Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

‘One, they aren’t bad guys, they’re our hosts. Two, not a danger,’ I said.

Nicky said, ‘I told you.’ He walked toward us, the spread of his shoulders making him look shorter than the other two guards, though he wasn’t really. His haircut was actually the thing you noticed after the muscles. His hair was short except for half his bangs, which hung in a long yellow triangle down the right-hand side of his face, covering the eye and halfway down the cheek. He used the hair to hide that the eye on that side was missing. He’d lost it when he was a teenager, years before he became a werelion, or he’d have still had the eye. The one eye that was left was a clear blue.

‘You told them what?’ I asked.

‘That you could handle yourself against anything that was on this side of the hangar,’ Bram said, in his clear, strong voice. He didn’t talk nearly as much as Ares, but when he did it was usually to the point. Ares would joke and tease, Bram almost never.

‘Should I be insulted?’ Alfie asked.

I said, ‘No.’

Ares said, ‘Yes.’

Micah said, ‘No.’

Alfie looked from one to the other of us, smiling slightly. ‘I don’t know what I expected from you, Ms Blake, Mr Callahan, but this easy camaraderie is unexpected.’

‘Pleasant, I hope,’ Micah said.

‘Yes,’ the vampire said, ‘most illuminating.’

‘Illuminating, why illuminating?’ I asked.

‘To shed light upon something; I thought it was a very appropriate word.’

I would have asked more, but Micah’s cousin chose that moment to come up and say, ‘Who’s riding with me?’

‘Juliet, this is Anita and Nathaniel.’

I offered a hand to forgo any thought of hugging. I didn’t like hugging people I didn’t know, and some families just hugged willy-nilly. Her hand was as small as mine, but more callused to match the working cowboy boots. She took Nathaniel’s hand, too, and he wasted a smile on her. She smiled back, but it didn’t reach her eyes. They were blue, and the frown between them made them look less the shape of Micah’s.

‘Aunt Bea said you were Mike’s fiancée; is that true, or are you just living together? I ask, because if it’s just Aunt Bea’s way of dealing with her issues about living in sin, I can help head off some of the wedding talk.’

It made me half-smile and half-laugh. It was blunt and I liked it. ‘No wedding plans; can’t we just introduce me as his girlfriend?’

‘Nope, believe me. I lived with my husband before marriage, and fiancée is the family’s nice, hopeful double-talk for living in sin.’

I looked at Micah, and he knew my expressions, too, because he answered the unvoiced question. ‘Some of my relatives are religious in a …’ He seemed to fumble for words, and finally settled on, ‘It’s going to be awkward.’

Juliet laughed and shook her head. ‘Awkward. Oh, cousin, how I’ve missed you. You always were the peacekeeper and the master of understatement. You should be able to come home and see your dad and not worry about this other crap, but you know it never works that way. I’m sorry.’

Micah nodded. ‘Me, too.’

I was beginning to get a bad feeling that maybe Micah hadn’t gotten back in touch with his family after Chimera’s death for more than one reason. He and Nathaniel had moved in at the same time; we had always been a threesome, never just a twosome.

‘We can call Anita your fiancée and the family will let it pass, but you can’t introduce them together like you just did to me, you know you can’t.’

‘I could,’ Micah said, and there was something in those two quiet words that held way more emotion than it should have.

‘Micah should be able to just see his dad and not worry about anything else,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I can just be a friend.’

‘No,’ Micah said, and he took Nathaniel’s hand in his and shook his head. ‘No, you can’t just be a friend.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Juliet said, ‘you’re going to force the issue. You haven’t changed; you were always so quiet, the perfect son, until you weren’t. You’d get something you believed in and you would never back down, no matter what.’ She sighed and shook her head. She looked at Nathaniel. ‘It’s nothing personal. You have to be a wonderful person for Micah to feel this strongly, but I do not want to be in the shitstorm that is going to happen when he introduces you to our family as his … what?’ She looked at Micah. ‘What do you say?’

‘Significant other,’ Micah said, and his voice was very firm.

Nathaniel said, ‘I love that you say that, but honestly, Micah, this has to be about you and your dad. It’s just words; I don’t want to make this harder on you.’

I saw Micah squeeze his hand and shake his head again. ‘It’s not just words, Nathaniel, or if it is, words are important, they have meaning and truth to them.’ He turned to Juliet still holding Nathaniel’s hand. ‘I’ll let the fiancée stand with Anita, because if we could figure out how to marry as a group, we would, but since we can’t do that legally, fiancée and significant other will do.’

Nathaniel looked at him. ‘Do you mean that? That if we could marry as a group, you would?’

Micah looked at him. ‘Yes.’

Nathaniel threw his arms around Micah, and they hugged. They hugged like they meant it, and I didn’t have to see Nathaniel’s face to know he was crying. I realized I was, too. Damn. I went to them and wrapped my arms around them both, my two men. And just like that the lines were drawn; Micah wouldn’t back down or make Nathaniel mean any less to him, not even to smooth things over with his family. If he could do it, so could we.

The three of us rode with Juliet, but the guards insisted on at least one guard riding with us. Since they were here to keep us safe, it was hard to argue with the logic, so we didn’t try. What did surprise me was that Dev ended up riding with us and not Nicky. If it was just one of the four I’d expected it to be him. Honestly, I felt odd without Nicky in the car. It wasn’t a matter of trust or skill. I trusted Dev to do the job and guard us just fine, but I hadn’t traveled out of town with Nicky and Dev since they started being partners so often, and I just plain preferred Nicky’s company. I couldn’t have put it into words, because God knew Dev was the better conversationalist and traditionally charming, but Nicky … was Nicky. He fit better. Micah, Nathaniel, and I rode in the back middle seat and we put the last row of seats down so there’d be more room for luggage. The rest of the luggage had actually fit into one of the black SUVs, so Alfie was driving Ares, Bram, and most of the luggage to our hotel so they could unload the regular luggage. Nicky was following us in the other SUV that Alfie had given to us as ‘our’ car for the time we spent in town. Most of the weapons we’d packed were divided between us and Nicky’s follow car. As a U.S. Marshal of the Preternatural Branch, I was duty-bound to keep most of my arsenal at hand, because as a federal officer I could be called up anywhere I traveled. The ruling had come down after a case when another marshal had been unable to perform his duties to the degree necessary to help out a fellow marshal who put out a call for aid. At least they’d changed the ruling that had forced me to either carry most of the ‘equipment’ with me or have it in a secure lockup at all times. That ruling had come down after an executioner had his bag of dangerous goodies stolen from the trunk of his car and one of the guns was used in a holdup. The ruling had been overturned when a fellow executioner had taken in all his equipment and challenged the judges to carry it. These weren’t laws most of the time, but ‘rulings,’ basically emergency actions taken from some knee-jerk reaction to a tragedy. Since my branch of law enforcement was never called in until people were dead, there was a lot of tragedy to go around. Worse yet, the ‘rulings,’ even most of the laws that I acted under, were made by people who had never used a gun for real, worn a badge, or had to make a life-and-death decision, let alone that decision in the split second of a vampire hunt or while tracking a rogue shapeshifter.