“Greetings, Sacred Abil’s sons and Sacred Willa.” She made a small bowing motion before turning her attention fully toward me. It wasn’t lost on me that she called me Sacred Willa aloud, but just Willa in her head.
“We’ll have the same thing as the last sun-cycle,” I told her.
The Abcurses liked to eat, but I liked to order. Well, and eat. I liked most things to do with food.
“Yes, Sacred One. I will bring the extra table.” She disappeared then, reappearing a moment later with a second table, because my last food order had been too large for our immediate available surfaces.
I glanced at Aros out of the corner of my eye. He was sitting at the head of the table to my right, glowering at the wall, apparently lost in his own thoughts. Coen had clearly warned me away from asking him about what was wrong, but I had never been very good at following rules, and I certainly wasn’t going to start now. I stood up, took the two steps needed to reach Aros’s chair, and gently lowered myself onto his lap, my hands finding the sides of his face. He didn’t push me off or snap at me, and for a moment I was almost convinced that I had imagined his foul mood, until the sides of his mouth suddenly dipped down.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It isn’t good for us to subdue our natural states,” he explained—somehow managing to explain nothing at all.
“That’s why Strength and Pain are always so grumpy,” Siret offered. “They’re constantly having to suppress their powers.”
I had turned my head at the sound of Siret’s voice, but I quickly turned back now, arching my brows at Aros. I understood the message: Siret and Yale were still allowing their powers to leak out, as they always did, but Aros had begun to suppress his in the same way that Coen and Rome suppressed theirs … and there was only one reasonable explanation as to why.
“Because of me,” I realised miserably. “I don’t want you to be in pain because of me.”
“It’s not painful,” Aros assured me, though he still hadn’t made a move to touch me.
I dropped my hands from his face to his shoulders, sliding them along the tense muscles that bunched beneath my touch. We were close enough that I could have kissed him and forced a reaction of some kind, but I was connected to the Abcurses in more than one way, and Iknew, somehow, that it would be a bad idea. Instead, I hopped off his lap and surveyed Rome and Coen. They sat beside each other, taking up one whole side of the table. I decided to tackle what I considered the biggest problem first, and tapped Rome on the shoulder. He pushed his chair back a little, giving me enough room to sit on his lap. I turned my back on him, resting against the solid length of his chest and pulling his arms around to circle me in.
“Crush,” I ordered.
“What the fuck?” he growled, immediately moving to shift his arms away.
I grabbed hold of him, forcing him to keep his position. In reality, I couldn’t really force him to do anything, but Rome reacted to even the slightest amount of pressure from me. He was proving Aros’s point—they were constantly restraining themselves around me. All of them except Siret and Yael, whose powers didn’t harm me in any way.
“Don’t hold back,” I pleaded with Rome, keeping my voice low. I was aware that I was speaking in a way so as not to spook him, as thoughhewas the frightened animal andIwas the predator.
The thought made me smirk, and across the table Siret’s smile matched mine. The derisive grumble that travelled through the warm body behind me confirmed that they had heard my thought.
“This isn’t happening, Rocks.” Rome’s voice was stern.
Donald appeared again in that moment, laying down dish after dish with pitchers of drink and platters of cheesy bread. Our table filled up and then the second table filled up. Nobody made a move to eat. Donald stood there watching, probably trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It wasn’t normal for us to restrain ourselves at dinner time. She disappeared and then reappeared again with a single piece of cheesy bread. She placed it on an already overfull platter and stood back, frowning. Still, none of us moved. We were all waiting to see who would break first—me, or Rome.
Donald disappeared again and reappeared with an open torch. She held it over the cheesy bread and then extinguished it, standing back, her frown growing. I was just about to ask her to stop when she disappeared once more. She popped back into the room accompanied by the squeal of a mudhog—a short, stocky animal with a wrinkled snout and leathery pink skin. She was leading it by a rope.
“Would the Sacred Ones like to make their own dinner?” she asked us, displaying the animal.
I winced at the high-pitched squeal of the animal, quickly shaking my head. “You can probably take that one back to wherever you found it.”
“I found it at the farm of the lowly and dirty dweller, Jay Gallagher,” she replied calmly, before promptly disappearing.
I grimaced, actually distracted from our current stand-off. I waited until she returned to frown at the food again before I voiced the question niggling at the forefront of my mind.
“You stole a dweller’s mudhog?”
Donald nodded enthusiastically.
I waited, but she didn’t elucidate. With a sigh, I asked the follow-up question. “Whydid you steal a dweller’s mudhog?”
“Because you weren’t eating.”
“No …” I pressed my fingers quickly to my temples, casting a sideways glance at Aros. He seemed to have relaxed a little, a small smile curving his lips as he glanced back and forth between me and Donald. Even Rome had relaxed, holding me gently in his lap. They had probably already figured out why Donald was doing the things that Donald did … but they were content to amuse themselves with watching me figure it out.
So I tried again. “Why didn’t you bring a mudhog fromTopia?”
