Chapter 21

Asire.

It was warm under the covers when I woke up. Especially along my back. I stretched and in doing so pushed against something very warm and solid. A person. A man, to be more exact. Fear rushed into my system and I scrambled out of the bed, barely managing to untangle myself from the covers before landing on the floor with a painful thud on my hip.

I was in the midst of freeing my legs from the covers when my nose told me that it was Loki. Instantly, all the fear drained out of me, leaving only the tang of its scent in the room. Stranger still, I felt warm. My stomach and chest heating up in an oddly pleasant way.

Without getting up, I just stared down at my body, as if trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I knew last night that sleeping in the same bed with Loki wouldn’t end well. I was surprised that waking up in the same room with him had gone as smoothly as it had. I didn’t do well with people being around when I woke up. There was that moment before full consciousness where I was back to being a fourteen-year-old living through Hell. Anything that isn’t immediately familiar becomes a threat.

So why wasn’t I currently apologizing to Loki for breaking some bones?

While I was contemplating, Loki woke up. He leaned over the side of the bed and looked down at me. There were sleep lines on his face and his big shoulders were relaxed. I watched his nostrils flare once, no doubt taking inventory of the lingering scent of fear. To his credit, he didn’t comment on that. All he said was, “Are you okay?”

“Peachy.” I sounded sour. None of this was his fault, so I followed the comment up with a smile. Somehow, I don’t think he bought it.

I picked myself up off the floor and ignored the twinge from the hip I landed on. All the while reminding myself, once again, that it wasn’t his fault. No need to bite his head off. Without glancing at him again, I moved over to my dresser and yanked out clothes. He was still lounging across my bed when I closed the bathroom door.

Clearly something was wrong with me. Maybe all the shit with the vampires and werewolves was starting to get to me. Debienne was a bitch of the highest order. She liked mind games and hated that she’d been exiled here. If Reggie had more manpower, we’d have been monitoring her for years. She was always up to something and whenever she showed up around us, we knew nothing good would come of it.

She was the mistress of the unofficial vampire coven in the city, as well, so she had a lot of minions to do her bidding. Vampires were more comfortable with sending their problem children to Seattle than they should be. More than all the other races, at any rate.

As for Basil… He was usually a lot calmer than that. We didn’t get along, mostly because he was used to people listening to him and I had a tendency to do whatever the fuck I felt was necessary.

This was the first time I’d ever seen him directly threaten us, though. We had hostilities just because Reggie didn’t kowtow to him and I openly ignored his every command— I didn’t do well with orders. Previously, he’d always been smart enough to realize that in a fight with us, he couldn’t win without heavy losses. If he could win at all.

Fighting a wolf wasn’t as easy as fighting a person. Especially wolves that weighed over a hundred pounds and had a tendency to have temper tantrums.

When I stepped out of the bathroom, hair and teeth brushed and dressed for the day, I found Loki just getting out of bed. He looked far too relaxed considering how jittery I was suddenly feeling. There was a ball of anxiety sitting in my stomach and I felt twitchy. I didn’t like that.

Perhaps sensing my sudden change in mood, he got himself a change of clothes and went into the bathroom without a word. Moments later, I heard the shower start up and that ball of anxiety unraveled. Once again, leaving me convinced that there was something wrong with me. Legions don’t get sick, so I didn’t know what it could be. We have the immune systems of vampires and werewolves combined. Where one could get a blood disease and the other could get things related to the flu, legions don’t get anything. Our systems are too strong.

I, being a more powerful kind of legion, had an even stronger system. Fine for keeping me alive, but not so for other things. Normal legions took twice the dosage of any medicine for it to work on them. I didn’t like sedatives or painkillers to begin with, but the normal legion dosage lasted only half the time with me. Then there was the whole baby thing.

Pureblood legions— what I am —have a history of bad pregnancies. There have never been a lot of us and currently there were only three in the entire world. Every one of us has been female. For a long time, we were killed at birth because we were considered too dangerous, but then people realized that was barbaric and we were allowed to live. Of all the recorded history there have only been two pregnancies that were carried to term. Our immune systems were too strong to accept the fetus. Our bodies recognized them as parasites instead of young. Of the two pregnancies that were carried to term, both babies were stillborn.

That was a long time ago, though. Back when it was common for babies to be born dead. The other two pureblood legions in existence and me were the first born in nearly half a century. There were a lot of theories on why. I didn’t bother learning them. The only reason I knew everything else was because it could directly affect me one day.

If I ever got a mate. Most legions were mated by the time they were sixteen, but the Orphans weren’t average. A good hunk of our population was unmated. There weren’t really restrictions to mating either. Even with Annihilists. If they fell in love with someone from another race, they’re given twenty-four hours to get the fuck out of dodge. If they did that, then their previous Family would not pursue them. I, however, didn’t see myself finding someone. Not because I didn’t want someone and not because I wasn’t open to it. I just wasn’t attracted to anybody. I could look at a man or a woman and list all the ways they were good attributes, but it didn’t really touch me. They could be sweet or funny and I might feel protective over them, but I didn’t want anything other than friendship.

Reggie made jokes all the time about how uninterested I was in anything sexual, but those jokes were thinly disguised worry. We were best friends and she was super aware of how easily I could end up alone. I didn’t know how to tell her being alone was something I was used to.

The house was quiet, so I assumed most of the other Orphans were out at work. I could hear the children watching a show. They had turned the volume up so I could hear the stupid sponge’s laughter from just outside my room.

It was still Christmas break. We had another four days until school started up, on the third. I didn’t think we’d get this solved in time. So some of them would have to miss school. Oh well. Grandfather had pulled Billy and me out of school when were twelve, in the sixth grade, so it wasn’t like not going to school a couple of days would ruin them.

Of course, Loki made Billy and Regory finish out high school. He had done it with all the kids that ended up in his Family. Billy said it was the one spot of normal she’d ever experienced.

Reggie had texted me, saying she was going off to work, to meet with the contractor to fix her gallery. Which meant that Henrik, Ella, Alain and I were the only Orphans left in the house. The children didn’t count. When they grew up, they wouldn’t be restricted to Seattle.

My first order of business was getting the television from an earsplitting volume to a merely annoying one. There were ten children altogether, including the kidnapped Millie. Six of them were under ten and two of the others weren’t teenagers. The teenager was clearly hiding somewhere else in the house and I couldn’t blame him. When I walked into the living room I was immediately mobbed by six grubby children. The other two ignored me.

“Hey guys,” I said, moving around them. For whatever reason, much like Millie, these children loved me. It took some finagling, but I managed to disentangle myself and grab the remote control. I hit the volume button until it had gone from forty-two to fifteen. And because I wasn’t an idiot, I put the remote on a high shelf so only the oldest child could reach it.

“It’s too quiet,” one of the girls moaned, looking up at me through her dark red hair. She got her glaring ability from her mother. “I can barely hear it.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, we got stuff to do and we need to be able to hear each other talk. So deal, sweetie,” I injected just enough kindness into my voice so that she thought I was joking. Instead of being dead serious, like I was.

I left them to their complaining.

Henrik was in the dining room again. He had his arms crossed over his chest and was looking down at the map. He was the only one in there. Ella and Alain were upstairs. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could hear their quiet voices. I could only imagine how insane they were going. Their daughter had been missing for four days now. We had lost two while waiting for the Heron Family to arrive in the city.

“What’re you doing?” I asked, walking up to Henrik.

He had his arms crossed over his barrel of a chest and his head bent over the map. He tapped one of his fingers against the inside of his arm and I watched his jaw clench. He hated this as much as Reggie and I did, but we were all keeping our heads. If Reggie was the head of this imaginary Family, Henrik and I were her successors.

“Could they have left the city with Millie?” He finally asked without looking away from the map. All the attacks were concentrated around our businesses and homes. All things considered, we were lucky we hadn’t lost more than Millie.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Would the guards around the city let a bunch of legions leave without checking the child’s identity?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t. If they weren’t registered in the Orphaning database, there’s no reason to think Millie isn’t their child. Most of these legions are blond and Millie is too.”

“She has red in her hair as well,” Henrik said.

I shrugged in agreement. “A lot of children have red in their hair. It grows out.”

“True… I guess,” he finally said. “But it’s an open secret that legions adopt their enemies’ children. Is that not built into the system of the city as well?” he asked. There was a line between his brows. It wasn’t the only sign of his repressed anger, but it was the most obvious.

I crossed my arms over my chest, mirroring him, and looked down at the map in front of me. “Well… I don’t know… Children don’t get Orphaned. To my knowledge the only way they’re built into the system is when they’re taken away from their parents.”

Henrik’s shoulders tightened. “You might be right,” he said gruffly. He turned away and paced the length of the room. Once. “If they did take her out of the city, what would keep them from spiriting her far, far away, until they had taken care of all of us?” he finally asked.

I eyed him. This was the most agitated I’d seen him in a while. Henrik was stoic by nature and the only time that changed was when he got drunk. It was his way of dealing with anything too heavy. But now, his shoulders were still stiff, that line was prominent between his brows, his fingers were cranked down on his biceps hard enough that they were turning white and I was worried about bruising.

Perhaps I should have mentioned these things. Calmed him down. But I didn’t know him well enough to say the things that would unkink his fingers and relax his shoulders. If he were Reggie, I’d have been able to do it. But he wasn’t. The only people who knew him that well were my best friend. And his, Santos.

“I suppose nothing would stop them,” I said. “But Billy got a read on her when she was tracking the other day.”

“Exactly.”

After a brief pause I said, “You’ve made a leap that I didn’t follow, Henrik.”

“If they were going to take her out of the city, far away from the city instead of just where we couldn’t find her, then they would have done it when we were waiting for reinforcements,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

I could see the logic. “Maybe.”

“Since Billy also tracked her down,” Henrik continued, “don’t you think they’d have moved her?”

That I was almost positive of, so I nodded.

The dining room door swung open and the Heron Family walked in, minus Dovie and Regory. I took a wild guess that they were with Reggie. They spread out around the dining room and Loki stood opposite me, with the table between us. My stomach tingled again, without warning, but settled down when I stared down at the map once more. Whatever this was, I was ready for it to be over.