“I meant species-wise.”
“Oh.” She thought about it a minute. “Mostly, he smells human, but not human. Know what I mean?”
“Uh, no.”
“Vampires carry this undertone of humanity in their base scent. It sours over time, but it’s still present, even on fledglings. Decay starts as soon as they turn. Corbin smells like you, but not like a necromancer, and like a vampire, but not a dead human.”
“As confused as that explanation makes me, I’m guessing inhaling it would also give a cadaver dog pause.”
“Probably.” She snickered. “They’re not exactly gwyllgi to know the difference, are they?”
Linus returned with a steaming mug he raised to Lethe. “Can you run this up to Corbin?”
Nose wrinkling, she reached for it. “Sure thing.”
Arm extended as far as it would go, she couldn’t run up the stairs fast enough.
Eager to get out of my head for a few blocks, I turned to Linus. “Do we patrol, or do we run away?”
Locks snicked on the front door, and I realized my mistake, but by then Woolly had latched the windows too.
“I’m kidding,” I told her. “It was a joke.”
The old house was not amused, and she refused to budge.
We were locked in for the night thanks to me and my big mouth.
“There’s more than enough to keep us occupied in the basement,” Linus pointed out.
Basement access had been a tender spot between us, but relationships were built on trust, and he had earned mine ten times over.
“That works.” I massaged the base of my neck. “I wanted to stretch my legs, but it’s probably smarter to stay home considering we have an unexpected guest.”
The chandelier in the foyer dimmed with Woolly’s suspicion that I had accepted being grounded so well.
Little did she know alone time with Linus was far from a punishment.
The lock on the basement door got thirsty from time to time, and tonight it must have been parched. That, or it tasted the remnants of old blood on my hand from where I pricked my finger to give Oscar a boost and got a hankering for more. I had to reopen the cut, stick the persnickety brass key in the lock, and bleed liberally on both before I could twist the knob.
“That never gets easier,” I grumbled.
“Paying a tithe never does,” Linus said, then took my hand, turning it over in his. He knew better than to offer to take away the pain, and it was too minor for a healing sigil. Before I could tell him so, he guided my finger into his mouth and swirled his tongue across the hurt. “Better?”
I managed a whimper.
“Grier?” He caught me around the waist as my knees liquified. “What’s wrong?”
“Her ovaries exploded,” Lethe called from the living room, having returned from her errand in record time to torment me. “I heard the blast from here.”
“How do you know what happened?” I yelled back at her. “You don’t have super vision.”
“I smell blood, and I heard you gasp, all breathy-like. It wasn’t hard to figure out what you’re up to back there.”
Linus’s cheeks managed to redden within a shade of his hair. “Oh.”
“No, no, no.” Lethe cackled. “It was more like Oooh, Linus.”
I died on the spot. I was dead. Done. That’s how it felt anyway.
“I’m just going to…” I indicated the open door leading downstairs. “Uh, basement.”
The claustrophobic press of a starless night sky swirled around me as I descended into what had been Maud’s private sanctuary. The walls closed in on me, the maw as cruel as my cell in Atramentous, the abyss ready to swallow me whole.
Usually, I darted straight through the enchantment that discouraged nosy visitors to the bottom. Tonight, I lingered in the magical gloom while my blood cooled from Lethe’s taunting.
The problem with hiding in absolute darkness is no one can see where you’re standing.
Linus bumped into me, and I stumbled down a few steps. He caught me in a steely grip and lifted me back onto the stair below his. “I thought I gave you enough time.”
“You did,” I panted, clinging to him now that I had lost my sense of place. “I was dragging my feet.”
More certain in the dark than me, he took my hand and escorted me into the library.
The spell dissipated on the lowest stair, and Woolly flicked on the lights, her consciousness hovering.
“We’re not going to jailbreak,” I assured her. “There’s no way out of the basement.”
Unconvinced, she settled in to watch us start cataloging the treasure trove that was Maud’s life’s work.
“This is where we left off.” Linus dropped a box onto the research table where we had taken our lessons with Maud. “Do you want to skim or sort?”
“You read faster.” I pulled out the chair for him. “I’ll sort. I want to burn off some of this energy.”
Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined the walls. Scrolls and books and pamphlets overflowed the shelves. We had never paid much attention to the upper rows. I say we, but Linus would have asked about them. She must have kept their contents to herself since he appeared as overwhelmed by the process as me.
Necromancers lived a long time, and we accumulated a lot of junk during those years. People like Maud, the academics, the innovators, collected more than most. Their private thoughts carried weight, and she had safeguarded every single handwritten note by sealing it in the library, the lab, or her private office.
“These are letters from her former lovers.” Linus tossed a packet of envelopes bound with twine on the table. “I would rather not read those if it’s all the same to you.”
Wrinkling my nose at the content, I lifted them with a fingernail hooked through the knotted bow.
I didn’t want to read about more of her exploits in graphic detail. Once was plenty. More than enough. We had stumbled across enough love notes between her and her beaus to realize she enjoyed describing her sexual encounters down to her partners’ recovery time.
A few of the racier excerpts included sketches and read like instruction manuals for new hires.
It was more than any child ever needed to know about a parent.
“I’ll file these under Naughty,” I said, wishing for hand sanitizer, “and we’ll keep going.”
“We’re within two years of when your mother arrived in Savannah,” he offered. “We’re getting closer.”
The goal was to reach the point when Mom and I showed up on Maud’s doorstep. The hope was we could determine if Mom had written to Maud about her condition—or mine—prior to her arrival. Then we could read forward, absorbing Maud’s observations over the years in the hopes we could learn what she had discovered and build our knowledge base on hers.
“Are we not going to talk about Corbin?” Linus asked into the quiet. “You must be reeling.”
With my back to him, I took longer than required to tuck the letters into the correct box.
“I never thought we would meet. That was silly, wasn’t it? He’s immortal. I’m the next best thing. It makes sense that he would seek me out eventually. He would have been curious about me, about his unicorn status, even if his resuscitation happened under normal circumstances.”
“You prioritized. There’s no shame in that. It’s not like you’ve been sitting on your hands all this time.”
“No,” I agreed, facing him. “I’ve been trying to survive.”
“Do you feel drawn to him?” A hint of the clinical seeped into his voice, the professor at work.
“He makes my back teeth ache.” I turned to him and leaned my hip against the box. “Is that normal?”
“Each practitioner has a different response to their progeny. This might be normal for you. It’s hard to say without a second progeny for comparison.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “How do you feel around Keet?”
“My heart gets squishy, and I want to coo at him, even when he’s being a weirdo. Can you believe he barked at Corbin?”
“That’s not what I meant, and yes. I can.”
“Keet and I have been together since I was a kid.” I rolled a shoulder. “I might have grown used to him over the years.” Linus inclined his head, awarding me the point. “What are we going to do about Corbin?”
“We?”
“Pretend this is dodge ball. I picked you first. You’re on my team. Sorry not sorry, Grande Dame.”
“I’m always on your team.” He leaned forward in his seat. “I always have been.”
A burst of warmth ignited in my chest and spread through my limbs. “You’re spoiling me.”
“No.” Wisps of black swirled through his eyes, there and gone. “This is how relationships work.”
The mention of his greater experience doused the heat suffusing my limbs with icy reality.
It was stupid, I was stupid, for wanting him to be a paragon of virtue to spite Boaz. Linus had had a life before I crash-landed back in his. He had no reason to hope he would ever see me again. He had been free to pursue whatever, and whomever, he pleased, and it was obvious he had taken lovers.
He had told me as much himself.
“I bow to your wisdom,” I said lightly. “I don’t have much to compare us to.”
Hands braced on the tabletop, he rose. “I didn’t mean—”
“That wasn’t an invitation to share.” I swatted the air like it might knock down what he wanted to say. “I really don’t want to go down that road with you. Memory Lane is my least favorite street for cruising.”
“All right.” His lips thinned. “Back to the matter at hand. Corbin. What do we do about him?”
“How much trouble will we get in when your mother finds out we aided and abetted him?”
Linus sat. “A significant amount.”