When Alex parked in the back lot between our houses, he left me with a wave that felt more like a kiss-off than a kiss- you-later.
“Give him time.” Rene patted my shoulder before climbing into his pickup. “Shifters and weres, most of us like things straight and simple. And nothing personal, babe, but you ain’t either one.”
“You don’t seem to have a problem with it.” Rene liked my chaos. He didn’t even seem upset that it had almost gotten him killed today.
“Big difference between me and Alex.” He grinned at me out his truck window. “You aren’t my woman. Later, babe.”
Great. Relationship advice from a merman who bought questionable sexual-potency tonics. Life had come to this.
The pungent, nutty smell of Thai food hit me as soon as I opened my back door. I looked at the array of takeout boxes on the kitchen table and followed the sound of a male voice into my front parlor. Rand sat on the floor, fondling my cat and talking to him in that weird, guttural language. The wretch (feline variety) gave me a cross-eyed, baleful look before yowling once and running away.
“You want a cat? He’s yours. I inherited him and he’s never liked me.” I considered myself a dog person, Alex notwithstanding, and thought the fact that I ended up with a surly feline proved God had a sense of humor.
I threw my phone and keys on the kitchen counter, thankful I’d had them in my pocket instead of in my backpack. It would take me hours to re create all the base charms and potions I had in that pack. I kept the staff in my hand. With any luck, I could threaten Rand without him being able to tell it was broken.
“Tell me how you got in here, and then go home. I can’t deal with you right now.”
He looked up and froze when he saw the staff in my hand. “I picked up dinner—had to guess at what you might like.” He frowned. “What happened to the staff?”
Of course the freaking elf would have perfect vision. “None of your business. How did you get in here?”
Rand followed me into the kitchen and leaned against the doorway as I dumped cat food into Sebastian’s bowl and refilled his water dish. “Sebastian, you unfaithful ingrate—come here!” I yelled loud enough that Rand winced. “Dinner!”
“I got chicken pad thai, spring rolls, red curry. You want extra nuts?”
Good grief. The elf was dense as week-old bread pudding.
“Rand.” I held up the Meow Mix–coated spoon. “I’d rather eat this than sit down with you. It has been a bad day. I don’t want to talk about weird elven politics. I don’t want to talk about the Axeman. I don’t want to talk about bondage. Go home.”
“Do you want beer or soda?”
I rinsed off the spoon and stuck it in the dishwasher, listening to my stomach rumble. And I did need to find out how he’d gotten past my wards. Still, it set a terrible pre cedent.
“Get out of my house.” I glanced at the kitchen table. “Leave the food. I’ll pay you for it later.”
He got both beer and soda out of my fridge, and I walked to stand beside him. With a hard poke, I stuck the staff against his arm. “It might be cracked but it’s still going to hurt like hell when I burn you.”
He looked down at me, but his face lacked the fear I wanted to see. “Do it.”
Damn it, he was calling me out. I wouldn’t really shoot at him unless it was in self-defense, and he knew it.
“Fine.” I jerked a chair away from the table and sat down. “Soda.”
He slid a diet soda in front of me and took the other chair, looking from my ash-smudged cheeks to the tear in my jeans just above the ankle. I’ve had doctor’s exams less thorough than Rand’s visual inspection. If I had tires, he’d be kicking them.
He nodded. “You’re okay, then.”
“Except for the staff. And how did you get in my house?” I’d keep asking as long as he kept not answering.
“I jimmied your back lock; you need a stronger one. Your security wards don’t work on me now. How did the staff get broken?”
Great. The person I most wanted to keep out of my house, other than the Axeman, and he knew how to pick locks.
“Something heavy fell on it.” I held up the crooked, cracked piece of wood that glowed only faintly now. I didn’t add that the heavy thing was me. “Think it would work with duct tape or wood glue holding it together?”
“Let me see it.”
I hesitated.
“It won’t work for me—only for its master.” He held his hand out, and I reluctantly let him have it. Rand examined the cracked wood. “The core is damaged so glue or tape wouldn’t work. Can you fire it at all?”
I poured my soda in a glass, trying to decide whether it would be safer to let Rand know my power boost from the staff was diminished, or to let him think nothing had changed. It all came down to whether or not I trusted him to be loyal to me rather than the Synod.
This would be his first test—and if he failed it, his last. “I can use it at maybe a quarter of its normal strength, and only at short range.”
Rand held the staff up to the light and studied it more closely. “Since it’s the staff of the fire elves, I should be able to repair it, with your permission as its master. I’ll ask my mother . . . No, on second thought, better not mention it to her.” He thought a few seconds. “I’ll slip into Elf heim tomorrow and pick up what I need.”
“You don’t trust your mother?” I didn’t trust his mother. I didn’t even trust him. But
he
should trust her.
“Her, yes, but no one else.” He handed the broken staff back to me. “I’ll get what we need and we’ll try to fix it tomorrow night.”
Uh-huh. I’d believe that when I had a repaired staff in my hand, shooting ropes of fire at something—maybe him.
I sighed, hunger and anger and exhaustion fighting for dominance in my heart. I didn’t have the energy to fight with him anymore, and if he really could repair the staff, it wouldn’t kill me to eat dinner with him. “Go ahead and start eating. I need to wash up.”
I dragged myself to the guest bathroom and scrubbed the smudges off my face. I thought about going upstairs and changing into clean clothes, but what the hell. It wasn’t like I needed to impress the elf. I did stop to examine my motivations, to make sure I wasn’t, even in some deep, prehistoric recess of my mind, spending time with Rand to get back at Alex for distancing himself from me.
But I wasn’t. Alex’s issues with me— with us—had nothing to do with the elf. He was just a symptom of a bigger problem we had to work through.
When I got back to the kitchen, I stopped and watched Rand for a moment, his back to me as he rifled around for silverware. He usually moved with a fluid, long-limbed grace— not that I noticed such things—but his actions tonight seemed stiff and minimized.
An overwhelming need to touch him set my fingers twitching. Not in a sensual way, but because I knew something wasn’t right. It was that bonding crap.
Mentally cursing Rand and his entire troublesome species, I walked up behind him and tugged the hem of his sweater up to his shoulder blades, hissing in a breath as he stilled. Deep marks scoured his back, fresh cuts in a regular grid, a couple still seeping blood. He’d been whipped, and badly.
He’d said the Synod would punish him for defying them, but I couldn’t take any pleasure in his pain. Not this. “Take off your sweater and sit down.”
I didn’t wait for an answer, just headed upstairs to my library and pulled out aloe, hawthorn, ground hibiscus—all magic-infused—and mixed them in a base of holy water. I’d used my healing potion on wizards and mers, but had no idea if it would heal an elf. All my premade potions had gone up in a fiery explosion this afternoon.
After carrying the potion back downstairs, I stopped at the kitchen door, speechless. Rand had taken off the sweater. Purple and turquoise bruises bloomed across his abdomen, and a burn mark in the shape of lightning bolt had turned the skin over his right pec a bright red.
The brutality of it shocked me. No wonder he wasn’t moving well. “What in God’s name have they done to you?”
He looked down at the wreckage. “It’s our way. When the Synod feels it has been wronged, each clan exacts its punishment. Our mental magic doesn’t work reliably on each other, so it’s usually physical.”
“This is because you bonded with me?” He might be taking it like a good elven soldier, but I was outraged. “It’s barbaric.”
He shrugged, wincing as his shoulders rose and fell. “They don’t know about the bonding yet, except my mother. This is for taking you out of Elf heim before they were finished with the regression. I knew it was coming and decided to get it over with this morning. It’s our way,” he repeated. As if that explained everything.
If they’d done this because he disrupted their regression, what would they do when they found out about the bonding? I set the jar of healing essence on the table. “Sit down. Let me see what I can do.”
He pulled out a kitchen chair, straddled it, and sat with his back to me. “I’m not sure what you can do, but I can’t reach it to treat it and my mother isn’t allowed to help me.”
That just pissed me off even more. I hated freaking elves. “Who did this? It looks like you’ve been whipped.”
“Mace. It’s his favorite punishment—I think he gets off on the sound of the cane whistling in the air before it hits skin.” His voice held more than a trace of fury. This kind of punishment might be “their way,” but he wasn’t as passive about it as he’d first sounded.
I pulled the band out of my own ponytail and snapped it around his thick blond hair to get it out of my way. Dipping my fingers in the tincture, I willed a bit more magic into it and began to ease it across the stripes of raw skin. Rand sat still except for a couple of flinches. I’d have been crying like a girl and cursing Mace Banyan with every breath.
“He’s done this to others?”
“He usually doesn’t take it this far, but he wanted to make sure he left scars.” Rand’s voice took on a bitter edge.
I smiled as I watched the cuts begin to close within seconds of the tincture being applied. My wizard’s healing magic worked perfectly on elves. “Then next time you see him, make sure you aren’t wearing a shirt. Because your lack of scars is gonna piss him off.”
“Really?” Rand tried to look over his shoulder.
I fetched a hand mirror from the guest bathroom and held it at an angle so he could see his unmarked back. “It’s going to be red and sore for a few hours, but it won’t scar. Turn around and let me see what else they’ve done to you.”
He stood up, turned, and sat in the chair facing me. I couldn’t help the fleeting thought that at least they hadn’t touched his beautiful face, and would bet if Mace Banyan thought he could get away with marring Rand in that way, he would have. He still had a bruised cheek and a black eye, thanks to Alex, but he’d deserved those.
I focused on the burn first. “It looks like you’ve been branded. But your clan is the fire elves. Your mother did this?”
“Yeah. Don’t heal that one. I want the scar. It’s the mark of our clan chief, and my mother pissed Mace off royally by giving it to me as my so-called punishment. We were going to do it soon anyway.”
“You said earlier that your mother was dying. Do you mind if I ask what’s wrong with her? Is she sick?”
“Yes.” Rand leaned back in the chair. “My father was Synod, but he was killed during a power-grab after Hurricane Katrina, when things were in such flux in the Beyond— and here too, of course. She ascended to his seat, but she’s lost the will to continue. She wants to follow him into our Place of Ancestors.”
I wasn’t sure what the proper elf etiquette would be for such a thing, so I kept my mouth shut. A potted aloe plant sat in my kitchen window, a testament to my proclivity to burn myself when I made a rare attempt at cooking. I broke off a piece and squeezed the clear, thick juice over the burn. “This will at least take some of the pain while it heals.”
Next stop, his stomach. Bruise city. “There’s nothing I can do to help that—who did it?”
“Betony—earth clan. He likes to spar. Of course, it’s better when you can fight back. The offender is restrained when it’s a punishment.”
Better and better. “I thought elves were supposed to be refined and gentle and nature-loving and all that.” I’d obviously read too much Tolkien. Something else occurred to me. “Wait, that’s only three. You left out Lily—what did she do?”
I hoped it wasn’t too gross and didn’t involve parts of Rand I didn’t want to see but would feel an obligation to heal.
He laughed softly. “Oh yes, Lily. Hers was best of all. She had her guards throw me in the water elves’ ceremonial lake and watched while I kept myself afloat as long as I could— which wasn’t long with my hands tied behind my back. Then she watched me drown. At some point—probably the last-possible second—she resuscitated me. She did it twice.” His eyes hardened into blue granite. “She crossed a line.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, either. All of them had crossed a line, including Rand. “Did you know it was going to be this bad?”
He stood up, moving the chair back to the table. “Yes, and I’d do it again, except maybe for the drowning part. Let’s eat.”
I
spent Saturday morning at home with my security wards firmly in place and Rand under orders to never again enter my house without permission. Like that would work.
First, I replicated the basic charms and potions I’d lost in my backpack. Camouflage. Healing. Replenishing. Translation (because Jean Lafitte spoke four languages fluently—only one of which I fully understood—and sometimes I wanted to know what he was up to). Plus a few that weren’t specifically outlawed but were considered a tad dark by the Elders: sleep charms, freezing charms, and one of my favorites, a confusion charm.
Next, I did more research on necromancers. There were geographic limitations—the necromancer could be no more than a mile from the person he was controlling. Which didn’t prove the necromancer had been in the dark sedan at Six Flags, but supported it.
My transportation problem wasn’t as easily taken care of. I couldn’t exactly call the insurance company and tell them I accidentally blew up my Pathfinder with a shot from an elven staff. I hadn’t reported it to the cops. Adrian was due back in town today, so maybe he could get me one through the Elders. They should give me a car to compensate for extreme hazard duty.