“And what does that mean?”
“I’m not saying you don’t have the right to defend yourselves. But a less confrontational manner . . .”
“You’ll need to give Rebecca Gennessee a call on that one. Good luck to you with that. I can tell you it is the policy—a policy we made very clear to Humans First two weeks ago—that we would no longer be turning the other cheek. If you firebomb our children, we will be confronting the hell out of any garbage washing up on our shores trying to do it again.”
She hung up, so pissed that she knew if she kept talking to him she’d say something worse.
“I used to be so much more diplomatic,” she snarled. “Lark, she was the hothead. I was the calm one. Look at me now, hanging up on FBI agents.”
“I heard. The conversation I mean. I think you showed amazing restraint, as it happens.”
“I like having you around. You’re a bad influence. And I mean that in the best way.” She grinned at him, some of her anger ebbing. “I need to make calls about all this stuff.”
“Go on. I’m not going anywhere.”
Helena handled calls for two hours more, including one to Rebecca Gennessee, who let forth a curse-laden invective the likes of which Helena rarely heard. She actually felt sorry for Agent Anderson, who she did believe meant well.
She instructed her staff to deal with the alerts to all community centers, covens, clans, et cetera, with the pictures of the PURITY people who’d been released. They’d have their own team watching the men, and if they got anywhere near anything that could harm an Other, they’d know what a mistake they’d made.
Eventually Faine pulled off the freeway and into a place for some food. It was a little diner she’d stopped at often enough on her way to San Francisco. Nothing fancy, but a lot of food for reasonable prices and their iced tea was good. But their milkshakes were heaven.
It was also run by shifters, which made her feel safer.
She dug into her cheeseburger and watched him drain a milkshake and order another as he demolished a French dip and shifted to his next plate.
“I envy your metabolism.”
He smiled her way. “You seem to do okay.”
“I have a physical job. But if I ate like you, I’d be unable to move.”
“There are benefits to being Lycian.”
Being in a diner run by shifters, being surrounded by Others of all types, meant it was easier to speak about their world without fear. It was nice.
So nice she wanted to keep the topic away from current events. And know more about him, too.
“Tell me about it. What’s Lycia like?”
His surprised smile made her glad she’d asked. “It’s beautiful. Forests and lakes mainly.”
“Industrial? Or? I’m sorry. I know my ignorance is shameful. I guess you’re my brother-in-law and I don’t know much of anything about where you come from.”
“We’ve never taken much effort to educate Others here on what we’re like.” He lifted a shoulder. “Not industrial. We do have machines and production, but it’s nowhere near the scale you have here. Life is slower.”
“Easier I suppose when you live so long.”
He nodded. “Yes. There’s no rush-rush-rush attitude there. Life is savored. There’s much time spent with family and Pack. Our young are kept home for far longer than yours. We tend to live in familial groups. Leviathan land is very large, spread out over hundreds of miles. We live in clusters, usually with our immediate family. I’ll take you. When we get some breathing room that is.”
She smiled. “To Lycia? Really?”
“You’d like that?”
“Are you kidding? I’d love that. I’ve been dying to go since Lark first told me about it. A world of warriors? I’m thrilled.”
His smile, which was normally laid-back and slightly dirty, widened into something else. “It would be an honor to take you.”
“If we survive Thunderdome, that is.”
“Thunderdome?”
“How long have you been here? On this side of the Veil, I mean.”
“Mainly I’ve lived in Lycia. My father has a private security force; I have been a lieutenant there. I came here and lived for thirty years or so in the eighteen hundreds. That was an interesting time. Then for about a decade in your nineteen twenties. I’ve only been here for short periods of time since.”
“Thunderdome is from a movie. Dick of a leading man, but it’s a fun movie. Plus, Tina Turner is in it, big win. Essentially it’s an arena, two men enter, one man leaves.” She bet they had stuff like that in Lycia for real.
“Ah, I understand. You and your sister like cultural references.”
“I can see I need to expose you to more movies. You know, update your knowledge. There’s plenty of downtime stuck in hotels on this damned roadshow. I’ll take your education on.” She winked. “Also, I can’t quite believe you’re old enough to have been here in the eighteen hundreds.”
They paid the bill and headed back to the car after a stop at the mini mart when they gassed up. You never knew when you were going to need Red Vines or peanut M&Ms after all.
Soon he was back on the freeway, which had been mainly empty once they’d cleared the Grapevine and had descended into Central California. They hit pockets of traffic here and there, but nothing too heavy.
He started to speak again, taking up the conversation from back at the diner. “The world here was different then. In eighteen forty. I lived in London.”
“Really? Did you go to balls and dress up and all that stuff?”
“I had a wife.”
She paused. “A
“All our lives we’re taught to avoid humans. Short life-span, you see, means that should you love one, you’ll see them grow old and die. Thirty years is nothing to me. But to her, my Lydia, it was from the bloom of her youth until she passed, devastated by tuberculosis. She was fifty-five. Which for then was a ripe old age.”
Helena hadn’t even thought of him being married. She tried to wrap her head about it.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was over two hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Well, seems to me that to you, that’s not so long ago. And some things aren’t so easy to get over.”
He breathed out. His eyes were hidden behind some snazzy sunglasses so it was hard to know what he was feeling just then.
“Was it difficult? The fact that they’d have seen you as black?”
He was nearly unbearably handsome. Tall and broad. Dark skin, luscious lips, deep brown eyes. Like Simon, he tended to dress up in suits. He often looked like he’d stepped out of a magazine ad for designer menswear. But in eighteen forty, people would have been less accepting of his skin color.
“I had a lot of money. That tends to ease the way. There were plenty who did not speak to me and who avoided my presence. But more who sought ways to ease me into their company because of the wealth I possessed. The rumor was that I was an African prince of some sort.”
“Well, you are a prince, so that part was true.”
He snorted. “Yes. I haven’t thought of Lydia in some time. Thank you.”
“What was she like?”
She had no idea why she asked. It wasn’t really her thing to poke around about a man’s old girlfriends or exes. But his Lydia had been dead over two hundred and fifty years. It wasn’t like there was a threat. Nor should she even be thinking about it that way because, hello, she was his friend and colleague.
“Kind. Beautiful. They’d needed the income and no one had offered for her. It made her sad. She knew horses really well. That’s how I got to know her. She wasn’t helpless like many women of her time were bred to be. She was smart and well read. I loved her.” He shrugged. “We got on. We married and she moved into my home and we had a life together for a time. She died and I went back to Lycia.”
“Did she know? What you were, I mean?”
