Five minutes later, my fire-call visitor stood in front of us. He was still wearing Saiman’s clothes, but the face and hair belonged to the man in the fire.
“Yeah,” Derek volunteered. “That’s him.”
Curran examined him, his jaw set. Julie snapped a few pictures. “You didn’t say he was handsome.”
Thanks, just what I needed. “He was handsome, but there was something wrong with him.”
“In what way?” Saiman asked.
“His eyes were . . .” I struggled to describe them. “Cold. Not exactly flat, but remote. It was like looking into the eyes of a gator.”
“Interesting,” Saiman said.
“Does he look like any ancient you know?” Derek asked.
“Nimrod and Astamur are the only ancient humans I’ve met in person,” Saiman said. “They don’t exactly wander about like stray cats.”
I got up. “I’ll be right back. If I come back and our guest is injured, I’ll be very put out.”
Julie opened her eyes as wide as they would go. “Injure? Us?”
I went upstairs and brought the box down. “I need you to look at this.”
Saiman collapsed into his neutral shape and examined the box, lifting the lid with his long slender fingers. “Is this an artifact?”
“It was left on my doorstep.” I told him about the boy burning. The more I talked, the deeper his frown grew.
“To burn a body alive but make the human immune to the pain . . .” he murmured. “How would you even begin to go about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“If this is a message, there should be some way to attribute it. Unless this being’s arrogance is so great, they believe they would be instantly recognized.”
“My aunt indicated the box is a generic way to declare war,” I explained.
“And you found nothing in the box or on the knife?”
“Nothing except this shape.” I drew the symbol for him.
“Arsenic? Curious,” he murmured.
“I have a body for you if you’re still interested,” I told him. “I took one to show my father.” Which was one of the reasons the trip had taken so long. We had to stop by the office and pull the spare out of the freezer.
“I am.”
Curran followed us to the Jeep and carried the body bag wrapped in chains to Saiman’s dark van. Saiman and I watched him.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“We’ve had our ups and downs. We are associates. Sometimes business partners. To your father, I’m a bag of magically potent blood. He chained me in a stone cell with a barred, narrow window. Every day at sunrise your father’s soldiers would walk into my cell and shatter the bones of my legs with a hammer, so he could take full advantage of my regeneration. I couldn’t slow it down. My body would rebuild my bones and make more blood, and every evening the soldiers returned to drain it. I sat in that cell, staring at the sliver of the sky, and I knew nobody was coming for me. I would be there until I died.”
We’d had this conversation before, but I didn’t want to interrupt to remind him.
“Then Curran came and pulled me out of that cell, because you asked him to.” Saiman wouldn’t look at me, his gaze fixed on something distant. “I still have nightmares. There are nights when I keep a light on, as if I were a child. I.”
I pictured him inside his ultramodern apartment, with his lab, his art, and the trappings of his wealth, on the top floor of an enchanted tower, flicking the lamp on. Oh, Saiman.
Saiman glanced at me and there was sharp green ice in his eyes. He didn’t look human. He looked like a creature who had risen from a place where ancient ice never melted.
“I can’t leave the city. If I do, your father will find me. This will never end unless you stop him, so I will do whatever I can to help you.”
Curran stuffed the body into Saiman’s van.
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” Saiman said.
We watched him pull away.
“What do you think that was all about?” Curran asked.
“I think he’s scared of my father. He wants revenge.”
“Think he’ll sell us out?”
“No. Besides, if you can’t trust an ice giant driving a creeper van with a dead body inside, who can you trust?”
Curran chuckled.
“He knows this whole street houses shapeshifters and none of them are his fans. He drove into the mouth of the beast in the middle of the night. Odd. I’m surprised he didn’t call ahead.”
“He couldn’t,” Curran said. “I broke the phone.”
“How?”
“I crushed it.”
I turned and looked at him. Curran prided himself on his control, especially now that he was a father. He didn’t punch walls, break furniture, or scream. Even his roar was usually calculated. As much as I pushed and annoyed him, I had only seen him lose control beyond all reason once. Watching him hurl giant boulders off a mountain was a memorable experience. But he had never broken anything of ours before.
“Why did you smash the phone?”
“I was trying to put Conlan to bed and it kept ringing.”
“That is not okay.”
“I know. It was an impulse.”
“You don’t give in to impulses. What’s going on with you?”
“Who knows.”
“Curran?”
“Your dad is getting ready to attack us, that damn fae assassin is running around in Atlanta, people are being boiled, some ass is sending you boxes with flowers and knives and delegations of screwed-up monsters, our son was crying, and that idiot from Sunshine Realty called again asking if we wanted to sell our house. So, I squeezed the phone and it broke. I’ll buy us a new one.”
“I changed my mind,” I said. “Instead of sparring, let’s go and take a nice long bath while the kid is asleep.”
“Mmm.” His expression took on a speculative tint.
“Although with our luck, he’ll wake up as we go up the stairs.”
“I’ll carry you,” he told me. “It will be quieter.”
“No, it won’t.”
“You stomp like a rhino.”
“I glide like a silent killer.”
His eyes shone. “A cute rhino.”
“Cute?”
“Mm-hm.”
“See, now you’ve sealed your fate. I’ll have to kill you . . .”
He kissed me. It started tender and warm, like wandering through a dark, cold night and finding a warm fire. I sank into it, seduced by the promise of love and warmth, and suddenly it deepened, growing hot, hotter, scorching. His hand slipped into my hair. I leaned against him, eager for the heat . . .
“Get a room!” George called from across the street.
Damn it. We broke apart. Out of the corner of my eye I saw George drop a trash bag into the can. She was grinning.
Golden sparks shone in Curran’s eyes, so bright his eyes glowed. Well, how about that?
“We are going upstairs and taking that bath,” he said. “I’m not too proud to beg.”
Neither was I, and if he kissed me again, he would find that out. “What if our son wakes up and starts banging on the bathroom door while we’re busy in the tub?”
“I’ll threaten to wash him, and he’ll go right back to sleep.”
He took my hand, kissed my fingers, and we went upstairs.
CHAPTER 8
THE PROBLEM WITH having a son who’d discovered he was a shapeshifter was twofold. First, Conlan was a hyperactive toddler. Second, lions are cats, and cats like pouncing. They especially like pouncing on their happily sleeping parents and then bouncing up and down on the bed, flexing their claws.
“It’s six . . .” bounce “in the morning.” Bounce. “I thought . . .” bounce “you hunted . . . in the evening.”