Page 9 of Vampire's Choice

When Kohana was alive, he’d come to Mal’s office and brace his hand next to it as he informed Mal of important matters. Like when Mal had his head up his own ass. Some of those marks were Mal’s answer to that assessment.

“Have you ever hit him, Sgidoda? By accident, or on purpose?”

Adan had asked the question when they were both much younger. Ruth remembered her brother’s wide blue eyes.

“I never miss what I aim at,” Mal had told him. “How do you think he lost his leg?”

They’d been in the living room, Elisa mending clothes, Mal whittling, Ruth and Adan playing a game on the rug. Kohana, peeling vegetables in the large kitchen, snorted and tapped his prosthetic leg with the butt of the peeler.

“Your father is telling tales,” he told Adan. “He annoyed me one day and I lacked a proper weapon. So I cut off my leg to have something large enough to beat some sense into him.” His mouth twitched. “Sadly, it was not large enough.”

According to her father, Kohana had written his own job description as a second marked servant. Her father still missed his friend. They all did. She and Adan had called Kohana “uncle.” When Kohana asked why, Adan told him, “Because you and father are brothers. Aren’t you?”

The two men had been out in the barn, working together to fix a faulty pump for the rain barrels. Mal had lifted his head at the comment. Kohana said nothing, one of the few times Ruth remembered him showing the deference a vampire expected from a servant, but ever after she’d known Kohana honored those protocols, not because they existed, but because he respected her father.

“Yes,” Mal said. “We are.”

When Ruth emerged from Mal’s office, she saw her mother sitting in the hallway. Elisa was rarely idle. Tonight, she was reviewing and making notes in her garden journal. Her curiosity, her desire to learn and her love of reading were things she’d given Ruth.

Unlike Mal, Elisa didn’t have an expression that walled off what was going on behind it. Her mother was resilient as hell, but the wave of emotions she was feeling made Ruth grip the frame anew.

“I’ll be okay.” Looking over her shoulder, Ruth met her father’s eyes, her back straight and chin set. “We knew I would eventually have to face the big, bad world of vampires on my own. I’m ready to take those risks. Just like Lil Sol.”

Lil Sol had been a bobcat cub born with a deformed leg and a bad heart. He’d been found on a Florida highway and had two years on the preserve before his heart gave out. Initially, they’d thought to keep him away from the others to protect him, but he’d pined for the company of his brethren. With them, he managed many of the hunting and play behaviors they did.

“There’s no sense in living a half-life to get twice as much time,” she told her father.

His flat expression came back, which surrounded her heart with his love and held it tight. Ruth moved into the hallway to accept the warm strength of her mother’s arms.

“Lil Sol was far tougher than those other cats expected,” Elisa said, woman to woman. “Tis the way of it, more often than not.”

Returning to the present, Ruth curled her arms around her knees, drawing them up against the pillow she was holding, and gazed at the bouquet of feathers.

Was the male she’d encountered earlier tonight both angel and incubus? Was that possible? She couldn’t ask Mal, not at this point. With the significant turn of events, she’d decided not to raise the issue she’d expected to have to discuss, why she hadn’t called for him when she realized an intruder was on their island.

She couldn’t give Mal an answer she didn’t know herself.

In the few days before she left for the Circus, she’d wait and see if the winged male came back. If not, then it was a passing encounter, over and done. Nothing her father needed to know about.

The sun was starting to crest, because the lethargy she could never seem to shake or push past started to grip her. Other vampires her age could get in a couple hours more waking time in whatever burrow they found from the sun. Watch cable, write letters. Surf social media. Instead, she was comatose once it fully cleared the horizon, and started its slow ascent into the sky.

She wondered how it would be at the Circus. Adan had told her when they weren’t doing a show, the Circus set up camp in the in-between places between worlds, and the daylight was a soft buttery gold that didn’t burn vampires.

On an impulse, she shoved herself off the mattress and stumbled to the dresser. She brought the clay pot back to her nightstand and took one of the wing feathers into the bed with her. As she held it against her, the tip teased her collarbone like the male’s fingertips.

Whether it made her sleep more or less restfully didn’t matter. Whoever he was, she wanted him in her dreams with her.

CHAPTER THREE

Several nights later, she was ready to depart, and full of anticipation. Adan had called and said he’d be the one guiding Ruth through the portal. He’d handle her introduction to Lady Yvette personally.

The thirteen years he’d been in the bowels of the Underworld, with a slim-to-none chance of surviving Guardian training, had been agonizing, for all of them. Though he was out in the world doing Guardian work now, Ruth still treated a chance to see him like being handed water when on the brink of fatal dehydration.

She tried not to show it too obviously, because he was her brother, which meant she had to give him a lot of shit about things. With the Light Guardian mojo, he’d become way too insightful, aka “pretending to be a know-it-all.”

Catriona, his mate and third marked servant, was visiting her adopted father, Lord Keldwyn, in the Fae world, so he’d be alone. However, on the call, he’d promised Mal and Elisa they’d both be at the next family holiday. If he managed it, Ruth would make sure Lady Yvette knew she’d need time off to join them.

She viewed Catriona as a sister-in-law, with a heavy emphasis on sister. Considering the first time they’d met, Ruth had done her best to kill the slim Fae, their relationship had progressed pretty well.

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