Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series) (22 page)

“Did you do that a lot?” Aaron asked. “Sit on his lap? Talk to him like that?”

She looked momentarily puzzled; had she mentioned aloud that she’d sat on Michel’s lap in the library that night? She must have, or at least figured that she had, because she said, “Oh, yes. That was my favorite thing to do. I had him all to myself then. Everyone else was asleep.” She smiled, but had grown tearful again, and blinked down at the table.

“Michel was always more a father to me than a grandfather,” she said. “My real father, Arnaud, he…went away after the fires, when Michel brought the clan west. And before that, on the farm…I never saw much of him.
When I did, he was usually drunk. Michel never treated me any different than any other grandchild—not because I was half-human, not because my mother was black. And he never let anyone else treat me differently, either.”

“Do you…” he began hesitantly. Flustered, he studied their hands for a moment, their fingers laced together, then tried again. “Do you know if me and
my
father…if…if he ever…?”

He couldn’t find the words. What he wanted to know was if his father had
always
been a sadistic son of a bitch, one whose only interactions with his youngest son had seemed to be violent and angry.

With a clumsy laugh, he glanced up and found Naima looking at him, her expression kind. “My father hates me,” he said.

“I’m sure that’s not true, Aaron,” she said softly, closing her hand against his in comforting reassurance.

“Remember I told you I’d remembered
something about Lisette?” he asked, and she nodded. “I remember we were playing in a field near the spring house, and I hid in the grass when he came up to us on his horse. He didn’t see me, not at first. He thought Lisette was out there all alone, so he…he raped her.”

Naima’s eyes had widened as he spoke; he’d heard the sharp intake of her breath. “
Oh, Aaron.”

“When he…when he’d finished…” Aaron paused, clearing his voice, which had suddenly grown strained. He found himself having far more difficulty talking about it than he’d anticipated or imagined.  “He got back onto his horse. It saw me in the grass, I think, because it spooked and started rearing. My father fell off. He and the horse fell down
an embankment and into the spring. It broke his back—you know he always used a cane?”

An icy shadow crept momentarily across her face. “With an ivory handle
that looked like a dog’s head. Yes, I remember.”

Flashes of memory darted through her mind, and Aaron saw them: Naima on her knees, and Lamar using the carved handle of that very cane to force her head back, making her look up at him;
Lamar using the shaft of that cane to swat her hard on the backside, or shoulders, across the bridges of her knuckles or the soles of her feet.

“It’s my fault,” Aaron said softly, stricken—meaning not just Lamar’s fall, his injury, but the pain he’d inflicted on Naima, as well, with that
godforsaken cane. “I made him fall. And while he was lying there in the gulley…bleeding and hurt, he…he looked up the hill and saw me. He knows what I did. He knows it was me.” He closed his eyes and hung his head. “And he’s never forgiven me for it…he’s hated me ever since.”

Naima pressed her free hand against the side of his face, drawing his gaze. Her thumb trailed lightly across his mouth, and he trembled. God, she felt so good—her thoughts, her presence, her touch. It all felt so warm and welcome to him.
Like coming home,
he thought.

“You know what we need?” she asked him softly.

I know what
I
need,
he thought in unspoken reply.
I need you. I never realized how broken I am inside, never knew I had anything missing, not until this moment.

“We need beer.” Naima leaned forward, pressing her lips softly to his,
making him smile despite himself. “Lots and lots of beer.”

“Tequila couldn’t hurt, either,” he murmured as she drew away. And God, how he missed her when she did.
I think I’ve needed you all along.

***

There was a bar called The Bright Spot within short distance of the motel, so Aaron threw on his clothes and they walked together. Outside on a large portable sign—the kind with the yellow flashing arrow at the top—the bar promised
HAPPY HOUR ALL NITE LONG
and
KARAOKE WITH DJ SLIM 7 PM TO ?? 
The parking lot sat about a quarter of the way filled, and a pair of men who appeared to be in their late forties, still dressed in their uniforms from working at nearby casinos, stood by the door smoking cigarettes. Inside, the music was too loud (an overweight, middle-aged woman belting out the lyrics to Shania Twain’s
Man! I Feel Like A Woman
), the lights were too dim, and the whole place reeked of Miller Genuine Draft and old cooking grease.

It was just about perfect.

Naima found a vacant booth in the far corner of the room and they settled in across from one another on the cracked, aging vinyl seats. Between them, a candle burned in ared glass container. There were cigarette burns on the table top, a leftover reminder from the bygone days when patrons had been allowed to smoke inside the tavern.

“
What’s this?” Aaron asked, reaching across the table. He tapped his fingertip against something around her neck: the St. Christopher’s medal. “How’d you fix it?”

Naima shrugged. “I had some needle-nosed pliers at home.” She’d actually forgotten that she’d slipped the necklace on shortly before they’d left
the compound. She hadn’t wanted to lose it, if only because it had belonged to Aaron’s mother and she figured he’d want it back. Wearing the necklace had seemed the only practical solution.  “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked. Ducking her head, she reached behind her neck for the clasp. “Here, I can…”

“No, it’s alright,” Aaron said, drawing her gaze. “It looks nice on you.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re my boyfriend or anything,” she assured him drily.

“Fair enough,” he conceded.
They look at each other, eye to eye, for another moment, and then both broke out laughing simultaneously.

Because of their accelerated metabolisms, it took a lot—and in pretty short order—to get someone of Brethren birth drunk. They ordered a pitcher of beer and a half dozen Cuervo Gold shots.

“To your grandfather,” Aaron said, lifting one of the shot glasses of tequila in a toast.

Naima hesitated, then raised her own glass.
What would Michel think,
she wondered,
if he knew I was sitting here, downing shots in his memory, with the man who shot him?

“To Michel,” she said, tapping her glass against Aaron’s. She wanted to believe that Michel would have understood; that he would have made his peace with Aaron, the way she had.

By the time they’d made their way through the first round and had ordered a second, Naima felt pleasantly lightheaded.

“This is very new for me,”
Aaron remarked.

“What is?” Naima asked.

“Seeing this, the pain of your loss. Sensing it through you.” Aaron shook his head, then took a long sip of beer. “I don’t guess I ever thought about it…or let myself, anyway.” He looked at her, eyes mournful.
“I didn’t know Lisette had married into the Morins. No one ever told me. She died?”

Naima nodded. “Earlier this year.”

“How?” he asked.

“She
was sick. She’d been sick for a long, long time. There was nothing anyone could do for her.”

He blinked down at the table, curling and uncurling his fingers around the handle of his beer mug.

“I wish I could remember more about her. Julien tells me we were close once, when I was younger. She taught me to play piano. She could sing like an angel, he said.”

Naima nodded. “She taught Tristan
to play, too,” she said softly. “And yes, she could.”

Aaron
told her about waking up in Boston after his accident and head injury, how he’d been left in the care of humans. It had been ten years or more before he had been invited back to the Davenant great house, and he hadn’t stayed more than a few days sporadically in all of the decades since.

“
It always seemed like it was this big secret, me being there,” he said. “I wasn’t allowed to see many people. My brothers, of course, and my father.” His expression grew troubled. “But never my sisters or my mother.”

“
Your father told everyone you died,” Naima said, drawing his gaze. “Augustus found that out today. He asked his brother to check the Tomes in Kentucky. The night of the fires, when you said you had your horseback riding accident, Lamar told the Council and the Elders you’d been killed.”

If this revelation came as a surprise to him, it didn’t readily show on his face. Instead, he seemed to accept it with a weary sort of resignation, as if
instead, it came as
no
surprise to him.

“Why would he do that?” she asked.

Aaron shook his head. “I don’t know.” Tilting his head back, he polished off his beer, then reached for the pitcher between them to pour another. “He probably thought I’d die in the beginning. Or hoped for it anyway. Then as time went by, and I started to heal, he figured out he could…use me for stuff, I guess. Things he couldn’t do because he couldn’t leave the farms in Kentucky.”

“Like what?”

“I told you my father uses Diadem Global to invest in different ventures around the world? I’m usually the one who scopes them out for him, who makes the connections he needs, and then keeps things running smoothly. Some of his investments are legal. Others…?” He smirked. “Not so much. It doesn’t really matter to him, the legality of things, as long as the return on his investment is strong. I travel a lot on his behalf.”

“And you kill for him.”

“If he needs that, yes,” he admitted quietly.

“How many people have you killed?” She didn’t want to know the answer to that, but at the same time felt like she
had
to. Because even though the boy she’d known and loved was still inside of Aaron—and she could see more and more of him coming out of hiding with every passing moment together—she knew there was also the other side of him she didn’t know, and couldn’t understand.

“I don’t…” He looked uncomfortable, his eyes cutting toward the small stage where the karaoke had been set up, and a pair of twenty-something girls now howled disharmonically along with Taylor Swift. “I don’t know.”

“Ten?” she asked. “Twenty? Fifty?” He wouldn’t look at her. “A hundred?” she pressed. “Talk to me, Aaron—five hundred? A thousand?”

“At least.” He looked up at her. “Alright? At least a thousand.
And sometimes I don’t kill them, because that’s not what Father wants. Sometimes I
do things
to them, things that make them wish they were dead…things that make them
beg
me to kill them.”

Stricken, Naima stared at him, until at last he shrank in his seat, his eyes filled with sorrow. Sighing heavily, he forked his fingers through his hair. “
I’m not proud of what I’ve done,” he said. “I never had a choice.”

“There’s always a choice, Aaron.”

He managed an unhappy laugh. “You’ve met Lamar. You know how he is. You’ve seen the scars on my back.”

Naima said nothing because he was right. She’d suffered countless nightmares over the centuries, dreams in which
she relived Lamar’s hellish torment. But for Aaron, the nightmares and suffering—two hundred years of relentless misery—had continued unabated. He wasn’t a killer; he was a
survivor.
He’d done what he needed to—however desperate or horrific—in order to stay alive.

When he reached across the table and caught her by the hand, slipping it lightly against his, she didn’t draw away. To be honest, Naima found herself enjoying the warmth of his skin, the sensation of his skin against hers. It brought pleasant memories to her mind; being with him made her feel comfortable and safe in a way she’d never felt with any other man but him in her entire life.

On a tequila-and-beer-inspired whim, she lifted his hand. Leaving the rest of his fingers curled lightly in toward his palm, she unfolded his index finger and, as he watched, slipped it into her mouth.

She sensed the sudden jolt of adrenaline this released within him, the sudden rush of blood that accompanied the quickening of his heart. She heard him gasp softly as she slipped her tongue in slow, deliberate circles, drawing him into her mouth to his knuckle.

What are you doing?
he asked.

She’d been spoken to telepathically countless times, by countless members of her family. But to that moment, Aaron hadn’t opened his mind to her; she hadn’t been able to as much as glean his most peripheral or passing of thoughts. He was too strong, his telepathic shields so impenetrable, not even Augustus had been able to breach them.

Startled—and admittedly touched because she realized he’d lowered his defenses, had allowed her inside—she blinked at him.

I didn’t mean you had to stop,
he told her pointedly, the corner of his lips lifting slightly.