“Cyrus,” she made the traditional gesture once more, more fluidly this time.“It would do everyone good to see you both.Unless… unless you’re going somewhere,” she added nervously, suddenly noticing our attire.
“We’ll be there,” I promised.“Can you sit for a moment and tell Cyrus your story?How you came to be in Tartarus?”
She looked confused, but she nodded readily enough.“Of course, if… it will help.”
But that didn’t turn out to be necessary.
“Sunflowers,” Cyrus said suddenly.
I looked at him.“What?”
But he was staring at Inese.“Your kitchen… it was decorated in sunflowers.You had a trivet, something one of the neighbor children gave you.You used to give them candy every Christmas, and he made it for you in school, painted it like a sunflower, to match your kitchen…”
She blinked at him in surprise, but not in shock, because she wasn’t afraid.He was the
co-leader of her clan, and she had nothing to fear from him.Nothing to fear at all anymore, surrounded by family.“Yes.How did you know?”
He didn’t answer, just turned away and walked over to the expanse of windows, and stood looking out for a long moment.Then he came back, took out a wallet, and handed Noah a credit card.“Get them a feast,” he told him hoarsely.“Take the others to help you and deliver it downstairs.”
“Most of the guys are off getting the supplies you wanted,” Noah said, looking between us.“And it’s gonna be a lot of food.I don’t think there’s enough of us—”
“We have plenty of clan,” I said wryly, looking at Inese.“Do you know anybody who could help?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Make it happen,” Cyrus told Noah, who nodded, although he looked confused.
Yeah, I thought, join the club.
They left, and I made a couple of stiff drinks for Cyrus and me, because we needed them.We sat on the sofa and stared out at the neon for a while.It didn’t seem to help.
“You saw the kitchen,” I finally said.
“Dimly, through the bond.Not as clear as you probably did, like a photo of a photo, but good enough.”He drank whiskey.
“That’s… freaky,” I said, because I had no idea what else to say.
“It’s more than that!”he said savagely.“We’re Weres!We don’t read minds!”
“It’s not true mind-reading,” I protested.“More like you said: pictures, memories, only carried by emotions instead of intellect.Strong ones, and even then, it’s only flashes—”
“Whatever you call it, it’s supposed to be impossible!”
“I don’t know what’s impossible anymore,” I told him honestly.
We sat in silence for a while longer.
I didn’t know what Cyrus was thinking, but I was trying and utterly failing to get a grip on this.“All those people—can we even afford them?”I said after a minute.“I mean, they’re going to need things, a lot of things—”
“As a clan, they have identities again,” Cyrus reminded me.“They don’t have to hide in fear for their lives, scraping up a living in the dark.They can get jobs, homes, lives.We’ll help those who want to work get stable; others who need more time can go to Wolf’s Head to bolster the numbers there; and the rest… Yes, there will be expenses.But that’s the least of our problems.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning this could be a game changer,” he said, sitting forward and nursing his glass.“We’ve always been secondary to the vamps and mages in most people’s minds.The only time anybody worries about us is when we ally with one side or the other, adding our weight to theirs to tip the scales of some conflict.
“But we’ve mostly stood apart from both groups, and our help was always temporary.Like the situation Carales described—aligning for a single purpose, in that case land, and then dropping away again.We needed our fortresses, our forests, our wilderness areas that nobody else knew, because without them—”
“We would have been annihilated,” I said, watching his face.
