“March thirteenth.” He took a drink of sake from the bottle and grimaced. It was not as strong as the spirits he was used to, and nowhere near as bracing. “Why?”
“Just curious.”
“When’s yours?”
“October. Just a few days before Halloween.”
“The scorpion.” How very unlike her.
“Scorpio,” she said. “Yes. You’re into horoscopes.”
“No. Odessa is.” She liked the predestination of it, the way it fringed on the occult. Mostly, he suspected it gave her a way to terrorize others with knowledge they didn’t have.
“You seem close to your sister.”
“As close as one can be in our family, yes. I suppose I am.” It was nothing like what Nadine had seemed to have with Noelle, if that was what she was suggesting. Despite her terror, she had made the journey to this place, willing to stand up to his father if it meant finding her older sister. Loyalty like that could not be extorted or bought, and it did not come cheaply out here in the mountains. “Did you ever hear that story? Of the frog and the scorpion?”
“No.”
“It goes something like this. There was once a scorpion and a frog. The scorpion wanted to cross a river and asked the frog if he could ride across on the frog’s back. The frog replied that she was afraid the scorpion would sting her. The scorpion argued that that would be foolish, because if he did, they would both drown.”
He paused, to make sure she was listening. She was.
“The frog decided this sounded reasonable and ferried them both across the stream, but halfway there, the scorpion lashed out, piercing the frog with its sting.
“As the frog and the scorpion were both dying, the frog asked, ‘Why did you do that to me? Now you’ve killed us both.’ And the scorpion replied, ‘I’m sorry; it’s my nature.’”
“What a terrible story,” she said emphatically. “No, nobody ever read me that at bedtime.”
“Mm, well, I can’t say it was ever my favorite either.”
“What’s the point of it?” she asked. “Or is there one?”
In his distraction, he had nearly cleared his plate. All that was left was one rubbery piece of uni. He looked at it dispassionately before consuming it without tasting it. “I suppose it’s meant to be a cautionary tale. That some people are simply doomed to go through life hurting others, even if it’s against their own interests to do so.”
“That sounds like a warning.”
“Perhaps it is.” He set down his chopsticks. “Let’s get back to town.”
The sky was nearly black as they walked out of the restaurant, the clouds bloated with heavy rains. They were mammatus clouds now, hanging down from the undersides of the bruise-colored cumulonimbus in egg-like sacs. They would likely get hail. They could get as large as golf balls up here. He could almost smell the lightning.
“Oh!” Nadine said, when they were halfway back to the house. “I left my raincoat under the table.”
“There’s no going back for it now. We have plenty more.”
She folded her hands on top of her purse, and said nothing else. His story had dragged down her mood and he should nothave felt sorry for that but he did. God help him, he pitied her, which made everything he’d done and still needed to do that much harder.
If she was trapped here, he would be forced to make a choice. And so would she.
Either way, blood would spill.
Cullraven brides always bled on their wedding night.
His mood mirrored the sky by the time they got back to the carriage house. Cal locked the doors, already thinking of the long, grim night ahead. She grabbed him as he attempted to pass her, the gesture so uncharacteristically aggressive that he was nearly startled into flinching.
“Yes?”
“I—I think . . . your family might be, um, trying to . . . set us up?”
