Page 48 of Bound and Tide

In such a short time, he’d become the first man—the first person—who she missed when he wasn’t around since…since her mother.

Xander quickly went back to speaking in circles, though these ones made even less sense than before, and the shop’s bell jingled once again. Her mind was occupied trying to parse out what Xander was truly requesting until her eyes fell on the three that walked into the apothecary.

Evangeline slapped a hand over Xander’s mouth to shut him up as she weighed the details she’d squeezed out of him against the possibility that stood in the entry. A boy and girl with copper skin, angled features, and eyes dark as night hesitated there, and she knew they just couldn’t be, but then they weren’t the sort to come into her shop, not unless they had some other reason—some sibling-ish reason.

Then Xander shouted a muffled curse beneath her hand, and Evangeline knew.

“They’re here,” she breathed, tingles in her jaw and behind her eyes, that burst dam wreaking all sorts of havoc on her senses.

“Get out!” Xander snapped as he freed his mouth of Evangeline’s hand.

“Oh, stop it.” She gave his chest a swat and went around the counter, eyeing the third figure shrouded in a cloak. “I thought there were only two of them.”

“There are.” A half-eaten pastry was whipped through the air, striking the covered figure, and a heap of water imps tumbled out from under the cloak. “I told you that was a moronic plan—look how unstable they are!”

The girl crossed her arms and gave him the most Xander-esque sneer Evangeline had ever seen. “Well, it worked getting them through town.” She was short and there was a slight roundness to her face even though she shared the same bone structure as the other two.

“Then stack them back up and get lost.”

“Xander,” Evangeline warned, and he just mimicked the girl, arms crossed and lips drawn into a sniveling pout. “Gods, you really are brother and sister, aren’t you?”

“We’re what?”

The air in the shop went thick with tension as silence fell on them all. In the quiet, there was only munching as the imps devoured the pastry that had felled them.

“They don’t know?” Evangeline’s heart raced—she hadn’t meant for them to find out like this, but then he certainly should have already told them if she herself knew! “How is this a secret? You look so similar! Well, except for your hair.”

“The hair is a demon thing from my mother,” he muttered.

The boy gasped. “Your mother’s a demon?”

“Forget that—she’s saying that Stavros is his father. Is that true?” The girl looked equally baffled.

“By all that’s dark and unholy, yes.” Xander threw his arms ceiling-ward with the most exasperated noise. “I’m a blood mage, and the three of us are related on the boring, weak human side, all right? Now what are you two brats even doing here?”

The young girl’s mouth fell open, her stance loosening as she simply stared back at Xander like the irascibility had been slapped out of her. In her speechlessness, the boy scratched at his face and cleared his throat. “Well, we were…worried about you.”

Xander scoffed. “Worried?”

He nodded, a swallow bobbing down his thin throat. A little too gaunt, he was much taller than his sister, but stood with a hunch and his shoulders pulled in like he wished he could take up less space or maybe none at all. “You looked pretty bad after the prison, and since you left the imps with us, we really thought something was wrong. They helped us find you, and we watched you come to this apothecary, and…” He bit a thin lip. “You’re not ill, are you?”

“Ill?” Xander pressed his hands into the counter and glared at them. “Do I look ill?”

“Well, no, but our mother didn’t look ill most of the time either.”

“For fuck’s sake, I’m fine!” Xander shouted, and both children winced. “I come here to get laid, not to be healed.”

“All right, you don’t have to say it like that,” Evangeline hissed and gestured for the two to come away from the door. She quickly set the lock so they wouldn’t have any surprise patrons with the imps running about and a familial spat unfolding. “And stop yelling at them, Xander. They were concerned for you; you should be grateful.”

Xander mumbled something about gratefulness and brats being allowed to live, but she pretended to not hear, instead doing away with the masquerade that she’d not been listening closely enough to him earlier. She grabbed the last of the pastries and shoved them into the children’s hands, guiding them closer to the hearth.

“Now,” she said with a clap that made them all straighten, and she eyed Xander, “you will tell me exactly what dangerous thing you’re planning with all of these herbs you’re borrowing and how it involves these two.”

He sucked his teeth. “Nothing.”

You’re lying, she thought, and somehow it was loud enough for him to hear.

“Well, nothing with those two—ask them yourself if I’ve invited them to the Kvesari Wood.”

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