Jayne Castle: After Glow

As far as he was concerned, there was no need to do any trial runs with this relationship, Emmett thought. He couldn't envision a future without Lydia. He would have been happy to go straight into a Covenant Marriage. But he had known that he would be lucky to get her to agree to start with an MC.

Lydia had a lot of issues when it came to ghost-hunters. He had tried to distance himself from Guild politics as far as possible, but he knew that she still fretted about his connections to the organization.

Now, thanks to the near-fatal assault on Mercer Wyatt a few hours ago, there was no point in even raising the issue of marriage in the immediate future.

He poured two glasses of the evil white wine and put the bottle back in the refrigerator. There was no sound from the bedroom. Lydia had had plenty of time to change into a pair of jeans and a sweater. What was keeping her?

Fuzz tumbled silently into the kitchen and looked up at him from the floor. The dust-bunny bobbed anxiously.

"What is it, pal? Want a pretzel?" Emmett removed the lid of the jar. Dust-bunnies were omnivorous. Lydia usually fed Fuzz whatever she had fixed for herself. But when it came to snacks, he had a pronounced taste for pretzels.

But Fuzz ignored the pretzel. Instead he made an odd noise, a sound that was very close to a tiny growl.

"Okay, no pretzel." Emmett replaced the lid of the jar. "Something wrong, buddy?"

A tremor passed over Fuzz's fur. He looked as if he was trying to bristle, not an easy thing for a ball of lint to do. Then he bounced a couple of times, turned and scampered a few feet back toward the bedroom, halted and tumbled back into the kitchen. He bristled some more.

"Right." Emmett picked up the two glasses of wine. "You want to play the Find Lydia game, is that it?"

Fuzz drifted swiftly back down the hall toward the bedroom.

Emmett followed warily. They had played this game many times in recent weeks both indoors and outside on the street or in a nearby park. Fuzz loved it. The rules were simple. Emmett would look at Fuzz and say, find Lydia , and Fuzz would rush off gleefully to lead him to wherever she happened to be at that moment.

But this time there was a sense of urgency in Fuzz's demeanor that was new.

At the doorway to the bedroom Emmett paused, trying to get a handle on the situation before he made a move.

Lydia stood at the window, her back turned toward him. She was still in her severely tailored, skirted business suit. She hadn't even removed the jacket. Her face was in her hands and her shoulders were shaking.

His insides turned to ice. He had seen Lydia in a lot of moods, including angry, passionate, happy, and scared. He had seen her confront energy ghosts, a murderer, and Mercer Wyatt's ambitious wife, Tamara, all without flinching. But in the short time he had known her, he had never seen Lydia in tears.

Fuzz hopped up on the windowsill near Lydia and huddled there, peering at Emmett with an air of agitated expectation. Dust-bunny body language for do something , probably.

Sorry, pal, Emmett thought. I haven't got a clue how to deal with this.

But he sure as hell could not continue to just stand here watching Lydia sob quietly into her fingers. She was tearing the heart out of him.

"Lydia? Honey?" He put the wineglasses down on the dresser and went to stand behind her.

She sniffed a couple of times. The tears continued to flow. Aware that he was way out of his depth, he seized a couple of tissues from the box on the nightstand and pushed them into her hands.

Lydia took the tissues from him without comment and blew her nose. Unable to think of anything else to do, Emmett gave her more tissues.

She dabbed at her eyes and took a deep breath. He put his hands on her shoulders from behind and massaged gently.

The flood of tears eventually subsided but she did not turn around. Instead she gazed fixedly out the window at the old building across the street. She sniffed a couple more times.

"Sorry," she muttered. "I hate when this happens."

"It's okay." He continued to knead her tense shoulders. "You've got a right. It's been a rough day."

"You think so? Gosh, I only came across one dead body, went through a police interrogation, and found out that you are now the chief of the Cadence Guild. Just an ordinary day." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "No good reason that I can see to break down in tears."

He winced. "It's the last item on the list that made you cry, isn't it? The fact that I've agreed to take over the Guild on a temporary basis."

"Why did you do it, Emmett?" she asked starkly.

"It's… complicated," he said.

"Tell me one thing. Does it involve Tamara Wyatt?"

The question surprised him. "Hell, no. Tamara has nothing to do with this."

"She's your ex-fiancée. She ended the engagement and married Mercer Wyatt when she found out that you were going to step down as boss of the Resonance Guild. And now you've just taken over the Cadence Guild, her husband's job. You two have a lot of history."

"Whatever Tamara and I had together ended when she made it clear that she wanted to be the wife of a Guild chief more than she wanted to be my wife. I told you that the night you met her."

"If this isn't about Tamara, what is it about? Is the old saying true? Once a Guild man, always a Guild man?"

"The Cadence Guild is in a very delicate situation right now," he said, choosing his words carefully. "Wyatt says he's preparing to step down in another year or two. He claims he is committed to modernizing the organization along the same lines as the Resonance Guild before he leaves office."

"You really think he intends to turn the Cadence Guild into a respectable business enterprise with a board of directors and an elected CEO at the top? After running the organization with an iron fist for over three decades? Give me a break."

"Wyatt is nothing if not a cold-eyed pragmatist." Emmett wondered, even as he spoke the words, why he was bothering to try to defend the boss of the Cadence Guild. Probably because he had just agreed to take over the job himself, he thought. Deep down he had been praying that when Lydia found out what had happened she wouldn't consign him to the same category as Wyatt, that she wouldn't conclude that he really was a low-life mobster.

"I agree he's probably one heck of a realist," Lydia muttered.

"He is genuinely concerned with the future of the Guild. He took a good hard look at the current position of the organization and realized that the Cadence Guild must change if it wants to stay relevant."

"Hah."

"Wyatt admits that he's having trouble attracting and keeping good, well-qualified hunters. There was a time when a talented dissonance-energy para-rez signed up with the Guild for life. Now a lot of them join for a few years, make some quick money ghost-hunting, and then get out in order to enter a more respectable profession." He hesitated. "That's especially true for hunters who want to marry outside the Guild."

"Uh-huh."

She didn't say anything else, but there was no need for further comment, he thought. They were both well aware of the facts. Ever since they had been established during the Era of Discord, the hunters' Guilds had operated as closed, insular societies with their own traditions and their own rules. Historically, if you were raised in a Guild family, the odds were very high that you would choose a spouse from another Guild family.

"Wyatt wants to change the image of the Cadence Guild," he said. "His goal is to turn it into a professional business organization."

"The way you did with the Resonance Guild?"

He wasn't sure where she was going to go with that. Her tone was a little too neutral for his peace of mind.

"That's the general idea," he said.