He stroked the baby-soft hair at her temple. Now that their ritual was complete, he could engage in her rational discussion.
“First, you’re a terrible teacher,” she said. He snorted, remembering her lessons while they were at his cabin. “And second…”
She felt around on the mattress, and the blinding light of her cell phone found him again. She scrolled up the stream of texts with Mrs. Jace, their niece Brianna’s current guardian.
The two women had been in constant contact after Sabrina had opened the package Mrs. Jace had sent on behalf of Sabrina’s deceased sister; the package that contained information about Sabrina’s deceased sister and the niece she never knew she had, a niece who Mrs. Jace now needed Sabrina to assume caring for. Though the Jaces had raised Brianna since birth, they were elderly and now needed to attend to their own health.
“Mrs. Jace found Brianna on the computer researching different kinds of knives last night.”
Zeus was pleased. “She was doing the homework I gave her, then.”
Sabrina rolled off him, sitting on the edge of the bed and switched on the bedside lamp. He grunted and flung his forearm over his eyes, not ready to have this conversation after all.
“Brianna is a child. You can’t expose her to that kind of violence.”
He didn’t bother to correct the misperception. He wasn’t exposing Brianna to violence at all; he was giving her knowledge, teaching her a spiritual trade. If violence one day happened, it was his job to make sure she knew the steps she could take to deal with it.
Shifting his arm to reach beneath the pillow, Zeus freed the blade resting there, pointed its tip to the light brown ceiling, and began rolling it through his fingers.
“There are tribes in Africa and New Guinea, indigenous tribes in the Americas, where kids learn to hunt at a young age, sometimes land animals, fish, insects, to help sustain—”
“And I’m talking about twenty-first century urban America, not some National Geographic documentary!” she snapped.
But she was therationalone. He snorted.
She reached back and smacked him on the thigh. He gestured for the black blade on the table, and she handed it to him.
“Did you hear what happened with that Billy Lancaster kid?” he asked, twisting blades through the fingers of each hand. Sabrina pushed off the bed as his blades spun through his fingers in steady motion. Zeus swung his legs around and sat up, planting his feet on the floor. “I teach her, and kids think twice about going after her or her friends,” he said, referring to Brianna bloodying this Billy Lancaster’s nose for picking on her smaller, quieter friend.
Sabrina paced in front of him. “Yetanotherreason I had to reassure Mrs. Jace. She said Brianna’s always been bossy, and I’ll admit that may be hereditary—”No shit. “—but Mrs. Jace says it’s rare for Bree to put her hands on someone else because she’s always eaten up with guilt afterwards.”
He’d cure the kid of that. If a situation required violence for it to be resolved, then guilt was both unnecessary and without purpose.
“This rational discussion over her training is pointless. She’s already pledged herself; she’s going to be bound to the blade spirits.”
The feeling he’d learned to recognize as pride stirred deep. Brianna’s training was a divine responsibility, one he never thought he’d be gifted with.
A number of emotions crossed Sabrina’s face as she paced, then her features relaxed as she seemed to resolve something within herself.
“Okay.” She nodded. “Okay. This just means I need to monitor the correspondence between you two until she’s with us. If she continues to behave the way she is, Zeus, the Jaces may decide they want to contest putting her in our care.”
The blades ceased all movement. Brianna was now theirs. Her mother had planned for it to be so. It was bad enough he and Sabrina had to wait these few weeks to heal to Mama’s satisfaction before they retrieved Brianna; now Sabrina was saying he could possibly have to fight the kid’s guardians for the right to her?
He smiled, the blades whirled through his fingers at an accelerated rate.
“Zeus!” Sabrina called out.
His focus shifted from images the blade spirits shared on how to resolve the potential threat, to Sabrina’s very real and naked body standing directly in front of him.
“Baby, you’re doing it again,” she said.
Like the apt student he was learning to become, he lifted the other side of his mouth in what Sabrina and the rest of the Brood termed “a normal smile.”
“Better?” he asked, blades humming in pleasure as he spun them about intoxicatingly.
“Better.” She frowned and walked toward the bathroom on the other side of the room. “But don’t think you’re fooling anybody,” she tossed back. “I’ll be monitoring your communications with Bree from here on out.”
His smile disappeared as the bathroom door shut.
