He was pretty sure that Bonarata—for all that he was as jealous as a cat whose owner had two dogs—knew they weren’t sleeping together in any but the most mundane sense of the word. Any werewolf worth his salt could have figured it out. There was something about body language and scent that made such things obvious.
At least her machinations had reduced his patrol area to two. His two outliers were only down a short hall and up a staircase from them. Adam wasn’t happy; it was too far for tactical safety. Smith’s victim-like demeanor made him a target in this house of predators.
If something happened in Harris’s room, Adam was pretty sure he’d hear the screams from the big suite. It didn’t make the beast who lived in his heart content—or Adam, either—but it was the hand he had been dealt.
“Dawn is coming,” said Marsilia as Stefan closed the door of the suite. The two vampires had volunteered to escort the pilots to their room. “There isn’t much time.”
“Rest well,” Adam said, though he knew that it wasn’t a rest at all—the vampires died with the rising of the sun.
Stefan, who had followed Marsilia as she walked rapidly toward their room, paused to give Adam a wry smile. “Stay safe,” he said, then disappeared through the doorway behind Marsilia.
Larry rubbed his hands together thoughtfully, staring at the door that had just closed behind their vampires. But when he spoke, it wasn’t—directly—about Marsilia or Stefan.
“I think that went about as well as could be expected,” he said. Then he said what Adam had just been thinking. “I’m not sure anyone but a love-struck fool, which Bonarata isn’t quite, would think there was anything between you and Marsilia. But the Lord of Night was plenty jealous anyway, for what it’s worth. I heard you open Bonarata’s eyes about the relationship between the Marrok and your wife. Is it true? Would the Marrok still go to war for her?”
If the goblin had heard all of that, he not only could hear as well as any werewolf Adam had ever met, he also had a larger capacity to sort through data than Adam had. The conversations in the dinner hall had blurred to incomprehensible for Adam.
He nodded in response to the goblin’s question. “Bran would not be pleased if something happened to Mercy. Very not pleased.”
Larry tilted his head in a way that was neither human nor quite wolflike. “Bran was Grendel?”
He thought about Larry the goblin king and how everyone underestimated goblins. He decided it would be a good thing if the goblin king knew something of what the Marrok was.
“Not quite,” Adam said. “As I understand it, Beowulf was written down a long time after the events it purports to tell. The purpose of the story as it was recorded was to recite the final deeds of Beowulf, a great hero. Somewhere along the way, someone put him up against the scariest monsters they’d ever heard of instead of the terrible monsters who did kill him. That tale then blended back to the original.”
On one remarkable night, not long after Adam had been Changed, the Marrok’s son Samuel had sung (then translated) several versions of the tale of Beowulf.
“Beowulf,” Adam told the goblin, “isn’t any more accurate than any story told by mouth for centuries before it was written down, which is not very. Bran’s story is that a long time ago, he was broken. It had something to do with protecting his son. For a very long time afterward—decades and maybe longer—Bran was a mindless monster who killed every living thing in his territory.”
“When you were talking to Jacob, you said Bran’s mother was a witch,” said Elizaveta.
He hadn’t. She was fishing. So he said, “Bran has never said so. I’ve heard the rumors, though. So has Bonarata.”
Samuel had told him that Bran’s mother was a witch, and Adam figured that, being Bran’s son, Samuel had been in a position to know. But he didn’t have to tell Elizaveta who his source was. If Bran had wanted it to be known that he was witchborn, he’d have told everyone himself. Since he hadn’t, Adam wasn’t going to do it for him. But everyone had heard the rumors, and those Bran encouraged. Adam just didn’t need to confirm them.
“Interesting,” she said thoughtfully. “It would explain some things if it were true.” She smiled wickedly at Adam. “Some things that others have tried to do to Bran Cornick and failed miserably.”
He didn’t want to know, especially because she wanted to tell him. Elizaveta was one of his, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know what she was—witch and all that entailed. He wouldn’t invite her to bring her brand of horror to their suite—and it did not matter to him in the slightest that it was only Larry and Honey here, and they could protect themselves.
“Be that as it may,” Elizaveta said when it became clear he wasn’t going to question her. He could tell she was disappointed with him for spoiling her fun, though she knew him better than to have expected him to allow her to play her games here. “I am an old woman, and I’ve been up for far too long. I’m going to bed and going to sleep.”
“Wait,” he said impulsively. “Can you help me contact Mercy again?” It was maddening the way the faintness of their bond told him nothing except that she was alive.
Elizaveta sighed. “I can. But it is not easy, Adya. And I do not think that it is wise to do not-easy magic in the home of one such as Bonarata unless it is necessary. Especially since such an effort will weaken me in this place where we might need every bit of power all of us can muster. Is there something that makes you think this is necessary?”