Lost (26 page)

I'd missed that
surge of emotion, or more accurately I'd sublimated it into pursuing
Jessica. Now that it was gone I didn't seem to have much left inside
of me with which to grieve. All the guilt in the world wasn't enough
to fill back up the internal reservoirs that had been emptied over
the last few months.

Celeste tried
to talk to me when I arrived back at our quarters, but I just stepped
around her and went into my room. I thought for a moment that she was
going to come into my room and confront me, but she didn't. I fell
asleep as soon as I climbed into bed.

I woke to more
noise than usual the next morning and for a few seconds I worried
that I was going to have to go back into the ring again. It was the
sound of Celeste singing to herself that convinced me Set wasn't out
there waiting for me. The entire time that we'd been at the enclave I
hadn't seen her relax at all around any of the lamias.

The knowledge
that I didn't have another fight waiting for me gave me the strength
to roll out of bed and stumble into the bathroom. Celeste said
something as I dropped the curtain, but I couldn't make it out.

As the warm
water from the gravity-fed shower ran down my body I realized that I
couldn't quite remember my dreams from the night before. I thought
that they had involved Jessica, or maybe Jess, but I wasn't sure.
Everything was a distorted blur, like I was looking back at the
dreams through dirty, bubbly glass.

It was hardly a
surprise that I would dream about Jess after everything that had just
happened, but I was surprised at just how calm I was about everything
now that I had a full night's sleep behind me. There was still a
sense of loss there inside of me and I still felt a little guilty
that I wasn't sadder, but there was enough distance between me and
all of those negative feelings that I felt like I could function
again.

Once I was dry,
I pulled on my last set of clean clothes and made a mental note that
I needed to hand-wash the rest of my clothes again. I steeled myself
with a deep breath and then walked out of the bathroom ready to face
the music. Only Celeste wasn't mad.

"What did
you tell Set to get him to bring all of these clothes over?"

It took me a
couple of seconds to understand what she was talking about. That was
mostly because I had to tear my eyes away from her in order to take
in the rest of the room. She was gorgeous. In fairness she was always
gorgeous, but right then she was even more beautiful than normal.

The jeans,
t-shirt and black tube dress that she'd been cycling through had been
discarded for a white sun dress that looked like it was made out of
layers of Egyptian cotton, and her hair was pulled back into a
ponytail that caressed her neck and shoulders with every movement of
her body.

She pointed at
the couch and I finally turned and looked at the mammoth pile of
clothes that had taken over the couch and both easy chairs. Shorts,
jeans, skirts, dresses, every article of clothing I could think of
was there and while most of it was white or black, there was a
scattering of other colors mixed in, enough that I figured Celeste
could probably go for at least a couple months without having to wear
the same outfit twice.

"Set
brought that over?"

"Yes, he
and a small army of workers. I'm amazed that you were able to sleep
through all of the noise. He said he'd be back later today with a
load of clothes for you. Seriously, did you sell your soul or
something to get your hands on all of this?"

I'd asked Set
for some clothes for Celeste, but we hadn't actually stipulated how
much 'some' was. I'd been expecting him to stop by with a couple of
pairs of jeans and three or four t-shirts. This was way more than
anything I would have considered necessary to balance out the fact
that I was going to leave my phone powered down whenever I wasn't
using it.

I was so
shell-shocked that I said the first thing that came to mind. "I
told him that you've been difficult and that giving you some clothes
would make you easier to live with."

Celeste looked
at me in amazement for a couple of seconds. I half expected her good
humor to evaporate, but instead she burst out into laughter.

"I guess I
deserved that."

I shrugged.
"Not really. I just needed a reason to not have my phone on all
the time without offending the requirements of his honor. He was
obviously worried that it was going to lead one of the Consumed—or
the Consumed—to the enclave, but once I asked for it he was set
on me having it on all of the time.

"You
disappearing into your room gave me an idea so I told him that I'd
only wanted to call home because I felt so isolated here. He agreed
to get some clothes so that you'd be less unhappy."

"The idea
being that if I was less…unhappy, then you'd have a friend
here or at least not be quite so miserable?"

I was suddenly
uncomfortable. I'd had to tell Set the truth—mostly—about
my situation, which meant that I was now telling Celeste more than I
really wanted to.

"Yeah, I
guess. The important thing being that I managed to convince him to
not be offended if I kept my phone off most of the time."

"Well,
thanks for thinking of me in your moment of need. I don't mind taking
the fall if it means I can finally change into something else. I'm
surprised though that you were able to convince him to alter the
original terms. He seems to be a real stickler about his honor."

"I'm not
sure that I would have managed it if not for the fact that he's super
worried about the Consumed. There is so much about them that I still
don't know. Have you noticed that our rooms are getting smaller?"

She looked at
me like she thought I was pulling her leg for a few seconds before
shaking her head. "I hadn't noticed. Are you sure about that?"

"Yeah, I
put my bag exactly one cubit from the wall a few days ago and the
wall is closer than that now. Set mentioned it the other day when he
told me about the Consumed. It sounds like they can only hide the
enclave as long as it stays under a certain size, but now that we are
here something about our presence makes it harder to hide."

"So they
are shrinking it down to stay hidden."

I nodded. "It
seems that way, but it isn't just a one-time thing, the enclave seems
to be shrinking on a consistent basis."

"That is
pretty interesting in a so-terrifying-I'd-rather-not-think-about-it
way. These Consumed must be really dangerous if the lamias are hiding
from it. They are pretty scary all by themselves."

"Yeah,
you're not wrong. Still, setting aside the fact that we are in mortal
danger, I wish I could stay here for years. I don't know how you
managed to keep their existence a secret for so long. I wouldn't have
been able to stay away. You've got an incredible amount of willpower
to have never come looking for them until now."

Celeste
actually started to fidget. After several seconds she sighed. "This
isn't the first time that I've had a brush with the lamia. I actually
went out into the swamp looking for them right after Ash left home."

"I don't
understand. I thought that Ash said they were your trump card, the
thing that you were saving until you didn't have any other choice but
to use them."

"Yeah,
that sounds like Ash. He was always pushing for me to be more
aggressive, for me to lead some kind of glorious charge against Onyx.
Back then Nicolas hadn't arrived yet, but it still would have been
suicide to try and stand up to Onyx. I told Ash no, told him that I
wasn't going to use the lamias until we'd exhausted every other
option.

"He didn't
like that answer so he faked his own death and disappeared, leaving
me wondering whether he was really dead for an entire decade, and he
never even looked back."

"So you
went looking for the lamia."

"Yeah, I
went looking for the lamia. I thought it was my fault that
Ashley—that Ash—had died. I thought that he'd given up
hope of things ever getting better because I told him that I wouldn't
go to the lamia queen and ask her for an army of lamia to come out of
the swamp and kill Onyx and his men. It seemed like going to the
lamia was the only way to honor Ash's memory."

"But you
couldn't go to the lamia without a champion…"

"Yeah,
back in the day Ash wanted to be my champion. Ash might be able to
take on a lamia if they let him use his weapons and gave him plenty
of room, but the old Ash—Ashley—wouldn't have lasted
three seconds against someone like Set."

"So what
did you do?"

"I had a
guy, Bennet was his name. He was on my payroll, a dispossessed my
people found and offered a ridiculous amount of money to join the
pack and pretend to be working for Onyx. He was pretty good in a
fight so I thought we had a chance of getting in to see the queen."

Everything
about her from her posture to her tone of voice told me that the
story didn't have a happy ending.

"So what
happened?"

"Ash hated
Bennet. Onyx figured that Ash was the weak link in the family. He was
just a wolf, and a weak one at that, so Onyx ordered his guys to
rough Ash up every chance they got. I tried to protect him, but I
couldn't be there all of the time and Ash made things harder than
they needed to be."

"He
resented the fact that he had to rely on you for protection."

"Yeah, you
could say that. He used to run off by himself, but every so often
they would catch him and bring him back to the house half dead. That
last time Bennet was with one of Onyx's other guys when they found
Ash. Bennet kicked his ribs in—he nearly killed him. The other
times had been bad, but it wasn't anything like what Bennet did to
him."

"So Ash
faked his own death."

"Yeah, but
he didn't just fake his death, he used Bennet as his patsy. I don't
know what he was thinking. Maybe he just wanted to get back at me for
hiring Bennet, for bringing one more person into the pack to beat up
on him."

Celeste was
silent for several heartbeats while she tried to regain control of
herself. "Bennet and I had been dating—very quietly—for
a few months before that. I think out of everything, that was the one
thing that Ash couldn't forgive. He thought I was dating the enemy,
but it wasn't like that. Initially I thought it would be one more
thing to tie Bennet to me, but as time went on I started to feel
things for him.

"It…well,
it was nice to have someone else to back me up. With Bennet, I didn't
have to always be
on
. Having him around meant that if things
went south I'd have at least one other person around who I could
count on to help me fight my way out of New Orleans. It wouldn't have
mattered against Onyx, but it would have made all of the difference
against his guys if Onyx wasn't around."

Celeste put the
palms of her hands against her forehead and closed her eyes. "Ash
and I had a deal. With every generation our family has fallen a
little further from power so we decided that there weren't going to
be any more kids. I stuck to our deal, but Ash didn't believe me. He
said such horrible things."

She opened her
eyes and stood so that she could start pacing. "Whatever his
reasons, Ash screwed things up. Bennet didn't have any proof that Ash
wasn't dead, but we didn't have a body and Ash had been acting weird
all day."

"He went
to Onyx with his suspicions."

Celeste shook
her head. "No, although it would have been easier in some ways
if he had. He didn't tell Onyx, but he was getting sloppy. He was
going off of script a lot. I had bugs in the house back then that
Onyx hadn't found yet. I heard Bennet trying to set Onyx up for some
kind of long con. It was dangerous. I'd tried to tell him half a
dozen times that he needed to get back to the plan that we'd agreed
on, but I couldn't just come right out and say it, not without
revealing that I had bugs all over the house."

"What
happened?"

"I decided
to get my money's worth out of him before it became too late. I
decided that I would take him to the lamia and have him fight so that
I could get the help I needed from their queen. Then we could go back
and kick Onyx out of the city. As long as Onyx was out of the picture
it wouldn't matter that Bennet had been disobeying orders. I knew I
could depend on him to fight when things got rough, and that was the
most important thing."

My shock must
have made it onto my face. Celeste mistook it for disbelief.

"Don't
give me that look. There are plenty of alphas who keep control of
their pack through financial means. You just need to find people who
remain bought once you buy them off. Once you hit a certain size
things become self-sustaining. The upper-tier hybrids who initially
joined you for the money realize that they like the security of being
towards the top of a pack a lot better than being one of the
dispossessed. Ulrich has reformed half a dozen hybrids just in the
last couple of decades who everyone else said couldn't function
inside of a healthy pack. Raynor has done the same thing, just on a
smaller scale."

"Your plan
didn't work though? I mean Onyx is still around, right?"

"I never
carried it out. We were headed here, but I stopped to make sure that
nobody was following us. That was when Bennet told me his suspicions
about Ash. It was like having my brain jammed inside of a blender. On
the one hand, I was overjoyed to find out that my brother might still
be alive. On the other hand, it meant that I'd been abandoned by my
own flesh and blood. Ash left me in New Orleans to rot, and he used
Bennet to do it."

"I'm
sorry, Celeste, but I don't understand. Why did it matter that he
used Bennet as his witness when he staged his death?"