Page 20

Damon

R ight before Frankie did…whatever she did, I gave her a flat look. “Don’t mention Azazel. Or Arsay.”

She rolled expressive dark eyes. “I wasn’t born yesterday, big guy.”

“Don’t even hint at either of them—if you do—”

“I’m not an idiot,” she said succinctly. “If I do, I might not even make it out of the room—or wherever he is. There are probably only a few things on the planet that can kill me.” She looked me up and down. “You might be one of them. But that guy? He’s definitely one of them and I don’t plan on dying because the guy who is half my genetic makeup is a fucking monster.”

“What’s fucking ?”

The question from the small boy named Asam had us both withdrawing our claws—figuratively.

“It’s a bad word and if you say it around your mom, she’ll wash your mouth out with soap,” Frankie said cheerfully.

Asam wrinkled his nose. “That would taste bad.”

Something about the way he said it made me think of Kit’s commentary on the weird sayings of the English language and I looked for her one last time.

“Let’s go.”

Frankie gripped my arm. “Kids, close your eyes.”

I don’t know what she did but a moment later, the younger ones I held slumped into a deep sleep and then the world twisted around us. I felt like I was being shoved through a wormhole ten times too small for my body and it was trying to squeeze all of my internal organs out through any orifice available.

My skull clamped down until I was certain it would collapse and crush my skull.

The older children with Frankie sobbed.

And then it was over.

I sensed movement and I shoved in front of Frankie only a split second before Chang could grab her by the throat.

“It’s us,” I panted out. “Me. It’s me.”

If he went after her, I’d never get back to Kit. If he went after her, whatever secrets she knew about Arsay would die with her.

Chang snarled, the deadly threat rumbling out of his throat.

I bared my teeth at him.

The little boy in my arms who’d cuddled up to Kit only moments before opened his eyes and yawned, then tensed, eyes wide and locked on Chang. In that too-loud whisper of young kids, he said, “He looks mean. Even meaner than you.”

Chang went still.

In the span of a heartbeat, he sucked the monster back inside him and became the calm, collected father figure I’d known almost my entire life.

“Hello, Damon.” He pushed his fingers through his hair, restoring it. He offered a smile to the boy before looking at the other kid who was still oblivious to the world. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

The boy peeked up from my chest.

“This is Asam,” I said, unceremoniously dumping the child into Chang’s arms. He caught him easily, nose wrinkling slightly as he caught the scent of illness on the boy. “And this is Maril. They’re…Kit’s people.”

“So I gathered.” Eyes glittering, he stared me down. “And your other…guest?”

Frankie stepped out from behind me. If she was scared, she didn’t show it.

Chang’s nostrils flared.

Rage pulsed inside him. I could feel it. Taste it.

“Right now, she’s an ally. She’s the one who helped Kit fix the bond with her sword,” I told him. “And she’s helping these kids.”

Chang blinked, a slow, lazy action that did nothing to hide the watchful predator looking out at us from those black eyes. But then he turned his focus to the children. Looking at the older girl holding Frankie’s hand, he asked, “Have you all been ill?”

Nervously, she nodded. She had a pinched look around her mouth and I waited to see if she’d be sick, but the healer had dosed all of them with some sort of brew that was supposed to stem off nausea and vomiting—Kit’s idea. I wished I’d taken her up on it when she’d suggested it to me because I wanted to empty my guts.

I swallowed the bile churning up my throat and focused on Chang.

“You need to call Colleen, probably have her reach out to other strong Healers. It’s some weird kind of cholera. The healer there can’t fix it and she told me it felt unnatural.”

“Very well.” Chang’s eyes returned to Frankie before he looked back at me. “Are there more?”

“Yes. Twenty-four children in all.”

His jaw went tight. “I see.”

Crossing to him, I lowered my head and said quietly, “She needs to come back when she’s done transporting the kids. Don’t stop her. Please.”

Chang studied me. A hundred unspoken questions passed between us. “You could have considered warning me about this.”

“Yeah, well…my phone is on the bottom of the North Atlantic right about now.”

He sighed and the cold, angry killer was replaced by an annoyed man. “Why am I not surprised?”

A few minutes later, I had two fresh sat phones, one in my hip pocket, one in the back. I explained the need for a new boat and he narrowed his eyes but nodded. “Anything else you’d like me to pull out of thin air, Damon?”

“Not that I can think of. “

“Good.” He moved over to the couch where the children all waited, carrying blankets he’d unearthed from somewhere. Colleen was already en route, along with Justin and another healer from Green Road. “I’ll update you both on the children as I’m able. Now…go. Before I change my mind.”

His gaze moved to Frankie before he finished tucking the blanket around the children.

She’d been silent throughout the entire exchange, thankfully.

As I crossed to her and let her take my hand, I told myself this had gone better than I could have hoped.

But I wouldn’t breathe easier until she was done transporting the kids.

Chang’s fury toward Azazel had had a long, long time to fester and grow.

It wasn’t precisely her I was worried about. It was the way Kit had accepted her presence. Her gut was telling her something about Frankie that I couldn’t pick up on—this wasn’t just about whatever favor she owed the female.

I didn’t have Kit’s instincts but I didn’t need to. I’d learned to trust hers.

I made the trip with Frankie three more times—I hadn’t planned on that. But either Chang had unsettled her, which was possible, or it was the truth when she’d told me that it was better for her to make fewer trips and if I could carry several kids, it would make it easier on her, and them.

She made the last go-round on her own and neither Kit nor I took a deep breath until Frankie appeared back in our sight.

The tall Black woman almost collapsed and Demetrio reached her before anybody else could, steadying her but when he tried to walk her over to a nearby stone to sit, she waved him off and walked over there on her own. She did accept the tall, earthen goblet filled with more of the tea the healer had pushed onto all the kids, sipping it as everybody around us hurried in dozens of directions.

Demetrio lingered long enough to make sure she was drinking it and then he strode off, returning to join Kit and the rest. Save for a group that was monitoring the healthy kids, everybody was packing up. There were pinched faces, people who looked nervous and ready to panic.

Some side-eyed Kit as she moved from group to group, her full name rising in the air every few minutes as people called out to her with questions.

Once I didn’t think anybody would take notice, I went to lean against the massive boulder next to the one where Frankie was sitting.

“He say anything to you?”

Frankie’s dark eyes moved my way before returning to the chaos in front of us. “No. Not once.”

I set my jaw. That silence wasn’t good. Chang was at his most deadly when he went completely quiet.

“How have they lived like this?” Frankie murmured.

I followed her eyes and studied the setting in front of me, smaller homes neatly set apart as they circled a larger, finer structure. That was Aneris Hall. Something about its design made me think of ancient Greek architecture but that wasn’t entirely right. It was too big for this small, isolated space, too lavish, just too…much.

I wanted to find something heavy and lunge at the walls of the place where Fanis had lived, smash, tear and claw until they all fell and the place was nothing but rabble and ruin.

“It’s what they knew,” I said, a few more vague memories of a forgotten life in a peaceful valley drifting to the surface.

“No shops. No money. All the homes surrounding this field and that…” She waved a hand at the Hall. “Clearly, that’s her palace. These people are living in these tiny little homes…” She shivered a little as a gust of wind blew through the clearing. “They’d be warmer in there. All of them would fit.”

“Fanis lived there.”

Frankie shot me a look.

“The queen. Or who everybody thought the queen was. She wasn’t going to bring the lowly subjects into the Hall. And the cold didn’t use to penetrate the protections around the island from what Kit’s said.”

As if I’d summoned her, Kit appeared out of the corner of my eye and I watched as she strode toward the broad staircase that led up the Hall.

I shoved off the boulder.

Kit hadn’t made it up four steps before I caught her upper arm.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going inside.” Her eyes met mine levelly.

“ Why ?”

“Because I have to.”

For a second, a glimpse of the fragile female I’d sometimes seen when we first met peered out at me from behind her eyes. She’d all but taken over after Jude had kidnapped her but Kit had come clawing back, fighting tooth and nail to find herself again.

A heartbeat or two passed and she twitched her arm.

Slowly, I let go.

“You don’t remember everything she did to you,” I said gruffly.

“I’m remembering enough.” Half-turning, she pointed to a spot in the square before us that held a pole jutting up from the ground. It had been hacked off about three feet from the base.

Before she even spoke, I knew what she was going to say and my claws punched out of my skin, so hard it hurt. The pain was too swift, too fleeting, fading in seconds and it wasn’t enough of a distraction to take away from the fury I felt over what was coming.

“I remember being bound to the pole there,” she said in a wooden voice. “I don’t remember why. But I remember the pain.”

Her eyes moved to mine and I saw the questions.

Squeezing the question out was like choking on broken glass but I made myself ask. “Do you want to me to tell you?”

“You know why?” She canted her head to the side, her pale hair sweeping to brush her shoulder.

“Not in detail. You didn’t talk about this place much and rarely in detail. But I know some of it.”

“Then tell me,” she said.

It came out an order.

“You were eight.” I could hear her voice just like it was yesterday, how she’d stood in front of me, challenging me, all but calling me a coward for not removing Annette from the position she’d held.

Kit had been right. It had been the easy way, just maintaining the status quo. Sometimes, I hated looking back at seeing the man I’d let myself become in the years since we’d settled in East O. “You were smaller than everybody else. Weaker. You didn’t pass the tests they put all the kids through—some sort of weapons training. You weren’t as far along as the other kids and you failed. So, she whipped you, in front of everybody else. That was the—”

“—the first time,” she said along with me. Her eyes had taken on a haunted look and she swung away from the pole. “The first time. Not the last.”

“No.”

“And that’s why I’m going in there.” She glanced at me. “I’ve had this deep, cold fear at the back of my tongue ever since I saw the Hall. I’m not going to hide from it. I’m done with that.”

“Can I come with you?”

Her lips twitched. “I’m starting to remember you better. You don’t usually ask.”

“You threatened to throw me off a boat if I didn’t start doing better about things like that.”

She looked me up and down, skepticism in her eyes. “Okay. Sure.”

Somehow, I was able to laugh and without thinking, I offered my hand.

Before I could take it back, she accepted and we started up the broad, numerous stairs.