Page 25 of Threadbound

“Oh, no. I don’t do church.” Jamie had beenina church, of course. A lot of them. And he did very much enjoy the annual Christmas concerts at St. Giles. Christmas had always been his favorite holiday—more because his mother had loved it so much, whispering Yule tales to him in the dark after Bill Eckel had lectured them extensively on how Christmas was under attack and that they needed to remember that Jesus was the reason for the season.

Nell would tuck Jamie in—like she had before Bill Eckel had come into their lives—the soft, warm glow of fake candles illuminating odd shadows in his room, and tell him about theever-burning Yule Log, about the war between the Holly King and the Oak King, and the feasts and offerings made to bring back the return of the light.

She whispered to him about how newer stories had come to replace the old—how the Christians kept the festival for their own, but how people were never able to let go of trees and fire and light and food—so those had become a part of the new traditions, thus keeping the old ones still alive under new names, like a Christmas tree and Christmas lights and boughs of holly that still reminded them of the darkness of the Holly King.

“You dinna need a church for religion,” Bran pointed out, his lips half curved in an expression that might have been mischievous, although Jamie had a hard time telling.

“True enough. No synagogues or temples, either, though.” Jamie offered a lopsided smile, trying to be as unoffensive as possible.

He shifted, clearly uncomfortable, as Bran studied him. “Then what do you believe, Jamie Weaver?” he asked, and Jamie suddenly felt like his answer was very important.

And something he didn’t want to talk about at work.

“Tell you what,” he said, instead of answering. “I’ll buy fish and chips and a pint, and we can talk theology over dinner.”

His belly warmed at the sparkle that ignited in Bran’s deep green eyes. “Verra well. I’ll see you after closing, then.”

Jamie nodded. “After closing.”

Bran had been waitingfor him in the same place, leaning up against the column beside the gate, when Jamie and Trixie closed up. Trixie’s giggles made Jamie’s face heat even more in the late August sun as he shoved his hands in his pockets and stared down at his toes. “Ready to go?”

“Aye,” came the response.

Jamie led the way to a small takeaway place called The Chippy in New Town, and they took their takeaway boxes the few blocks to St. Andrew’s Square to sit on the grass and eat their fried dinner.

Jamie sat with his legs out, leaning back on one hand as he ate his chips—which he stubbornly still thought of as fries—with the other, but Bran had folded himself smoothly into a cross-legged position, the box open on his lap, a paper napkin folded over one thigh.

Jamie was amused to note that although Bran ate almost delicately, breaking off bite-sized pieces of fish, he was completely unconcerned about the decorum of eating either fish or chips with his fingers, licking them off when they got too much vinegar or sauce on them.

Jamie himself had always struggled to eat fish and chips neatly, and he enjoyed the fact that someone else seemed to have the same problem, although he was a bit jealous that Bran could still make itlookcharming, even if there was finger licking involved.

And then, of course, there was the fact that finger licking was involved, and that kept making Jamie’s mind go somewhere that he was struggling to keep from going. Not that he felt guilty about it—it’s just that thinking about Bran licking things didn’t seem to be somethingBranwas interested in, and Jamie wasn’t the kind of person to get pushy about sex.

In fact, he was the opposite of that kind of person, which meant that, more often than not, he wasn’t the sexual initiator in most of his relationships, something that had annoyed more than one date. Apparently if you were very tall and broad, people expected you to be the assertive, aggressive one.

As far as Jamie knew, he didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body.

He did have a curious one.

“So… why are you so interested in me?” he asked, having decided about ten times not to ask that question and then asking it anyway.

Bran looked up at him, his expression guarded. “Do I need a reason?”

“Most people have reasons for doing things,” Jamie replied.

“I want to know more about you.”

“Yeah, butwhy? Why me?”

Bran wasn’t sure how to answer. Telling Jamie the truth—that they were bound together by Fate—was not going to be believed, given the fact that humanity had mostly given up on magic and wandered about blindly insisting that supernatural things either didn’t happen or were the work of their Christian gods or saints.

But Bran didn’t think he had an answer Jamie was likely to accept.

“Why not?” he asked, instead.

Jamie’s expression told him that the half-breed wasn’t buying it. “So you just follow all sorts of people around and show up to their work and buy them dinner?”

“You bought the fish and chips,” Bran pointed out. It had pleased him that Jamie had immediately assumed it was his turn to pay—returning the dinner Bran had bought for him in kind. He also knew that it was kind of silly that he was happy that Jamie seemed to share his sensibilities. There wasn’t anything between them, really.

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