When the water had cooled, I grabbed a towel, emptied the tub, dried off, and when I was sure I was covered, stepped out into my bedroom. Ren was on my bed, leaning back, his eyes closed. He breathed deeply.
I smiled. I grabbed my pajamas and dressed as quietly as I could. He didn’t stir, but he didn’t look comfortable. His arms were crossed over his chest, and a pained, not relaxed, expression was over his face. I padded toward him. The first thing that had to happen was his shoes needed to come off.
I untied them and slipped them off his feet, setting them to the side. His eyes opened to slits. “Hi, sorry. Don’t be mad. I fell asleep.”
“Why would I be mad? I’m trying to get you more comfortable.”
He closed his eyes again. “I said we’d hang out.”
“Well, we kind of are. Scoot under the covers for me.”
He did as I asked, and then I got in on the other side. Ren was bigger than Wayne, Neil, and Lennon. He took up more space in the bed, which was fine. It was kind of cozy.
I picked up my book and started reading. The bath had relaxed me enough that I only jumped a little every time the thunder assaulted the night.
I’d managed to read half a page when Ren rolled over. He opened his eyes just long enough to take my book away, set it aside, and blow out the lamp next to the bed. “Ignoring it doesn’t work. What we have to do is decide we don’t care.”
“Thank you for the we, but I don’t think you’re afraid of the lightning.”
With his eyes still closed, he grinned. Every few seconds the room would light up from the lightning. “Close your eyes.”
“I’m not going to sleep.”
“Didn’t say you were.” He patted his shoulder. “Come on, lean here. Eyes closed.”
I did as he said in terms of location, but I kept my eyes firmly open. He was warm, so there was that at least. His hand came around me, his fingers running circles on my shoulder. “My parents didn’t believe in medicine or traditional ways of managing anything. It was good and bad. They killed themselves with the wrong mushrooms. That being said, everything they said wasn’t totally ridiculous.” He pressed lightly on my shoulder, a little bit firmer than he had before. “We all have spots on our bodies that can help relieve tension. Help to release some of the tension that builds up in us during certain circumstances. Like sometimes being scared of something can be sort of a habit, and our body reacts the same way to the same stimulus because it is used to doing so.”
“Tell that to my body. I do this every storm.” And as interesting as it was to understand the why of things, I was in for a long night.
“Change the feelings.” He lowered his hand, rubbing further down my arm. “Close your eyes.”
With his eyes closed, I wondered how he knew that mine were open. Still, I did as he said. Ren rolled over until he was on top of me. Even with my eyes closed, I knew what was going to happen.
I could have said no. I didn’t.
Ren’s mouth met mine, gentle at first, but then he increased the pressure.
Keeping my eyes closed, I stroked the side of his cheek, letting my hand run down his face. He sighed. “Kissing. Lightning could mean kissing.”
“Ren.” I had to at least tell him what I’d told Lennon and Neil. I needed my eyes open to do so. I lifted my lids. “I’m sorry to do this now. I told this to Neil and Lennon too, that…”
He interrupted me. “I know. You have feelings for all of us. But it can’t go past light weight. We’re leaving. Neil keeps things to himself, but Lennon leads with truth out loud. It’s okay. Better we all talked about it. Can I admit I got a bit of a thrill that it was all of us? I thought maybe you didn’t like me because of the horn issue.”
I took my fingertips and pointed them off my forehead to him. “Maybe I have hidden horns.”
He grinned. “A little kissing, and then I’ll keep my hands to myself. When I go, you won’t be left broken. I’d never hurt you like that. Not on purpose. I promise. We’ll do this your way.”
Ren was magic.
8
His kisses were soft, and his weight above made me feel as though anything that came through the door wouldn’t get to me that evening. The lightning and thunder were just background noise against the sounds of our lips joining and the little sighs that he made every so often. His long, black hair tickled my skin and added to the jolts of pleasure traveling through my body.
“Mika.” He kissed my chin. “I’m going to stop now. I don’t want to. But this is as far as I can go if we aren’t going any further. I think. I’ll just leave it at that. Okay?”
I nodded. In this case, I was going to follow his lead. He really had made me forget about the storm outside. Apparently, all five of them knew how I felt, and at least three of them were fine with it. This was a bizarre turn of events. I hadn’t anticipated being in a situation with five men who were not my Guards, who were just passing through my life. And they were all sort of enamored with me, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
Maybe this sort of thing happened to other women… but not Sisters.
He wrapped me against him. The lightning and thunder were still present, but I just didn’t care. I was safe in his arms.
With my back to his stomach, we snuggled in the darkness. He kissed my neck. “Get some sleep.” His hand settled over my stomach. He whispered in my ear, “Do you dream?”
“Yes. But most of the time, I hate it.” I didn’t know if I’d ever said that aloud before.
He shifted slightly and drew me even closer to him. “Why?”
“I was trapped in my mind when I was cursed. I don’t even know how I got here. They found me at the gate. But I tend to spend at least a part of every dream back there. I don’t know if I’m still partly cursed or if it’s just what my mind does because it’s all kinds of angry at me. I visit there. I hate it.”
Ren kissed the back of my neck. “I’m sorry. I asked you because I’ve been wondering what a Sister dreams about. A world without demons, maybe.”
“Ah, in a world without demons, I wouldn’t have this job. I could just be a woman who had a normal life. I could go places, see things.” Not potentially be responsible for separating families. “Tell me about where you are going next. Or do you guys just figure it out as you go along?”
He was so quiet I wondered if he’d fallen asleep. When he spoke, it was no more than a whisper. “We keep moving orth. We’ve been east, about as far as we planned to go. The idea is to go north until we hit the coastline. Follow it back down and back to Peter’s. A few years then home again.”
“How many years have you been doing it now?”
“Two.” Part of his hair fell onto my shoulder. It tickled, and I grinned.
His hair was vanilla scented. I wondered if he used the shampoo that Daniella made. I didn’t like it. My hair was thick, and I didn’t find that it really cleaned it, so I made my own. But everyone else used Daniella’s. She must have put some in the guesthouse.
“Best place so far?” I had visions of waterfalls, sunsets, and blue skies. But maybe those places didn’t really exist. They might just have been part of my imaginings. Or maybe they had or would in another time. Just not ours.
“Pretty great to be at a Sisterhood, lying in the dark with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, who also somehow manages to kill demons and keep us all safe. Oh, I got to kiss her for a while. That was pretty amazing, too.”
I smiled. That was a great answer, but it didn’t give me anything to daydream about the next time I was trekking through the mud from one house to another, as I would—for the rest of my life. “When you get done, when you finish your adventures, someday, will you somehow send me a note? Through one of those delivery carriages. Tell me what the best place was.”
He lifted himself up on one elbow. “I already did tell you.”
“With years ahead of you, there will be something you can write to me about.”
I turned slightly to look at him,
and his smile was small. “Something I’ve discovered on this trip is that there is pretty much nothing prettier than Peter’s. In terms of landscape. Most of what I see in the world around here is barren, nearly dead. People are hurting. There’s more to fix than can possibly be done. What I like is meeting new people, seeing if I can help them, learning what they know. And nothing is ever going to be better than this moment.”
Until someday, when he was back home, married, and holding the woman he’d spend his life with in the dark. I pushed that thought away. No one was promised forever. The best I could do was live in this moment.
He kissed my shoulder. “Believe me?”
“I do.”
Ren lay back down. “Good. Time for sleep. And no bad dreams. I refuse to allow it.”
I smiled. If only the world could run based on Ren’s pronunciation alone. I closed my eyes. Darkness came, sweeping me away from the storm raging outside. I had no dreams I could remember at all.
Daniella’s daughters had shut themselves away from the world for a long time. But here they were, the three of them, in the guesthouse. I considered it a huge step for them.
They were quiet and shifted around a lot in their seats. They’d been like this since I met them, although Anne said they’d been more boisterous when the girls first arrived. It was hard to live in this Sisterhood, constantly under assault. My childhood may have been silent, but I’d been safe.
Of course that had been because Katrina had some deal with the demons. Or she was one.
Alexander hummed to himself. He was happy to have their company. Now that we’d gotten through the learning to read stage, he was really blossoming.
The girls were doing math, the subject I’d been least proficient at in school. They were tremendously good students and took little instruction, which was wonderful since I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be able to give them any. We needed Teagan back, soon. She was a better teacher than me.
Jayne, the youngest of the three girls lifted her head. “She’s not.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure what she meant.
She waved her hand, and her sisters both side-eyed her. Something was going on. She smiled. “Nothing.”
It was obviously not nothing. I sat forward. “Jayne…”
Gordon walked through the door slowly. He leaned on the frame, and when I made eye contact with him, he nodded. “Ladies. Alexander. Am I interrupting?”
I didn’t know if he’d met Daniella’s daughters yet, so I quickly made introductions. All three girls rose, said hello, and scampered from the room as though they ran for their lives. I sighed.
“Something I did?” Gordon stepped toward me, having jostled out of the way to let them through.
Alexander shook his head, answering for me. “No, something scared them and they won’t tell anyone what. They just get scared of everything and everyone. They were here for two hours. It’s a big day.” Alexander rose to his feet. “Can I be done, Sister Mika?”
I would have loved another hour of time with the kids. “Sure.”
He grinned. “Thanks.”
Alexander rushed out of the library to go do I didn’t know what. The boy was always busy. I wondered if I’d ever been that kind of young. This was okay. The girls were way ahead and Alexander was learning more every day.
“I didn’t mean to scare them.”
I shook. “It really wasn’t you. We’re trying to draw them out bit by bit. We don’t know what happened. It could be anything.”
He walked toward me. “Is it okay for me to read the books in here?”
It was such an unexpected question. “Sure. I mean, of course you can. Books are for everyone. Read anything you like.”
“No Sisterhood secrets I can’t know?” He pointed at the shelves.
The only things we kept secret anymore had to do with co-joining, and that was because we didn’t want Katrina to know about it. “Nothing here you can’t know.”
“Great.” He came closer to my table. “I’ve had a headache for three days. I don’t know why I want to start reading, but I do. I’ve always loved to.”
“You and me both.” I rose and walked toward him. Gordon grew very still as I approached. Out of all of them, he liked me the least, which was not to say that he disliked me completely. Gordon, as far as I could tell, wasn’t sure what to do with me. He was so handsome that he took my breath away.
My powers weren’t turned on, so his headache wasn’t demon related. I placed a hand on his forehead. He was cool. No fever; that was good.
He didn’t flinch away from my touch. Instead he held eye contact like he owned the right to do so. I couldn’t look anywhere but into his deep brown-eyed depths. When I moved my hand, he grabbed it in his. His fingers were so much bigger than my own. I stared at them for a second. “Wanted to make sure you weren’t sick.”
“Not sick. Just headachy. Can’t really explain it.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not going to kiss you. I just wanted you to know that.”
“Well… okay.” I wasn’t really sure what to say about that. The guys had talked. They knew I’d admitted to being attracted to all of them. Gordon was under no obligation to feel that way about me. “I don’t expect you to. Or to want to or…” I quit talking. There wasn’t a good thing to say. I pulled at my hand.
“I’m not going to kiss you because, like you, when I leave here, I have to not be broken. When Lennon said that was your thinking, I understood it completely. So we’re not going to be friends that kiss. We’re just going to be friends.”
I nodded, this time pulling my hand back. “That’s fine.”
“But I would like us to be friends. Things are awkward with us. Much more so with me than with the others. I’m hard on new people. I know that. I’ve only ever trusted the four of them and my father. Being so interested in you scares me a bit, and I’m not easily rattled. I’d like to know what it is about you that is so… enticing.”
I shrugged. “I can’t answer that for you. Maybe that you met me first? All of you were pretty much alone with me for a while. If Anne had answered the gate, maybe she’d be of more interest.”
Gordon walked to the bookshelves. “I don’t think so.”
I wanted to read the history of Sisters taking babies, and I was going to even if every hair on the back of my neck stood at attention, thanks to this incredibly awkward conversation with Gordon.
I supposed I could ask him why he thought he was interested, but maybe the less said the better. If we had to speak, perhaps I should completely change the subject.
Why was I the one being made uncomfortable in this moment? I hadn’t done anything wrong. Had I?
“Maybe we should focus on you. Why is it that I’d be interested in you? Let’s dissect it.” I put down my book. “Then I can disagree with whatever it is that you suggest. Just so we can be really discomfited right now.”
He turned around, his lip twitching. “I made you mad.”
I pointed right at him. “As you intended.”
“Easier to stay away from you when you’re angry.” He grabbed a book then sat at the table.
“Then why come in here at all? Why not ask Anne or Daniella or even Krystal about the library? Why come when I’m here if you want to stay away from me?” Now that I had opened my mouth and let the beast that was my temper loose, I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to swallow it again.
He stretched out his long legs, slightly bumping mine under the table before he moved them. “You’re like a flame, and I’m a moth. I can’t stay away. I told you. I want to be friends.”
Well, I wouldn’t mind being friends. I looked at my book. But I wasn’t done. “I’m not a flame. I’m not doing anything to you to draw you in here. You can stay away from me if you want to. Just because I told Lennon and Neil I was attracted to all five of you, that in no way obligates any of you to feel the same.”
Gordon rubbed his eyes. “I’d have to be dead to not be attracted to you, Mika. Just when I t
hink I’ve memorized every facet of your face, you make another expression, and I realize something asinine like I hadn’t really memorized how high your cheekbones are. And I think you would kill me. I think if I let myself, I would fall into feelings for you that I’d never get over. You have five fated people out there, and despite the fact that there are five of us, we are not your Guards. I’ve never even held a sword.”
I held out my hand. “I am not holding auditions for the roles. I know you’re not my Guards. There is a very typical way the Guard-Sister relationship works, and it just didn’t work out that way for me. Fine. Why are we discussing this? Again?”
I got to my feet. I was outright yelling, and it was better to do that from a standing position than in my seat. He jumped to his own. Gordon towered over me, and yet, I wasn’t at all intimidated by him.
“I can’t fall for a woman who is bound to other people. Even if I could get over the idea of having to share you with them, which surprisingly doesn’t bother me as much as I would have imagined it would, I can’t go into a relationship knowing you have divinity-destined soul mates who might show up at any moment.”
Fair enough. “Why are we shouting?”
“Because I have been kind of hard on you, distant, and then I came in here and poked at you. Apparently, you have a temper I hadn’t seen yet. So we’re yelling.”
I sat back down, the fight fleeing out of me. “Okay, I’m going to stop.”
He took his own seat and opened his book. As I read the history of educating Sisters, none of which had any suggestions other than taking the kids and raising them at the Sisterhood, I realized how little we knew about the history of our Sisterhood. At what point had the Sisterhood even started? It couldn’t have always been. Sisters came to fight the end of days. It hadn’t always been this way.
I raised my head to stare at Gordon. He chewed on his bottom lip while he read. The lips that would not be kissing mine. I hadn’t been lying when I said I hadn’t given that a thought at all. In no way had I expected to be kissed, but now that he’d told me it wouldn’t be happening, I wasn’t at all okay with the idea of it never happening. His lips were thick, and I wanted to run my tongue on them.