“Not unfair at all. Sounds like a pretty fucking valid wish to me.”
Everil heard the soft complaint of the settee as Bo rose, and the gentle creak of the floorboards after. The ache of distance subsided as Bo approached, though not completely, a space remaining between them.
“So I thought,” Everil murmured, bitter humor under the simple words.
“Fuckface is a grown-ass man. What he does is on him. Not you.”
“Everil doesn’t believe in problems that aren’t his fault,” Talia piped in, almost sounding chipper again.
“A belief built on centuries of experience.” Everil could see Bo reflected in the window. It was surprisingly hard not to watch him. The man was so vibrant. “What doyou intend, Bo?”
Just tell me what you wish me to do.
Pathetic.
“CSI: Table Manners have formal wording for this shitshow?” Bo asked in response. “The soulbond to ward a Talia thing. Or is it just ‘a bonded pair is needed to protect a person in a hoodie?’ ”
Everil rested his forehead against the glass. The tension in his shoulders threatened to ease with Bo’s nearness. He couldn’t relax into this. They had so little time before Nimai arrived. And Bo wasn’t listening.
Had he really once found humans’ irrationality endearing?
“We’d need a witness,” Talia said. The hope in her voice grated.
It wasn’t her fault, Everil reminded himself. It was, once again, his failing. She had grown up sheltered and lonely, and Everil had not been there to lobby on her behalf. Of course she wanted this clever, vivid human more than mannered, ambitious Nimai.
“We would require a witness so willing to ignore Protocol that they would acknowledge this as a valid bond. Who would then accept the further breach of ahumangiving his oath to a Gate.” Everil’s sigh misted the glass. “I may know someone.”
“Yeah?” Bo asked.
Everil hadn’t spoken to Declan since the day the sluagh’s deathsight had battered them both with a vision of Lawrence’s death. Witnessing it, Nimai so terriblyinventivein his cruelty, Lawrence so terrified, begging and apologetic, had broken Everil.
It had broken his friendship with Declan as well.
Given how they’d left matters between them, how poorly Everil had treated his friend, it was possible the sluagh wouldn’t come. And if he did, well, perhaps exposure to one of Faerie’s more unsettling denizens would clear Bo’s head.
“Talia, I’ll need you to contact someone for me,” Everil said, pulling back from the window. “And, should he be willing, bring him here.”
Everil had given Taliathe third floor. Well, in point of fact, he had intended to give her aroomon the third floor, but once she’d discovered there were four to choose from, she’d insisted that she was going to cycle between them. As a result, every time Everil went looking for her, he found her somewhere different.
It was the gold room that she led him to, throwing herself down on the coverlet and rolling over so she could watch him with her chin in her hands and feet kicking the air.
“Well?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?”
Talia’s eye-rolling was truly a subtle art. It hadnuance. Most of that nuance had to do with gradations of how much of an idiot she thought Everil was being. She appeared to be particularly displeased, just now.
“Bo. Your new, well, beau. Do you like him?”
“That’s entirely immaterial.” His feelings in this, as in most things, were best ignored. That Bo was fierce and raw-edged and tasted of sugar did not bear thinking of. “And he isn’t my beau. He’s a temporary bond.”
Talia scowled, her feet picking up new velocity. “Yousaidwe’d call someone to witness the oaths.”
“We’ll ask. I highly doubt even Declan will be willing to be party to such an action.” At least, not if Everil could talk him around. “Talia, this entire circumstance places Bo in very real threat. I know I’ve told you Nimai isn’t as you imagine him. And he isn’t. But he’s still–”
“A bastard?”
“I was going to say, ‘given to intense reactions.’ Particularly where I’m concerned.”
