Chapter 6
If it were happening on television or to someone else, Audrey might have laughed. Audrey should have told Tiara about her powers when she’d come to visit. She never should have waited. Audrey had met only a handful of people who had even the smallest psychic abilities since she’d left Las Vegas thirty years ago. Now she was in a room of people sizzling with it, and Tiara was in the middle. With her powers so rusty, she wouldn’t stand a chance against them if they turned on her, but Damian was the one she worried about most. She knew that scent that still lingered on his psyche.
Without her powers, they could easily overwhelm her, but they hadn’t. Still Audrey knew that they were only holding back because they respected and cared for Tiara. Audrey’s status as Tiara’s mother had earned her that much respect, but it wouldn’t last if she fought them harder. Audrey reluctantly nodded to Rianna.
Marcus dropped the dampening effect, and Audrey felt the weight of normality lift. She didn’t reach for her powers, but she knew that they had returned. Rianna reached her healing talent into Damian. Audrey pressed her lips together nervously. If Damian was the threat she thought he was, maybe she could convince the rest of them to fight him once he showed his true colors.
Damian sat up with a groan, and Audrey pulled power to her quietly. Marcus eyed Audrey with a keen suspicion that kept her honest, but if Damian so much as twitched out of line, Audrey was going to go down fighting. Rianna smiled down into Damian’s face, and Audrey wondered how far he’d gotten his talons into their hearts.
It took a groggy few minutes for Damian to recall where he was and what had happened, but as soon as he did, his eyes snapped to Audrey. She watched, coiled to strike at his first pull of power, but he respectfully wasn’t pulling anything she could see. His eyes narrowed.
“Are you okay?” Rianna asked Damian, petting his shoulder.
“I’m fine,” he answered without taking his intense attention off of Audrey.
Damian levered himself to his feet and took a cautious step toward her. His eyes swept her hair, and he searched her face and eyes without a hint of power against her. Audrey kept her eyes haughty and indignant. She also kept her shields hard against any intrusion, not that he probed.
They all waited with their breath caught in their throats. They waited for Audrey to break her word, and Audrey waited for Damian to strike her. Damian took another few steps closer, slowly, but he was still more than fifteen feet away when his eyes cleared with recognition.
“Aureynia?” he asked, his tone polite and respectful.
Audrey turned her eyes away and lifted her chin as she searched for a way to hide her feelings. Anger and confusion warred with a need to strike out against the truth or whatever fiction he might spin out of it. All eyes stared at her now, but Greg was the first to nod.
“She does look an awful lot like the memory of your mother,” Greg noted for them all.
Zack gasped as he made the connection, and the implications smacked him in the face.
“They were identical triplets?” Jordan asked.
Damian’s mother had been one of a set of triplets, but the third triplet, the most powerful of the three was supposed to have died. Then again, Damian was supposed to have died. It all wouldn’t have been nearly as surprising though if Damian, his mother and Aureynia, his mother’s sister, hadn’t been from a parallel world.
“Yes,” Damian told them all, then he dropped to one knee before her. “Please excuse my lack of manners. I am Abbidal’s oldest son.”
“But that would mean that she’s from your world,” Rianna blurted out the obvious, just as Tiara started to come around.
“Who’s from Damian’s world?” Tiara asked still trying to gather why she was sitting on the floor in Jordan’s lap.
“Your mother…” Rianna sputtered, her eyes wide as saucers. “You, for that matter!”
Marcus and Jordan rolled their eyes together, but it was Marcus who strode over to Rianna and clapped a hand over her mouth. “The queen of tact, appearing right here in our living room,” Marcus’s sarcastic joke fell a little flat for Tiara.
“What are you talking about?” Tired of sitting on the floor and looking up at everyone, Tiara pushed to her feet and faced the room of her friends. All their eyes flitted back and forth between Damian, Audrey and herself.
“She’s the lost triplet,” Zack pointed to Tiara’s mother, and Tiara tried to look past her mother to see who he could be pointing to. When it dawned on Tiara that Zack was pointing at her mother, Tiara’s first reaction was to laugh at the joke.
“Okay, who’s been watching too much daytime television?” Tiara chuckled at Zack, but everyone looked so serious, and Damian was only now rising from his knee.
Damian turned with a small smirk and held a hand out to Tiara. “It would seem that we are cousins.”
“Huh?” Tiara could have kicked herself for the stupid response, but the joke was wearing thin.
“Hold on,” Jordan broke in. “Give Tiara a chance to adjust to it. It’ll hit her in a minute.”
“Adjust to what?” Tiara remained stubbornly obtuse.
“Adjust to the fact that my real name is Aureynia, and Damian and I are from the same world,” Audrey finally admitted out loud.
“Thank you,” Damian gave Audrey a nod.
“But if you all know about Damian’s world, then do you also know that he has been marked as an Assassin?” Audrey sneered at Damian. “Whether he is my sister’s son or not, he has been taught to lie, betray and kill. You cannot believe anything he says.”
“Marked?” Damian’s eyes snapped.
“All Assassins are marked, so that Weavers know them on sight and can track the rogues,” Audrey gloated, eager to expose him and whatever lies he’d told them all.
“Of course,” Damian snapped his fingers. “That explains why they could track me so easily. It must have been the tavern owner in Weaverton.”
“No, no, no,” Tiara interrupted. “My mother is not from Damian’s world, much less the lost triplet. That’s absurd. Damian and I are the same age and his mother had him when she was sixteen. My mother was married to my father at twenty-one and didn’t have me until she was twenty-two.
“How could you be a party to this kind of joke, Mom?” Tiara fretted. “It isn’t funny, guys. How are you doing this?”
“Besides, Tiara’s mother is retired,” Rianna protested weakly.
Audrey debated with herself for a moment and then settled on the truth. “I was cast through the portal when I was twelve. A twelve-year-old on the streets of Las Vegas thirty some-odd years ago was unheard of, and I did what I had to do to survive. I lied. After being lied to, I learned fast that lies were common and the only currency I had to use at the time. I used a few glamours and pushes to convince people I was eighteen. After a few false starts, I got a legitimate job stripping in a seedy little club off under the freeway.
“It took me a year to get together enough money and street smarts to get out of Las Vegas and another two years to adapt to a respectable life in Bakersfield and find your father,” Audrey wouldn’t meet their eyes. She didn’t want to see their disbelief.
“You found your mate here?” Damian asked.
“I won’t answer your questions just so that you may use them to enhance your lies, Assassin,” Audrey snapped at Damian.
“Fine, then I’m asking,” Tiara snagged her mother’s eyes with her own and held them.
Audrey squared her shoulders. “My mate was on the other world. I loved your father but he wasn’t my mate.
“I’m surprised that you would tell them so much,” Audrey snarled at Damian.
“I’m not an Assassin,” Damian tried to explain, knowing his protestations were in vain. “I refused their training, but they branded me anyway. Eventually, they managed to exile me to here.”
Audrey probed Damian for the lie she expected to see somewhere in his eyes an
d mind. He didn’t shield against it even when she became rough with her probe. He winced slightly but gave no other outward indication that she’d gone against her word and hurt him.
Maybe her powers were too rusty to pick up the taint of the lie. Maybe he really was better at telling lies than she was at detecting them. He’d have to be more powerful to lie to her. She had no doubt that he had to be stronger than she was. She hadn’t touched her powers in years. She hadn’t needed to.
“But you’re retired,” Rianna protested weakly this time. “You can’t retire until you’re sixty-five or something right?”
“I worked in the school district as a high school teacher,” Audrey let her gaze drift to Rianna, but her mind was on Damian still. “Once Tiara’s father got sick, I took a sabbatical and when he died, I saw no reason to go back. I had other means of income that were easier; and without Tiara or her father looking over my shoulder at finances, I could pretend to retire early.”
“Why strip for money when you could make it yourself?” Marcus interjected.
“I didn’t know any better,” Audrey shrugged. “I thought they had a way to tell, and I was so strictly taught honesty that it literally took a year of the seedy side of this world’s life to teach me otherwise.”
Tiara sat down hard on the back of the couch. Her emotions were numb with shock, so much so that the walls didn’t even threaten to bleed. Jordan walked over to the bar, poured Tiara a drink and returned to plant it in her hand. Tiara stared at the drink dumbly for a moment before she recognized it for what it was. Tiara tilted the drink to her lips and then threw her head back and downed the whole thing.
“I could use one of those,” Audrey gestured to the empty glass and looked at Jordan hopefully.
“I’m not an Assassin,” Damian told Audrey again.
“How many people have your Weavers thrown into our world anyway?” Marcus interrupted the tension between Audrey and Damian.
“You might want to ask yourself what kind of people they’ve been sending here?” Pete pointed out.
That thought was so sobering that they all headed to the bar where Jordan made them drinks to order.
“They’ve been sending the criminals and killers of their society here for thirty years?” Greg whistled through his teeth.
“A lot longer than that,” Audrey admitted. “I’m here because I wouldn’t keep that secret. They’ve been sending the outcasts of their society here for more than three centuries.”
“But why?” Rianna asked.
“That I don’t know,” Audrey took a healthy swig of the fine scotch. “When they realized that I wouldn’t keep their secret no matter the reason, they clammed up. The next day, they banished me to the worst streets of Las Vegas.”