Page 54 of Monster Married
I clicked at him softly. “You’re impossible.”
“I am inevitable. Now go in there and make up your mind. I’ll be out here and stop anyone from barging in.”
“With your daggers?” I gave them a casual glance. He wore them at his hips, not at all for show like Hove wore his dagger.
“Oh, my charm is much sharper than those, and you know it.”
I nodded in thanks and slipped into the suite as quietly as I could so as not to disturb Fellisse.
There was no hallway, just one big room in which two bedrolls had been set up. They had not been put away since we’d gotten here. Vergis had insisted he sleep out here, so Nokim had joined him, saying that Lissir would be more comfortable in the back room. Two doors at the back led to the smaller rooms, and I could make out Fellisse’s deep breathing from the one on the right, which he shared with Lissir.
I made for the one on the left and saw Vergis standing in the corner across from the bedroll with his hand on the hilt of his knife, watching to make sure it wasn’t a stranger coming in. He dropped his hand and gave me a nod, then went back to watching Rory, who lay there as pale and unresponsive as I had left him.
I knelt and clicked at Rory and gave his neck a few licks. He was cool to the touch; not terribly so like he had been when he’d collapsed, but noticeably. He warmed when I was in bed with him, but if I wasn’t, he cooled off quickly. His lips were rough, the skin there starting to break and chap, despite the salve Fellisse applied each day.
“I’m pretty sure he’s not dying,” Vergis said, defaulting to English like he did most of the time. He spoke barely above a whisper. His face was drawn with concern—or rather, with the pain caused by being powerless to do anything at all for Rory.
“What do you mean by that? Why would he be dying?”
He looked off to the side and ran a hand through his hair, cut short in the human fashion. “Well…I think something happened to me when Rory made that Koa Esher soldier die. Or when he saved Nokim, I don’t know which.”
I looked at him. “Please speak plainly. I don’t think I have any patience left today for you dicing out the information.”
“It’s dole out—never mind. I’ve been to the library here, and while you may all think I’m some backwards, uneducated halfwit, I know magic. Rory manipulated someone’s death, either to save Nokim, which I think is more likely, or to save me for no good reason. I could’ve taken those Koa Esher. Either way, I’ve noticed something strange about my sacrifices these past few days while I did Hove’s warding.”
“No one here thinks you’re a halfwit, Vergis. No one ever thought that of you.”
“Save it. I’ve been seeing some kind of aura around the sacrifices. And I…I can do this thing. Well, I had no idea I was doing it, but I put it together today when I was warding this one house where a hangu and his hangu mate live with their three fathers. Doesn’t even matter. One of the fathers was old. Unwell. And I saw that aura. It’ll sound stupid, but I just knew he was close.” His voice hitched, and his hand had settled around the hilt of his knife again.
“Close?”
“To dying. I felt this overwhelming need to go and sit with him. Help him along. So I did. And he died. With a fucking smile on his face. He didn’t say anything, but I got the sense that he was grateful for me being there and…helping him along.”
“You…what?” Vergis had been our guide on a few missions into Koa Esher territory before we’d gone to Earth, and I’d seen him in a fight. He was lethal, even without a gun. “You never made anyone die with a smile on their face.”
He made a human sound at the back of his throat. “You don’t think I know that? I have absolutely no idea how this happened, because I still haven’t found anything that explains what Rory can do. He can take sacrificial energy from plants rather than animals, not to mention all the other stuff. But it’s how I know he’s not on his way out. I don’t see the death aura around him. You don’t have to worry about him dying.” He took a step toward me and Rory. “I have a suggestion.”
“Just tell me, Vergis.” I longed to slip under the blankets with Rory and warm him with my own body’s heat. Perhaps if he was finally warm enough, he’d wake and kiss me in his human way, would say my name with the lilt to his voice that was so much like Vergis’s own.
He sighed. “I could take you all home. Not the house. My home. To my dads. My dad—my hangu father—has collected human myths and stuff, basically every scrap of human magic, or at least the rumors and tales about human magic, he could get his hands on. Maybe he knows what to make of this. I’ll be straight with you, your freaky mate is beyond anything I know of magic.”
I looked at Vergis. He’d never spoken much about his fathers, not beyond saying he had two; one hangu, one human. I was still surprised he’d shared the foods his human father had been able to consume back at the hotel. If nothing else, it implied that his human father had eaten those foods, possibly here on Aër.
Vergis’s offer made my decision an easy one.
“That’s a kind offer. Can you be ready to leave in an hour or so?”
Vergis pulled his shoulders up, only to then drop them in the human fashion. “I can be ready to leave in five minutes if we stop by the hatchery to grab some sacrifices on our way out.”
I looked down at Rory and brushed a curl of his pretty red hair off his forehead. He had looked so bright-eyed at the honkora, fascinated by the smallest things, delighted by the idea that I had made our mated status official, even if that was not a big thing, certainly not with a mate call as strong as ours.
“Could you tell Lissir to go and get Noki? We can leave once he gets back here.”
Vergis nodded. “Will do.”
“Oh, and wake Fellisse. He might want to say goodbye to Hove.”
When Vergis was gone, I decided I could steal a few moments. I lay on the bedroll next to Rory, holding his cool hand in mine.
