Tempered (A Daughters of the People Novel) (Daughters of the People Series) (21 page)

“Because sometimes,
even adults can’t control their hearts.”

“Aw.” She laid
her head on his shoulder and toyed with the button over his heart. “You can’ts
be sad, Airn. You just can’ts be.”

“I’ll try.” For
her, of course he would. He brushed the silky strands of her hair out of her
eyes. “Why aren’t you sad? I figured you’d cry up a storm as soon as Hawthorne
left.”

“Silly puppy.
Nana always comes back.”

The simple faith
in her words touched him.
Nana always comes back
. Just like she always
kept her promises and always spoke the truth.

Except about her
past. Or did she?

He shoved it out
of his mind. He’d made a promise, too, to open his mind as wide as the love in
his heart, to listen and believe. This time, he’d keep it.

* * *

The hours
dragged once Hawthorne left. Lali refused to let Ruby care for her and pitched
such a fit at bath time that Aaron compromised and stood outside her bathroom
while Lali bathed, reading a story to her. It took both Aaron and Ruby to get
Lali into bed. At last, they crept through her door, drawing it nearly shut,
and heaved twin sighs of relief.

Aaron scrubbed
his hands wearily over his face. “I’ve never seen her like that.”

“I think she
knows something’s wrong.” Ruby snuck a furtive glance at Lali’s door and
lowered her voice to a tense whisper. “Lali might be young, but she’s got great
instincts.”

The first day
he’d met Lali popped into his mind, how she’d wrapped her arms around Bobby
Upton’s neck and asked him to be her other husband. “Sometimes.”

“Always,” Ruby
shot back. “Trust me. Lali’s not a fool.”

“She’s four.”

“And? Sometimes
age doesn’t have anything to do with wisdom.” Ruby’s mouth tilted into a tired
smirk. “Take you, for instance. You’re, what? Thirty-three?”

“Thirty-four.”

“And you’ve not
exactly made rational choices where Nana’s concerned, have you?”

A rueful grin
tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Does anybody when their heart’s involved?”

She laughed
softly and threaded her arm through his. “You’ve got a point. Hot chocolate?”

“Sure.”

They ambled
downstairs arm in arm, sat around the kitchen table drinking Ruby’s homemade
hot chocolate, laced with shavings of milk chocolate, and talked quietly about
whatever came to mind.

When their mugs
were nearly empty, Ruby’s cell phone beeped. She fished it out of her pocket
and read the message, her smile soft and secretive.

“Boyfriend?”
Aaron pointed with his mug to her phone. “You’ve got that look a woman gets
when she’s thinking about someone special.”

“He might be.”
She set her phone aside and sipped hot chocolate. “Someday.”

“Who is he?”

“No one you
know.” At his steady gaze, she huffed out a sigh. “A guy I know. Jordan. He’s a
Son…”

“Son?”

“Born of a
Daughter who’s become mortal. I guess you and Nana haven’t sorted this out yet,
huh?”

“We’re getting
there, though not as quickly as either one of us would like.” He sipped hot
chocolate and eyed her carefully closed expression. “So what’s the problem with
Jordan?”

“Nothing. He’s a
great guy. Sweet, hard-working. Funny, when he wants to be. Maybe a bit too
reserved sometimes.” She cupped her mug between her hands and rolled it back
and forth. “Maybe a little too young, too.”

“Yeah? How old
is he?”

“Twenty-two,
almost twenty-three.”

“Yes, I can see
how that would worry you, what with your advanced age of, oh, twenty-two-ish?”

She laughed
softly. “You’re so adorably naïve, Aaron. I wouldn’t worry about his youth if I
were the same age.”

“How old are you
then?”

“You sure you
want to know?”

He met her gaze
steadily. In for a penny. “Yeah, I do.”

“Fifty-one.”

His breath
whooshed out in a rush. “Fifty…?”

“Yup. Hit the
big five oh last year. You see why I’m worried about the age difference?”

“Ok, let’s say
you’re really fifty-one and Hawthorne’s really nearly two millennia old, and
all the other women around here are the same, ancient but youthful looking.”

She speared him
with an icy glare. “Yeah, let’s assume that’s true, since it is.”

He waved her
comment away. “So you’re all in the same boat. It’s not like there are a lot of
men out there who are the same age, are there?”

“Lots of
fifty-year old men around, Aaron.”

“Don’t be
obtuse.”

“I’m not…”

“You are,” he
said firmly. “How many men your age have you dated in the last few years?”

Her gray eyes,
so like Hawthorne’s, dropped to her mug. “None.”

“Uh-huh. That’s
what I thought. And how long have you and Jordan been dating?”

She slumped into
her chair and her voice dropped to a near whisper. “Since he turned eighteen.”

“To paraphrase,
age doesn’t have anything to do with it, sweetheart.” He leaned forward and
cupped her hands in his. “Love is what it is. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.
The sooner we accept that, the easier we’ll have it.”

“Is that how you
think about Nana?”

“Sometimes. When
she’s really ornery.”

Ruby laughed.
“That’s pretty much all the time.”

“Yeah, it is.”
He stood and pulled her up out of her seat. “Come on. It’s past your bedtime.”

She shot him a
haughty glare. “I’m not a kid.”

“So we can watch
a movie and then you can go to bed.”

Her brows shot
down over stormy eyes. “I told you, I’m not…”

“A kid, I know,
but right now, you feel like my kid, so humor me.”

Her expression
turned thoughtful. “I never knew my father.”

“God, Ruby.” He
stuffed his hands into his pockets. Did all the women in this family have
tragic pasts? “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It
was a long time ago.” She threaded her arm through his elbow and tugged gently.
“Come on. I’ve got just the movie for you.”

A couple of
hours later, after a light-hearted comedy and a bowl of popcorn, they trudged
up the stairs to the second floor, Ruby yawning as she stumbled to her room
across the hall from Lali’s, and Aaron thoughtful. He’d never considered that
by loving Hawthorne, he’d be taking on all of her family as well. Lali, sure,
and maybe even Ruby and Levi, but she had to have other progeny, possibly
numbering in the dozens or, God help him, hundreds. Would he have to learn to
love all of those people, too?

He tucked it
away and got ready for bed, slipping under the sheets, his mind in turmoil.

He drifted into
a restless slumber full of dreams. Hawthorne hacking her way through an army of
angry, sweaty men, her eyes cold as her arm lifted and fell, delivering justice
with each stroke. Ruby running from a faceless, nameless enemy draped in
shadows, her eyes wide and frightened as she ran ever faster from the monster
chasing her. And Lali, lying in a broken heap on the living room rug, her
beautiful gray eyes staring sightlessly up at him.

He sat up and
gasped, trembling and sweaty, his heart a solid roar in his ears. The sound of
scuffed footsteps and harsh whispers came from the hallway a moment before his
door snicked shut and tiny feet pattered toward him.

“What is it,
Lali?”

“Sh.” Though she
stood at his elbow, her whisper barely reached him. “Ruby’s fighting the mean
cushion. We has to go, Airn.”

“What?”

“Sh.” Her hand
grasped his and tugged. “You has to come now.”

Ruby’s earlier
words flitted through his mind.
Lali might be young, but she’s got great
instincts
. He slid from the bed and shrugged on a t-shirt. “Tell me what to
do.”

“Come with me,
Airn.”

She took his
hand in her ice cold one and led him to his closet. Inside, a narrow door in
the back wall stood open. He’d never noticed it before, and probably wouldn’t
have anyway. Most of his clothes were stored in the chest of drawers in his
bedroom, not in the closet.

Lali disappeared
into the blackness on the other side of the door. He slipped in behind her and
fumbled with the interior knob, pulling the door as tightly closed as he could.
A light flashed on with a loud click, illuminating an inter-wall passageway
barely wide enough for a small woman to walk through. He turned sideways and
shuffled after Lali through twists and turns, down a flight of stairs, then
another.

After ten long
minutes of brushing cobwebs out of the way and cursing the tight confines of
the narrow passage, he stumbled to a stop behind her. She pressed her ear to
the wall and listened for a long while before pushing against it. This door
opened into an anteroom, one he wasn’t familiar with. Lali touched a finger to
her lips, then crept toward a thick, metal door embedded into the wall to their
right, opposite a staircase. The floor was solid concrete and the space held
the musty smell of a basement.

She held her
hands up to him. When he lifted her, she pointed to the red-lighted keypad mounted
on the wall next to the metal door. “P-u-p-p-y,” she said under her breath as
she keyed in five numbers, then pressed her right thumb firmly to the blank
screen above the keypad. The light flashed green. Lali squirmed out of his arms
and opened the door, revealing a black void.

He patted the
interior wall, flipped on the lights, and gaped at the view illuminated beneath
the harsh fluorescent lighting. The room was a massive space of row after row
of bookcases, each one filled to the brim. Weapons of all shapes, sizes, and
kinds hung from the sides of the shelving and on the walls, what he could see
of them. Down the center of the room, directly in front of him, a series of
glass cases held a variety of antiques and artifacts.

Lali pushed
against the back of his thighs. Aaron obliged, moving farther into the room,
his gaze caught by the assortment of books and objects collected within it.

Lali shut the
door and sighed. “Now we is safe from the mean cushion, Airn.”

“What is this
place?”

“Nana’s vault.
She’s got lots of stuff in here.” She skipped down the center aisle, still
carrying the flashlight. “I gots a bed back here. Nana said if I ever had to
come in here and hide that I had to go straight to bed
or else
.”

A laugh pushed
its way out around the sheer awe lingering over the museum Hawthorne had hidden
away somewhere in her house. His bare feet chilled on the cold concrete,
reminding him that Lali was shoeless, too. “Come here, kiddo. Guess I need to
tuck you in, huh?”

He swooped her
up, fed her giggles with gentle pokes to her tummy, and tucked her into the
twin bed located along the back wall in a corner where the light didn’t quite
reach. “Want me to cut the lights off?”

“Not until Nana
comes,” she said around a yawn, and snuggled into the small bed with her eyes
closed and a smile on her face.

He kissed her
cheek lightly. “I’ll be close by if you need me.”

He walked back
to the entrance of the vault. Hadn’t he heard Hawthorne refer to it, or maybe
Ruby?

If Lali was
right, her sister was at that moment battling Isolde somewhere above them.
Short of throwing weapons to Ruby as she needed them, there was nothing he
could do about it. Hopefully, she could handle the older woman on her own,
though how Isolde had made it into the house in the first place was a mystery,
considering all the guards Hawthorne had left behind.

His curiosity
over the room’s contents gradually edged out his concern for Ruby and the
guards. He examined each case, tapped lightly against the glass of one holding
the remnants of an ancient book written in an unknown language. Climate
controlled or just protected? He moved on to the next case and the next,
lingering over each one and their respective contents. A wooden shield with
cracked leather peeling away from its surface. A short sword pitted with rust
and age. A silver armband in the shape of a coiled serpent, mounted in the same
case as an intricately made heavy gold necklace and a lock of curly red hair,
dulled by time.

A row of
leather-bound volumes caught his eye. He pulled one carefully from the shelf
and flipped it open. It felt familiar, the slant of the handwriting, the
density of the pages. It took him a moment, but his mind finally hit on the
reason why. He’d held two volumes similar to the one in his hand back in California,
the ones written by the Chronicler containing the tales of Rebecca the Blade.

He slid the book
into its spot on the shelf, selected another, and nearly laughed. This one he
could almost read. The language was… He struggled to put his finger on it. An
older English, but not so old he didn’t recognize some of the words.
There
.
He squinted and finally made out
Una
and reared back. Una Longshadow.
Had Hawthorne, like him, borrowed tales from the ancient volumes she collected
and turned them into stories?