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I smiled, too. “Nice to know I can still surprise you.”
She chuckled softly. “Oh, trust me, you are more than capable of that, even now. What can I do for you?”
Straight down to business. Which meant she had clients waiting. “Have you heard from, or seen, my father since the night of my conception?”
Again surprise flickered across her almost ageless features. Werewolves tended to be a long-lived race, but Mom was also a clone—lab-created and enhanced—and, by rights, she should have been dead by now. Every clone who’d been created at the same time as her had died, most of them taken by a defective gene that either accelerated aging or caused their organs to fail inexplicably. In Mom, that gene had—for some reason—flipped. It rejuvenated rather than destroyed. No one was sure if I’d inherited that gene, and Mom had never allowed such tests—as much as the Directorate had pressed her for them.
“No,” she said slowly, “I’ve never seen him since that night. Why?”
“Because I’ve had a barrage of people insisting that he’s going to contact me. I was just wondering if maybe he’d contacted you instead.”
“No, and I wouldn’t expect him to. We both got what we wanted out of that night.”
And what they’d both wanted was me—the daughter she’d longed for, and a continuation of his genes.
“Is there anything at all about him that you haven’t mentioned?”
She frowned. “I think I’ve told you everything I could about that night, Ris.”
“So you never really talked about what he was or what he did for a living?”
“Not really. I knew he would give me you; that’s all that really mattered to me.”
“You knew he was Aedh, though.”
“Yes, but that was not something he mentioned. It was more an information leak from our merging.”
I blinked. “Merging? That’s an odd way of putting it.”
“Having sex with an Aedh is an interesting experience, Ris. The first meeting—the first kiss—is very explosive, and designed, I think, to ensnare completely. After that, it’s pure functionality. But”—she paused, as if searching for the right words—“while the actual sex is mundane, for those of us who are psychic there can also be a melding of minds. It’s not a very deep connection, but it’s a connection nevertheless—and I suspect it goes both ways.”
I frowned. “So when this connection happened—did you happen to catch whether he was a priest or not?”
“No.” Something flickered across her eyes. Uneasiness, perhaps. “But there was something about being a member of the Raziq. I have no idea what that was, but I got the distinct feeling he was troubled by something involving them.”
“Maybe the trouble he sensed was his approaching death.” Aedh only bred when their end was nigh, after all.
“Possibly.” Her gaze was still pensive. “Has this anything to do with what almost happened to Ilianna?”
“Yes.” There was no use lying to her—she’d sense it, even over the vid-phone. Mom might be blind, but she didn’t need her eyes to be able to see stuff like that. Of course, most of the time she wasn’t exactly blind, either. She was psychically linked to several spirit creatures known as the Fravardin, and they took turns being her eyes and her guards whenever she ventured outside the walls of her home. I added, “But Riley and Rhoan are hunting down those behind the attack, so I’m not expecting any more trouble.”
She didn’t look convinced. But then, neither was I.
“Just be careful, Ris. That’s all I ask.”
“I will.”
I glanced at my watch again. I really needed to get going because cabs were always damn hard to get along this section of Lygon Street, thanks to the proximity of two of the most popular wolf clubs and the fact that street parking was almost impossible to find these days.
And of course, Tao had insisted I take a cab this morning rather than risk the possibility of my bike being bugged again. I could walk, because Carlton wasn’t actually that far, but I’d be rushed for time now and the last thing I wanted was to arrive all hot and bothered. But there was still one question that needed answering. “Mom, what can you tell me about Mr. and Mrs. Kingston?”
“Fay’s been coming to me for years, but I don’t really know a lot about her family. Why?”
“Because the thing that stole Hanna’s soul took someone else’s last night, and I don’t think it’s a random event. I need to find out what connects them.”
“God,” she said, rubbing her temple wearily. “If only I’d foreseen this—”
“Mom,” I interrupted gently, “even you can’t predict everything bad that is about to happen to your clients.”
