Page 19 of Caelum

EIGHTEEN

EREN

“What is it?” Eve whispered.

As we stared into the closed off garden that Dre had long since claimed as his own, I leaned against the doorway that was tagged with the words, “ ?Vete a la chingada!”

The spray paint had long since dried, and I knew Dre frequently topped up the charming declaration of ‘fuck off’ in Mexican Spanish.

Dre wasn’t unlike the plants he tended to, and I wanted to show them to Eve in the interest of cultivating some goodwill for my brother.

Even though I accepted Dre was a dick, and I loathed how he was treating Eve, I knew him well enough to understand that his past was making him be like this. That didn’t justify him being so mean, but his childhood… it hadn’t been easy. I was just hoping he’d come around, pull his head out of his ass, and come to see how lucky we all were to have her with us.

In the interim, she didn’t have to put up with him, could lay into him as hard as she wanted, but as mate to Stefan, she’d have to deal with Dre for a long time to come. I was waiting on her to start fighting back, to begin defending herself, but she was still too timid for that.

If he didn’t change… Well, breaking up the Pack wasn’t impossible but, when it boiled down to it, for our safety, she’d need to either understand Dre better or to fight fire with fire. We were a unit, after all. We’d trained for half a decade to be a strong team. Without him? It would be like fighting after losing a limb.

That I’d even think of breaking up the Pack surprised me, but Eve was special. She wasn’t even my mate like she was Stefan’s, and I knew that. Nestor did too. That Dre was being a bigger fucker than usual told me he saw it, sensed it, but was refusing to accept what she would mean to us as a unit.

When Eve shot me a questioning look, I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck and sheepishly apologized, “Sorry. Mind wandered. They’re blue agave plants.”

She frowned at me. “What are they?”

I liked how she always thought I’d know the answer to everything. It should have grown tiresome, but it hadn’t yet. Not even when, the other day, she’d asked me why it took Einstein so long to figure out that E equaled MC squared.

I wasn’t sure what had perplexed Nestor and me the most—the fact that she understood that shit period or that she’d expected me to know the answer.

A scientist I most definitely wasn’t.

But was Eve?

I figured she’d had a basic education at best, and even though she’d been reading up a storm, her understanding of not only that, but other topics, led me to believe my earlier suppositions were concrete fact.

Eve was fucking smart.

While I wouldn’t always be able to answer her questions—that was what Google was for though, right?—this time, I could. “They’re a special kind of cactus.”

“Why does he grow them?”

“Back home, he was a jimador . A tequila farmer.” Before she could ask, I carried on, “Tequila is a kind of alcohol.”

“Like wine?” she queried.

“You know what that is?”

Her smile was faint but evident nonetheless at my surprise. “Yes. We had it for sacrament.”

I tipped my chin in understanding and watched as she looked at the small rows of blue agave that had a hue of that part where the ocean morphed into the sand. Blue and green, not quite turquoise, but richer somehow.

There weren’t many plants because each one took up a shit ton of space. The area was around twenty by twenty feet, and the rows of plants were curved in a way that obviously made each square foot count. The spiky leaves were nearly six feet long at some points, and they kissed the sky with a pride that came from Dre’s hard-earned tending. The soil was dusty and close to orange-brown, and whenever I came down here, I always wanted to sneeze from the dust in the air.

It wasn’t my favorite place in the world even if it was Dre’s. Still…

“It always amazes me when I come down here,” I told her softly, and though I was trying to color her opinion of Dre, I was being honest. I wouldn’t lie to her. She was Pack. That meant being truthful, even if it would hurt our cause in the long run.

“Why?” she questioned.

“Because I remember when Dre first planted these. They were small. Just like him.”

“How old was he?”

“He planted them the first year he was here. When he was thirteen. We both got here at the same time.”

Nicholas had pulled some strings to get us both in a couple of years ahead of schedule. Me because I wouldn’t have survived another of my brother-in-law’s beatings, and Dre? Because he’d almost killed his grandmother. That was how he’d come to be recruited—a creature had sensed him in the town jail.

Her mouth fell. “He’s been growing these for nearly seven years?”

“Yep,” I confirmed.

“What’s he waiting for?”

I snickered at that. “Well, it depends on why you’re growing them. He does this because it’s what he was raised doing. It was all he knew, and when he moved here, and he was given his credit card like we all get, the first thing he bought were these tiny one-year shoots. Next, he asked Nicholas for some garden plot, and Nicholas agreed.” I dug my heel into the soil. “This part of the yard isn’t optimal for growing things, so that’s why Nicholas agreed. The soil here is good, but we have to grow as much as we can, you know?”

“I like the gardens. They smell good.”

“They don’t when they’re spreading manure on everything,” I groused, my nose wrinkling.

She snickered at me, but though one of my brothers would have called me a wimp, she didn’t take her amusement out on me and asked, “Who looks after the vegetable gardens?”

My mouth tightened—I should have anticipated that question. “Staff.” It was a short and brisk answer, but she didn’t seem to think anything of it.

We weren’t ready to share the whole truth with her. Not when she was still so new to this world .

How could I tell her that injured soldiers were the ones who did the grunt work at Caelum? That, as part of their recuperation, they worked here. In the kitchens, in the gardens, teaching… It was considered therapy for them. A means of getting them back on track and healing.

“But Dre looks after this himself?”

“All by himself and he’s done a damn fine job of it.” I pointed to the large plants. “They’re almost ready to harvest. It normally takes eight years.”

“So they’ll be ready when it’s time for you to graduate?”

“Yes. But now, he probably won’t harvest them for a few more years.”

“Why?”

I half-smiled at her. “Reasons.”

One of those being that we wouldn’t be going anywhere until she was old enough to graduate too. One of Dre’s major reasons for disliking her—she just didn’t know that yet.

She huffed.

“Remind me to show you on YouTube how they make tequila,” I said, changing the subject. “Technically, it can only be called that if it’s made in this little area in Mexico. That’s where Dre is from. Jalisco.”

She repeated it, using the same intonation I did on the ‘J.’

“He wants to go back there when he graduates,” I told her.

“He does?” She winced. “I never want to go back.”

“You don’t?”

“My family would never accept me, anyway. When someone leaves, they’re cut from the Order like they died.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear that, but it didn’t make it any less sad. “Do you wish you could see them?”

“No. At least, not at the moment. Maybe when I’m older.”

“Did many people leave?”

“A few over the years. Leave is the wrong word, though. I should have said escaped.”

That made sense. “I’m glad you’re free, Eve.”

Her smile made me feel ten feet tall. “Me too, Eren.” She tilted her head to the side. “Why does Dre want to go back to Mexico? I wouldn’t have said he was homesick. Unless that’s why he’s mean all the time.”

I snorted. “It’s one of the reasons, but he’s not homesick. He’s angry.”

“You didn’t have to tell me that.” She rolled her eyes. “He’s angry all the time.”

“You know what a coyote is?”

“No. Unless you mean the animal. ”

“I don’t.” My lips pursed. “His parents wanted to live in the US, so they paid a coyote to help them cross the border. They left him with his grandmother and promised to send for him when they could. For a long time, he thought they’d abandoned him, but once, when his grandmother got drunk, she told him that they’d been killed by the coyote . There’d been some kind of problem with a cartel—they’re like a group of bad people who are responsible for a lot of crimes in that area—and Dre’s parents ended up dying.”

“He wants revenge?” she guessed, and I nodded.

“Yes. Badly. So badly sometimes I think that’s what makes him so bitter.”

“He’s patient,” she murmured, her eyes taking in the small garden that had taken years of backbreaking dedication to tend to. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

“It’s not a bad thing when it’s aimed at doing some good,” I said quietly.

“Why are you telling me this, Eren?” she asked softly, her gaze cutting to me.

“Because you’re seeing one side of Dre and not the other. I know you don’t like him?—”

“A mutual feeling, Eren.”

I nodded. “Yes, but there’s another side to him.”

“The side that likes to garden,” she stated blandly.

My lips twitched. “Yes. The green-fingered side.”

“That doesn’t make him a nice person,” she retorted. “And the fact he wants to kill someone certainly doesn’t.”

“No. But he’s loyal, and when someone earns his loyalty, there’s nothing he won’t do to protect that person or keep them safe, even if it means doing something that many consider wrong.”

She gnawed on her bottom lip for a second, stared over the plants again, and nodded. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

I barely refrained from laughing at her tone, which was like that of a judge working out whether to sentence someone to death row, but I managed it. Instead, I held out my hand and asked, “Want to go watch TV?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Nothing with blood, guts, or boobs.”

I winked. “You jest, right?”