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“There’s Tami,” I said defensively, while wondering why I was arguing with a madman.
“Who is run off her feet and who isn’t you.”
He stopped the tirade as suddenly as it had begun and dropped onto the little pale blue velvet chair in front of my dressing table, although he was too tall for it and it left his knees poking up awkwardly. He ran a hand through his wet blond hair, making it stick up in little Pritkin spikes. And I felt a sudden pang of longing.
The war was playing havoc with my personal life, not that I had much of one anymore. I had to make an appointment to see my ex-“husband”; my supposed lover—who wasn’t one, since we’d never had a spare moment to define our relationship—was off trying to get himself killed; and now I was being told that I was managing to screw up my court.
Great.
I flopped onto another chair opposite Augustine and fiddled with my robe ties. “Maybe I’m better off at war,” I finally admitted. “I’m learning how to deal with that. I’m . . . not so great with the personal stuff.”
Augustine chuffed out a laugh and let his head fall back, exposing the long line of his throat. “Neither am I.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“All I know,” he finally said, “all I can tell you, is what it’s like growing up in an environment where nobody cares. Or where it seems that way.”
I thought of Tony’s court, and my heart seized a little. I thought of Eugenie, my one-time governess, and it got worse. I’d clung to her because she was one of the only people who seemed to give the slightest of damns about me. But she’d been like Hilde—stiff upper lip, mind your manners, emotions are bad m’kay?—and I’d always, always, ended up feeling like I was starving, subsisting on crumbs of affection when I needed a full meal.
I didn’t want to be Eugenie. I didn’t want my girls growing up in a court that was physically safe but emotionally barren. But what was I supposed to do about it? They already had what I could give them: security, a nice place to live, other people to meet their emotional needs. I couldn’t do that. I literally couldn’t do that.
You learn to love by being loved. You learn to nurture by being nurtured. You learn to meet other people’s emotional needs by having your own met, and I never had.
Even at Tami’s, where I’d found a home after running away from Tony, I’d been one of twenty, maybe thi
rty kids at any given time, all of us strays that she’d taken in and worked to house and clothe and feed. Some women are crazy cat ladies; Tami had been the crazy orphan lady, picking up kids off the streets or breaking them out of the Circle’s special “schools”—basically just detention centers for children with unapproved types of magic. And many of the kids she picked up had had far worse emotional problems than me.
Or maybe they’d just been louder, I thought now.
Because I hadn’t been okay, either.
I’d grown up feeling stunted, like a part of me was missing or just really, really underdeveloped. Augustine wasn’t asking for much, I knew that. Just that I open up a bit more, let a few people in, be a little more approachable—
And make myself vulnerable, leave myself unprotected, start to care, only to have it all ripped away again! He was right, it was fear—or, rather, stark raving terror. Of a bunch of little girls!
Or, no, not of them so much, but of what they represented. Another Eugenie, dead on the floor after Tony ripped her to pieces; another Mac, a war mage—a decent man—who had given his life for mine; another Raphael, my substitute father growing up, burnt to a crisp in the desert trying to help me; another Mircea—
Goddamn it! Didn’t Augustine get it? I didn’t want to get to know them! I didn’t want to care more than I already did!
Superficial stuff was fine; superficial I could do. Like taking them shopping or . . . or watching them eat breakfast—I’d done that a couple of times. But anything more left me feeling like I wanted to run in the opposite direction. Or hide out in my luxurious new suite within a suite, letting other people manage my court while I took care of business with a few trusted confidants, emerging when there was a threat to be dealt with or some problem to be managed. That was how a real court worked, I thought; less like a family and more like a business. One that was streamlined and efficient, and where everyone knew their place. One like the court I’d grown up in, where—
Oh God.
Chapter Eight
“What is it?” Augustine asked, and I realized that I’d closed myself up at some point, physically as well as every other way, pulling my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around them. If I’d been a hedgehog, I would have been in a tiny ball by now. If I’d been a porcupine, I would have been bristling.
As it was, I just sat there, fear clogging my throat, for a long moment. I didn’t want to give voice to my little epiphany, in case it made it real. But it already was real, wasn’t it?
I’d made sure of that.
“Tony,” I finally croaked. “He was the vampire who ran the court I grew up in. I hated him. He was vicious and vile and cruel, and the only thing he loved was money.”
Augustine looked confused. “So?”
“So I never saw him if I could avoid it, and I usually could. He didn’t seem to actually like his own court very much. He stayed in his private apartments, locked away with a few trusted people—or as trusted as they got. Tony was paranoid, he never let anybody get too close . . .”
Like somebody else I knew.
