Ash and Quill(88)

Jess would have, of course; there was nothing to it but business courtesy. But it still set him on guard, and he saw the brief flash in Brendan's eyes before he turned to look out the carriage's window at the rough, rocky coast. Anit wasn't here just to smile prettily and offer family greetings, and his brother well knew that.

"You seem at home away from home," Jess said.

"You mean, considering my age?" Anit said coolly. "I have traveled with my father since I was old enough to remember. But this trip to Mexico is the first I've taken alone on his behalf."

"And we landed you in it, didn't we?"

She looked away and lifted her shoulders in a very small shrug. "I think none of us have ever been out of it."


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Morgan laughed. It had a bitter little edge to it. "You and I already have much in common, Anit. It isn't just the smugglers who spend their lives hunted."

"No doubt." Anit glanced back at Jess. "Thank you for the lions. I will hold them in trust for you, as I promised."

"We'll be along to get them. Sometime."

"Of course," she said. "You may count on me, Jess."

She sounded all right when she said it, but she was still young, and he sensed that hint of falseness in it. Lying was as easy to smugglers as respiration, normally, but not among family. She wasn't quite comfortable with it yet.

Morgan sighed and leaned her head on Jess's shoulder. "I need a bath. A hot bath, with rose soap. And a meal that isn't military rations."

"I think that can be arranged," he said. "One thing I know about my da: he won't be living in a tent and eating beans from a metal can if it can be helped."

"I think I'll like it, then."

"Oh, you won't," Brendan said. "But I don't think he'll care."

There was a certain relaxing quality to the ride, the sway of the carrier, the hiss of the tires . . . at least until they hit a bump that lifted everyone in the vehicle six inches into the air, and slammed them down hard. They'd all been through enough to take it in stride, but even Brendan had to wince. The driver's cheerful cry of "Sorry!" didn't seem very sincere.

Nearly an hour later, and (by Jess's count) more than twenty similar bounces, they finally squealed to a halt, and the back doors flapped open to admit gray daylight. No rain, and though Jess had expected to step out onto mud, he found himself standing on clean, ancient flagstones. The sight of the brooding old walls that rose thirty feet into the air made the breath in his lungs turn sick and tainted. He turned, staring. The walls circled the court in which the carriage had parked. Another carriage had already come to a halt beside theirs, and a third rattled over a wide wooden bridge and in through an enormous arched door.

And then, as the bridge cranked up with a hiss of powerful hydraulics and a clank of iron chains as thick as his legs, as it sealed shut with a boom and inner doors were pulled closed, Jess realized that his brother hadn't been exaggerating.

His father was living in a castle. And the sight of the walls made him feel sick and hot and short of breath, and he didn't know why, until he thought he smelled a phantom whiff of rotting plants and Greek fire. 

I'm past Philadelphia. I'm over it.

But it left him shaking and sweating, with a sick taste in the back of his throat, and he flinched as Morgan put her arm in his. "Sorry," he murmured.

"This is your home?"

"I've never seen it before," he said. The fortress proper consisted of gigantic, brooding buildings and towers. The London town house he'd grown up in could have fit within the entry hall, he imagined. The place was large enough to hold an entire High Garda company. Pity they'd had to leave theirs behind. "I thought Brendan was exaggerating."

"Not a bit," his brother said, and lifted Anit down from the carriage. "Da's owned this place for twenty years, give or take. Never in his own name, of course. And this is the first time he's felt threatened enough to make use of it."

"Jess! Oh, my dear boy!"

He turned toward the voice, and his mother came rushing down the narrow stone steps of the castle's main door and threw her arms around him. He froze for a long second, staring in blank panic at Brendan, who'd crossed his arms, and then tentatively hugged her back. Celia Brightwell had always been a distant presence in his life; Callum had married her for position and money, not love, and though she'd been a dutiful enough mother, she'd never been a warm one. She'd certainly never embraced him like this before. If it weren't for her familiar features and the expensive cut of her dress, he'd have thought it was someone playing her.