Another visitor came one afternoon. Pia looked up as Aryal threw her six-foot body onto a couch beside her. The harpy’s black hair was tangled again, which seemed to be its usual state. She wore low-rider jeans, a sleeveless leather vest and the requisite sentinel weapons.
Pia studied her as Aryal fidgeted. The harpy’s odd gaunt beauty had nothing to do with dieting, and while lanky, her body was sure cut. Pia looked at her arm muscles and rippling stomach, thinking of all the hard work it took to look like that. Not in this lifetime.
Aryal glared at General Hospital playing on the flat-screen and jiggled a foot. She picked up a Harper’s Bazaar, thumbed through a few pages and tossed it aside. Pia thought she heard the harpy mutter, “I’m no good at any of this girlfriend shit.”
She raised her eyebrows and wondered if she was supposed to say something.
Aryal looked at the TV. She said, “Can you believe it—first, the witch Adela sold you a binding oath, the next day she put a tracking spell on you for Dragos and this week she contracted with the Dark Fae to find you. You turned out to be quite the cash cow for her.”
She shook her head. “That’s pretty wrong. I never did feel quite right about her.”
The harpy continued, “We found her body in the Hudson River. Her throat had been slit. Apparently she contracted her services out one too many times. The forensic report is inconclusive, but we’re guessing the Dark Fae killed her. The estimated time of death is shortly after you were kidnapped. It looks like the Dark Fae were trying to cover their tracks after taking you.”
“I see,” she said, her tone neutral. Maybe she should care that the witch had been murdered. Whatever Adela had done, Pia wasn’t sure that she had deserved to die for it. At the moment she couldn’t seem to muster much of a reaction.
Silence fell between them. Then Aryal’s strange stormy gray eyes met hers. “Bayne and I feel like shit about the kidnapping. But I’m not sorry about the rest of it.”
“I didn’t ask you to be. You’re entitled to your own opinion, and you were trying to protect Dragos in your own way. I respect that and there’s nothing more to be said.” Pia took the end of her cheerleader ponytail and flicked it at the harpy.
A feral grin spread across Aryal’s face. “Uh, listen, sometime when you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to have a round or two with you on the mat. For a while the gryphons couldn’t talk about anything else.”
“Sure, why not,” she told the sentinel. “The way things have been going, I had better keep up on my training.”
“Okay.” Aryal put her hands on her knees and started to push to her feet.
“Just one thing,” Pia said. The harpy paused and looked at her. Pia regarded her with a cold, steady gaze. “Try shoving me into a wall again and I’ll smack you down.”
Aryal’s grin turned into a scowl. She looked like she had just swallowed something sour, but after a moment she nodded.
Pia returned the nod and looked down at her magazine. It was a dismissal. The harpy took it as such, launched off the couch and disappeared.
Pia also had time to give Quentin a call. She went out onto the balcony on a sunny afternoon and closed the door for some privacy. Then she leaned against the new wall and looked out over the city as they talked.
It was quite an exchange. She had to fill Quentin in on all that had happened since her brief stay at his beach house. It was a lot to tell, including that she was now apparently Dragos’s mate and carrying his child.
When she finished, there was a long, long silence on the other end. She toed one of the flagstones and watched traffic below as she waited. “That’s going to take me a while to process,” Quentin said in a scrupulously neutral tone of voice.
“Tell me about it.”
“How . . . is he?”
“You know Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady?”
“The professory, growly son of a bitch?”
“Yeah, well”—she closed one eye, squinted at the skyline and grinned—“Dragos is a lot worse.”
That caused another rant that went pretty much along the lines of he’d-better-treat-you-right-or-I-don’t-care-who-thebastard-is-I’ll-kill-him-myself kind of thing. She bent over, put her forehead on the wall railing and endured it with as much patience as she could muster, making noises every once in a while to pretend she was actually listening.
Finally he said, “I want to see you in person. I want to make sure that bastard hasn’t addled you with some kind of beguilement.”
“He hasn’t,” she said. “But I’ll come to Elfie’s soon for a real visit.”