ThirteenNights Read online

  “Why don’t we park ourselves at the Quill and Parchment? If he is a myth hunter, that would explain his frequent visits. Our clubs and pubs do have a distinct odor. Some humans learn to detect it.”

  He nodded, not having a better idea.

  At the pub, they discovered another reason why Sander Xenos might spend a lot of time here—it probably felt like home. Tempered lighting, a polished wooden bar, darts in the corner, ales and bitters by the pint, fish and chips, ploughman’s lunch and shepherd’s pie on the menu and a collector’s assemblage of scotch whisky lined up on the shelves—a quintessential British pub. They found Clio, the pub’s muse proprietress, behind the bar. Since they were new in town, pantheon etiquette required they make themselves known to her. They also asked about Sander.

  Clio cocked her head in thought, her gaze locked onto Tai. “You’re a game-changer,” she whispered, eyes gone wide.

  “How do you know?”

  “Game-changers have different textured threads on the Fates’ loom. I can feel it on you. Will the person you seek feed this change?”

  “We think so.” I hope so.

  “He looks like you. Settle yourselves at a table. If he comes in, I’ll make sure you meet.”

  “Is he a myth hunter?” Annie jumped into the conversation.

  “Yes, but his motives are mixed. If you need to reveal your true origins but determine him a danger, I have several siren patrons I can call who can voice the memory away.”

  They both nodded and found a table in the corner with full view of the establishment, including the door.

  Twelve games of hangman, eleven stolen kisses, ten arm wrestles, nine footsie matches, eight pints of beer, seven trips to the bathroom, six rounds of darts, five bowls of peanuts, four bacon burgers, three Scrabble contests, two cheesecake wedges and a tumbler of Glenfiddich later, the pub’s inhabitants who had slowly streamed in throughout the night started to exit. The clock read ten thirty, half an hour to go before closing. English pub to the letter. Clio had trained her clientele well.

  “Another game of hangman?” Annie suggested without enthusiasm. It seemed his Amazon had a secret love of word games, but even she had her limits. When this was over, he’d fill their house with them.

  The clock spluttered to 10:35, 10:40. Annie looked at him, compassion in her eyes. Her hand reached across the table to squeeze his. “I’m sorry, babe. We can try tomorrow. Just help me think of something to say to Marta. She’s been calling every other hour and I’ve been letting it go to voice mail.”

  “Text her. Tell her you’re busy bonking your brains out and to leave you to it.” Unable to resist, he leaned toward her to land a kiss on those luscious lips, showing her just how much he appreciated her support. In mid-liplock, Clio interrupted. “Look who just walked in.”

  He turned his head, his hands remained tangled around Annie’s fingers.

  “Wow, it’s like fast-forwarding you a few decades,” Annie said, vocalizing his thoughts. “You’re only going to get sexier when you age.”

  “Another reason to stay with me. Let’s do this.” His gut heaving, he stood to face Alexander Xenos, who dropped his scotch glass when Tai approached him.

  “Who are you?” Lines rippled across his forehead as he leaned back against the bar to steady himself.

  “Your son.”

  Sander pushed his hair back off his face. Still thick and lush like Tai’s wilder, less-styled tresses, but with elegant streaks of gray at his temples. “Bloody hell of a way to tell a man.”

  “I’m shocked myself. If I could have done it differently, I would have, but…” He pulled Annie to his side, desperate for her scent and warmth. “We need your help or our unborn child will be taken from us at birth…as I was taken when my mother tried to bring me to you.”

  Sander’s eyebrow flipped up in a perfect Mr. Spock imitation. “Clio, another Talisker. I’ll meet you at your table. You’ve got some ‘splaining to do, Lucy.”

  “Your dad has one geeky sense of humor, he may be all right.” Annie pitched her voice low, knowing Tai’s hearing could pick it up. “I’ll text Marta and get us a round of drinks. I think your father’s going to need quite a few. He’s already downed the last one.” It took an enormous quantity of alcohol to inebriate one of the warrior races and it had no impact on their fetus. Annie and Tai had not even come close to their limits.

  “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? I assume you have a mother with whom I consorted in my early years.” Sander was already halfway through the drink Annie brought him.

  “Her name’s Phoebe. You met at an historian’s conference in London, thirty-one years ago.”

  “I remember the conference. Her name wasn’t Phoebe.”

  “You may know her as P.S. Cassidy.”

  “Cassie? I tried to get back in touch.” He drained the scotch glass. “She cut me off, said she wanted nothing to do with me. I never saw her again at another conference. As if she knew which ones I was attending and avoided them.”

  “You never married?” Annie asked.

  Sander shook his head and waved Clio over with another drink. A soul-deep sadness softened his eyes. His body hunched over as if in pain. “There was something different about her, otherworldly.”

  Tai glanced at Annie, who nodded in response. “She’s an Amazon, a supernatural being.”

  “I think I knew that,” Sander whispered. “My obsession with mythology, trying to answer the question of whether or not supes existed accelerated after I met Cassie, uh, Phoebe. Blimey, I can’t get my head around this.” His accent descended from clipped, proper English to a more cockney rhythm.

  “Maybe we could meet up tomorrow, talk this through. After a good night’s sleep,” Annie offered.

  “Flipping good idea.” Sander wiped his brow.

  “Meet us back here tomorrow when it opens at eleven,” Tai instructed.

  After Sander left, Clio tapped into the pantheon network and had him followed. The tail would watch over him, make sure he didn’t escape. They didn’t always wipe knowledge from humans but Sander had not yet proved his trustworthiness.

  * * * * *

  Annie dragged a wound-up Tai to their new hotel, given the state of their room this morning. She stripped them both and ushered him to the bed. Tai pulled her close, locked her in the steel cage of his arms and nuzzled her head and neck gently. The tenseness of his body told the tale of the emotional churning the past few days inflicted. Like most male warriors, he did not verbalize his emotions. Unlike them, he let her know in other ways how deeply he felt. Right now, as they subtly declared war on the warriors’ way of life, she needed the words.

  “Why do you want me the way you do?” she asked.

  “For all my rebelliousness, I am a Gargarean warrior as you are an Amazon.” He gave her a quick kiss on the head and held her impossibly closer. “How could I not fall for someone as strong as you with the courage to be gentle, to love, to be different? You’re everything I ever wanted but never believed I’d find.”

  After a nip to her lips, he let her go and pulled a pillowcase off the pillow, then carefully ripped it into five ties and handed them to her. To be tied up and blindfolded, to give oneself to such vulnerability was an act of total trust and it hit her in the gut. This went beyond words, beyond touches—he was giving her all that he was and trusting her to take care of him. His courage touched her heart, made her strong.

  With a kiss she accepted them. The image of Tai at her sexual mercy had her core clenching in anticipation, the reality even better. All that hard, lean muscle offered up for her pleasure, the memory of those black eyes gone midnight with passion focused completely on her before she covered them up—a willing sacrifice to the gods of love and war. The battle would begin soon. Tonight was about love and she was going to show him just how much she loved him.

  She kissed and licked every ounce of skin exposed to her, taking time out for all-consuming kisses that branded his mouth with hers. With her
tongue, teeth and fingers, she caressed every mark of his tattooing, memorizing each of his victories. She nipped with gusto along the corded muscles that rippled across his chest, his arms and his stomach.

  Drunk on the salty male taste and scent of him, she settled at his cock and decided to make him squirm. Flicks of her tongue on the crest, whispers of kisses along the engorged vein, and finger tickles of the sac had him bucking and groaning, straining the fragile ties.

  “You’re only showing me your mean streak now,” he rasped.

  “I like the way your muscles bunch when you’re reaching for more.” She nibbled at the tender skin where thigh met groin.

  “Damn it, Annie. You’re killing me.”

  “I wouldn’t want that, now, would I?” She took him in her mouth, his moan of pleasure scorched down her spine, an aphrodisiac racing through her blood. When he came close to the edge, she mounted him, wanting to ride out the explosion. Even though her instinct was to take him hard, she kept the rhythm gentle. That mix of tenderness and ferocity was simply how they were together, a blending of human, warrior and empathy. Tai allowed that part of her to surface, embraced it with gusto, and she never wanted to give it up.

  When his thrusts accelerated, she abandoned any pretense of civility. The ride turned wild, ferocious, warrior, until they both detonated into oblivion. Annie returned to earth in Tai’s arms, the ties ripped to shreds, more determined than ever to keep her half-human warrior.

  Eleventh Night

  Sander was waiting for them, soda in front of him on a corner table, when Annie and Tai arrived at the Quill and Parchment carrying an overstuffed bag. “I just want to be sure I’ve got this down. Thirty years ago, I had a wild week with an Amazon warrior masquerading as a history professor, and you’re the result.”

  “No masquerade. Phoebe’s not only an Amazon scholar whose job is to maintain the records of the race, she earns income as a history professor,” Annie said.

  “You’re an Amazon warrior as well.” A shrewd intelligence shown from Sander’s eyes—a sharpness which had been buried last night under the surprise and the scotch.

  She nodded and continued. “What’s rare is an Amazon-human coupling. Many humans cannot satisfy our carnal needs so we tend to have our flings with our own kind.”

  Curiosity drew lines across his forehead and had his eyebrows scrunch low over his nose. “Do you know why Phoebe dallied with me?” Her real name now seemed to come easily to his lips.

  “Your mind. Her intellect is not widely appreciated amongst the warrior races. For a human, you’re in excellent shape,” Annie said with a smile, touching Sander’s arm lightly. Although she hadn’t admitted this before, she liked Tai’s intelligence, the way his mind thought through and around every situation—it challenged her, excited her, she could spend a lifetime engaging with it.

  “And your research.” Tai jumped in. “The warrior races face extinction. Infertility accelerates every generation and our Elders are in denial. She needed proof to club them over the head with, and hoped you could provide it. But it wasn’t enough. Her findings were squelched.” Tai placed the bag on the table. “Our hope was you could look through this and find ways to strengthen it. Provide us with additional irrefutable evidence that we could take to our Councils.”

  “Why do you need this? Why did Phoebe never inform me that I had fathered a child? I had tried to get in touch but all my attempts were cut off. How have supernatural beings remained hidden? I have so many queries.” Turning his discomfort into a series of research questions, Sander seemed to pull himself together—using what he knew to handle the shock that they’d thrown at him.

  They quickly detailed the warrior rites and rituals that prevented them from creating their own family, the impossibility of escape from the reach of the Elders and what happened when Phoebe tried. Sander’s eyes softened, his body hunched as if drained of energy when he grasped that Phoebe had attempted to contact him, to bring Tai to him. Exploiting the moment, Tai pushed the bag of research toward Sander, the cheap plastic crackled against the table. “Help us to stay together and raise our child.”

  Sander expelled a breath, then reached for the bag, dug out the contents and arranged the materials systematically in piles on the table. He took reading glasses out of his jacket pocket, put them on, then opened the top document. He skimmed page after page, almost supernatural in speed. Humans who mastered their skills could come close to the supes, and Alexander Xenos excelled in his discipline. Annie sat on Tai’s lap, pressed close against him. The tick-tock of the grandfather clock a drumbeat in her ears, a warning that their time was running out. She buried herself into Tai’s warmth, not wanting to lose a precious second of nearness, the sound of his heartbeat, the tattoo of his pulse against her lips.

  Putting the papers aside, Sander stood and paced in front of the table. “To fully analyze this would take me a few weeks, but at first glance, the work is first-rate. Her evidence is ironclad—there is a rapid trend toward infertility—her recommendations, which are based on my research, are spot-on. They are the only chance your race has to survive. I’ve gathered more evidence that supports these recommendations but it’s not different from what you have here, only more of it. Since none of my data comes from supernatural peoples, it would be easy for your Council to discount it again, just like they did with Phoebe’s original paper.”

  “You can’t help us then?” Tai’s hand caressed along Annie’s thigh and then tangled in hers. He needed touch as much as she did.

  “No, I’m sorry. I can’t add anything that will make a difference. May I make copies of these to take with me?”

  Annie glanced at Tai, lids heavy, skin stretched tight across his bones—disappointment woven through concern. “The public can’t know about us. What do you want with it?” she managed to ask, her chest constricted in frustration.

  A flush crawled up Sander’s cheeks, he glanced down, to break eye contact.

  “We’ll keep the papers but we can give you Phoebe’s direct contact information—it wouldn’t be rerouted by pantheon authority,” Annie said, compassion lowering the cadence of her voice. “I think she’d welcome hearing from you again.”

  “What will you two do?”

  “Don’t know but we still have a few months before the pregnancy shows,” Tai said.

  “Can you show the research to someone else, someone with enough clout to make your Elders change their minds or overrule them?” Sander looked at his feet, shuffled a bit, and blew out a breath. “If I can be of more help, please, call me. I would like to know you better, Tai, and if you succeed, to know my grandchild as he or she grows.”

  Unable to stop herself, Annie hugged him and allowed the contact to coax out some of the soul-deep sadness inside Alexander Xenos. “If we do figure this out, we’ll expect your visit for the winter solstice every year.”

  “With a suitcase full of gifts.” Sander gave Tai his hand but the warrior pulled his father into a bear hug.

  “All my life, I’ve wanted to know you. We’ll find a way.”

  Arm in arm, Annie led Tai to the street into a cab to the airport where they caught the first flight home to DC. Bone-weary and unable to think through the fatigue, their automatic pilot took them to Annie’s house. Naked in bed, they held each other for hours, touching, stroking and sharing long, wet, consuming kisses. Periodically, Tai slipped inside her, and they’d love each other with slow, tantalizing thrusts. It wasn’t about mating or owning or carnal desire, just the ultimate pleasure of being with the one you love, connected on every level until the lines between them blurred. He was hers and she was his.

  In the morning, Annie awoke to a chill of cold air splashing across her body. Someone pulled off the blanket. When had Tai become a bed hog, she wondered, her brain drugged by sleep.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a shrewish, angry voice said. Marta had arrived.

  Twelfth Night

  Annie blinked a few times to get th
e sleep out of her eyes. She felt Tai bolt up and heard Marta pace across the wood floor. “What I’m supposed to be doing, sleeping with my assigned breeding partner.” The ice she projected in her voice hid the fear, anger and frustration erupting inside.

  “He’s supposed to leave after he delivers his seed. You’re acting like lovers. I know you went away together. I used your text to trace you.”

  “It’s discouraged, not forbidden. This way, we have increased the number of exchanges. It’s what we would be doing now if you hadn’t interfered.” Annie lashed out at her sister, pissed off at the interference but aware now that Marta shared her anomaly, her mind reached below Marta’s surface anger—fear and below that, sadness. Her sister was driven by fear—whether it was for Annie or for herself she couldn’t be sure—but maybe that was the lever. Maybe Annie could make her see.

  “It’s considered dangerous. I’ll have to report you.” Marta’s pacing increased. “Why do you do this to me?”

  A warmth on her buttocks, Tai’s hand in a form of support. Fortunately, her warrior was not the average hothead, ready to fight at any perceived insult. Ice instead of fire, he held back and observed, working out the most efficient response she guessed. His eyes never left Marta, his body coiled to pounce—pure Tai—silent and lethal.

  “Marta, you do this to yourself. You’re like me—you deny the empathy. Punishing me for it won’t make it go away.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not like you. Never say that.” Quiet words. Marta’s pacing stopped, the tic that tattooed along her jawline the only indication that anger pulsed through her body.