On a slow, deliberate heel, Saladan turned to Kal. His fingers were twitching but she felt no connection to a ley line to actually do a spell. He knew better. Not in the middle of a field surrounded by humans. He was probably just reaching for an absent cigarette.
“It’s that attitude that’s caused your family’s failing, Kalamack,” Saladan said as he took off his glasses and looked at Kal mockingly. “Broken not just in finances but also in genetic code, so degraded you can’t engender a child with even a human anymore.”
Trisk’s eyes widened as Kal went white in anger.
“You are a field manager, Kalamack,” Saladan said coldly. “Don’t lecture me on social demographics until you have a hundred more years behind you.” Tapping his sunglasses against his palm, he ran his attention up and down Kal. “And maybe a child or two. If you can manage it.”
Kal’s jaw tightened, and Trisk stiffened when the faintest tingle prickled through her aura. Kal might be stoically silent as he took the older man’s abuse, but his fingers were twitching behind his back in a ley line charm. He was spelling, using the energy in his own chi instead of tapping directly into a line so it would be harder to detect. It wasn’t a difficult skill, but she was surprised he knew about it. The technique would give his magic a stealthy finesse she hadn’t expected from the elitist snot.
She took a breath to warn Saladan . . . then shut her mouth.
Clearly thinking he had them both cowed, Saladan smiled. It was as ugly as he was. “It’s said the Kalamacks descended from the original slavers in the ever-after,” he said as he turned back to Trisk. “They don’t like to admit it, and they even changed their name when they migrated from the ever-after, but they’ll never be anything other than flesh dealers.”
Kal’s eyes narrowed. His fingers had gone still, but his hand cupped a tiny, almost-not-there ball of glowing haze. It was a charm, his aura peeping between his fingers coloring it a pale purple and green.
Trisk arched her eyebrows at Saladan, long practice at swallowing insults making it easy. “That’s nice,” she said in a show of nonchalance. “Insulting me into giving you a free modification to your new tomato isn’t going to work. If you’ll excuse me, I have to write up my final report. Do you want a meeting between you and Rick or not?”
Saladan’s lip twitched. He glanced at Kal when he snickered, then back at her. “Rick is an idiot, too,” he said. With a sound of sliding gravel, he turned on a heel and walked off, yelling at the kids to get out of the field and back to the school where they belonged.
A tiny line in Kal’s forehead showed, the only hint of the frustrated anger Trisk knew to be coursing through him. Under it was a growing embarrassment. “He built that school to keep them in the field, not out of it. Have you been to it?” Kal asked as he stared at Saladan’s back.
“No.”
“I have. It’s amazing. I’ve never seen so much potential intentionally stifled to maintain a cheap workforce.” With a flick of his wrist, Kal tossed the charm at Saladan. It was so small, it was hard to see it arcing through the low sunlight, but Saladan’s entire aura flickered into the visible spectrum for half an instant as the spell sank in. Smirking, Kal turned to face her. “How have you been able to stand working with him for over a year?”
Trisk rocked into motion and headed for her truck, her steps slow enough so there was no chance of catching up to Saladan. “An egotistical, chauvinistic, hard-to-please bastard? I have no idea,” she said, thinking the same words could be used to describe Kal. “I’ve never run into him outside of an arranged meeting, but I wanted to take some measurements of the woody stems.”
Is Kal’s family really on the skids? she thought as he silently paced beside her. The older families seemed to have been hit the hardest with the cascading genetic failure. Her line hadn’t been affected as badly as most, prospering even with the occasional dark-haired elf showing up. Maybe because of it. Her mother had almost transparent hair, but had to marry into a lower house, Cambri, because of her dark eyes. In hindsight, it had probably given her children an unexpected vigor that marrying a blond, green-eyed godling would have lacked. Every child was precious, but some were more precious than others.
Saladan stalked into the field office, the door slamming shut behind him.
“He had no right to say what he did about you,” Kal said, and she glanced up, surprised.
Her truck was just ahead, and she slowed even more. Seeing Kal in jeans and an open-collared shirt was giving her mixed feelings. He still had that insufferable confidence about him, but damn it if she didn’t like the casual look on him better than the suit and tie. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been called worse by people who really mean something to me.”
A grimace crossed his face. Without warning, he touched her elbow to bring her to a halt as she reached for the handle of her truck’s door. She jerked back, startled at the twinge of ley line energy trying to equalize between them, tasting of ozone and power. “Trisk, I can’t tell you how bad I feel about how I treated you in school,” he said, and a bitter emotion flashed through her. She’d tried to set it aside and be the grown-up, but it had been there, coloring every chance meeting in the hall or request for information. “It’s part of the reason I took this job.”
Hand on her hip, she stared at him. “Really,” she said dryly. I am not going to let him cleanse his conscience and think it’s all better. “I thought it was so you could publicly find fault with my work.”