A Cowboy in Ravenna (12 page)

“Marcello didn’t know what he is.” Chace couldn’t imagine the alpha shifter would have been dumb enough to tangle with
that.

Calhoun shook his head. “Probably just fighting with Marcello wouldn’t have triggered the creature to come out, but Marcello also threatened you. Bad idea.”

“Bad for Marcello.”

Calhoun nodded. “Hope he’s not dead.”

Chace was surprised.

“He has a safe house in Siena. I’m going to head there soon and check it out.”

“So the kids aren’t here? Trin thought…” Chace swallowed as Calhoun removed the blade from the fire and waved it, letting it cool. He guessed heating it had been Calhoun’s form of rough and ready sterilisation.

“No, some of them are definitely here. As soon as I do what I can for Trin, I’ll go looking,” Calhoun said. “The kids were set to be sold to some buyers from South America. Shifter kids are really attractive in the sex slave trade. You can beat them up, deprive them of food, all kinds of fucking abuse and they go on living… If you can call it that.”

“When we first arrived, Trin thought Sage was here. He sensed him.”

But if he thought the news would electrify Calhoun he was wrong. “When Sage first went missing Trin frequently thought he was close by. He was pretty messed up.”

“I don’t know. It felt pretty real.”

“You caught it too?” Calhoun looked surprised. “Good. If your bond with Trin is that strong, you might have a shot in healing him.”

Chace pretended the hand Calhoun took wasn’t his. He couldn’t look away as the blade pressed into his palm, sliced fast. Blood welled up like dark jewels. “I don’t understand what bleeding all over him will do.” Chace panted. Damn, that hurt. Only on TV could someone cut himself without pain.

“Mate’s blood. Only blood stronger is the blood of family, but we don’t have that.”

Dizzy. Not from blood loss, but from looking at the cut on his palm and then at Trin’s missing eye…

Calhoun held Chace’s palm over Trin’s wound. Chace focused on the rest of Trin’s face, seeing dirt and bruises. Trin just looked tired that way, not maimed.

“Marcello’s still alive. Aberto’s with him,” Sabin said in a weary voice. He knelt beside Calhoun. “You sure that will help Trin, blood from a human?” He made it sound like Chace’s blood was a bad vintage or something, but he let it go.

A weird sliding sensation was pushing behind his eyes and rushing through the top of his head. The fire blurred, became gold, red and amethyst snakes, then slowed. It was very strange, like seeing each individual flap of a hummingbird’s wings.

He focused on Calhoun and Sabin, saw them looking at each other. Talking, they were still talking, but Chace couldn’t hear them anymore. They were drowned out by the huge drum of a heartbeat. It got louder and louder, so Chace wanted to cover his ears, but if he did that he’d have to take his hand off Trin’s empty eye socket.

Sweat prickled his face as he slipped down what felt like a giant water slide, gaining momentum so that his body leapt off the slide into free fall. As he tumbled, all around him were points of light. Colours. To keep himself whole, he named them. Burnt sienna, yellow ochre… Pigments used by prehistoric humans to paint caves. He wanted to go to France and see them and maybe he could convince Trin—

Trin.

Chace shivered.

“Reach his heart,” he heard Calhoun say. “You have to reach his heart.”

The first time they’d shared a connection, Chace had seen Trin as a wasteland of dead grass, enclosed by high walls. Nothing could grow there. There was only the wind, as endless as life without the piece that was missing.

My son.

Trin’s voice. Chace heard him, surged towards him and felt Trin, felt the burning brand of the wound that had never closed.

Trin was sitting in a cave with a tiny fire. He was naked and he had a rag wrapped around his eye. All around him were tools, some recognisable, some esoteric, that Chace guessed he used as a healer.

Chace knelt beside him.

“I can’t heal myself,” he told Chace. “I can’t see Sage. I felt him tonight but I can’t find him.”

“I can help you.” He opened Trin’s travelling bag, which was inexplicably in this Other Place, and found the familiar pencils and drawing pad Trin always carried as a backup for Chace. Trin had done that for as long as he’d known how much Chace loved to sketch.

Chace’s throat tightened. He couldn’t lose Trin. But drawing was all he had to offer, as if his talent had the power to heal.

His fingers took over and he drew without glancing at the paper, which was some trick, even for him. And he did it with his left hand. His right hand he put over the makeshift bandage covering Trin’s eye. “Let’s look for Sage,” he said. “I believe you when you say you sensed him tonight.”

“Been sure…so many times,” Trin whispered.

 
“Take a look.” Chace handed the finished likeness to Trin. “See your son, see Sage.”

“Holy shit!” Trin crushed the paper in his fist. “I didn’t see. How could I not see?” Trin touched Chace in wonder and blue light sparked between them. Their connection was suddenly visible, arching like silent lightning.

They weren’t in the cave anymore, but standing on the grass, the long waving grass moving like hair on the earth—pale yellow and endless.

Trin took Chace’s hand.

A sparrow dived low, hunting for airborne insects. The single bird couldn’t make this arid place a garden, but it was the first sign of life Chace had seen in Trin’s private world.

“You’re a healer as much as I am, Chace,” Trin said. He leaned his forehead against Chace’s. “I’ve never cared what happens to me.”

“But I do,” Chace said. “So you’re goddamn going to care.”

“Ouch!” Chace stared up at Calhoun, seeing his worried face washed by firelight. “Why’d you slap me?”

“You were out of it, sunshine, visiting lala land. You’d finished what I sent you to do. I needed you back or I’d have to cook you breakfast and I never hang around for breakfast.”

“Trin!” Chace rolled over and spotted his lover curled up in the foetal position next to the dying fire. The moon had sunk and the stars had moved. How the hell long had they been here? His body felt stiff and sore, his arms and legs not his own, but sticks attached to his body.

“You were in the healing place most of the night,” Calhoun said, as if he read the question in Chace’s eyes. He nodded towards Sabin, who was pouring steaming liquid from a carafe into a cup.

“Is that coffee?”
Please let it be coffee.
He didn’t crave the stuff the way Trin did, but he felt tired, like old cloth that had given way and torn at the seam.

“Yep.” Sabin looked tired too. “Trin’s okay. I checked on him every fifteen minutes while you two were, uh, out of it.” Sabin didn’t look any more comfortable with the idea of a ‘healing place’ than Chace was.

Chace took a sip of the coffee and grimaced at how strong it was. Apparently decaf didn’t exist in Italy. “Thanks,” he told Sabin. “Where’s Marcello?”

“Gone,” Calhoun said, but he didn’t explain.

Sabin wrapped his arms around himself.

Okay, obviously more had happened tonight than the strange healing dream he’d experienced but it could wait until after he checked on Trin.

He leaned over Trin to stroke the hair off his face, taking in the heavy whisker growth and—

“His eye!”

Calhoun was nodding, an emotion flickering in his expression. Awe? Couldn’t be, Chace thought.

“You reached him. Somehow you healed him. You’re as gifted as Trin.”

Gifted? Nah, unless it was with pen and paper. But though Trin looked exhausted, he wasn’t even bruised.

Tears stung Chace’s eyes. He closed them, sponging Trin, needing to be grounded in the contact of flesh against flesh. “Thank God you’re okay,” he whispered.

“Is that coffee for me?” Trin asked, sounding grumpy, the way he always did when he had to get out of his bedroll early in the morning when they went camping in the forest.

“Yeah, there’s coffee,” Chace said, sitting up to hand it to him. “Black as sin, the way you love it.”

Trin turned on his side to look at Chace. “You…all right?” Both eyes looked at him, the familiar shape, the steady grey, but something was different. Trin’s sadness had eased. Chace thought of the sparrow that had appeared in the healing place. Hope. Trin had let hope into his world.

“Yeah, sure, dandy.”

Trin’s lips quirked. “Uh huh.” He gulped his coffee, eyes slitted with pleasure. He wasn’t in pain anymore and he was obviously savouring the moment.

Chace reached out to touch Trin’s eyebrow and temple where the eye had been destroyed, all too willing to savour along with Trin.
Whole again.

“Well, I gotta get going,” Sabin said. He looked deliberately into Chace’s eyes. “This time I’m letting you know.”

Trin snapped his head up in Sabin’s direction. “Christ, don’t go.”

Sabin frowned, looking a little freaked out by Trin’s intensity. “I have stuff.”

Chace took Trin’s arm, squeezing in warning. Trin panted, sweat breaking out on his forehead as he watched Sabin walk away.

“We’ll see him again.” Chace soothed Trin, cuddling. “He’s not lost anymore.”

“Sage isn’t lost,” Trin said. “He’s broken.”

Chapter Eleven

His son was broken.
His beautiful, bright, curious, laughing son.

The only time Sage laughed now was with derision.

“I didn’t even
like
Sabin. He tried to steal my wallet,” Trin said. “I felt sorry for him because he’s abused, because he’s a whor—”

He cut off before he could finish the word. He couldn’t… Sage, his little boy.

He felt like a truck had hit him head on and now he was lying in the dirt, bleeding out. “How could I not know who Sabin was?”

“I didn’t recognise him at first either,” Chace said, not letting go of Trin for a second, his lean, strong arms holding tight, his scent all around Trin. His mate, his beautiful mate.

Chace was going to try to fix this too. Why wouldn’t he give up? He should have run when he’d seen the creature. Trin had been so sure Chace would run.

Instead he’d cared for Trin, healed him.

“He doesn’t know who I am. His memories… When I healed him back in our room, I felt a block. How could I touch him and not know he was mine?”

“He doesn’t look like a little boy anymore, and it doesn’t seem a given to me that just because he’s your son you’d somehow immediately know, years later,” Chace said. “But I guess my artistic muse caught a few similarities. The shape of his jaw, and he has your mouth.”

Trin covered his eyes.

“Trin, we’ve found him. We can’t change his past but we can help him now.”

“He won’t let me get close to him. If he knew I was his father—”

“So don’t tell him,” Calhoun said, interrupting unexpectedly. “Be his friend now. Maybe one day, if he’s ever ready…”

Trin swallowed. Not tell him? “I want my child. I want him in my arms.”

“If Sage was an abused horse, what would you do?” Chace asked, rubbing gentle circles over Trin’s back.

“I’d…” Trin inhaled deeply, centring himself. “I’d put him somewhere safe and leave him alone. I might show up sometimes to give him a carrot or something but I wouldn’t push. It might take months before I’d approach him.”

Chace nodded. “Sounds like a good plan.”

“But he’s not safe.”

“Yeah, he is,” Calhoun said. “I made him safe, Trin.”

“What do you mean?” Trin demanded. “He’s mated to that bastard Marcello—”

“I’ll take care of Marcello.” Calhoun’s voice was a cold promise. “And it happens that Sabin has a new nipple ring, so he won’t be able to run out on me and disappear.”

Trin blinked. “You put a tracker on him?”

Calhoun nodded.

“I’m not following,” Chace said.

“Calhoun somehow persuaded Sabin to wear a nipple ring with a tracker embedded in it. He’ll know where Sabin is as long as he wears it.”

“Our little thief couldn’t resist the drop of turquoise on the ring.”

“Turquoise is the stone of protection.” He hadn’t dreamt Calhoun would know that. That Sage now wore turquoise comforted him.

“So you got him to wear it because it looked…pretty?” Chace asked.

“We played a hand of cards. I cheated and he lost,” Calhoun said. “Now I have to go. I got two kids waiting with Sabin in the car.”

“You found the kids!” Chace said. “Thank God!”

Calhoun shook his head. “Thank your boyfriend. The monster act scattered the guards so I was able to secure the kids. Marcello slipped away but I…persuaded Aberto to take me to them.” He gave one of his twisted smiles. His knuckles were reddened.

Persuaded. Yeah, Trin could imagine. “I want Marcello. You hear me? He hurt Sage.”