Chapter 25

After every shock wave, the magic grew a little stronger. Like dripping water in a bucket. Eventually the bucket would be full. It lasted anywhere from three days to two weeks.

Mine had been six days.

I went downstairs. My Family was there, but the Orphans had scattered. Including the children. Billy and Regory were sitting very close together. He looked as neutral as he ever did while she had sadness deep in her eyes. The only indication that today’s events affected him was his hand on Billy’s. Hers was lax, but his was curled around her until both their fingers were white.

Shade and Wynn were absent.

“Are you okay?” Dovie asked me quietly, at the base of the stairs. That careful mask she showed the world had slipped a little. Her green eyes were dark with concern and her mouth was puckered. She had yanked her red hair back into a ponytail and changed in preparation for the hunt later today. She wore shorts and a tank top.

I nodded because I knew she’d catch the lie if I spoke.

Her eyes narrowed, as if she caught it anyway, but she let it go and we joined the other three in the living room.

I looked at Sunbeam. For the first time I noticed the dust on her clothing, which meant she had been covered in blood when they cleaned the bodies. Turning them and any bodily fluid into dust. I looked at her face closely. Her eyes were a little fuzzy and she looked paler than normal, but I didn’t think she was on the verge of an episode.

“How’re they?” I asked.

“Winner probably won’t wake up until tonight,” Dovie answered. “Shady will be up a little sooner, and Aby is already leaving messages on his phone, teasing him for getting drugged.”

I nodded.

“According to Henrik,” Regory said, “Shade and Wynn just slumped over in the table and then Alain hit him in the back of the head just before Ella did the same to you?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep the sour note out of my voice. Even if I couldn’t quite keep the embarrassment off my face. I’d dealt with demons and didn’t get hit as hard as I did today. Serves me right for trusting them.

“Why don’t all of you get some rest before we head out tonight,” I finally suggested.

“Yes,” Dovie said, grinning widely. “Reggie and I could use some rest.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at her.

The four of them departed and I trudged back upstairs. It had been awhile since I’d felt this useless. I didn’t like it.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Asire’s room was the music. Very loud, heavy rock music. It was muffled because it was coming from a pair of headphones stuck in her ears, but not so muffled that I didn’t hear the singer screaming out lyrics. I glanced over and found her in that alcove behind the broken rollaway bed.

She lay on her stomach, on the floor. All those art supplies were out again and surrounding her. A sketchbook was by her side and a spare sheet of paper was on her other side. In front of her was a canvas with a half-finished painting on it. She had a water glass with gray liquid inside as well as two other paintbrushes. There was a pallet and paint next to the canvas and she was using it. Around her I could also see pens, both the writing kind and those used for comic books, jars of ink, tubes of paint, watercolors, charcoal and pencils.

Asire had her headphones in and was completely focused on the painting. I hadn’t been gone long, but it was long enough for her to get messy. There were streaks of paint on her arms, different colors, and her hands were almost black from all the smudges that she had. There was even a small line on her chin and flecks on her shirt. She was completely relaxed.

Which only made me realized how tense she’d been all day.

I glanced at the broken rollaway bed and then her bed. She had been fine last night, to my knowledge anyway. Then this morning I woke up to the scent of fear and her tangled up in the sheets and on the floor. It concerned me for the obvious reasons, but more than that… It made me curious. I didn’t know much about her childhood. Billy, having grown up with her, knew everything. But she never let that knowledge slip. Regory had, once or twice. Nothing major, just injuries that the girls had endured.

Billy had been more open about her experiences though. So I knew something of the hell Asire had been through.

She was so absorbed in the painting that she didn’t even notice me. I left her to it, while my thoughts churned. I sat on the bed and turned the television on, so it would look like I was doing something.

There was that scar on her leg too. Legions didn’t scar from anything but fire. So something very hot had been pressed against her leg. She was very levelheaded, but something frightened her this morning. The only thing that could have done that was me.

Finally, after the end of a particularly violent song, she sat up and looked down at her painting. She pawed at the headphones until they fell out of her ears and managed to hit pause on her IPod without getting paint on it— I was not even sure how she managed to do that. Then she glanced up at me. She didn’t look surprised that I was there. She maneuvered the canvas around until it was propped against her legs and showed it to me.

“What do you think?” she asked.

The painting was dark, done mostly in blues, blacks, and grays. It was a forest scene with a woman standing with her back to the audience. She had black hair down to her waist and a skirt on, but no top. The dark forest was in front of her and she had her arms wrapped around herself. In the background, I could see different birds and trees and plants. It was intricate. Arguably more so than it needed to be to capture the attention of someone walking by. It was also beautifully done and I told her as much.

Asire smiled shyly— which made my heart stutter in my chest —and leaned it against the wall. All without marring the picture or getting paint on the house. It was quite impressive.

“Why don’t you get an easel?” I asked as she shuffled into the bathroom. The water came on and she started washing the paint off.

“I could,” she said. “But I’d never use it. I like having everything within easy reach without being trapped by tables and chairs and organization.”

I laughed.

She came back out of the bathroom, wiping off the last of the paint from her face and arms.

I nodded to her left arm, which had lines of paint running the length, different shades of gray, from light to dark. I knew, because I had watched her do it, that she had been testing out the color to see which ones fit together the best. “Why not use a sheet of paper then?”

She scrubbed the shades of gray away with the stained towel and shrugged, “And waste the piece of paper? It could be something much prettier than a test sheet,” she told me with bemusement.

Also, just the tiniest hint of a lie. Having essentially raised twelve kids, most of them teenagers when they came to me, I was good at detecting lies.

No matter. In the last hour I had been thinking and I thought I finally had a way to learn Asire’s secrets. Not only would it help me deal with her and this situation we’d found ourselves in, but it would make my understanding of Billy’s childhood even more complete.

That was the reasons I was telling myself. In reality… I wanted to know about her. I was ignoring the reasons why, because they were ludicrous. She wasn’t the first pretty girl I’d talked to since Eve died. She was, however, the most beautiful girl I’d talked to since her death. But that was only scratching the surface of Asire. I had been lonely for a long time, even with my Family all around me. Here was an interesting girl who could be my friend. That was all. I wasn’t mate material anymore.

“I’ve got a proposition,” I said.

She smirked. No doubt several interesting thoughts just went through her head. “Oh? And what would that be?”

I leaned forward, trying to look less dangerous than I appeared. I was a big man with a deep voice. I’d gotten lots of sideways glances when I walked around at night. Especially from those that could tell I was a legion. Fear was as good for caution as it was dangerous for stupidity.

“I’ll tell you something about me,” I said. “That I don’t like people knowing, if you’ll do the same.”

All amusement went out of her face. She rubbed the towel across her clean hands for a couple of more seconds. My heart wanted to pound right out of my chest, but I waited calmly. She would either agree or tell me no and make me leave her room.

A full minute went by before she spoke. “All right, then,” she finally said, tossing the towel into the hamper in her closet. Her room, aside from that corner with all her art supplies, was extremely neat. It gave almost nothing away about the person who lived in it. But the girl had already let me see her Orphaning papers and trusted me with the life of a child she needed to protect. Her answer simultaneously surprised me and didn’t seem out of character at all.

“You first,” she said, sitting on the other side of the bed and bringing her legs up. I mirrored her position so that we wouldn’t have to look at each other. The intimacy of sharing secrets was uncomfortable enough.

Quickly, I ran through everything I could say to her. What ended up coming out first was, “I killed my parents.”

“Just dive right in, why don’t ya,” she said.

I smirked. “Might as well start with a big one,” I said. “That way the little ones won’t seem so bad… I didn’t mean to do it,” I continued. “They were dedicated to the war, you see. It was their whole lives, not just holding the city, but killing the enemy. It’s what they lived for. Me and my little sister, Monday? We were accidents to them that could be used as soldiers.”

I stopped. “Your turn.”

“Gonna be like that, huh?” she said, but there was wry amusement in her voice. “Well, you started with your parents. Might as well do the same. Mine…should never have met. They weren’t even dating and I’m not entirely sure they knew each other’s names when they got pregnant with me. They lived in the same house after I was born, but I can’t remember a single time they ever spoke each other. My father left when I was three and he found a proper mate. My mother killed herself six months later.”

That was common knowledge. It’s how Asire ended up with her father’s birth family. A family of Annihilists. They wanted her because of how powerful she was, but they couldn’t get her until her mother died. Legion laws say that, after her father took off, her mother had the bigger claim on the daughter. But once Anne Poole, Asire’s mother, died and her father didn’t come to get her… His blood relatives had the right to her. So they took her away.

“I watched him go,” Asire said. “From the stairs of the house. He and Serenade, his mate. He didn’t even look back.” She paused. “Your turn.”

“My parents started training me the second I could walk,” I said. “Come to think of it, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in training. It’s interesting how elementary school teachers don’t notice that the little boy in the back has more muscle than fat. Not common for children that young. Anyway, when I was five, my mother had my little sister. I remember she couldn’t have been less interested in her than if she were a loaf of bread.

“The day they brought her home, my mother fed the baby, put her in her room and then went downstairs to work out with my dad. The last thing she said to me was that the kid needed a name. Dovie and I have known each other our whole lives, having grown up on the same side of the war and in the same city. She was there that day and we just named her after the day she was born. My parents had that put on her birth certificate and after that… They had nothing more to do with her upbringing than feeding her. I tucked her in at night. I helped her take her first steps. Her first word was my name. Yet, when she was old enough to start training, I didn’t keep my parents away from her.” My voice was a little thick. I had only been a kid, but I could have kept Monday safe.

“Their training was brutal, too. At the end of the day, more often than not, I didn’t fall asleep so much as pass out. They worked us until we couldn’t stand anymore. When we were younger. As we got older, their training got harsher. If we couldn’t stand, then we better find a way to bring them down from the ground. While that was going on, I was teaching Monday to read and write. Making her breakfasts and lunches and dinners. Forging my parents’ signature on her school papers. Reading her bedtime stories.” I paused. “Your turn,” I finally said.

She nodded. “After my mother killed herself, her parents knew that Grandfather was going to take me away. I had too much power, you see. Not only am I a pureblood legion, but I also got the Thomas Family strength. The other two pureblood legions… One I think has four powers and the other I think as three. I had six. Do you know what they were?” she asked.

I shook my head.