Lord of Unkindness Ch. 28

 Notes: Back to the den of iniquity we go!

Title: Lord of Unkindness Ch. 28

***

Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

In the end, they don’t wait around after starting the fire. Nephele decides she’d rather head back to the private airfield where their jet is waiting for them—“It’s not like I’m letting this girl go, after all.” Ciro doesn’t try to convince her otherwise. Engaging with Nephele is a delicate thing—she’s as likely to go off the rails when she’s being argued with as when you’re trying to be passive and ignore her, and being in Maria’s body makes her invulnerable to him right now. Once Maria is on her own again, Ciro might be able to do something, but he’s not going to risk damaging her by trying to force his cousin out.

Instead they stay just long enough to watch the flames really catch on Angelo’s family house. This refuge, this beautiful home that his parents left him, a place of ethereal music, his connection to his people—it goes up in fire and burns down to ash, and it feels like Ciro’s heart does the same inside his chest.

I should have run. I knew it. It’s too late to indulge in those sorts of regrets, though. He’s got to armor up before he sees his family again.

Nephele is oddly quiet all the way to the airfield, her control of Maria’s body herky and jerky. It’s bad enough that they almost go off the road several times, but Ciro doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing for him to say; he won’t offer to help, and antagonizing her will only mean more pain for himself later on. Instead, he sinks into a form of meditation he perfected as a child; awake and aware, but drawing in on himself. He tucks his emotions deep into a box in his head, along with all his most vulnerable thoughts. Angelo goes into the box, and so does Annette. He can still think about them, but it’s dispassionate, and anyone scanning him with mental magic will see the same.

His family will know what he’s doing, of course. They’ll try to break him down, drive him out of cool distance into their suffocating heat, but he’s not going to make it easy for them. He closes the box with the magic from one of his sole raven’s feathers, binding it in an intricate pattern that reminds him of some of the textiles in Angelo’s safehouse. When he thinks about the destruction Nephele wrought with only the slightest pang, he knows it worked.

One hurdle down. Only a hundred or so more to go.

The airfield is surrounded by a chain-link fence. There’s an office and a series of hangars attached to it, but the place feels deserted. The only plane there is a very familiar jet, painted red and black and stupidly ostentatious against the desert landscape. They park the car next to it, and Maria gets out and takes all of two steps before falling to her knees with a gasp.

Ciro doesn’t run to help her. He barely even glances at her; he can’t afford to give anything up now, not with the welcoming committee coming toward them across the tarmac. There’s Nephele, tall, upright, and skinny as a twig. She looks gleeful but exhausted—controlling another person’s body for that amount of time is no easy task. At her feet, a whole pack of rats is running alongside her, welling and falling back again like a brown, furry wave. And beside her is…

Richard, Uncle Magnus’s bodyguard. His cougar familiar is beside him, but she’d walking with a nasty limp. He looks grim, and is hands are working like he’s imagining breaking all the bones he promised Ciro he would.

“There’s the man of the hour!” Nephele says as she gets close, slurring the words. It’s part fatigue, part the result of the soft palate deformities in her mouth. She’s gone through dozens of surgeries to correct the results of generations of inbreeding, but there’s only so much you can do when your family tree is as twisted as the Hapsburgs. Her hands are twitching as well, but it’s with a desire to grab. As soon as she’s in range, that’s what she does, reeling Ciro in and clamping on to him like a lamprey. “Baby, it’s been so long,” she whispers against his ear before pressing a kiss to the skin right below it.

Her lips are wet, her hands clammy. It’s the last thing Ciro wants to feel, but he doesn’t let on. He doesn’t hold her back, either; capitulating won’t do him any favors.

“Miss Hambly,” Richard grinds out. “We need to get going.”

She giggles and jumps up and down a little bit. Her grip is so tight her nails are digging through Ciro’s clothes and leaving marks. “Ciro,” she whispers, “Ciro, my Ciro, I missed you. Tell me you missed me.”

Ciro doesn’t say anything.

“Ciro. Tell me you missed me.”

“Miss Hambly,” Richard tries again.

Nephele pulls back just far enough to look into his eyes. “Tell me you missed me,” she hisses, “or I’ll have my rats eat that girl alive, right now.”

“We need the girl, Miss—” Richard grunts with pain as half a dozen rats suddenly swarm his familiar, biting viciously. He holds the cougar in check; no one lashes out at a Hambly unless they have a death wish.

“I missed you,” Ciro says dully, not for Richard’s sake as much as Maria’s. Maria must have been conscious while Nephele was hag-riding her, because she’s not trying to run—she knows there’s nowhere to go. She’s on the verge of hyperventilating, though, so Ciro needs to keep her calm. He can’t help her if she loses control now.

Nephele melts against him. “I knew it,” she says with satisfaction. Ciro stares at her and wonders, for the thousandth time, why a person as smart as his cousin constantly deludes herself when it comes to him. Their relationship is her most consistent lie. “I told Uncle Victor he was too hard on you. I knew he was going to make you run.”

You killed Annette’s familiars, not my father!

“I told him not to beat you,” she continues. “You’re too delicate for that.”

Ha. Where’s the woman who was threatening to amputate his legs an hour ago? But that’s Nephele—burning one moment, freezing the next.

“Miss Hambly,” Richard finally speaks up, and now he’s less brimming with an urge for vengeance and more hoping to get through the next few minutes without taking more damage. “We should go. Your uncle is expecting you.”

“Mmhmm,” she says, finally pulling away from Ciro. “Okay.” She glances at Maria. “Put her in the cargo hold,” she says contemptuously. “With my rats.”

“Ciro,” Maria whimpers, turning big, scared eyes on him. “Don’t—”

“Don’t what?” Nephele asks, getting in her face. “Don’t let me do that to you? Bitch, has he been able to stop me from doing anything I want so far?” She laughs. “This is what you get for messing with powers you have no business knowing about.”

“I—but I—”

Dispassion, except Ciro can already feel it breaking. He reaches absently up to pet his raven, and a tiny feather comes loose in his hand. It’s a second’s work to waft it over to Maria and tuck it into her hair. Protection. She’s nothing to you. You barely even notice her.  The charm seems to work, because neither Nephele nor Richard say a word when the rats turn their backs on Maria like she isn’t even there.

Good. Hopefully it will last her all the way back to New York. Then…well, Ciro will have to have another plan in place by then. Angelo will never forgive him if he lets Maria get killed.