Page 42 of Cathmoir's Sons

“Kellan,” I whisper. “Let me come over. I won’t do anything but hold you. You need a hug.”

I’m so sure she’s going to saynothat I see her mouth frame the word. But my mind’s playing tricks on me, because the word never comes.

Instead, she nods. “I really need a hug. Please—nothing more than that. Please, Luca. I need to be able to trust you.”

“You can,” I promise.

I roll out of the cuddle pit, tapping a message to Rho so he doesn’t freak out if he wakes up and finds me gone. I leave my phone on a cushion and slip out of my skin, into my fur. The shadows open for me. Normally, I’d need to know exactly where I was going to walk from shadow to shadow, but Kellan calls me like a beacon in the darkness. I step out of the shadows in the corner of the bedroom and bound up onto her bed.

“White—oh. You’re not Whitey. Hey, Luca.” She sits up and sets her phone on the nightstand. She’s wearing a sweatshirt. Her hair’s in a long braid. She looks tired and sadness pours off her like a sour perfume. I stretch into my skin and pull the bluequilt around my waist so she’s not threatened by my nakedness. Then I scoot up the bed to kneel next to her.

Without a word, I open my arms.

With a sigh, she falls into them.

She tucks her face into the curve of my neck. Her arms slide around my shoulders. “Thank you,” she breathes.

“Any time,” I promise. “Any time you need a hug, I’ll be here to give you one.”

She settles in and I have the sense she’s here to stay for a while. Smiling, I ease us down onto the bed and tuck her into my body. I push the quilt down between us so my semi’s not poking her.

“This okay?” I ask.

She nods. “I’m sorry, Luca.”

“For what? Don’t be sorry. You need me, you call. I know things are bad between you and my brother and Rho, but all of us are here for you. Whatever you need.”

“Thank you. It’s been a day and tomorrow’s going to be hard. I want to let go of Carrie, but there’s something horribly final about her memorial. I have to acknowledge she’s gone. Really acknowledge it, down deep. I have to let her go.”

I rub her back, feeling the bones of her ribs and spine through her sweatshirt. She’s lost weight. She’s always beautiful to me, but I hate that even an ounce of her is melting away under her grief and heartache.

Hearing her talk about Doctor Prince gives me another insight to her dream. She’s lost a mentor, a teacher of her inner crow-child. But that same teacher has set her on a path she’s afraid of. A path that could end in blood.

“Tell me your favorite memory of Doctor Prince,” I say, hoping to divert her to happier thoughts.

Tomorrow, the women of Bevington will gather to trade their favorite stories about Doctor Prince and sing her soul off to theMother. Unless Jane Serpa breaks with tradition—which I highly doubt—men aren’t invited until the memorial the day after tomorrow. Law intends to crash the girls’ night, but even if we successfully lure Kellan away, I doubt she’ll be in a storytelling mood, so I settle in to enjoy what she’ll share with me tonight.

“The time she bailed me, Teddy, and Rachel out of a human jail,” Kellan says, a thread of humor entering her voice.

“What?” My voice shoots up. I know Kellan and her group of friends were troublemakers while they were at Bevington, but I had no idea Kellan had ended up in a human jail.

“She probably came because of Teddy. Teddy was always her favorite student. But I was so ridiculously grateful to see her face, I didn’t care who she came for. We were in Charlemont, a human town east of here. There’s an organization based there, an anti-fae organization called Evanda Hale. It’s run by Rhodes’ uncle, so you probably know about it.”

I grunt. “I do. Rhodes was doing a little work for Evanda Hale when we first started dating. Fundraising, outreach, that kind of thing. He stopped when we got serious.”

“The wild fae don’t have anything to do with human abductions, though,” Kellan says.

“No, but the organization attracts extremists. They’re not there because of the abductions. They’re there because they want someone to hate. The fae are an easy target. Rho didn’t want to be involved with an organization that promoted hate against his boyfriend’s race.”

Kellan sighs. “There’s so much hate in the world.”

“What did she do that night? And how did the three of you getcaughtby humans?”

“Well, we might have been drinking,” Kellan admits. “Quite a lot. And Rachel might have stripped down to her underwear and passed out while we were breaking into a warehouse whereEvanda Hale stores records. Teddy was looking for information on the Bloodelm court, you know the one that was destroyed?”

“I remember,” I stroke her head. “I’d never been there, but I knew about it.”

“We didn’t find what we were looking for. We left Rachel outside and thought we’d cast concealment charms, but I guess we blew it because we were drunk. The next thing we knew, someone reported a naked, drunk girl dancing in an alley and the human police showed up. A lot of the humans in the towns around Bevvy have more than a drop of preternatural blood. These cops could see and hear us and they arrested us. Teddy was afraid if she called her boys, they’d choose violence. Teddy had this ring that was connected to Carrie. She used it and Carrie came. Eventually. She let us marinate in jail for most of the night and showed up around five in the morning. We were sober by then, hungover as hell. She took absolutely no pity on us. She bailed us out, drove us back to Bevington, fed us breakfast, and made us go to our morning classes.”

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