CARNAL, The Beast Who Loved Me (38 page)

So he leaned back into the granite kitchen counter behind him and waited. But he never got a chance to ask the questions that were forming in his mind because a figure materialized behind Rosie. In his kitchen. Uninvited.

Over the years Storm had become somewhat desensitized to people forming from thin air, but some residual feeling that it was just wrong would always remain.

“Rosie!” Kellareal said it like an accusation. “What have you done?”

Storm actually wanted to know the answer to that, himself. The fact that the angel looked appalled wasn’t lost on him, but his instincts as a father overrode everything else. He quickly moved Rosie so that he stood in front of her, knowing that he could only form a barrier so long as the angel allowed it.

“What do you want and what makes you think you can just barge into my kitchen whenever you want?”

“This doesn’t concern you,” Kellareal said to Storm dismissively.

“Really? Does it not concern
me
either?” Litha stood at the door with tousled hair wearing a flannel plaid robe similar to Storm’s, but smaller and floor length.

“Not really, witch.” Kellareal’s attention barely flickered away from Rosie.

His dismissive attitude incensed Litha. “Witch, is it? This is my home! This is my child! If you have business with her, you have business with us.” She moved to stand next to Storm, took in a deep breath, looked at the ceiling and shouted, “Dad!”

Kellareal did a double take and gaped at her. “You think summoning that ridiculous sex demon is equivalent to calling in reinforcements? This is not his concern. You know he only makes fucked up situations more fucked up.”

“Strange language for an asexual entity,” said Deliverance as he appeared next to Kellareal. “What’s up?”

“This is between Elora Rose and me,” said Kellareal. “We had an agreement. She violated the terms. Restitution has to be made.”

Storm, Litha, and Deliverance all looked at Rosie to answer the charge.

“Is that true?” Litha asked quietly. Rosie’s tears had slowed. She sighed, glanced at the angel, and nodded, looking so grief-stricken that Litha’s maternal empathy joined her defensive instincts. She pulled a tissue from her robe pocket, wiped Rosie’s cheeks then gave her a reassuring hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure this out.”

She looked at Storm. “Can I have some of that coffee?”

Storm looked at the machine. “Yeah,” he said tossing both the pod and the coffee he’d been brewing for himself. “Everybody sit down.” He motioned to the wrought iron stools with padded leather seats that were pulled up to the kitchen island. “Who else wants coffee?”

“I’ll take a Kona,” said Deliverance. Storm reached for a pod. “No. Not that cheap stuff. I’ll take the hundred percent Kona you keep in the cabinet.” After giving Deliverance a brief glare, Storm opened the cabinet above the coffee station and retrieved a gold foil hundred percent Kona pod. “Don’t be so stingy. I’ll bring you more next time I find myself craving grass skirts.”

Storm started the brew then looked at Rosie, who had seated herself near the fire.

“Hot chocolate,” she said, looking miserable and clutching the tissue her mother had given her.

When Storm nodded at Kellareal, the angel rolled his eyes, crossed his arms over his chest and said, “Earl Grey.”

Eight minutes later all five had a steaming cup of comfort in front of them. Three were waiting for an explanation.

“Rosie,” Kellareal began, “has been doing a self-imposed time out in a dimension that is host to a special project of mine.”

Deliverance nodded. “I know. I was there. So what’s the problem?”

Though delivered with Deliverance’s special brand of belligerence, Storm and Litha were both secretly glad that he’d given voice to exactly what they were thinking.

Kellareal said, “The problem is that your daughter,” he looked at Storm and Litha, “or granddaughter as the case may be,” he looked at Deliverance, “just wiped out an entire subspecies of hybrids including every trace that they ever existed.” His crescendo flared during delivery of that sentence so that he was practically yelling at the end. “She left three hundred humans and hybrids, assembled on a desert plain to fight a war she started, wondering what the heck they were doing there. Since all memory of the people she obliterated was gone as well.” He fumed.

Storm and Litha both looked at Rosie.

“You can do that?” Litha asked, sounding more than amazed.

Rosie shrugged.

Kellareal was nodding. “Yeah, Mommy. She can do that and a whole lot more. That’s why I’ve been watching her so closely ever since she was born, trying to keep universal bigwigs from getting wind that she exists!” His temper was growing the longer he talked.

“Okay. Okay,” Storm said in his best calming tone. “Let’s all settle down.” He looked at Kellareal. “Take a whiff and a sip of that tea and pull yourself together.”

Lines had formed between Litha’s brow and she looked worried. “That’s why you’ve been around so much?”

Kellareal softened just a touch. “It’s not that I don’t like you, Litha. I do. But yeah. Your kid is the big fish fry.”

Litha looked at her daughter. “Why’d you do this, Rosie?”

“I fell in love.” Rosie sniffed. “With one of the hybrids.” She glared at Kellareal. “He left them enslaved to an open ended bad deal. He gave them freedom in exchange for protecting humans that weren’t worth protecting.”

“That’s not for you to say,” said the angel.

“Well, it wasn’t for you to say that the Exiled should have to spend eternity fighting and dying to protect people who despised them, just so they wouldn’t be kept in cages like breeding animals.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Kellareal protested.

“It was
exactly
like that!” Rosie shouted. “At the very least their indentured servitude should have had an expiration date.”

She and Kellareal glared at each other.

“You fell in love and…” Litha quietly prompted, trying to get Rosie back on track and emotions under control.

“They killed him.” New tears started running down Rosie’s face. “So I killed them.” As she wiped her face with the tissue her mother gave her, she raised her chin, looked at the angel with defiance and said, “All of them.”

Kellareal barked out a laugh. “You really don’t seem to get the enormous consequences of what you’ve just done.”

Storm was trying to think his way around the mind-blowing idea that his baby had god-like power. “Why don’t you tell us?” he asked calmly. “About the enormous consequences.”

“Arbitrarily changing the natural progression of things,” he looked pointedly at Rosie, “in this magnitude, creates ripple effects all over the Earth dominion. Cross-dimension. An event like this in one dimension could change the history and future of the entire planet. Remember the overlap I told you about?” He shook his head. “I should have killed you as soon as I knew what you were.”

Deliverance flew off his barstool as he lunged at the angel and the two of them fell to the kitchen floor in a tangle of elemental limbs and wrought iron legs. Storm sat quietly, but looked at Litha with a sigh and a WTF expression as they exchanged a wordless dialogue.

“Rosie,” Litha said. “I don’t suppose you have the ability to break that up, do you?”

Rosie turned her swollen face to her mother. “Stop!” she commanded. The angel and the demon froze in place in a viral-worthy freeze frame.

Storm and Litha took a moment to consider the implications of having a daughter, a somewhat immature daughter with questionable control, who could bring about such a physics-defying event. One that affected creatures as powerful as angels and demons.

“Gods almighty,” Storm said, staring at the two on the floor.

Litha looked at Rosie. “Normally I wouldn’t condone this,” she gestured toward Kellareal and Deliverance, “but your father and I would like to know what has happened without interference. So let’s leave them like that while we talk. Just the three of us.”

Rosie nodded. Litha got up, fetched an entire box of lotion-laced tissues from a cupboard, and set it down in front of her daughter. “Tell us.”

“I gave Glen an ‘if this, then that’.”

“We remember,” Storm said.

“He didn’t comply and I thought that meant he didn’t love me. At least not as much as I wanted to be loved. So I decided to disappear for a while, partly to teach him a lesson, partly to protect my pride. I asked Kellareal for a place to stay. He said there were some people, hybrids, who owed him a favor.

“So that’s what happened. I stayed in their house and became fond of them. I worked in the bar slash café and sort of learned to like it.” Storm glanced at Litha with a raised eyebrow at that revelation. “I didn’t forget about you. Sometimes I thought about coming home, but I liked it there. I felt useful. I liked the people. And after a while I started to have feelings for one of them.” She looked up. “Strong feelings.”

Litha nodded slightly, silently urging her to continue. “Like I said, these people, they called themselves Exiled, had made a deal with Kellareal. He’d learned that they were going to be killed. All of them. He told them that he would free them and give them a new home if they would protect the humans in another world from their own version of hybrids who’d escaped and caused a lot of havoc.

“That was twenty-five years ago. This whole time the Exiled have been sacrificing their loved ones for a cause that wasn’t even their own to save people who wanted them dead. So, yeah, I wouldn’t say I started a war, exactly, but I did tell their leader they should merge their society with the humans and end the cycle of responding to raids. I said they should take the fight to the terrorists and end it.”

Big tears began to roll down her face again. “I’d give anything if I’d kept my mouth shut and minded my own business.”

Litha and Storm exchanged a look. “The person you loved. Did he die in the battle?” Litha’s voice was full of compassion and she hoped Rosie knew that if she was hurt, her parents were hurt, too.

Rosie tried to speak, but could only nod as a flood of new tears coursed down her face.

“Kellareal says I’m not supposed to change things, but
he
changed things when he moved the Exiled to another world. Didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Litha said. “I’m not going to pretend that I understand that reasoning. It seems mind-bendingly complicated, but I can say this. If Kellareal is concerned about your special gifts drawing the wrong kind of attention then I’m worried about that, too. With great power comes great responsibility. Seems like you’ve gotten more than your share of both, which means that you’re going to have to learn to be just as super-careful as you are supernatural. Do you understand?”

Rosie stared at her mother for a few seconds. “I do understand that.”

“Your dad and I are very sorry you lost someone you loved. Either one of us would always choose to take your pain for you if we could. Since we can’t, we’ll just promise to always love you and be here. For you.”

“No matter what?” Rosie asked.

“Of course. No matter what,” Litha answered. Looking at Storm, she said, “How are we going to fix this?”

Storm looked at the two frozen in combat on the floor beside the kitchen island. “I never could have imagined myself saying this, but let’s find out if the angel fella has a suggestion.” He lowered his chin and asked Rosie. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she answered, and just like that Kellareal and Deliverance were sitting on their stools at the island with full, steaming cups in front of them.

“Listen,” she said, and both elementals gave her their rapt attention. She directed her question to Kellareal. “First, what’s the difference between moving the Exiled to a different world and just wiping out a nuisance that was about to be wiped out anyway?”

“First,” began Kellareal, “there’s a big difference between moving something from one place to another and wiping it out. It’s the difference between relocating wolves to a wildlife refuge and wiping their entire species from existence as if they had never lived, including all photos, art, historical and literary references, and domesticated dogs. No Jack London. No Little Red Riding Hood. Everything gone.

“Second, the Rautt were not about to be wiped out. If you’d been paying attention, you would have noticed that the Exiled spared everyone who was prepubescent. One or more of those young, given an entirely different nurturance, might have made a contribution of monumental proportions.