,” she said, frowning. “He said the Svarestri know we spy on them, just like they do on us. And that if Æsubrand
was
here, his mother would be doing everything in her power to make it look like he was still at court. He’d be seen riding, hunting, hawking—anything to make him highly visible. But he isn’t.”

“Which means what?”

“That’s just it—I don’t know! Caedmon thinks Æsubrand probably
is
away from court, just not here. So he doesn’t need anyone to cover for him. He said he could be patrolling the border, or leading war games, or on a freaking trade mission—” She threw up her hands in disgust.

“But you’re assuming the worst.”

“Do I have a choice?” she asked wildly. “After everything?”

No. She really didn’t. Aiden’s talisman protected him,
but only to a degree. It meant that someone might not be able to just walk up and kill him, as they’d tried once before. But it wouldn’t do a damned thing to stop a kidnapping. And if Æsubrand ever got Aiden into his elegant hands, I didn’t think it would be long before he’d find a way to dispose of the problem—permanently.

It was, I suspected, why Claire was still here instead of back in Faerie. She’d recovered the talisman two weeks ago but had shown no signs of leaving. Maybe because Æsubrand didn’t know Earth all that well, which put him at a disadvantage here.

Not that he hadn’t managed to compensate before, at least somewhat, but Faerie had proven no safer. Some of Caedmon’s own courtiers seemed to think that a full Light Fey king sounded better than a part-human, part–Dark Fey mutt. It was probably what had Claire looking like she was about to explode.

“There must be some way to verify—” I began.

“Heidar’s trying.” Her hands twisted in her apron, and for all her power, she was suddenly just another anxious mother, desperate to ensure her child’s safety. “That’s why he went back. He’s doing a reconnaissance into the Svarestri lands—”

“What?”

She nodded, frantically. “I begged him not to, but he said he used to do it for fun as a boy. That he knew some old trails, had some contacts. That he might be able to alleviate my fears…”

And instead he’d doubled them. Now Claire was left worrying about her son
and
her fiancé. No wonder she’d been going out of her mind.

And I really wasn’t helping, was I?

“What can I do?” I asked simply.

“You can let me return the favor you did me,” she said severely. “When I came here in the middle of the night with a baby on my hip and half of Faerie after me! The smart thing would have been to throw me out—”

“It’s your house.”

“—and leave me to handle my own problems, but you
didn’t. You refused to let me run off and possibly get myself and my child killed. You did what friends do when other friends are acting stupid and panicked and you
told me so
. Like I’m telling you.”

“That was a completely different situation, and you know it. Your enemies were outside—”

“You’re not an enemy, Dory!”

“I’m not an enemy
now
.”

Claire didn’t like that. “Last night, the only person in danger was you! Louis-Cesare—”

“Isn’t here all the time.” And might not be again. “Your eyes,” he’d said, looking a little freaked-out. And yeah, I guessed so. I’d only glimpsed myself in full-on dhampir mode once before, in that fight a month ago, and it hadn’t been pretty. Hadn’t, in fact, looked particularly human—snarling face, gleaming fangs, and glowing, demonic eyes…

Shit.

“He doesn’t need to be!” Claire said forcefully. “I was going to say that if he hadn’t been able to take care of it,
we
have a garden full of fey
. And the elite of the royal guard at that!”

“Who might not have been enough.”

“Oh, please!” She looked me up and down critically, and didn’t seem impressed. “If they can’t handle one lone dhampir, I’ll kick their asses. And then I will.”

“You will what?”

“Handle you.”

“
You’ll
handle me.”

“You think I can’t?” she asked, her chin lifting.

“I think you
won’t
.”

“Then you don’t know me that well.”

I rolled my eyes. “I know you plenty. You’re a
vegan
. Cutting up meat for the fey’s meals almost makes you sick. You have all those marigolds because you don’t even like hurting bugs!”

“Faerie changes a person.”

“Not that much. And my other half is a ruthless—”

“So am I. I’ve had to learn to be. And if it will make
you feel any better, if you go crazy, and for some unfathomable reason decide to attack Aiden or Stinky—and for the love of
God
give that child a better name—”

“I told you, Duergars have to earn—”

“—then I’ll kill you myself.”

I stopped. Because Claire had sounded like she meant it. She looked like it, too, with those usually soft green eyes hard and steady on mine.