I blushed furiously in the dark. “You’ll one-up Aeson. He’ll think I’m willingly giving you what he tried to take by force.”
“And all the while, I’ll actually be getting nothing except tantalizing glimpses of you in outfits like this.”
“I’ll cover up more if it makes a difference.”
“What would make a difference is if you were sleeping with me for real.”
“That’s not fair either. Not for a few magic lessons.”
“‘A few’?” He laughed again, his voice carrying the kind of incredulity that seemed to amuse rather than upset him. Jesus. Did nothing bother this guy? “My dear, it’s going to take more than ‘a few’ lessons to quell that storm in you, pun intended. Especially with your temper. It’s going to make focus hard.”
I felt indignant. “Hey, I’ve been focusing since I was a kid. I can clear my mind in the middle of a fight to banish spirits. I go to trance in seconds.”
“Perhaps,” he conceded grudgingly. “But I’m still not sure this is fair. You’ll be getting more than lessons. Assuming you are my ‘lover,’ people will be hesitant to assault you. You’ll find your status soaring.”
“Christ. Nothing gets past you, does it? Apparently Volusian and I have a lot more to learn about subterfuge too.”
“Who?”
“My servant.”
“Ah. The sullen one with red eyes?”
“Yes.”
He made a disapproving click with his tongue. “He’s both dangerous and powerful. You’re brave to keep him.”
“I know. I couldn’t send him to the Underworld, so I bound him to me.”
“If I helped you, we could probably send him on.”
The thought astonished me. With Volusian securely in the world of death, I’d probably be a lot safer.
As though reading my mind, Dorian added, “Things will get nasty if he ever breaks loose on you.”
“I know. He tells me on a regular basis—in graphic detail. Still…he’s been useful. I think I’ll keep him around for a while.”
We sat quietly in the darkness again. I realized it must be getting past the castle’s dinner hour. Part of the reason for showing up at this time had been to get invited to dinner. With gentry pride in hospitality, Volusian had thought it would please Dorian to show off his resources, especially since being half-gentry meant I could safely eat in this world now. Finally, a legitimate perk to all this insanity. I half-smiled imagining a hall full of hungry gentry, pounding their silverware on the table. With the way everyone danced around Dorian’s moods, however, I had no doubt they’d wait hours if need be.
“If you’re going to pretend to be my lover, it will involve more than just say-so. You’ve seen how free we are with our affections in public. If you keep ten feet away from me, no one’s going to believe it.”
I froze, suddenly remembering that other dinner. I hadn’t entirely considered the implications.
He chuckled softly, a low and dangerous sound beside me. “Oh, yes, you didn’t think about that, did you?”
He was right. I’d figured Dorian and me disappearing into his bedroom for lessons would be convincing enough. But now I had to picture sitting on his lap, letting him touch me and kiss me. I had trouble with the image. He was one of the gentry, the beings I’d hitherto kept a wary eye on and tracked down my whole life. Discovering Kiyo’s true nature had been a shock to my system, one I was slowly starting to reconcile. How could I handle someone who was completely of the Otherworld?
Yet…the more I hung around Dorian, the easier it became to think of him as just a person. Weird or not, there was something comfortable about being with him. So, yeah. I could handle this. Maybe. It was just a little making out, right? It wasn’t sex. And wasn’t it a small thing to ensure I didn’t tear anyone else apart inadvertently?
“I’m not going down on you or anything,” I warned, using flippancy to cover my discomfort.
He laughed again. “As saddening as that is, it might actually be too much. You’re human enough that they’ll expect some modesty.”
Small blessings. “All right. I’ll hold up my half if you hold up your half.”
“Well, in distribution, I think I’m actually doing three-quarters of the work here. But yes, I’ll do the same. Shall we shake on it? Isn’t that how you humans seal a deal?”
I extended my hand in the darkness, and he took it. Suddenly, he pulled me to him and kissed me. I immediately pulled back, aghast.
“Hey!”
“What? You don’t expect to have our first kiss in public, do you? We want to be convincing, remember?”
“You’re a sleazy bastard, you know that?”
“If you truly believe that, then maybe you’ll feel better finding another teacher.”
I thought about that. Then I leaned forward and tried to find his lips in the darkness. I didn’t realize I was shaking until his hands gripped my arms.
“Relax, Eugenie. This won’t hurt.”
I took a deep breath and calmed myself. Our lips found each other. His reminded me of flower petals, soft and velvety. Whereas Kiyo was all about animal passion and aggression, Dorian seemed more about…precision. I suddenly remembered his metaphor about the difference between slapping paint on a canvas and fine brushstrokes.
Don’t get me wrong, Dorian wasn’t exactly sweet and chaste. There was heat in those soft lips. He seemed to want to draw out the experience, almost in a taunting way, so much so that I found myself impatient and eager when his tongue finally darted in between my lips. He pushed it farther into my mouth, the rest of the kiss intensifying. He smelled like cinnamon and cider, like all the good things in an autumn night. Finally, he pulled away.
“You’re still afraid of me,” he noted, amused by that fact just like everything else. “Your body still won’t relax.”
“Yes.” I swallowed. It had felt good, the kind of good that sends heat down your body and makes your toes—and other parts—curl. But my fear had underscored it all, that fear of gentry and otherness that I still couldn’t quite shake. It was a weird combination, physical pleasure mingling with fear. Very different from the way it was with Kiyo—physical pleasure mixed with a larger, all-encompassing sense of chemistry and mutual affection, despite my unease over his half-kitsune heritage. “I can’t help it. This is all still strange for me. Part of me says it’s wrong. It’s hard to change what I’ve always believed overnight, you know.”
“Do you want to go back on the deal?”
I shook my head. “I don’t go back on my deals.”
I could feel him smiling in the darkness. He leaned over and kissed me again.
Chapter Seventeen
To his credit, he didn’t really manhandle me too badly that night. At dinner, he kept a hand on mine or an arm around my shoulder but little more than that. As he pointed out to me in a quiet moment, anyone could make a brazen display of fleshiness. What really indicated intimacy was how two people interacted with each other, what their body language said. So I worked on looking comfortable and happy in his presence, and from the shocked expressions on people’s faces, we must have done a pretty convincing job.
He took me to his bedroom after that, looking smug and presumptuous to those watching. But when we got there, he actually gave me my first lesson. Honestly, it was a bit disappointing. I’d been ready for fireworks. What I got was a lot of practice on quiet meditation and focus. He claimed if I couldn’t control my own mind, I couldn’t control the power.
So I spent the next couple hours with him working on this and found my most difficult challenge was in not slipping into trance or astral travel. Those behaviors came so automatically to me in still moments that I kept lapsing. The kind of meditation he wanted me to do involved turning my senses outward rather than inward, which seemed strange to me since I had thought magic came from within.
We finally ended the lesson with him giving me a heavy gold ring that he’d put part of his essence into. It was an anchor
. Now if he left the Otherworld through a thin spot, he could transition to mine without appearing in a corresponding thin spot. He would simply travel to wherever the ring was. It would save both of us extraneous travel time.
What it also meant was that he planned on coming to my world for some of the lessons. I had mixed feelings on this. Certainly it would be more convenient for me. But the fact that he could even jump with an anchor like that indicated how powerful he was. That realization was just a teensy bit unsettling, as was the thought of him in the human world at all. And yet, by being there, his powers would diminish. He would be safer—or rather, humanity would be safer.
Back home, the following couple of days were more of the same: fights, fights, and more fights. Yet, as Dorian had predicted, some of the traffic dried up. I liked to think this was because my reputation was scaring would-be suitors away. More likely, my new connection to the Oak King made my assailants think twice about incurring political fallout.
As it turned out, I had to deal with my own share of fallout over this alliance—from Kiyo.
“Are you sleeping with Dorian?”
He stood in my doorway, his dark hair backlit by the late afternoon sun. He wore a white lab coat with KIYOTAKA MARQUEZ, DVM on the pocket. He must have driven here straight from work.
“Good news travels fast,” I said. “Come on in.”
I offered him a drink and a seat at my kitchen table, but he just kept pacing around restlessly. He reminded me of a wolf or a guard dog. I didn’t really know anything about fox behavior.
“Well?” he asked.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and gave him a sharp look. “Don’t take that tone with me. You have no claims to what I do.”
He stopped pacing, and his expression softened. “You’re right. I don’t.”
It wasn’t exactly an apology, but it was close. I sat down in a chair, folding my legs up underneath me. “All right, then. No. I’m not sleeping with him.”
His face stayed the same, but I saw visible relief flash in his eyes. It was petty, I realized, but knowing he’d been jealous made something warm flutter up inside of me.
Grabbing a chair, he turned it around and sat down so that his chin rested on its back. “Then what’s up with the stories?”
I told him. When I’d finished, he closed his eyes and exhaled. A moment later, he opened them.
“I don’t know what bothers me more. You turning to magic or you turning to Dorian.”
I beckoned behind me. “Have you seen my living room? I am not going to be responsible for inflicting Hurricane Eugenie on Tucson.”
That made him smile. “Tucson already deals with Hurricane Eugenie on a regular basis. But yeah, I get your point. What worries me…I don’t know. I don’t really use magic, but I’ve spent half my life around people who do. I’ve seen how it affects them. How it can control them.”
“Are you questioning my self-control? Or my strength?”
“No,” he replied in all seriousness. “You’re one of the strongest people I know. But Storm King…I saw him once when I was little. He was…well, let’s put it this way. Dorian and Aeson and Maiwenn are strong. Compared to other gentry, they’re like torches beside candles. But your father…he was more like a bonfire. You can’t use that kind of power and walk away unscathed.”
“I appreciate the warning, Gandalf, but I don’t know that I have a choice.”
“I guess not. I just don’t want to see you changed, that’s all. I like you the way you are.” A smile flickered across his lips and then faded. “And as for working with Dorian…well, that just makes the situation worse.”
“You sound jealous.”
“Of course.” He answered without hesitation, not really ashamed to fess up to his feelings. “But he’s power-hungry too. And he wants to see the Storm King conquest happen. Somehow I doubt he’ll be content to have you be his pretend-lover for long.”
“Well, hey, remember I’ve got a choice in there too. Besides, contraceptive technology is a wonderful thing, right?”
“Absolutely. But Maiwenn says—”
“I know, I know. All sorts of wise and compelling things.”
Kiyo eyed me warily. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just that I think it’s funny for you to talk to me about Dorian when—”
“When what?”
I set down my cup of coffee and looked him in the eye. “Honesty again?”
He returned my stare unblinkingly. “Always.”
“You two seemed…more than chummy. Is there anything going on between you? Romantically, I mean?”
“No.” The answer came swift and certain.
I reconsidered. “Was there anything going on?”
This got a hesitation. “Not anymore,” he said after a moment.
“I see.” I looked away and felt my own wave of jealousy run through me as my cruel mind pictured him and that beautiful woman together.
“It’s over, Eugenie. Has been for a while. We’re just friends now, that’s it.”
I glanced up. “Like you and I are friends?”
His lips turned up wickedly, and I saw the temperature in his eyes dial up a few degrees. “You can call it whatever you want, but I think we both know we aren’t ‘just friends.’”
No, I supposed not. And suddenly, after so much time with him and the fact that I’d made out with a full-fledged gentry, Kiyo being a kitsune wasn’t really a problem anymore. The lines that organized my life had all blurred. That scared me because I wanted Kiyo, and suddenly I had no excuses standing in my way. And honestly, I realized, it was a lot easier having excuses. Excuses meant you didn’t have to work or open yourself to someone else and be vulnerable. If I really wanted to be near and with Kiyo now, I was going to have to look beyond sex. Sex was easy—especially with him. What was going to be hard was remembering how to get close to someone and trust him.
I looked away, not wanting him to see the fear on my face, but he already had. I don’t know what it was about him, but sometimes he seemed to know me better than I knew myself.
He stood up and moved behind me, his hands kneading the kinks in my neck and shoulders. “Eugenie,” was all he said, voice warm.
I relaxed into him and closed my eyes. “I don’t know how to do this.” I referred to him and me, but considering the rest of my life, that statement could have applied to any number of things.
“Well, we stop fighting, for one. Let’s drop this other stuff and go out.”
“Now? Like on a date?”
“Sure.”
“Just like that? Is it that easy?”
“For now. And really, it’s only as easy or hard as we choose to make it.”
We took Kiyo’s car, a pretty sweet 1969 Spider, to one of my favorite restaurants: Indian Cuisine of India. The name sounded redundant, but the latter part of it had been a necessary addition. Considering all the local restaurants that served Southwest and American Indian cuisine, a lot of tourists had come in expecting to find Navajo fry bread, not curry and naan.
The tension melted between us—the hostile kind, at least—though he did have one pensive moment in which he asked, “All right, I have to know. Is it true you kissed him?”
I smiled enigmatically. “This is as easy or hard as we choose to make it.”
He sighed.
After dinner, he drove us out of town but wouldn’t say where we were going. Almost forty minutes later, we were driving up and around a large hill. Kiyo found an area with other cars but saw there were no spots left, forcing him to drive back down and park a considerable distance away. Twilight was giving way to full night, and it was hard to find the path up the hill with no lighting. He slipped his hand in mine, guiding me. His fingers were warm, his grip tight and secure.
It took us almost a half hour, walking until the path finally crested to a small clearing. I hid my astonishment. It was filled with people, most of whom were setting up telescopes and peering up at the clear,
star-thickened sky.
“I saw this advertised in the paper,” Kiyo explained. “It’s the amateur astronomy group. They let the public come out and hang with them.”
Sure enough, everyone there was more than happy to let us come and look through their telescopes. They pointed out sights of particular interest and told stories about constellations. I’d heard a lot of them before but enjoyed hearing them again.
The weather was perfect for this kind of thing. Warm enough to not need jackets (though I still wore one to hide weapons) and so perfectly clear that you could forget pollution existed. The Flandrau Observatory, over at the university, had fantastic shows, but I loved the casual nature of this one.
While listening to an older man talk about the Andromeda galaxy, I thought about just how vast our existence really was. There was so much of it we didn’t know about. The outer world, the universe, spread on forever. For all I knew, the inner world of spirits continued on just as far. I only knew about three worlds: the world we lived in, the world the dead lived in, and the Otherworld, which caught everything in between. A lot of shamans believed the divine world was beyond all of this, a world of God or gods we couldn’t even imagine. Looking up at that snowstorm of stars, I suddenly felt very small in the greater scheme of things, prophecy or no.
Kiyo shifted beside me, and I felt his arm brush mine. My body kept an exact record of where we touched, like some sort of military tracking system. He caught my eye, and we smiled at each other. I felt at peace, almost deliriously happy. For this moment, all was right in the world between us. Maybe I’d never fully understand what pulled two people together. Maybe it was like trying to comprehend the universe. You couldn’t measure any of it. It just was, and you made your way through it as best you could.
“Thank you,” I told him later, as we walked back down the hill toward the car. “That was really great.”
“I saw the telescope at your house—er, what was left of it anyway.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Being up here had sort of taken me away from reality. I’d forgotten that my home was in a state of disaster. “Mine couldn’t really compare to any of these. Maybe I’ll have to upgrade now.”