As much as Bran believed the Sluagh were in the right, that Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha had ruled hard and long enough, Bran could not and did not pretend that his people were any less violent or cruel than the Sidhe. Nor did he doubt that many Sidhe thought their king justified in his actions, just as Bran thought of his father and great-uncle.

  He also couldn’t explain any of that to Jamie, at least not in terms that Jamie would be able to accept or understand. Bran put another forkful of casserole in his mouth, enjoying the smooth creaminess of the sauce and noodles. Then he noticed that Jamie had mostly just been pushing his around in his bowl.

  “They willna come back soon, I do not think,” he said softly. “And they will avoid the city.”

  Jamie looked up at him, his blue eyes worried. “Do you live in the city?”

  “Aye.”

  “Are you safe? At home?”

  Bran wasn’t sure how to answer that one—honestly, anyway. While he was confident the geàrd would be hesitant to attack either of them within a populated area, he wasn’t certain they wouldn’t try to kill him in the attic he’d been calling home for the past few months. “I do not think they know where I live,” he answered, a little hesitantly.

  “You should go to the police,” Jamie told him, his expression clouded.

  “And tell them what?” Bran asked.

  “That you were attacked!”

  “By people I canna identify?”

  Jamie frowned. Because of course he couldn’t have provided any useful details about the appearance of Bran’s attackers, either, even though they hadn’t been wearing masks. One woman, two men, all tall and fairly thin, fair skinned. One guy with teeth that seemed oddly sharper than they should have been.

  Jamie sighed. “It still might help. If these people are dangerous.”

  “It willna,” Bran answered, shaking his head, then taking another bite, his fork scraping the bottom of the bowl.

  Jamie didn’t like it. He didn’t like the idea that Bran might be in danger if he went home, and he didn’t like the idea that he himself might be in danger, and he really didn’t like the idea that nobody was going to do anything about it. “You can’t just do nothing,” Jamie grumbled irritably. “And pretend everything is fine.”

  Bran put the last bite of casserole from his bowl into his mouth and studied Jamie while he chewed. “I canna do anything about it, either,” he replied, his voice surprisingly calm. “Your police canna help me, and I canna hide away and never go outside again. So what would you have me do?”

  “Go to the police!” Jamie repeated, getting agitated. “File a report so that if they do come back⁠—”

  “If they do, then what?” Bran asked him, letting his bowl rest in his lap. “Ask them not to kill me while I go to the police again?”

  Jamie sighed. It was the same argument he’d had with his mother all over again, every time he’d begged her to call the police on Bill Eckel. She’d remind him that the police wouldn’t do anything, and that then they’d be left in the house with an even angrier man who had already proven more than definitively that he had no compunctions about using his fists to make his points.

  Besides, Nell had explained, Bill didn’t mean it. Not really. It was the alcohol. Or he was tired and stressed from work.

  A thousand excuses for a thousand bruises.

  “Fine,” is what Jamie said out loud, standing up and carrying his mostly full bowl and Bran’s empty one back to the tiny kitchen. “Do you want more?” he asked, not turning around to look at the fragile-seeming form in his recliner.

  “Aye, please,” came the answer.

  Jamie left his own bowl on the counter, his stomach too tied up in knots to actually eat, but he scooped out more for Bran and brought the bowl—still steaming, because Jamie owned a decent casserole dish that retained heat—back.

  Bran took it with a small smile. “It is good,” he said, twirling another forkful of noodles.

  “It’s nothing special,” Jamie replied, now thoroughly cranky as well as hungry, although the nausea from anxiety was keeping him from being interested in food. Maybe he’d eat later.

  Or maybe he’d end up lying in bed, staring up at the pattern of shifting light on his apartment ceiling made by streetlight filtering through the leaves of the tree outside.

  Bran had fallen asleep in the recliner, and Jamie hadn’t had the heart to wake him again. Also, his own back ached from spending too much time in his office chair, so he’d taken the bed and tried not to think about the faint scent that still clung to the fibers of his sheets. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant—there was sweat, yes, but mostly an odd, earthy-salty smell that Jamie found he sort of liked.

  Which he had no business thinking about, given Bran’s physical condition and circumstances. Because if he wasn’t lying, then he was trouble. And if he was lying, he was still trouble, just of a very different variety.

  Jamie shouldn’t want anything to do with either.

  He took a deep breath, intending to calm himself to try to go to sleep. Instead, he inhaled a lungful of Bran’s earthy-salty scent, which made his heart beat faster and his mind spin.

  A few hours after that, Jamie finally got up and made himself a cup of chamomile tea dosed with milk and honey. On a whim—because he hadn’t done it in years, decades, probably, he left out a tiny dish of milk with honey on the ledge of the kitchen window. For the fairies, exactly the way his mother always had.

  Maybe he’d just dump out the sour milk in a few days, or maybe it would bring him luck, but, either way, it made him feel a little better.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  At some point, Jamie had finally fallen asleep, although waking up only four or so hours later meant that he didn’t feel at all rested. Probably better than he would have if he hadn’t managed to get any sleep, but still ragged and hollowed-out. And worried.

  Bran’s explanation about the people who’d attacked him didn’t make much sense to Jamie, even within the parameters of what little he knew about organized crime. Admittedly, that wasn’t something he knew much about, but he’d seen a bunch of movies that had mobsters and gang warfare and even depictions of the Yakuza, but all of them had fought about crime. Money, guns, drugs, prostitution rings, human trafficking. Something illegal. Or industrial secrets. Not ideology.

  Sure, he knew that there had been wars and even gang conflict over religion as late as the nineteenth century. And religious belief had fueled hate crimes against Muslims and Jews for the better part of the last two millennia, but people didn’t just hunt down your kid and kill them because they didn’t like your church.

  Did they?

  The obvious answer was that Bran was lying to him, although Jamie didn’t get that sense and definitely didn’t want that to be the truth. The alternative was that it was as messed up and complicated as it sounded, but that didn’t help him understand or give him a way to do something about it.

  Jamie frowned to himself as he got up and carefully padded into the kitchen to make coffee, checking over his shoulder periodically to see if the noises he was making had disturbed Bran.

  The smaller man slept on, a slight furrow to his sleeping brow.

  Not wanting to make too much noise in the main room, Jamie stayed in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, drinking his coffee, liberally dosed with sweetened creamer more for the calories than the taste. Not that he minded creamer—he liked a little in his coffee, just enough to take the bitter edge off. He didn’t actually like it as sweet as he’d made it, but he’d thought the sugar might help with his agitation.

  He also made himself a bowl of instant oatmeal using the obligatory electric teakettle that you simply had to have if you lived anywhere in the UK. Jamie didn’t mind tea—he wasn’t into tea the way Rob and Trixie were, but it was an acceptable beverage. He owned the electric kettle, though, and used it far more often to make oatmeal or hot chocolate or instant noodles.

  Even though stress and worry were suppressing his appetite, Jamie knew that he really did need to eat. He’d barely had any casserole last night, although he’d eventually managed to choke down a bowl, but on top of the day before’s lack of food, he was feeling both woozy and nauseous, and he knew that was a recipe for nothing good.

  Jamie hopped up on the edge of the counter—he only just barely fit—and pulled his bowl into his lap, half-watching Bran and thinking. About Bran, of course. And the members of the not-mafia who had tried to beat him to death. Or at least into a bloody pulp, although Bran hadn’t argued otherwise when Jamie said they’d tried to kill him.

  Jamie put a spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth, grimacing around the sticky-thick texture, which tried its best to stick in his throat. Normally, he liked oatmeal just fine, although he tended to save it for cooler months. He’d gone with it today because it was quieter than cooking in a pan or pouring out a bowl of cereal, and he was regretting it a little. But he’d made the goddamn oatmeal, so he was going to eat it and not waste food and money. He took another bite.

  Bran shifted a tiny bit in his sleep, his forehead creasing further as a small sound that might have been distress slipped through barely-parted lips. Jamie froze, watching to see if whatever it was that disturbed Bran’s sleep continued, prepared to wake him if he seemed upset, but Bran’s features smoothed out again and his breathing evened.

  Jamie took another bite of oatmeal, then washed it down with a mouthful of slightly over-creamered coffee, the frown on his own features more to do with the situation than with his regret over his breakfast choices, although they certainly weren’t helping.

  Jamie couldn’t decide if he was more disturbed by everything that had led up to Bran being in his apartment, or by the fact that he felt so strongly protective toward a man he barely knew. Two half-dates, several encounters that might be describable as stalking, and an argument about why Bran was drawn to him should definitely not have Jamie trying to figure out what he could do to keep this man safe.

  It should have had him do his due diligence in seeing Bran loaded into the ambulance, and that should have been an end to it. But Bran’s panic had felt like a vice around Jamie’s heart, and he just couldn’t leave Bran to the undoubtedly irritated ministrations of the EMTs. Bran would undoubtedly have been fine, but…

  Jamie couldn’t do it. He couldn’t explain why he couldn’t do it, but he just couldn’t.

  In the same way that he couldn’t help putting himself between Bill Eckel’s fist and his younger half-siblings or his momma, he couldn’t help trying to take care of Bran—going with him in the ambulance, staying with him at the hospital, going back to the hospital to be with him. And then bringing him home.

  Last night, he’d asked Bran if he wanted to go back to where he was staying—if he’d be able to take care of himself, and although Bran had said he probably could, he’d also looked scared. The same kind of scared that Jamie recognized from the time Billy—the oldest of his half-siblings, although he’d only been five at the time, and Jamie’d been almost thirteen—had accidentally broken one of Bill Eckel’s beer steins, collected over many years from various thrift shops and flea markets and the occasional tourist shop somewhere on one of their family road trips to some cave or lake in Kentucky or Tennessee.

  It had been on one of the rickety tables next to the hideous plaid orange and brown couch that Bill spent most of the weekends sprawled on, watching sports or fishing on TV and drinking beer—out of whichever stein was presently his favorite.

  Bill hadn’t been in the room at the time, either because he was getting a snack or using the bathroom or had gone to get something, Jamie couldn’t remember, but Billy had been running through the room with his newly-acquired toy airplane. Some cheap thing their momma had picked up, probably at a thrift store or church sale.

  He’d hit the corner of the table while making a sweeping turn with his toy plane, and knocked the stein to the ground, where the thin carpet of their house didn’t manage to provide enough cushion to keep the handle from snapping off.

  Billy’s face had held the same expression of mindless terror that Bran’s had as they were strapping him to the gurney. And Jamie just couldn’t let him go like that, anymore than he’d been able to keep himself from claiming responsibility for the knocked-over stein.

  One would think that he’d have learned from the bruising and aches the first, or second, or dozenth time, and that he’d have known better than to follow Bran into the ambulance—or than to intervene in the beating in the first place—but apparently Jamie just wasn’t wired that way.

  He sighed and forced another spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth, wishing he’d made another breakfast choice and vowing to not buy oatmeal again for at least a year.

  What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep getting myself into these things? He knew, logically speaking, that he probably didn’t deserve the blame for anything his step-father had done all those years ago, but the child who had been on the receiving end of Bill Eckel’s fists had frequently asked his momma what he’d done wrong, and the man who had emerged on the far side of it still wondered if he hadn’t in some way borne some amount of responsibility. If he’d been less clumsy or more attentive or followed the rules better—nevermind that he didn’t fit within the parameters set by the rules of Bill Eckel’s household.

  That same man wondered now whether or not he’d somehow drawn trouble to himself. That he shouldn’t have agreed to go out to dinner with Bran in the first place, that he should have called the cops when Rob suggested he had a stalker, or that he should have just gotten curry with Rob and Trixie when they’d asked him to.

  But he hadn’t. He never did any of the what-ifs that pushed and shoved their way through his mind, although he supposed that’s why they were what-ifs and not memories.

  In theory, Jamie understood that he wasn’t responsible for the decisions other people—Bill Eckel, his mother, the people who’d attacked Bran, even Bran himself—made. All he could be responsible for was himself.

  But then why does this keep happening to me? All this shit, and there’s only one common denominator.

  Jamie sighed, ate more oatmeal, forced himself to swallow, and took another gulp of rapidly-cooling coffee.

  The weather was going to be hot again, and his tiny apartment didn’t have air conditioning—most of Edinburgh didn’t have air conditioning, either, so it wasn’t like that was a particularly sad feature of his living accommodations.

  It would have been a good day to go hike the Crags, take his lunch outside, or hide in the actually air conditioned library with the manuscripts that didn’t change on him from one day to the next. They might puzzle him and resist his ability to interpret them, but every time he looked, they always looked the same back.

  The same thing was frustratingly not true of people.

  Beside him, his phone buzzed, and he picked it up.

  You okay? It was Trixie.

  Yeah, he sent back. Long story, but life emergency. Nothing I can’t handle, and I’ll tell you everything when I come back. He’d texted her yesterday to beg her to take his shifts or pawn them off on someone else. Usually there weren’t quite enough hours to go around the staff, so it wasn’t a huge problem if someone had to call out—somebody else would take over the shift. The only problem was that if he wasn’t working, he wasn’t getting paid, even if it was fine from the Museums’ perspective.

  You sure you’re okay?

  He wasn’t, not in the slightest, but he didn’t want to violate Bran’s privacy by explaining. If Bran didn’t want him to talk about it, he’d make something up. Or just use some previous crisis he’d had to handle with Billy or Nora. Ginny and Tommy were still young enough that they hadn’t hit their full rebellious stages, yet.

  Just need a few days, he sent back. It’ll be fine. Even he wasn’t convinced by that. Promise. Then he sent a smiley face. It was still weak, and he knew it, but he wasn’t sure how to convince Trixie that things were fine because they weren’t, and he was a terrible liar, even in text.

  Call or text if you need anything, okay?

  He sent a thumbs up.

  And then he finished his now-disgusting oatmeal.

  Jamie had carefully retrieved his research notes and spread them out on the bed so that he wouldn’t accidentally back up in his office chair and run into the extended end of the recliner where Bran was still sleeping. So now his notes were strewn across the bedspread—because at least he could be civilized enough to make the bed before covering it in papers—and Jamie had a crick in his back from sitting awkwardly bent over them, still trying to identify the goddamn thistle-burdock-knapweed-sea-holly and not feeling any closer to figuring it out, despite looking up all of them, repeatedly, and then trying to sort out what the stupid recipe was for and seeing if that would help him to eliminate any of the possibilities.

  It didn’t, for the record, because he couldn’t make sense of several of the written-down ingredients, either. He knew what the letters said, but four of them weren’t things that he could find in any of the three compendia he owned copies of. He figured if he could get into the library, he might be able to match some of them up there.

  It was making him seriously question whether the thing he’d thought was bog myrtle actually was bog myrtle, and whether the dandelion-thistle was actually either of those things. It was definitely puffier than the thing he had no clue about, and the bog myrtle had the right shaped leaves and pine-cone-like flowers, so he was still pretty sure that was it.

  There were a few herbs whose names Jamie did recognize, although none of these had drawings—heather, hyssop, yew berries, and elderflowers.

  Added to the plants were milk and honey, which were common enough ingredients; some kind of blood he couldn’t really make out, and although blood was less common than some other things, it wasn’t that strange; and a crust of bread, also fairly common in folk magic. Why, Jamie had no idea. Probably because people had bread, and if it had gone stale, they could give it to the fairies or spirits or gods and get some use out of it that didn’t break anyone’s teeth. Ground pearl was less readily available, at least in terms of what ordinary peasants would be able to have on hand.

 

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