Tangled Webs (4 page)

“What are you planning to do today?” he asked.

“I’m meeting Marian. We’re going to walk through the building we’re going to transform into a spooky house.” Jaenelle gave him a bright smile that said,
Ask me. Come on, ask me.

No sane man with any kind of functioning brain would go near that statement. But he knew his duty as a husband, so he said, “Spooky house?”

Jaenelle swallowed a bite of omelet. “I was visiting one of the landen villages that’s located near the family vineyards, and I got to talking to some of the boys. They had the strangest ideas of what the Blood are like—especially since common sense should tell them the things they think can’t be true.”

“They’re boys,” he said. “They don’t have common sense.”

“No doubt, but I thought it would be fun to create a house based on all the silly, spooky things they think we live with day to day. There are usually harvest festivals in the late autumn. We could have it ready by then as an entertainment.”

“An entertainment.” Hell’s fire, Mother Night, and may the Darkness be merciful. “Where is this entertainment?”

“We got a big old house in a landen village located in the central part of Dhemlan. Well, I bought it. It’s structurally sound, but it looks…” She shrugged.

There was something stuck in his throat. He was pretty sure it was his heart. “You bought a house?”
And didn’t tell me?

“Yes.”

She gave him an unsure but game smile—and he had a sudden understanding of the terror his father, the powerful, Black-Jeweled High Lord of Hell, must have felt during Jaenelle’s adolescence when greeted by that smile.

“What are you doing today?” Jaenelle asked.

Had Marian told Lucivar about this spooky house? Surely the lovely Eyrien hearth witch hadn’t kept it a secret from her own husband! Which was a thought he wasn’t going to follow to its logical conclusion because then he would start to wonder why his own lovely wife hadn’t informed
him
until now.

But if Lucivar
had
known, why hadn’t the prick sent a warning? A man did
not
need to be blindsided by something like this at the breakfast table. Or any other time, for that matter.

“Daemon?”

“Uh?”
Pay attention, fool.
“Oh, I have some paperwork to finish up for my meetings with the Province Queens.” He focused on his coffee cup and added, oh so casually, “And I thought I would drop in at the Keep and see how Father is doing.”

“Uh-huh.” Jaenelle sliced her omelet in half, put a half between two pieces of toast, and wrapped her breakfast in her napkin. “I have to run if I’m going to be on time to meet up with Marian. She’s a little nervous about doing this.”

I wonder why.
“Are you taking one of the Coaches?”

“No, I’ll just ride the Winds.” She drained her coffee cup and stood up.

Something not quite right here. “It shouldn’t take that long to reach the landen village, should it?”

She came around the table and gave him a sweet kiss. “No, it won’t take that long.” Then she gave him a wicked grin. “But first I have to yell at the cat for waking me up.”

THREE

H
ow did I get talked into this?
Marian wondered as she followed Jaenelle into the next gloomy room of the old landen house that had sat empty and neglected for the past decade or more. Of course, based on what she’d seen so far, the house hadn’t been cared for even when people had lived in it.

She waited until Jaenelle nudged open one of the slatted shutters to let in dingy light through the grimy window. Then she looked around and decided this was the worst room yet. Judging by the furniture, this must have been the dining room. Judging by the wallpaper, the people who had lived here must have wanted to discourage everyone from lingering over a meal.

“Cobwebs,” Jaenelle said, looking at the corners of the room.

Marian winced as she forced herself to take a closer look around. She was here because her hearth witch practicality provided balance for Jaenelle’s more whimsical ideas. Besides, they were family. Jaenelle had been adopted by Lucivar’s father when she was twelve, so even though there was no bloodline connecting them, Jaenelle was Lucivar’s sister—and Lucivar’s Queen. Since Marian was Lucivar’s wife, that meant Jaenelle was also
her
sister now.

And there was another connection between them. If Jaenelle hadn’t saved her and brought her to Kaeleer, she wouldn’t have survived the attack by five Eyrien Warlords, and if she hadn’t survived, she wouldn’t have fallen in love with a strong, wonderful man, and she wouldn’t have a son.

So she owed Jaenelle. But debt or not, family or not, there was only so much
ick
a hearth witch could handle.

“Yes,” she said. “Those cobwebs definitely will have to be cleaned out.”

“No. Well, yes,
those
will have to be cleaned out, but we’ll put new cobwebs in the corners. Black, sooty strands. Clots and layers. Maybe add an illusion spell in a couple of them so it looks like there’s something moving.”

Marian shuddered. Her membranous wings, shades darker than her brown skin, were pulled in tight to her body, an instinctive response to make herself look smaller. “They think our homes have cobwebs?” She wasn’t sure if she was insulted or appalled.

“And rats,” Jaenelle said cheerfully as she called in a list and handed it to Marian. “I took notes when I was talking to the boys.”

Those weren’t boys,
Marian thought darkly as she studied the list.
Those were maggot-brained little beasts.
“We can’t have rats.”

“Not real rats,” Jaenelle conceded. “But we can create a skittering noise so it sounds like there are rats in the walls.” She looked around, considering, then frowned as they both heard a
skitter skitter
.

Marian closed her eyes for a moment. They’d bring some of the kindred wolves with them the next time to deal with the rats already in residence.

“So these”—
maggot-brained beasts—
“boys think the Blood live in moldy rooms with creaking doors and squeaking floors and furniture that hasn’t been dusted in a decade, and we eat in rooms that have cobwebs in the corners and rats in the walls.”

Jaenelle smiled brightly. “Yes. Exactly.”

Marian walked around the table that clogged the center of the room. What would it take to clean that thing? Maybe a chisel. Or a sledgehammer. She stopped at the serving board and stared at the silver serving tray set just off center enough to make her grit her teeth.

At least, she thought it was silver under all that tarnish.

Seeing it made something in her brain fizzle. She turned and marched to the closest door, baring her teeth in a silent snarl as she turned the grimy doorknob. It took some muscle to open the stuck door, but when she finally succeeded, she discovered it wasn’t a way out of the room. It was a storage cupboard with shelves that had more blackened silver and bug-infested linen. And she couldn’t take any more.

“Why not a rotting corpse?” Marian said in a voice so snippy she didn’t recognize it as her own. “Wouldn’t we lock our enemies in a cupboard and let them starve to death while they watch us dine?”

“Well…,” Jaenelle began.

“You said you were thinking of ghostly narrators. So just tell the”
—maggot-brained beasts—
“boys not to open that door. If they’re anything like Daemonar, they’ll open the door as soon as they can just to find out why they’re not supposed to.”

“But these aren’t little children Daemonar’s age,” Jaenelle protested. “These children will be old enough to have gone through the Birthright Ceremony—or would be if they were Blood. A child that age is
not
going to open a door after he’s been told not to.”

“Then have an illusion of a boy the right age. Have
him
be the one who opens the door. In fact, don’t even have a knob on the door until the ghost boy appears. Then a ghostly knob will appear that only he can turn.”

“He’d been told not to open the door, but he did—and the knob came off in his hand, breaking the locking spell on the door,” Jaenelle said. “The ghost boy will back away, and visitors will hear a malevolent laugh as the door slowly opens.”

“And that’s when they’ll see the skeleton of the boy who had been told not to open that door and had disobeyed.”

And, apparently, would still be disobedient even as a ghost.

“The skeleton,” Jaenelle said softly. “Yes. A boy’s skeleton. With just enough scalp left to hold a little hair, but otherwise ragged clothing over clean bones.”

“Isn’t that what we all have in the closet that holds the tablecloths and napkins?”

Silence filled the room. Then…

“Marian,” Jaenelle breathed, “that’s brilliant. We’ll have to figure out why he wasn’t supposed to open the door, but…It’s
brilliant.
”

That would teach her to try to be bitchy. Obviously she didn’t have the temper for it.

“Come on,” Jaenelle said, heading for the hallway. “Let’s see what sort of nonsense we can come up with for the upstairs rooms.”

Marian stared at the empty doorway and considered what would be upstairs. Bedrooms. Bathrooms. Closets. And above that, the attic.

As she reached the doorway, she heard the loud creak of the old stairs. Heard Jaenelle’s delighted laugh. She looked at the list Jaenelle had made based on how landen boys thought the Blood lived.

May the Darkness have mercy.

Daemon carefully leaned back against the large blackwood table that provided a work space for the scholars who were permitted to use the material in this part of the Keep’s library. A sore muscle in his back. Nothing more than that. All things considered, he’d gotten off lightly.

Damn cat.

“What brings you to the Keep today?”

Affection. Dry amusement. Love. He heard all those things in the deep voice. He turned his head to look at the man sorting the books stacked in the center of the table.

A handsome Hayllian whose thick black hair was heavily silvered at the temples. His face was beginning to show the weight of his long life, but it was the laugh lines fanning out from the golden eyes that cut the deepest in the brown skin. He was a Guardian, one of the living dead, and had walked the Realms for more than fifty thousand years.

He was Saetan Daemon SaDiablo, a Black-Jeweled Warlord Prince who was the Prince of the Darkness, the High Lord of Hell, the High Priest of the Hourglass. Formerly the Steward of the Dark Court at Ebon Askavi—and still the unofficial Steward of that same unofficial court—he was now the assistant librarian/historian at Ebon Askavi.

He had one other title, the one Daemon considered the most important: father.

They hadn’t known each other for that many years. The Birthright Ceremony, where a child acquired the Jewel that indicated the power born within that young vessel, was also the time when paternity was formally acknowledged or denied. At Daemon’s Birthright Ceremony, while he’d stood proudly holding his Red Jewel, paternity had been denied. Saetan had been stripped of all rights to his son, and they had been lost to each other—until the need to protect a powerful but fragile girl brought them back together.

Now he had a father, someone he could talk to, someone who, being the only other male who wore Black Jewels and was also a Black Widow, understood his nature better than anyone else could. Even Lucivar.

“Do I need a reason to visit you?” he asked.

“Certainly not,” Saetan replied, walking to the far end of the table and putting three books next to another stack.

Daemon shifted a little to get a better look at the stacks. Were those the books to be discarded or the ones Saetan and Geoffrey, the Keep’s historian/librarian, were trying to preserve?

Old books, from the looks of the covers. Most were so old the titles had faded and the bindings had become fragile despite the preservation spells that must have kept them intact for so long. Culling the volumes in the Keep’s vast library was an ongoing project, and every book had to be handled with care.

“I’m always delighted to see you, Daemon,” Saetan said, returning to the stacks in the center of the table. “But I recognize the difference between a casual visit and when one of you drops by because you have something on your mind.”

Caught. But he wasn’t ready to ask the question. So he lobbed a different conversational ball onto the table. “Have you heard about the spooky house?”

“The what?”

With perverse glee, Daemon told his father all about Jaenelle’s plans to create a house based on landen children’s ideas of how the Blood lived—and watched the High Lord of Hell pale.

“You’re joking,” Saetan said hoarsely.

Daemon shook his head. “Jaenelle and Marian are there right now, inspecting the property.”

“Can’t you stop this?”

“Would you like to suggest how?”

Absolute silence.

For a minute, Daemon watched his father sort books, certain the man wasn’t paying any attention to what was being placed where and would have to sort them all over again.

“Wasn’t there anything else you wanted to discuss?” Saetan asked, picking up a stack of books.

It was that tiny hint of desperation, the little undercurrent of a plea, that made it possible to ask the question. But he turned his head and stared at the wall instead of the man.

“When I was a pleasure slave in Terreille, I woke up each morning and wondered who I needed to kill that day, or what kind of vicious game I would have to play, or if I’d be the one who was killed. I lived on the knife’s edge every waking moment, and I honed my own temper on that edge. I earned being called the Sadist.”

“And now what’s the most frightening thing you face?”

“Morning sex.”

Saetan dropped the books.

Daemon cringed, hoping none of the volumes had been damaged.

Saetan fussed over the books, then stopped. Just stopped.