Page 24 of Damned and Broken Gods
LEELA
We’d taken to eating supper together, claiming the table we’d clustered around that first day as ours. The native demigods left it free for us now, but I caught them watching us from time to time.
Watching me.
The anomaly.
Still, it was beginning to feel like home here with Araz, Blue, Dharma, Joe, and Sylvie, and every evening Priti and Remi would join us around the hearth. Even Vick was beginning to feel like part of our circle.
And I could lose it all.
Any day now, I could be taken to the Shahee Kshetra and ensconced there. Yes, a fast-track ascension would bring me closer to my goal of freeing Nani and Pashim, but only if Araz was wrong about the Authority’s control over the crown. Timewould tell, but time seemed to be determined to root me here and make me love it.
Forks and spoons scraped against plates as we finished up our meals.
“I’ll go get the fire going,” Vick said.
We started gathering the plates and cups and carrying them to the sink.
“Leela?” Araz gently gripped my elbow, and a buzz of awareness shot through me. He let go quickly. Had he felt it too? It was the first physical contact we’d had since our moment in his underwater sanctuary. “I need to go out for a little while. Stay in the barracks till I return.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d ducked out like this during our time at earth house, and heck, he’d probably done it in the newbie barracks too, except back then, he hadn’t told me he was off anywhere.
But now that I knew he was going somewhere, my curiosity was piqued. “Where are you going?” It was the first time I’d asked him, and his mouth tightened. I realized that my question sounded like a demand, that maybe as my drohi he would feel obliged to answer, so I followed up quickly with, “You don’t have to tell me. I was just curious.”
His lips relaxed into a smile. “I’ll be back soon.”
Okay, so he wasn’t going to tell me. Fine.
I watched him leave, my gaze flicking to the windows across the room where the sky was blood red.
“Hey, chickadee, I gotta go too,” Blue said, scampering up my arm and onto my shoulder to rub his whiskers against my cheek. “And don’t worry about buns of steel; ’ee’s not doin’ anyfin nefarious. The big lug likes to tell stories to the mini drohis in the cradle.”
“Wait, what?”
Blue canted his head. “I know, right? ’Ee don’t strike me as the paternal type eeva, but there ya go. It’s a fing.”
“How do you know this?”
“I may ’ave snuck into the cradle once or twice. The nibblets are adorbs, and they ’ave the best snacks!”
“Then why didn’t he just tell me where he was going?”
“Maybe cos of that look on ya face right now.”
“What look?”
“The swoony one. Look ’ere, you know the score. ’Ee knows the score. A little fun is one fing, but ya got to guard that tender ’eart of yours…at least fer a while. Least till we know what the deal with this royal stuff is. Araz is doin’ the same.”
But now that I knew about his little trips and his storytelling, I wanted to see him interacting with the young drohi, to hear his stories too.
“Nah-uh, bad idea,” Blue said, reading me easily. “And ya know it.”
I exhaled. “Yeah, yeah. You’re right. He’s doing his part, and I need to do mine.”
Blue gave me one more whiskery kiss before scampering down my arm and hopping to the floor. Most of the other anchors had already left, but Dharma’s hunting hound had waited for Blue.
My buddy hopped up on Ida’s back, and she bounded off with him.
