"Well, you'll still be walking back here all by yourself," Geoffry answered, not quite ready to give in.
Caleb was over sixty, slightly stooped, with thick silver hair. He seldom spoke but had a presence that made people to stop and listen when he did. He looked at Geoffry in mild displeasure.
Geoffry sighed, walked to the door, and jerked his cloak off the hook. He grabbed Aria's as well as she emerged from the kitchen. Leesil ushered all three out into the night.
Magiere went to sit on the hearth's edge. Her knees up in front of her, she reached out to where Chap lay nearby and stroked between the hound's tall ears. Chap rolled his head to lick her hand. His silver-blue fur was soft, and his clear eyes seemed to express sympathy, as if he understood her suffering. A foolish thought, and Magiere shook it off.
"Are you all right?" Leesil asked, walking toward her. He pulled the tied scarf from his head, shook his long white-blond hair loose, and scratched at his scalp for a moment.
Stupid question. She didn't answer.
"It had to happen eventually," he said. "I've been waiting for it, though you hadn't really thought it through until today. And it won't be the last time. Word is spreading. Maybe some of them are going to want help… and some of them…" He paused, seeming hesitant to finish. "Well, some might offer a great deal of money."
"We don't need their money!" she responded.
It was a lie. She knew it and so did he.
"Yes, right, of course we don't," he said, mockingly agreeable. "But for the moment, I'm not talking about us, and you know it."
Leesil crouched on the floor in front of her, bringing them face-to-face.
Amber eyes just slightly almond shaped, and not as slanted and large as Loni's, stared back at her from under thin white-blond eyebrows. Magiere wanted to look away but wouldn't. It was so hard to look him in the eyes without memories surging into her thoughts-frightening and bloody memories. She wanted to see no more pain on his face and no more scars on his body. Her gaze drifted down to his wrist and then back up.
Even with his thin-lipped mouth always on the verge of a wry smile, he seemed almost sad-or perhaps bitter.
"Loni may be rude," Leesil continued. "But some of what he said is true. I burned that warehouse down and… I'd do it again without a second thought-given the same need."
Magiere remembered nothing of their flight from the warehouse, when Leesil had set the building on fire to cover their escape. But from what she'd later learned, he'd been rather thorough and zealous in executing that chosen task. They'd tried to take the family of undeads in their underground tunnels beneath the building. The heated memory of fighting Rashed flashed unwanted into her head. She'd been in bloodlust, her dhampir nature consuming her with hate and hunger as she fought with the warrior vampire. Then his longsword sliced through the side of her throat, and she collapsed into darkness.
There was no memory of how Leesil had gotten her out of there. The only thing she did remember was awaking to Leesil healing her by feeding her blood from his own wrist-and wanting him to go on and never stop.
The start of a cold sweat broke out across Magiere's skin, and nausea rose in her stomach. She swallowed hard, not wanting Leesil to notice.
"Miiska now suffers for what I did," he continued with a shrug. "There is a chance to make amends. Plus maybe something for ourselves. The payment will be made to you, not the town, regardless of what that letter implies. And a rebuilt warehouse run by the town doesn't mean we can't get a piece of it for having funded the whole thing."
His schemes aside, Magiere couldn't believe what she heard, and then realization struck her.
"You want to go. You want to do this."
He dropped his head until his long hair hung forward around his face and across his ear tips.
"No. It's not about what I want. I don't see how we can refuse."
"Easy, I just did. Or weren't you listening in the kitchen?"
Leesil rubbed his temple with one hand, pushing his hair back and letting it fall again like a curtain.
"You want to stay here and have us run this business forever? Fine. What if things continue the way they're going in Miiska? Where's our business going to come from with no spare coin in anyone's pocket? What happens to Karlin and Geoffry? To Aria and her family? How are we even going to pay Caleb enough to properly care for little Rose?"
Magiere couldn't see Leesil's expression hidden behind his hair, and a numb feeling crept through her. There was more behind his words than Miiska's welfare. He'd never wanted the Sea Lion in the first place. She'd purchased it on her own, and he'd fought her, conceding in the end only when she wouldn't change her mind. Now it seemed his mind was changing. She leaned against the stones of the hearth.
"If you want to do this," she returned, "then be honest about it and stop hiding behind concern for the town."
Leesil's head jerked up, anger plain on his face.
"It's not that way, and you know it!" He dropped onto one knee, bringing him close enough to lean his hands against the hearth's ledge to both sides of her legs. "You're just trying to make it simple enough to ignore, and it's not."
Magiere was forced to look him in the eyes again.
Leesil leaned farther toward her, and Magiere's whole body tensed.
He turned, pushing his side between her knees as he settled to the floor between her feet and leaned slowly backward. It took several breaths as he settled there with his back toward her, coming closer to contact with her, until Magiere realized she wasn't breathing at all. She took a slow breath, forcing her limbs to stop shaking.
His weight against her was no more than a feather quilt at first; then it settled warm and firm as the back of his head came to rest against her breastbone.
"Nothing is that simple for us," he said quietly.
His body felt slender, warm, and solid. She'd spent so much time watching over him every moment after the final battle, tending his needs to be sure he survived. Though she'd stripped, bathed, and bandaged him, and did whatever else was necessary to keep him recovering, they'd not touched like this, both of them fully aware of the other.
She could smell his hair, filled with forest scent, lavender soap from an afternoon bath, and remnants of ale, pipe smoke, and other lingering scents of a night in the tavern. He was still and quiet, pressed against her. Her gaze traced down his flaxen hair running across the front of her dress and his own shoulders. Instinctively, she lifted her hands to rest on his shoulders, and then her gaze fell on his left arm against her thigh.
Shirtsleeve loose, it exposed the wrist sheath holding his remaining slivery stiletto strapped to his forearm. Just below the downward-pointed hilt were the scars on his wrist.
Memory boiled into Magiere's mind, calling back her first waking awareness after flight from the burning warehouse. Blood filled her mouth, running across her tongue, and bringing life into her body as she swallowed.
Leesil's blood.
She remembered her teeth set into the wrist he'd slashed open in order to feed her. He'd straddled her on the bed and pressed that wrist against her mouth until running blood awakened her. In those early days in Miiska, she'd already begun to think more on him each day, and that fixation mingled in her hunger. He was right above her, and her teeth sank deeper into his flesh as she pulled him close.
He was so warm, so near that everything she felt might have been poured from him right into her. And she was killing him. Had Brenden not been there to pull him away…
From that moment, part of her became linked to the world of the undeads she'd destroyed. She was a danger to those she cared for, and deadly to the one closest to her. Leesil never saw this, would never accept it. Magiere didn't know which horrified her more-what she was, or what she could do to him if she ever became a dhampir fully again.