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“So…” Rath left that single syllable hanging in the air for a moment. “That was a short shopping trip.”
“Mother saved some of Iris’ clothes,” Char replied.
“I knew it.” Rath slouched back against the sofa, a sour expression on his face. “That means you’re still on the hook the next time she wants one of us to go shopping with her.”
Char snorted. “Tell her that. She’ll take whichever one of us she wants.”
“True.” Rath sighed. “Are we going out this weekend?”
“No.”
“Come on! We haven’t gone anywhere since getting Iris out of here.”
“Nothing’s been stopping you.”
“Except pity for my lovesick little brother, moping around, thinking about his girlfriend all the time. But she’s back now, so why not?”
Char rolled his eyes. “Well, we still have to keep her hidden, for one thing.”
“That doesn’t mean you and I can’t go.”
“You really I’m leaving her alone here while I go off and party?”
“No, I guess not. You’re pretty stuck on her.” A mischievous smirk crawled across Rath’s lips and lit up his blue eyes. “Hey, you know what we can do? I can go out and give you two some privacy, and you can crack open a bottle here and have your own little party.”
Often, Rath’s enthusiasm was contagious, but Char couldn’t catch it this time. “Yeah. Right. When she’s still recovering from what that mage did to her.”
Three weeks. Three weeks of Micah torturing and manipulating her. Touching her.
The picture flashed through Char’s mind again of how he’d found Iris, unconscious, with the mage sitting at her side and stroking her hair. As if he cared at all for the girl he was abusing.
“You didn’t know,” Rath said, pulling Char out of his dark thoughts. “He’s been fooling everybody his whole life.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Then how about this?” Rath leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Covert operations aren’t Kelnor’s thing. That’s all us. And we’re the ones who’ll have to do it, anyway, since we have natural hair and eye color for humans. So. Ever been to the human capital city?”
Char shook his head, and then he thought of something. “Actually, yes. Father took me once. I had to have been fresh out of flight school.”
“Inside information. Perfect.”
“Not exactly. We were nowhere near the castle, and I don’t remember much of anything.”
Rath waved his hand. “It’ll all come back to you. So, we go as soon as she recovers?”
Char rolled his eyes. “Little problem with that. The war? We can’t just fly in.”
“Covert. Operations. We fly in as close as we can, and we go on foot the rest of the way.”
“We’re talking about days of walking.”
“Yeah.”
“Without flying.”
“So?”
“You’ll hate it.”
Rath grinned. “Probably.”
A reluctant smile came to Char’s lips. “Okay. If Kelnor doesn’t come up with something better—”
“Which he won’t.”
“Then we do it our way.”
“Yep.” Rath leaned back against the sofa, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and kicked his feet up on the coffee table. “I should look Misa up before we go.”
“I don’t think she’ll be happy to see you.”
Rath turned his head to the side to look at Char. “Why not?”
“You haven’t talked to her in three weeks.”
Rath shrugged and resumed his study of the ceiling. “I haven’t talked to anybody in three weeks. There’s a war on, you know. She’ll understand.”
Char smirked. “Uh huh. Tell me how that goes later.”
A moment of silence fell, and then Rath said, “Probably shouldn’t tell Iris, in case that mage can get inside her head.”
And just like that, Char’s fragile good mood was gone. “Probably not. Although he doesn’t know what she’s been doing right under his nose.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He’s too smart to underestimate.”
Char grimaced. “Yeah.”
Another beat of silence, and then, “Sorry about your friend Jonah.”
Now it was Char’s turn to slump back against the sofa, dejected. “Yeah.”
“How’d Father meet him?”
“In the human capital city, I think. When Jonah was still in the magic school. He said Jonah reminded him of us.”
Rath turned his head to look at Char again. “Really?”
Char nodded. “He was about your age. Liked to get out in the world, explore, see new things. He did a lot of camping so he could get away from everything for a while.” Char groaned and put his face in his hands. “Which was something else I should have picked up on. Iris asked him if he ever left the tower, and he said there wasn’t much outside to interest him.”
“Stop that. You didn’t know, and it’s over and done with.”
“Easy for you to say. You didn’t hand-deliver the nicest girl in the world to a psychopath. Ow!” Char rubbed his shoulder where his brother had punched it. “What was that for?”
“To get you out of your own head. So. What was our father like with Jonah?”
Char sighed and shrugged. “Just like he was with us. I don’t know if Jonah ever told him about his background, but it was almost as if Father adopted him. You know those trips he’d take us on, where we’d just go off for days at a time and rough it?”
“Yeah. Mother always complained about what a mess we were when we got home.”
“We’d do that human-style. Jonah could almost start a fire faster than I could with my breath. Apparently, he’d take Iris camping, too. That’s how she managed after that battle until we found her.”
“Huh. Wondered about that.”
Rath’s responses were losing their energy. Char glanced over at him and noted his glum expression.
“Father talked about bringing you along, but he didn’t think you wanted to have anything to do with humans.”
Rath shrugged. “He was right.”
“He usually was.”
“And when he wasn’t, Mother was.”
“Still is.”
A pause, and then Rath said, “Funny how things turn out.”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
“You owe me, by the way.”
Char looked over at Rath again. “Why?”
Rath smirked. “I didn’t tell Mother about your injuries.”
Char thought back and realized she hadn’t scolded or fussed over him at all. “Oh, I didn’t even notice. I keep forgetting about them.”
“Because you’re too busy thinking about a certain someone.”
Char shrugged and smiled. There was no use denying it.
Especially when he was on his feet the second he glimpsed Iris in his bedroom doorway.
“Hello again,” she said, smiling but still moving with slow, stiff steps aided by the fairies. She had changed out of his bathrobe and into a dress, and he had to admire his mother’s fashion sense. Modest, but still showing off Iris’ curves.
Then again, Iris looked good in anything.
He crossed the room to her side, taking the place of the fairies and helping her to the sofa as a lazy, crooked golden line trailed after them.
“Up for all day now?” Rath asked, moving from the sofa to a chair.
“Hopefully. I’m not used to having anybody except the fairies around. I just took a nap whenever I felt like it in the tower.”
“If you need to, go ahead. I don’t mind,” Char told her, sitting next to her and draping his arm around her shoulders. It was easy to ignore his brother’s smirk when she was blushing like this.
She dropped her gaze to her lap. “Because that isn’t awkward.”
The fairies were coming to rest on her hair, the cushion beside her, the backrest of the sofa—none were more than a foot away from her. Rath watched them with interest.
“They’re obsessed with you. Were they like this the whole time you were there?”
She nodded. “I thought they were just spoiling me to be nice the first day, but then…”
“So he didn’t start on you right after Char left?”
Char shot Rath a glare. “We don’t need to talk about that right now.”
“I don’t want to talk about it at all, but we’ll have to move pretty soon, and we need to know as much as we can about this guy,” Rath replied. “And it sounds to me like Iris has been gathering information so somebody could use it against him after she escaped, am I right?”
She nodded again, and her brown eyes met Char’s. “It’s fine, Char. If something I can tell you helps, then I need to say it.”
A fairy alighted on her bandaged hand. The others huddled closer to her, as if they were hugging her.
She smiled at them. “Thanks.” Then she took a deep breath. “No, he didn’t start right away. He’s very patient. Everything he does has a reason, and… I think… I know he wanted me to relax and let my guard down. I didn’t see him the rest of that day, but Jonah had always been a person who would get really involved in something and forget about everything else, and he’d said he’d be in his study, so I thought nothing of it. But that night…”
She hesitated, and Char tensed. The image of Micah sitting on the bed next to her flashed through his mind again.
“He came to my room after I fell asleep. The… I hear… whispers from the past bearers of the amulet… sometimes, and… They tried to wake me up, but he… He disguised himself as one of them, and he…”
She paused, worried eyes flicking up to Char’s and then back to her lap. Her fingers clenched in her skirt. His free hand curled into a fist.
“He… pretended to be… Char.”
Char sucked in a breath. He glanced over at Rath, blue eyes wide.
“What do you mean?” Char asked, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.
“It was the way he… touched me. A-anyway, he cast some sort of spell on me, and then I don’t remember anything until morning,” she continued, her words tripping over themselves in her rush to move past that point. “I woke up really sick—”
“Hold on,” Rath interrupted. “How did he know?”
“Rath,” Char growled.
“Look, I hate it, too, but I think it’s important. How did he know, Iris? Did he get in your head somehow? Was he watching you two when Char brought you there?”
Iris opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “After that battle, when he used Srot to… lure me out there, he… followed me back to my body. In the magic school dungeons. And I was too weak to fight him off. I-I know he was looking through my memories. He was looking for… something. I don’t know what.”
“But you and Char weren’t together yet,” Rath persisted. “I know you managed to hide how you felt about her from me, Char, but I also know you weren’t sneaking off to have romantic rendezvous with her. No way you could have hidden that from me. She messes you up too badly.”
The fading blush returned to Iris' cheeks, and the back of Char’s neck warmed. He cleared his throat. “Then he must have been watching us.”
Iris shook her head. “No, he wasn’t, or he would have known what I was doing whenever he was gone. He’s very smart and very observant. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to guess at how Char… how Char acted with me.”
Rath frowned. “I don’t buy that, but keep going. You woke up sick.”
She nodded. “I felt awful. I could barely walk. He came to my room again, this time as Jonah, and I told him what had happened the night before. He acted really concerned, but he told me there was no way Micah could have been there, and he told me I should go back to bed. So I… I begged him to take me to his study with him rather than leave me alone.” Her fingers clenched in her skirt again, tight enough for her knuckles to turn white. “He made me beg.”
Char and Rath exchanged grim looks.
“That was the ‘permission’ part, right?” Rath asked. “You said he needed permission and trust to extract magic from somebody?”
She nodded again. “I trusted Jonah, and I gave him permission to take me to his study. Begged him to do it. And I was so sick that he had to carry me. When we got there, he gave me a potion he said would help, and I drank it without even thinking about it.” She grimaced. “Then he turned back into Micah, but the potion… I couldn’t even move. He strapped me down on a table, and he told me what he’d done to Jonah, what he’d do to me. And he… He had a fairy in a bottle, and he… He killed it. Right in front of me. Just to prove he would if I didn’t do as he said.”
A tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it away. Char felt like punching something. Anything.
“When he was done, he carried me back to my room and threatened Char if I didn’t keep my mouth shut. I didn’t see him again until after Char’s next visit.”
“Was he there with you when I left?” Char asked through gritted teeth.
Iris nodded.
Rath raised a hand to stop Char from speaking again. “Okay. That’s plenty. He’s patient, calculating, great at disguises—and not just visual ones. Basically, we can’t let our guards down. Ever. Not even here. Char, you should probably sleep with Iris tonight.”
Iris’ eyes flew wide open. She looked at Char, her cheeks reddening, and he knew the back of his neck was doing the same.
He cleared his throat. “He means in case Micah tries to get at you while you’re asleep. Right?”
Rath’s lips curled up into a smirk. “Of course, if you want to have a little fun with it—”
Iris covered her face with her hands.
“Shut up,” Char snapped.
“Hey, that isn’t a very nice way to talk to your older, wiser brother who is only looking out for your girl’s best interests.”
Char scowled at him. “That is not what you’re doing, and you know it.”
Rath shrugged. “I think ‘a little fun’ is in everybody’s best interests. Hey, what are these fairies doing? Get off of me!”
Char smirked and leaned back against the sofa as the fairies swarmed Rath. He pulled Iris closer and whispered in her ear, “I’ll sleep on the sofa. If there’s any trouble, the fairies can come get me. Okay?”
She peeked through her fingers at him and gave him a shy smile. He glanced over to ensure the fairies were still keeping Rath occupied before he stole a quick kiss.
It would all work out somehow. He would keep her safe this time, and that mage would never touch her again.
Never.6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCfWmKAEEvx
