The Executive Mansion, Norseton, Three Days Later
Keith
“We have many squabbles to resolve, but we will hear all of them,” Nan shouted over the din in the packed gathering hall. Everyone went silent, as they should have. Powerful magic notwithstanding, Nan held a chilly edge of authority in her voice that made even Asher, standing behind Keith, shudder.
As a child, Keith had never seen her cutting such a commanding figure. She’d always come across as something of an eccentric hippie to him. Casual and enigmatic. Always so concerned about people’s feelings. Apparently, in the past few days, Nan had stopped giving a damn about anyone’s feelings. He couldn’t blame her. Lora had been awash with pregnancy hormones and threatening the demise of pretty much everyone in the mansion, Ótama was quietly throwing fits about her unwanted guard, one of the Fallon delegates had shown up full of piss and vinegar and demanding rock star treatment, and then there was the weird aunt no one had ever talked about and who wouldn’t let them find her a comfortable room.
“Not yet,” Aunt Dahlia kept saying.
After five tries, Nan had stopped pressing. She must have figured she’d sort it all out after the meetings, and after her detailed testimony about Magnus Anders. They could only deal with one threat to the clan at a time.
Nan leaned against the lectern positioned in front of the arc of ten chairs on the dais. A representative of a group descended from Ótama’s voyage filled each chair. Dahlia was nervously fidgeting, but Keith couldn’t really blame her for that. He was happy she’d decided to participate.
“I think you folks in the audience are going to get bored really fast,” Nan said into the mic, “but if you want to stick around and see how the sausage gets made, feel free.”
Looping his arms around Keith’s neck, Asher leaned down and put his lips against Keith’s ear. “I like your nan when she’s no-nonsense.”
“I think Nan needs a nap,” Keith muttered back. “Probably hasn’t had one in twenty years.” He gripped Asher’s wrists to keep them in place atop his heart and watched the crowd shift and writhe. Some of the people in attendance obviously doubted their stamina and were opting out for the time being.
He liked that they were leaving. No one had predicted a retinue from Fallon would show up just to observe the ordeal, given their particular distaste for anything having to do with Norseton. The cavernous space was practically standing-room-only. Having so many Afótama and Fallonites in close physical proximity was fucking with his psychic regulation. There were too many stray thoughts and feelings swirling around and unlike with sounds, he couldn’t just plug his ears and make them go away.
And then as the crowd ebbed and thinned, there was a pinprick of familiar energy on the edge of the room. Tentative. Wary. Frightened.
Keith craned his neck and tried to see through the filtering crowd.
There she was. Mallory.
She stood across the room in dark, Norseton red like so many other of the clanspeople who’d recently returned to the fold. They were showing they belonged, in spite of what anyone told them.
She was uncomfortable, though, wringing her hands against her belly. Not looking their way.
Keith gave Asher’s forearm a nudge and tilted his head toward the bank of windows on the other side. “Do you see her?” he murmured.
“Ah. Yes.”
“Go get her.”
“Is she asking to be retrieved?”
“No.”
Asher chuckled. “I see.”
As the crowd resettled, Nan made her way back to the microphone. “There, that’s better. Now I can hear myself think. We may seem disordered, but as the host group, we are obligated to respect the structure and procedures established before us. If your clan has not presented your delegates with complaints to present to the council, please confer with them now. We will reconvene in fifteen minutes. I expect there to be silence when I bang the gavel.”
The room shifted again. People searched in their bags, likely for pens and paper to write down the insults they wished to have resolved. It wouldn’t only be Norseton’s problems they’d be sorting out, but those of other groups, too. All-group councils so rarely convened that when they did, they had to make the most of the time.
Asher delved his way back through the choking throng and pulled Mallory out after him.
She looked hesitant. But before she could say anything, Keith pointed to one of the balcony boxes on the second level of the two-story room that looked down over the proceedings. They couldn’t hide up there, exactly. Everyone on the lower level would be able to see them, but it had a locked door, and no one would be able to overhear them.
“I have keys. Have to take the elevator up there.”
He moved toward the service elevator without waiting for a response. He didn’t look back and accepted that Asher would keep her moving if she lagged. Keith didn’t want to make a scene. The opposite, in fact.
Twirling the key ring around his finger, he watched the elevator door slide shut and braced himself for the box’s lurch.
Mallory stared, wide-eyed at the door, still wringing her hands.
Asher rubbed her back.
Keith didn’t want to say anything yet—not until he was a little farther from the crowd and out of range of psychic eavesdropping.
As the door opened on the second floor, Asher said brightly, “You look lovely in that red.”
Mallory’s brow creased, and she looked down at herself. “Oh. I…think I was dressing on autopilot. Nadia might have bought it over. Not knowing what’s going to shake out with my father, I didn’t want to come, but…”
She didn’t need to finish. They understood. She didn’t want to be there, but she didn’t want anyone to think she was a coward.
She didn’t want to be there, but she didn’t want anyone to think she was guilty of anything except being born to a lawless father.
She didn’t want to be there, but…she had to be.
Asher led her out and toward the locked door of the private box.
Keith followed, staring across the high-ceiling room.
Jody was entering the box on the other side with Lora and Ótama, who was holding April. Tess must have been somewhere in the throng down below with her chieftains.
Keith would have bet his father’s sword that Lachlann skulked somewhere nearby. To be nearly seven feet tall and broad as an offensive lineman, that fairy was a true master of stealth.
He unlocked the door and told Asher, “Don’t bother with the light. No reason to help the nosy assholes down below leer at us.”
Asher surged ahead and righted the chairs that had been left in haphazard arrangements, likely after the ball held for Tess’s ascendance to the queenship. He made room for Keith’s chair and helped him navigate it far enough back from the railing to discourage any stares from down below, and then he locked the door.
Mallory settled onto one of the velvet-upholstered chairs and twined her fingers atop her lap.
Too prim.
Too nervous.
Keith couldn’t stop her from being nervous, but he could, for a moment at least, help her forget why she was.
He extended a hand. “Mallory.”
She gave her head a hard shake. “I-I can’t. If I touch you—”
“If you touch me, our connection will be that much more noticeable on the psychic web and you don’t want anyone to know.”
“No!” She groaned and pounded her fists atop her thighs. “It’s not that. I don’t care about that anymore. Of course people are going to find out. I’ve already swallowed and digested that pill, and I assure you, it went down just fine.”
Oh.
Keith was ready for them to find out. All of them. The idea of nothing else excited him more at that moment.
“Then what?” he asked.
“My father is somewhere in this building, and if he wanted to, he could get into my head. He could get in there and hear every thought, every piece of evidence that—”
Grunting, he thrust his hand out again. “Give me your hand.”
“Were you even listening to me?”
“Of course I was listening. Do you trust me?”
She would have been wholly justified in saying, “Absolutely not, Keith,” but she didn’t. She gave the tiniest of nods.
“I’ll keep him out of your head.”
“You can’t hold my hand forever,” she whispered.
“I won’t need to.”
But if he had to, he would. If holding her hand made her feel safe enough to open up to him and be her whole self, he’d clutch it until his hands were too feeble to grip her.
He tried to soften his rough voice and make it appealing to her. “You can ask me for anything. I’ll help you through this, and you’ll help me.”
“And I’ll help the both of you,” Asher said. He had his feet up on the railing and lounged casually in a chair near the front of the box. From down below, he might have looked like he was patently disrespecting the proceedings, but Keith suspected he was actually doing what he could to block people’s view of Mallory’s face. “I bet that when this is all over,” he said, “half the clan is going to want to hole up for a little while and not show their faces.”
“We’ll recover,” Keith said, truly confident of that. Yes, the council proceedings, which would likely span weeks on and off depending on how much information came to light, were going to wring them all out and make them cynical—and perhaps untrusting of each other. But the web would heal in time, and soon enough, they’d be able to find their equilibrium again. “Let me hold your hand.”
Mallory’s breath came out in a shudder as she placed her hand into his. He actually set hers on his lap to remove the glove he’d neglected before picking it up again. He gave her hand a careful squeeze and brought it to his mouth. Kissing the back of it was more instinct than calculation. He craved her touch, and after so much bullshit on both their parts, she was finally near.
“It’s going to be all right,” he whispered.
“I hope so.”
The proceedings returned to order. Uncle Joe was compiling all the complaints onto a master ledger, and Nan called out the first. The item was a property dispute in need of a juried decision. The first dozen or so were like that. Straightforward and low-angst for the spectators.
Boring, even. Mallory’s restlessness hadn’t ebbed much, but Keith was pushing back against it with some of his own energy. Chasing the fear away. He wasn’t afraid of Dan. She had no reason to be either.
“There’s Marty.” Mallory leaned forward and pointed down to the back corner of the room.
Sure enough, her sister was edging her way into the crowd with her partner at her back.
Marty didn’t look frightened at all. If anything, she looked pissed.
“Oh, God. She has Elliott with her.”
Elliott looked perfectly serene. He strode behind them with his hands in the pockets of his red hoodie sweatshirt, smiling at anyone who looked at him, seemingly unconcerned about whether or not they knew who he was.
Mallory let go of Keith’s hand and leaned onto the railing. She didn’t call down, at least not aloud, but Keith could see Marty stop in the aisle and look directly up at the box.
“Tell them to come up here,” Keith said.
“I did.” Mallory sat back, confused, and retook his hand. “She said she wants to be at eye-level. She’s in a mood.”
Asher snorted. “We’re all in a mood. I take it hers is unique?”
“She’s going to confront him. Maybe I should—” She started to stand, but Asher and Keith both yanked her down.
“If she wants to, let her,” Asher said. “You need to keep some distance between you and Dan.”
“Why?”
“Marty can be bold now in certain ways that you can’t,” Asher explained.
Keith was glad that he was taking point on that task because Keith didn’t have the right words to tell her. He didn’t have the diplomacy to explain that shit. Half the time, he forgot there even were rules. He was operating on instinct. Meanwhile, Asher was an outsider who’d had to study what was normal so that he could fit into it.
“Elliott and Marty aren’t attached to someone in the clan’s inner circle,” Asher said. “They don’t need to concern themselves with certain proprieties. They don’t need to be as discreet about their grudges or who they align themselves with.”
“But…I do?” Mallory asked.
Keith squeezed her hand again. “Shit. I do, too. I’m pretty sure my grandmother has fathomed sewing my lips together to keep me from embarrassing the family.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
He re-laced their fingers and looked at Asher over the top of her head. He had been, in a way, but there was some truth in it. Everyone in Norseton knew him as the wildcard. That would never change. The best he could do was not bring any additional shame onto the family.
Marty and her entourage found seats near the front as Uncle Joe called out the next tier of arguments to be heard.
As time wore on, Mallory became more and more agitated, in spite of the magic Keith tried to push at her. She wasn’t receiving it well, or she was simply too scared, and he didn’t know how to filter her anxiety.
He was starting to feel that sense of unspecified dread, as well, and it sat heavily in his stomach.
Asher whisked around and glared at them both. “Whiskey.”
“What?”
“I’ll call downstairs for whiskey or gin or something. That ought to take off the edge.”
“You don’t want to give me liquor, Asher,” Keith said. “Have you forgotten how belligerent I get?”
Asher already had his phone to his ear. “No, I haven’t forgotten. I’d rather you be cranky and on your A-game than fidgeting and unsettled. This is unlike you.”
“I’m sorry,” Mallory whispered.
“Don’t worry about it,” Keith said. “After today, this shit with your father will be over.”
And they were going to do exactly what Asher said. They were going to go somewhere and hole up until they absolutely had to show their faces again. They wouldn’t answer any doors unless there were new developments with Anders or his lot. They wouldn’t take any calls.
They’d lay in the dark and kiss, touch, and make love until they felt like everything was okay.
That didn’t mean it would be—only that they felt like whatever happened would be endurable.
For the Afótama, that was everything they could hope for.