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But I was getting ahead of myself. Date first, then determination of the extent of Taavi’s tattoos. Maybe. If I got lucky.
I parked at Maymont, and Taavi and I headed down the main pathway toward the estate gardens, and I watched as he took in everything around him from the sweeping magnolias to the flowers hedging the walk leading past the barn and up to the old house in the deepening twilight.
But the house wasn’t the best part, so I led the way around the back to the Italian-style arbor that had been used by at least a couple thousand people for their weddings. There weren’t any chairs set up tonight, which meant that they must have had a weekend off, but tiny white lights still twinkled overhead in the twisting grapevines. Taavi had slowed, looking up at the vines.
“This is beautiful,” he said quietly.
I couldn’t help the smile that slid over my face. “Wait for it,” I told him, and he looked down at me curiously.
“For what?”
“C’mon.” I jerked my head toward the path that led to the waterfall and then down to the Japanese garden—the part of Maymont everybody really came to see.
The look on Taavi’s face as he saw the cascading water was totally worth it.
“Yuma doesn’t have this much green,” he said, his rich baritone gentle.
“Desert?” I asked.
He nodded. “Cactus. Big spiders. Roadrunners.”
“Do they beep?” I asked him.
“Beep?”
“Yeah, you know,” I waved a hand, feeling my ears heat. “Like in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Beep beep.”
He shook his head. “I never watched them.”
“Oh.” My ears were burning. “No Loony Toons?”
Another head shake. “We didn’t have a tv. I’d watch movies at myTíaAna’s sometimes, mostly old Disney.”
I wondered if that meant he’d grown up poor, or just with parents who hated television. It must have shown on my face, because he answered the unasked question.
“My mother was deported, and Papá worked two jobs, but we didn’t have a lot of money.”
“Taavi, I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged, his fingers trailing down the ledge that ran alongside the staircase leading into the gardens at the bottom of the little waterfall that was the highlight of Maymont, as far as I was concerned. But the absolute excess of Maymont as somebody’s fucking private estate now seemed a bit gauche in comparison to a childhood with a single dad and no tv.
“Papá did his best,” Taavi replied. “And I was… different, so I didn’t go to school.” He was quiet for a moment, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Then Taavi shrugged. “I didn’t really know that my life was unusual.”
“Because of your mom?” I asked, a little confused.
Taavi smiled, the expression flashing over his fine-boned features. “No. I was born a shifter.”
I blinked, surprised. Born Arcanids are rare. The more Arcanids there are, of course, the less rare born Arcanids were becoming, but thirty-five years ago a born Arcanid was all but unheard of.
“You must have been one of the first,” I murmured.
He nodded. “Probably. My mother got sick, and my father took her to the hospital because he was afraid she would die—or that I would. Then they found out she wasn’t in the US legally.” He turned and looked up at the waterfall, something slightly wistful in his expression. “She and Papá weren’t legally married, so they took her right after I was born. But Papá was a citizen, and she made him promise to raise me here.”
“They deported her right after she gave birth? Fuck.”
He nodded again. “She wrote to me, telling me about our people, her life in Mexico. Until one day, when I was sixteen, the letters stopped.”
I felt like a complete asshat. I’d been trying to just… I don’t know, get to know him? One casual comment about roadrunners, and five minutes later he’s telling me about his childhood in poverty as a fucking shifter before anybody had a goddamn clue about how to deal with shifters. And his dad had probably spent his childhood afraid of losing his kid just like he lost his wife… Or, worse, being afraid of his kid.
