Magic Rises (28 page)

I was the badass Consort and he was the grim Pack’s executioner. Hugging him in the hallways would be entirely inappropriate.

“Thank you for your help,” I said.

“Anytime,” Mahon said.

Barabas spun toward the stairs. Lorelei circled the landing and kept going up the stairs, her dark green dress with a diaphanous skirt flaring as she walked.

Barabas inhaled. “Is that . . . ?”

“Now isn’t the time,” Mahon said.

Oh no, now was the perfect time. She was walking upstairs, and unless Curran waited for her in her room, he would be alone and available for a little chat.

“Where would Curran be now?” I asked.

“It’s lunch,” Barabas said. “In the great hall.”

Good. It was about time I talked to him.

* * *

By the time we reached the great hall, common sense had kicked in. Marching in there and punching Curran, as satisfying as it might be, wouldn’t accomplish much except make me look like a jealous idiot who couldn’t control herself. I wouldn’t give him and the other packs the satisfaction.

I halted at the door. “Why don’t the two of you go in. I’ll be right behind you.”

Mahon went on. Barabas lingered for a long moment.

“I just need a minute to myself.”

“Kate . . . I’m the last person to give love advice. I find calm, grounded guys, because I know I’m high-strung and I need someone to steady me, and then I get bored and act out until they leave me. I know I’m doing it, but I keep repeating the same mistake over and over, like a moron, because I keep hoping it will be different with this guy, because he is different. But it’s always the same, because I don’t change. People don’t suddenly change, Kate. You understand?” He leaned forward and looked into my face. “Just . . . take longer than a minute. So there are no regrets later.”

He went into the great hall.

People sat at the tables, eating, drinking, talking. Tension vibrated in me. I was a hair away from violence. I imagined walking in there and stabbing Curran with a fork. Barabas was right. I needed more than a minute. I needed to splash some water on my face.

Across from me a short hallway led to the side. If I took it, it should lead me to one of the two bathrooms. I stepped into the hallway. A door stood ajar on my right side, leading into a small room where a set of dark wooden stairs climbed up.

Maybe it was the way to the minstrel’s gallery.

I climbed the stairs. If there were any snipers up there, I wanted to meet them for a friendly conversation. If not, I could look at the dining hall unnoticed.

The stairs ended. I passed through a doorway in the stone wall and found myself in the minstrel’s gallery in the great hall. Score. Something went right today.

The great hall had no windows, the only illumination coming from the electric lights or, right now, with magic up, from the feylanterns shaped like faux torches. It could’ve been midmorning or midnight—the outside light made no difference. The gallery lay soaked in gloom, the dark wooden beams almost black. I walked the length of it. Two doors, one at the far wall and the other at a midway point, interrupted the stone wall. Aside from that, nothing. Empty.

I leaned down on the wooden rail. Below me the great hall stretched, brightly lit and loud with people. The windows in the castle hallways must’ve been opened to vent the air heated with human breath and still-warm food, and a draft flowed from below, bringing with it a hint of spices and stirring the long blue-and-silver banners on the wall to the left of me. From this point I was probably nearly invisible to those beneath me.

I hadn’t realized how high the gallery was. Leaping over the rail was out of the question. My bones would snap from the impact.

Curran strode through the door into the hall. He walked to the head table, where Barabas sat on the side next to Mahon, and asked Barabas something. Barabas spread his arms in response. Curran’s face snapped into a familiar unreadable mask. He sat back in his place in the middle.

A moment later Lorelei floated up. She wore tight jeans and an off-the-shoulder, nearly sheer blue peasant blouse. Her hair streamed over her shoulders. Her face looked flawless. How the hell did she have time to change and get here so fast?

Curran turned to her and said something. She sat next to him. Her smile was nothing short of radiant.

It felt like someone had dropped a brick into my stomach.

She asked him something. He reached for a plate of carved meat.

If he offered her food, I’d jump right off this gallery and kick him in the face with my broken legs.

Curran moved the dish toward her.

Don’t.

He set the platter down.

Lorelei smiled at him, speared a slice off the platter with her fork, and leaned in to tell him something, a little sly light in her eyes.

They were sitting too close. I stared at Curran, wishing I could see through his skull into his head.
Why are you doing this? Why?

“Perhaps because she is younger and fresher,” Hugh said behind me.

I hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud. I didn’t hear him walk up to me either. Shit. This situation needed to unscrew itself up really fast, because it was distracting me.

Hugh came to lean next to me, a hulking shadow. He wore jeans and a gray T-shirt. The thin fabric lay across his broad back, following the contours of his trapezius and latissimus dorsi muscles. I knew this build: a meld of strength and high endurance, flexible, mobile, but capable of crushing power. Hugh would be very difficult to kill.

He turned, watching Curran down below. “Perhaps he wants her because she is a shapeshifter and his people would accept her. She’ll birth him a litter of cubs and everyone will cheer. Perhaps because she would bring a political alliance. Perhaps because she won’t argue with him. Some men enjoy obedience.”

“Thank you for your analysis, Doctor. Measuring others by your own standard?”

He tilted his head, presenting me with a view of his square jaw. Punching it would be a bitch. I’d bruise my hand for sure. Voron had chosen well. Usually I didn’t have any issues with my body, but right now I wished for another six inches of height and an extra thirty pounds of muscle. It wouldn’t make us even, but it would tighten the gap.

“Interested in my standards?” Hugh asked.

Danger, icy lake ahead. “No.”

“If we’re talking a one-night stand, I’m looking for enthusiasm. Perhaps for someone fearless. Blind obedience is boring. I want to have a good time, I want her to have a good time, and I want to make a memory I’ll enjoy remembering.”

“Too much information.” Hugh’s one-night stands were the last thing on my need-to-know list.

“You asked. But you’re not his one-night stand, Kate. Or are you?”

I gave him my hard look.

He grinned, a wolfish sharp grin. “You know what I’m looking for in a partner? A challenge.”

“Good luck.”

He laughed quietly, a raspy sound. “Perhaps we’re overthinking it. Maybe your Beast Lord is leaning toward her because he needs a wife and her father isn’t planning to destroy everything he stands for.”

Ouch. “Is that what Roland wants to do?”

Hugh sighed and surveyed the people below. “Look at them. They think this gathering is about them, their petty territorial clashes, their problems, their lusts, wants, and needs. They gorge themselves, squabble, and flash their fangs, and all the while they have no idea that it is all about you.”

Thin ice. Proceed with extreme caution.

He turned toward me, blue eyes luminescent. “There are thousands of shapeshifters. Kill a hundred and there are always more. But there hasn’t been another one like you for five thousand years. I would slaughter everyone in that room below for a shot at a single conversation with you.”

The imaginary ice was cracking under my feet. He was taking this someplace very strange. “Laying it on kind of thick, don’t you think?”

“I’m only stating facts.” Hugh leaned back on the rail. “Spar with me. You know you want to.”

I leaned forward and pointed to my forehead. “Tell me if you see
IDIOT
written on there.”

“Scared?”

I shrugged. “Scared of what will happen after I ruin your face and Hibla starts a massacre.”

“You have my word I won’t let you anywhere near my face.”

“Let?”

Hugh grinned.

In another minute, I’d need a rag to mop up all of the smugness dripping off him. “Big talk for someone with a scar on his face.”

“If you win, I’ll tell you how I got it.”

I waved my hand at him. “That’s okay. I don’t want to know that badly.”

“What
do
you want to know?”

“Does it matter? So far you’ve ducked every question I asked.”

“I didn’t think I had a fighting style,” Hugh said. “If it comes within range, I can kill it, but I thought what I did was a hodgepodge of techniques that worked. It’s not something one ponders: what is my special brand of violence? And then I saw you. Admit it, you felt it.”

I did. I’d never before seen anyone who fought like me. We had been completely in sync, so perfectly that the memory of it was disturbing.

He looked at me. “I want to experience it again. Spar with me.”

“Sorry, but I’m done playing.”

“Kate, come on.”

“I mean it. No.”

Hugh chuckled. “Mean
and
a tease.”

Below us Curran stood up. Lorelei stood up, too. Now what? Curran walked across the hall and out through the door under the gallery. Lorelei followed him.

“Would you like to spy on the lovebirds?” Hugh asked.

“No.” I didn’t need any favors from him.

“Having the right intelligence is the key to winning a war.”

“I’m not at war.”

“Of course you are, Kate. You’re at war with yourself. A part of you knows that there is more to life than being the Consort. A part of you is wondering if he is betraying you. They are going to talk, whether you listen in or not, and hearing them won’t change what they have to say.” He nodded to the left. “I’m going. Feel free to join me.”

Something inside me snapped. I had to know. I didn’t trust the man I loved enough not to listen in. That said volumes about me and right then I didn’t care. “Fine.”

Hugh walked to the nearest door and held it open. I walked through it into a long curving hallway. I could see a balcony at the end. A light breeze, cold and spiced with the salty dampness of the sea, swirled around me. The sky was a brilliant blue, and against this happy, sunlit turquoise, the pale rail of the balcony seemed to almost glow.

A long rug stretched across the stone, swallowing our footsteps. Voices drifted up from below. I stopped just short of walking onto the balcony and propped myself against the wall.

Hugh leaned against the opposite wall, watching me.

“You don’t take good care of yourself,” Lorelei said.

And she was ready and willing to help him with that.

“You make so many sacrifices.”

He couldn’t possibly be buying this crock of bullshit. The man who manipulated seven different sets of alpha personalities on a daily basis couldn’t possibly be this stupid.

“It must be lonely sometimes.”

“It is,” Curran said.

He was lonely. We had been together almost 24/7 for the past two months, yet he was lonely. When in the bloody hell did he have a chance to be lonely, exactly?

“It gets to be too much sometimes for one person. I understand,” Lorelei continued. “After my mother left my father, I had to go with her, and I didn’t really have a choice. I miss my father. I miss being somebody. In Belgium, because of my uncle, my mother and I aren’t permitted to actually do anything in the pack. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be aware every minute that you are a guest and you must think over every word that comes out of your mouth. I would give anything for a place where I belong. Sometimes I wish I could sprout wings and just fly away. Just be gone to someplace better. Some place where I matter.”

She fell silent.

“I’m sorry it happened to you,” Curran said. “Sounds like you feel trapped and alone.”

“I do. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to heap my problems on you.”

“It’s alright.”

“No, it’s not.” Lorelei sighed. “Sometimes I just feel like I have nobody to talk to. At least no one who understands me. I’m sure you know how that feels. Your mate is human. There are some things that she simply can’t understand.”

I fought to keep from grinding my teeth.

“We are different,” Curran said.

Yeah, those differences didn’t bother you until now, jackass.

“I’m sorry she couldn’t be with you and share in the thrill of bringing down the prey after a long hunt. It is such a rush to hunt next to your mate. You are so selfless to give up that joy. I don’t know if I could do that.”

Oh, give me a break.

“We all must make sacrifices. Hunting with my mate is just one of the things I can’t do.”

The way he said it, with deep profound regret, stabbed me straight in the chest.

“Perhaps she could become a shapeshifter?”

“She is immune,” Curran said.

Lorelei inhaled sharply. “So you gave up half of your life for her? I’m so sorry. What if her children are born human?”

You bitch.

“Then I will deal with it.” He sounded cold like a glacier.

My chest hurt. The world gained a slight red tint. I concentrated on breathing. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

“I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s just that she’s so much more fragile than we are. Humans die of disease. They’re weaker and easily hurt. If her children are born human, they would inherit her weakness . . . You shouldn’t have to give up your . . . I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”

Exhale. Inhale.

“I appreciate your kindness. It’s about time for us to go back,” Curran said. “I will be missed.”

Exhale.

“Of course.”

A door thumped closed. Hugh shook his head. “I wasn’t sure before, but now I know—the man is an idiot.”

The pain sat in my chest, hot and solid. “Don’t say it.”

“He’s a man of limited vision, Kate. All he cares about is the immediate: she’s telling him that you can’t hunt with him, you don’t grow fur, and he isn’t defending you. Sweet gods, your children might be human. The horror. He hasn’t even considered what it means to have you on his side long-term. You handed him a priceless red diamond and he’s reaching for glass beads because they are bigger and flashier.”