AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And I truly did want to stay that way, but I’d clearly underestimated Beatrice’s reaction, and since my reason for calling her was to prevent deaths, I felt like I kind of had to intervene. With a sigh, I moved behind her so I could put myself between the humans and the twodraugr.
“Not his fault. He was injected against his will,” I told her in the most soothe-the-predator voice I could muster. “Murdered, just like another man I recently sent back to death.”
Odem was silently staring at Beatrice. He did not behave like a sentient man, nor did he rage like a newdraugr. I realized then that Beatrice was reading him, much as I did with the truly dead and with her kind.
“He’s yours,” Beatrice said softly.
“What? My what? My problem, my—”
“Yours,” Beatrice repeated as she turned to face me. Her eyes had slipped from human to narrow slits as mine often did. It was unsettling to see my eyes in her face. Mostdraugrdidn’t do that, and as much as I’d thought it was a trait that I’d inherited from the dead jackass who impregnated my mother, I’d not seen it in otherdraugr. Why did Beatrice have snake eyes? Why did I?
“You bound him to you, Geneviève,” she added mildly.
“Dick waffles.” I tried to think of how I had done that and offered, “Not on purpose.”
Beatrice stared at me in silence, and then, she dropped Odem to the ground, where he sat and looked around. Something about Beatrice made him opt to stay there rather than standing. I couldn’t blame him. My knees felt weak, but I think that was a mix of shock and terror. Okay, admittedly, that was probably exactly what he felt, too.
Eli joined us. I felt him crossing the lot and stopping behind Beatrice. I wasn’t sure whether to move so I was between him and the monsters or stay where I was, so the humans were behind me. My logic said to defend the weak, but my instinct was to protect Eli.
I glanced at him where he stood behind Beatrice. The glittering night sky that he usually hid was shining in every strand of hair. He glimmered. There was no polite way to tell him to tone it down, not without drawing her attention to him. I wanted to ask why, to tell him not here, to get him out of here.
But then Beatrice sighed and folded her arms. It was disconcerting how maternal—or grandmotherly, perhaps—the terrifying dead lady was. Oddly, it made me like her a little bit more. Intense, powerful women made up an easy ninety percent of my idols. Maybe Mama Lauren wasn’t the cookie-baking maternal prototype for most people, but she wasmytemplate, which meant that deadly women made me relax a bit.
“You truly had no idea you could bind,” Beatrice said, continuing the weary-mom-who-could-flay-you schtick she had going on.
I shuffled awkwardly. No one really loved being called stupid, and aloud or implied, that was what she was saying. In my defense, I’d been kissing a hot mostly-fae man and dealing with some complicated feelings about my own magic. I wasn’t exactly at peak clarity.
“I knew I could with the ones I put together and pull from the soil,” I said, my words slipping out in a voice quieter than I meant to be. “The truly dead will obey me. Follow me. That’s why I tuck them back into their graves. If not, it’s like this combo of surprise army and needy kids all in one.”
“I bind my subjects to me,” Beatrice said mildly. She stared down at Odem with a strange expression. “The new are unpredictable, and once I bind them, they are not wandering off gnawing on the peasants.”
“Peasants?” Eli echoed. He’d taken another step, so he was closer still.
Seriously, I could’ve smacked him for drawing Beatrice’s gaze to him. She looked him up and down, not like he was a food source but like he was a beautiful man. Her gaze was pure predator, but less like the lion looking at the gazelle and more like the lioness picking a lion for a romp.
“Mine,” I growled, staring at both of them.
“Always,” he replied with a smile just for me, and I decided that particular smile of his needed to be patented as a panty-dropping weapon.
Beatrice shot that vaguely amused look at me again and stroked her chin lightly with one hand. “You would fight me over”—she motioned at Eli—“this?”
“Mine,” I repeated, moving between them. My back was to him, defending him. A rational part of my brain screamed not to attack the scary dead lady, but another part saw only that she was looking at someone I could not sacrifice.
My sword was suddenly out and raised.
“Geneviève?” Eli touched my shoulder. “Bonbon, I do not think she means me ill.”
“I recognize you now, Son of Stonecroft.” Beatrice sighed and then gave a moderately deep bow in Eli’s direction, not taking her gaze from us as she did so. When she straightened, she said, “I knew your grandfather. The earth mourned his loss.”
Eli looked pained, but I didn’t know enough about his familyorhis culture to understand why. “You speak in words that I would not expect to find on this side.Draugrare not typically so eloquent.”
“Those who walk among the peasants are not,” Beatrice corrected. “We are not all the same. Much like your father’s kin. Much like humans.”
“Do you all eat people?” I asked cheerily. I’d rather be cheerful and fight her than see Eli look wounded. Admittedly, I’d caused that look more than a few times, but I was trying to do better, and I sure as sugar wasn’t going to let anyone else cause it if I could help it. “Nosh on the living? Nibble unwilling necks? That sort of thing.”
“Yes, we do require living food.” Beatrice straightened her very elegant dress. “Not flesh. Merely live blood. The young only take flesh because they are uncontrolled.”
“Huh. Good to know,” I muttered.
