“Watch what you say or I will give you a reason to be afraid of me,” I warned.
Robert glared at me. “She’s hot,” he said as if daring me to argue with him.
I snorted and shook my head. “Yeah, I’ll give you that one. Let me grab my jacket and we can get out of here.”
“What about the tattoo Reave said you’d work on?”
Rage flooded my veins once again, but I kept my head this time. It wasn’t as much of a shock as it had been the first time. “I doubt what Reave has planned is something I can slap on in a few minutes. We’ll need to talk and plan. And drink.” The drinking probably wouldn’t help much with the planning, but it would help me from exploding again—safer for all those around.
Using the dim light from the front window, I walked into the main tattooing room to find that Bronx had already lit some candles and was in the process of setting up the stepladder so he could replace the fluorescent bulbs I had destroyed.
“I’ll be upstairs in case you need anything,” I announced. I crossed to the far cabinet and knelt down as I pulled it open.
“You taking the Mordred?” Bronx asked from the stepladder in the center of the room.
A little shudder racked my frame. “Absolutely not. I need to mellow out, not get stupid. I’ve got a bottle of Jack that should get us through without killing each other.” I may have hated Reave and held no love for the entire Svartálfar race, but by all that was sacred and pure, they knew how to make a damn good whiskey. Mordred was fucking hard to get your hands on if you weren’t Svartálfar and like liquid fire going down, but damn, it was good.
“I can take your keys to the shop. Protects against intoxicated tattooing,” Bronx offered.
“Fuck you,” I grumbled with no real venom. The last time Bronx and I had drunk Mordred together, the results were not good. Suffice to say, Bronx had tattooed an incubus, resulting in an outbreak of mass fornication that needed to be stopped.
I grabbed the liter bottle and stood, shutting the cabinet with my knee as I scooped up my jacket off a nearby chair. “I’ll talk to you guys later.”
Robert was out in the lobby when I returned, looking as if he wished he had left but was afraid to after my temper tantrum. He followed me out the front door of the parlor, but paused when I started down the alley beside the shop.
“Where we going?” he demanded, stopped at the mouth of the alley.
“Somewhere we can talk and drink.” I held up the new bottle and gently shook it back and forth as if trying to tempt him. Or hypnotize him. I’d take that. He frowned, but started to follow after me through the alley to the back of the shop and then up the wooden stairs to the second floor of my building.
After Asylum took off, I managed to buy the entire building from the owner instead of renting. I had lived in the second-floor apartment for a while, but had moved out a few years ago so I could get a little space in my life from work. The apartment above the parlor was kept empty for times like these, when it was better to deal with matters here rather than drag anyone into my home.
“This your place?” Robert asked as he shut the door behind him.
I shook my head. “Just somewhere I crash on occasion.” Setting the bottle on the scarred coffee table, I walked into the tiny kitchen and grabbed a couple plastic cups that I kept there. I paused, staring at the disposable plastic cups. It had been a while since I had gotten plowed in this apartment with a friend or two. Was I mellowing out too much? Getting old? I rolled my eyes and wandered back into the living room with its cracked beige walls and stained carpet to find Robert sitting on one of the sunken cushions of the couch.
Sitting on the other end of the couch, I poured us each a healthy shot of whiskey and sat back. “All right, talk.”
Robert took a big swallow and winced as it went down. Definitely not as smooth as Mordred, but it would get the job done. “I don’t have to tell you shit.”
“You’re going to talk and tell me every fucking thing I ask for. I deserve that if I’m going to protect you from whatever Reave has got you involved in.” I set my own glass down without drinking. It was like talking had triggered all the emotions that I had managed to get a handle on. “Why are you fucking working for Reave? You’re not an idiot. Fuck. How could you do this to Mom and Dad?”
“Do this to Mom and Dad?” he repeated, looking at me like I had lost my mind. “I’m not doing this to them. I’m helping myself, and what the fuck do you care about Mom and Dad? What the fuck do you care about any of us? You left!”
“Of course I left!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. Robert pushed to his feet as well so I wouldn’t tower over him. Whatever fear he was feeling toward me wasn’t there now—we were both too pissed. “I had to leave if I wanted to protect you and Meg and Mom and Dad. The Towers might have let me go, but they weren’t going to let me live happily ever after. I’ve had warlocks and witches hunting me for years. You think they wouldn’t have tried to use you or Meg as leverage to get me to do what they wanted? Fuck! I left because I had to.”
“You should have never come back in the first place!” Robert roared. I took a step back, my anger instantly melting away, but Robert didn’t notice. Apparently there was something on his mind that he had been itching to vent. “When you disappeared as a kid, we told the world that you had been killed in an accident. You think we could tell anyone that you became one of them? We would have been lynched in a heartbeat. But no! You came back, destroying everything. Dad tried to make up stories, like you were a distant cousin, but no one believed him. They knew you had been taken to the Ivory Towers. They knew you were a warlock, and everything changed.”
Robert paced a couple angry steps away from me and then turned back, his face twisted with pent-up rage and pain. “You want to know why Mom and Dad moved to Low Town? Because of you. They left Vermont and New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and West Virginia because they were trying to outrun the rumors that they had given birth to a warlock. They came to Low Town to hide!”
I collapsed on the couch behind me, staring blindly at the wall. Whatever anger I had felt only seconds ago about my brother being a part of the Low Town Mafia evaporated. My chest ached and there was a lump growing in my throat threatening to cut off my breathing. In my lifetime, I had been burned, stabbed, poisoned, shot, and had a chunk of my soul ripped off. This felt worse. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to move. It hurt to think, but I couldn’t stop my mind from churning over the same thought. If I had never returned home after leaving the Towers, my family would have been happy, healthy, and safe.
I had been sixteen when I left the Towers and I couldn’t think of any place I wanted to go more than home to my family. I hadn’t seen them in nine years, but they still represented the only happy memories I had in my life. They were laughter, warmth, and love wrapped in a modest middle-class home on an old tree-lined street in Vermont. I had nowhere else to go and nowhere else I wanted to go. I knew that it was only temporary; I didn’t trust the council’s promises and reassurances. But I needed help and my feet set. I was only sixteen.
When I walked in the front door, Mom cried. She held me so tight and cried tears of joy. She cried for four days every time she looked at me. Dad cried too, his arms wrapped around Mom and me. No one asked questions. We hugged, cried, and were happy to be together. I could only guess that was before anyone started to think about how the rest of the world would react to my miraculous return from the dead.
I should never have gone home.
“Gage, man,” Robert whispered beside me. The couch shifted as he sat down again, but I was still staring straight ahead, my body so stiff that muscles ached. I was afraid that if I moved, I’d shatter. I had destroyed my family. I destroyed them by being