Page 58 of Smoke & Ashes
“Yeah, if bystudied musicyou meanpissed around on Casio keyboards for a half-hour a week.”
She looked genuinely abashed. “I’m sorry, it wasn’t my intent to make you self-conscious.”
“Seriously, Tara, if the fact that you’re about eight million times posher than me made me even slightly insecure, I’d have bailed a long time ago.”
That earned me a suspicious look. “Would you?”
“Well, no. But only because I really, really like having sex with you.”
She took my good hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “Thank you, I value you as well.”
“So…” I squirmed a little uncomfortably. “What are your plans for—you know—Camilla and Antonia and the others?”
She was still holding my hand very close to her face, and I could feel her breath warm on my fingers. “I don’t know. Grandmama wasn’t entirely wrong. If they won’t be able to see they won’t be able to hunt, and perhaps it would be foolish to risk more of our pack just to bring back four wolves who can no longer do their duty.”
There was a chilling logic to that, but I was a world of not here for chilling logic. “I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, this does seem to haveI am a trapwritten all over it. But”—I turned towards her, tweaked my bad arm and immediately remembered why I’d been lying so still up until that moment—“I don’t think Sebastian Douglas is as in control as he has been before. The guy is more than two thousand years old—he’s slippery as a greased python and so ruthless that your granny would look at him and saygosh, that man is a little bit ruthless for my tastes—but he’s not at all used to dealing with things that change fast. I think if we hit him quickly it might surprise him. He’d have a way out, because he always has a way out, but you might at least save your people.”
“I don’t know if I can ask the pack to follow me into the Cold and Dark without a plan.”
I shrugged, then winced. Okay, another gesture off limits. Great. “Then we make a plan. And if you don’t want to take your wolves in then we can go together, you and me. Not that I’m sure I’ll be that much help what with the broken arm and tendency to go totally berserk if I draw on too much power, and Ithinkmy mother wants to either have sex with you or kill and eat you. But, those tiny details aside, I’ve got your back.”
She kissed my hand again. “Thank you.” Then she turned it over and gently brushed the tip of her tongue against my palm.
I shivered. “Okay stop that, because right now your mouth’s writing cheques that my moderate-to-severe injuries can’t cash.”
She kissed my wrist, and began working her way up my arm. “Are you sure?” And my, what big eyes she had.
“I’m sure.” I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. But operation be mature and make positive decisions was going pretty okay at the moment and I was sure sayingnot at all, do me hard, pleasewas not a mature or positive decision.
Carefully, almost too carefully, she curled up next to me, her fingers tracing lazy meandering patterns over the parts of me that were still okay with being touched, which wasn’t a huge number of them with everything I’d been through lately. I couldn’t decide if it was lovely and comforting and a little bit that R-word that I’m not mentioning, or if it was just total fucking torture. I settled on the side of comforting.
And let myself drift gently to sleep.
* * *
A forgetful snow fell on the dream of a forest. Blood and shadows tanged in my mouth and a pale woman in white stood bathed in cold, winter’s sunlight.
“What is it now?” I was hoping I’d hit the cap on strangers showing up in my head, but here we were with a new one.
“I come to negotiate peace.”
“Great. Give the wolves back and we’ll call it even.”
“The wolves were payment for a different bargain.”
I was beginning to see where the Merchant got it from. “With Douglas?”
The Queen of Winter nodded.
“They weren’t his to give.”
“That is a matter of perspective.”
Faery bargains were a mystery to me. It’d probably have been safer to learn more about them but seriously fuck that noise. “Okay, but either way aren’t they yours now, and so can’t you give them back if you want to?”
“I do not want to.”
“Well, if you want peace with Safernoc.” I shrugged in a “whaddya gonna do” kind of a way.
