Siren Queen(34)

Brandt shivered under her gaze, and her arm tightened around him.

“What are you afraid of?” she asked, her tone softening.

“Oberlin Wolfe, and you should be as well,” he said. He tugged down his winged collar, and shining at his throat was a silvery kiss. Greta reached for it with a finger, and pulled back with a hiss as it sizzled. Brandt flinched, but it was an old flinch. It hurt him every day.

“You’re not supposed to be here, are you?” I asked suddenly. “You sneaked away.”

“I came looking for you at Emmaline’s, and they told me you had come here,” he said, sparing a shy glance at me. I could see where it would be easy to love him.

“What did you sneak away from?” demanded Greta, and he lowered his eyes.

“I left the hunt,” he said reluctantly, and I half sat up in shock when Greta let out a laugh of disbelief.

“To come looking for two girls picking flowers. That man will eat you alive.” Oberlin Wolfe was always just “that man” to Greta.

“I don’t care, I found you,” he said defiantly, and Greta shook her head, still smiling.

“So I own your heart, and that man owns the rest. How strange, how strange.”

“Oberlin Wolfe owns everything here,” I said uneasily, and Brandt shook his head, refusing to meet my eyes.

“Me more than most,” he said, fear and sadness and a kind of awful pride to it as well. I understood better than I wanted to. If you couldn’t be a king, king-consort wasn’t a bad road. Of course that’s if the king wasn’t just as likely to devour you as to drape you with jewels.

Almost as if they had been summoned by their mention, we heard the baying of the shrill hounds and the brassy cascade of horns. I stood up, ready to flee with flowers in my hand, and Greta rolled smoothly to her feet, her silk falling down over her hips like smooth rain. Brandt got up more slowly, but he straightened his clothes with the deliberation of a knight strapping on his armor.

“Stay here. Stay quiet. Don’t look,” he said. The last sounded like a plea.

Greta nodded, and she pulled him close, kissing him right over the burning mark that Oberlin Wolfe had left. It must have hurt, she hissed with the pain of it, but when he pulled back, his eyes shone.

He walked towards the gate to the courtyard, and Greta pulled me into a crouch behind the fountain. I made an irritated sound when she covered my eyes with her hand, but she only laughed.

“You are human, min skatt, and thus frail.”

She was right. I could hear Brandt walking through the courtyard, and I heard the hounds still, and the horns go silent. There was a murmur of voices, and when those went still as well, I knew who had come forward.

“You ran, beautiful,” said Oberlin Wolfe. “Why did you come here?”

“Does it matter?” asked Brandt. “You found me.”

“Running’s cute when you’re new,” said Oberlin, and there was a rattling menace in his tone. “I thought you were past that. Do you need to be taught again?”

I would have turned into a tree with fear, but to my astonishment, Brandt laughed. Greta jerked in surprise at that as well, and her expression was more fascinated than it had been a moment before.

“Teach me, don’t teach me. You are going to do as you like, aren’t you? Don’t pretend it has anything to do with what I do.”

There was a rising growl that shook the earth, and then, abruptly, it stopped. Not just the growl, but everything was still, as if it were holding its breath or stifled some other way. Somehow, frail little Brandt Hiller had stopped the king of Wolfe Studios. Greta almost stood to look over the fountain, but I grabbed her and pulled her down. She glared at me, and I shrugged. I wasn’t the only frail one behind the fountain. Oberlin could have torn her to bits as easily as he could have me or Brandt.

I counted to ten, and then Oberlin laughed. I heard relief in the answering laughs of the people he rode with, but nothing from Brandt.

“Lessons can be enjoyable I suppose, with the right pupil,” Oberlin said, his tone expansive, positively daddyish. I realized with shock that the head of the studio himself had been beaten and fooled by the shy blond boy who could barely look Greta in the eye.

A shout went up, the hunt went off to find other prey, Brandt Hiller with them, and I fell against Greta with relief.

“I think I lost another twenty years off of my life,” I said when it was silent again, and she laughed a little, tugging me to my feet.

“Come on,” she said with a sly wink. “If you are lucky, you may find that the gratitude of a beautiful woman can restore twenty years or more. Especially if she looks at your rear as hard as Emmaline does.”

I blushed deep rose when I realized what she meant and what she had assumed, but hand in hand, we walked back into the dark.





VI


Emmaline’s fire was dim and low when we returned, and smaller as well. Some of the circle had stumbled away to bed, and others were stretched out in the orange light. Jillian curled up slightly separate and puppyish close by, and she didn’t stir as we approached. Greta took a seat at the fire, rifling through the remnants of a cheese tray with interest as I came close to Emmaline.

She sat tall and straight on her chair, staring into the fire as if it held answers to her most secret questions. When she looked up, there was a kind of pleasure in her face that took my breath away.