There was a teasing, playfully sexy undercurrent in the question. She’d have had to have been brain-dead to miss it. Brain-dead for a month, she decided, not to feel the little buzz.
“Not so much, but I win when I do.”
He draped an arm over the back of her seat in a casual move. “In some games, both sides are the winner.”
“Maybe. Mostly when I fight, I’m not playing around.”
“Play balances out the fighting, don’t you think? And our tournaments, well, they’ll have served as a kind of preparation for what’s to come. There are many men in Geall, and some women besides, who have a good hand with a sword or a lance. If the war goes there, as we’re told it will, we’ll have an army to meet these things.”
“We’ll need it.”
“What do you do? Glenna says that women must work for a living here. Or that most do. Are you paid in coin to hunt demons?”
“No.” He wasn’t touching her, and she couldn’t say he was putting moves on her. But she felt as if he were. “It’s not the way it works. There’s some family money. I mean we’re not rolling in it or anything, but there’s a cushion. We own pubs. Chicago, New York, Boston. Like that.”
“Pubs, is it? I like a good pub.”
“Who doesn’t? Anyway, I do some waitressing. And some personal training.”
His brows knit. “Training? For battle?”
“Not really. It’s more for health and vanity. Ah, helping people get in shape, lose weight, tone up. I don’t need a lot of money, so it works out okay. Gives me some room, too, to take off when I need to.”
She glanced over. Moira was staring out the side window like a woman in a dream. In the front, Hoyt and Glenna continued to talk magic. Blair leaned closer to Larkin, lowered her voice.
“Look, maybe our magical lovebirds can pull this transportation bit off, maybe not. If they can’t, you’re going to have to handle your cousin.”
“I don’t handle Moira.”
“Sure you do. If we’ve got a shot at executing a little cave-in, or firing up those caves, we have to take it.”
Their faces were close now, their voices down to whispers. “And the people inside? We burn them alive, or bury them the same way? She won’t accept it. Neither can I.”
“Do you know what torment they’re in now?”
“It’s not of our doing.”
“Caged and tortured.” She kept her eyes on his, and her voice was low and empty. “Forced to watch when one of them’s dragged out of the cage, and fed on. Terrified, or well beyond that while they wonder if they’ll be next. Maybe hoping they will just so it ends.”
There was no playfulness now, in his face, in his tone. “I know what they do.”
“You think you know. Maybe they don’t drain them, not the first time. Maybe not the second. They just toss them back in the cage. It burns, the bite. If you live through it, it burns. Flesh, blood, bone, a reminder of the impossible pain when those fangs sank into you.”
“How do you know?”
She turned her wrist over, so he could see the faint scar. “I was eighteen, pissed off about something and careless. In a cemetery up in Boston, waiting for one to rise. I went to school with the guy. Went to his funeral, and heard enough to know he’d been bitten. I had to find out if he’d been turned, so I went, and I waited.”
“He did this?” Larkin traced a finger over the scar.
“He had help. No way a fresh one would’ve managed it. But the one who sired him came back. Older, smarter, stronger. I made some mistakes, and he didn’t.”
“Why were you alone?”
“Hunting alone is what I do,” she reminded him. “But in this case, I was out to prove something to someone. Doesn’t matter, except that it made me careless. He didn’t bite me, the older one. He held me down while the other one crawled over toward me.”
“Wait. Can you tell me, is that the way of it with a sire? To provide…”
“Food?”