Page 2 of Rogue Familiar

“It was better for her not to know,” he answered wearily.

“What?” Selly screeched, gratified that Nic echoed it, though less strenuously. “My wizard told you he planned to leave me, which goes against all Convocation custom and laws, which you, as the lord of my House, are supposed to enforce with your minions, and you decided it was better that I not know?”

Gabriel gazed at her sourly. “Since when did you begin studying up on Convocation law?”

“Since I spent time being mired in those laws as the property of first House Sammael and then House El-Adrel. I figured I’d do better armed with knowledge.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he spat. “You were never their property.”

“Technically—” Nic began, and Gabriel thrust a finger at her.

“Don’t you start. I don’t need to be lectured on the second-class citizen status—at best—of familiars in the Convocation,” he snarled.

“Apparently you do,” she fired back, “if Seliah already understands more than you do. That is…” She sent Selly an apologetic look. “I take back the ‘already.’ I didn’t mean to call attention to your recent difficulties.”

As Nic was the primary reason Selly no longer suffered from those “difficulties,” Selly didn’t hold the remark against her. Instead, she shrugged, as if it didn’t bother her anymore, which it didn’t. Mostly. She had Jadren to thank for being able to regard her years-long battle with insanity with a measure of fortitude. Thinking of how compassionate he’d been, how frankly kind to her, in helping her face what the magic-induced toxicity had done to her mind, coaching her in how she could emerge from that, only made her angrier that he’d then callously abandoned her.

The coward.

It was especially annoying that she, in turn, could sympathize with the fear and insecurity that had driven Jadren to believe he could only keep her safe by leaving her. At the same time, she fervently wished she could pay him back for jilting her in such a humiliating fashion by putting an arrow through him. Again.

She wrung out a thin smile for Nic. “We don’t need to tiptoe around it. Now that I’m in my right mind again, I can acknowledge just how bad off I was for many years. But I’m fully recovered now and ready to—”

“You are still fragile,” Gabriel interrupted. “You weren’t in any condition to come on the mission to rescue Nic in the first place—I kick myself for allowing it—then, considering what you experienced afterward… Well, no one would blame you for needing peaceful time for rest and recovery. Jadren understood that, too, Selly. We all want only the best for you.”

Nic winced at his words and scrubbed a hand over her face, while Selly stared at her big brother in incredulity and building rage. “Don’t you patronize me,” she said softly.

“I’m not,” Gabriel returned, far too swiftly, then held up his hands in a pacifying gesture. “Do you deny that your sojourns in Houses Sammael and El-Adrel, where you were imprisoned and tortured, were traumatizing?”

“I don’t feel traumatized,” she returned evenly.

Gabriel smacked a hand on his desk. “Torture is, by definition, traumatizing. That’s what it’s designed to do!”

“They barely tortured me. Jadren took the brunt of it and suffered far more than I did. He protected me.”

“He bonded you as his familiar. Against your will,” Gabriel thundered, a rumble outside echoing him.

Nic cast her gaze at the rapidly clouding sky outside the tall glass windows, shook her head, and opened her mouth.

“Don’t, Nic,” Gabriel practically snarled. “Don’t tell me either to calm down or that a wizard bonding a familiar has nothing to do with the familiar’s free choice. You and Seliah are as human as anyone and you deserve the freedom to choose a bonding that affects you on the deepest levels for the rest of your lives.”

“It’s because of that deep-level effect that you should not have given Jadren permission to leave!” Selly said. “Jadren bonded me because he had no choice either. It was that or I’d have been bonded to one of his siblings, which he assured me would have been much worse, and I believe him. He did it to save me, as we’ve already explained, more than once. But all of that is immaterial, however, because we are bonded and one inescapable truth is that the wizard–familiar bond, once forged, cannot be broken. That’s in the past. He’s my wizard and I’m going after him.”

“You’re what?” Gabriel’s magic flared again. “No, you are not. I forbid it.”

Oh, he did not just try to forbid her. “You’re my brother, not my keeper. And unless I’m to be Lyndella to Jadren’s Sylus, going insane from the attenuation of the bond, I need to find Jadren before I lose my mind for a second time. A prospect I promise you I do not relish.”

“Dark arts save me.” Gabriel ground out in appalled astonishment. “Tell me you did not read that melodramatic pile of crap.”

“Hey!” Nic protested. “I love that book. So did everyone, which is why it’s famous. You read it yourself.”

“So that I could understand the influences that warped your young mind, my love,” he retorted, then returned his attention to Selly. “The pap that is the supposedly romantic tale of Sylus and Lyndella is Convocation propaganda aimed at familiars to make you believe that the slavery of your relationship to your wizard is not only palatable, but desirable.”

“Slavery?” Nic echoed with an arched brow and fire in her eyes.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child, Gabriel,” Selly said at the same time.

“You are a child,” Gabriel shot back, ignoring Nic and glaring silver daggers at Selly. At least he wasn’t manifesting real silver daggers out of moon magic. Not yet, anyway. “The madness took you when you were barely an adolescent. Ten years you spent barely knowing your own name, let alone anything else of the world. No one expects you to—”

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