Summer looked to me, her hands on the kid’s other arm, trying to pull it away. “Please. Don’t let this happen. He’s like my brother. He’s got a great destiny. According to the prophecies I’ve read, one day Dean will return to his home plane and save it from the great magician.”
Wait. What? I was really glad I was good at multitasking or I would have lost the battle then and there because those words shocked the hell out of me.
“Marcus Vorenus, you shut this shit down right this fucking second,” I screamed, digging my heels in for leverage because that sword was getting closer and closer. Summer’s words swirled through my head and I realized I might be here for a very big reason that would die if this kid did. I could be wrong, but I had to know. “I swear if he dies, I’ll stake you myself. I might cry while I do it, but I will.”
Marcus seemed incapable of listening to me.
I had to try something else. He might not mind hurting the kid, but I had a bet he would think twice about hurting someone else. “Summer, when I get the sword up this time, put yourself in its way. If he’s going to gut your little brother, he’ll have to get through you to do it.”
Summer’s eyes widened, but she immediately started moving into position. “Yes. Yes, I’ll do it.”
I liked the chick. I like any chick who puts her ass on the line for the people she loves. Or in this case, it would be her torso. I would try like hell to make sure I didn’t hit her heart. She could function with one lung for a while. Then Marcus could clean up his own mess and I could figure out exactly who Dean was.
Suddenly I really needed to know who Dean was.
I was about to make my move and braced myself to put all my strength into pulling Dean’s arm back enough to let Summer settle in when Dean went completely limp and passed out on the ground.
Summer immediately dropped to her knees beside him. I picked up the sword because I wasn’t about to let Marcus play eviscerator again. I turned to my old mentor. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
His eyes came up and I noted his fangs were out. His words came out on a low growl. “He was in my head.”
I stared at him. “Are you fucking kidding me? Hypocrite much?”
Dev snorted. “He’s not as self-aware as I thought he was. Will the boy live? Or did Marcus shut his brain off? I hope Summer didn’t care too much for him. It could cause her to think ill of the man who harmed him.”
Yeah, that was why Dev wouldn’t help. Asshole. Why couldn’t I be stuck here with the queen? She would be reasonable. Give me the queen over a couple of dudes with their mansies any day of the damn week. This was way more boy drama than I could handle without killing something.
I looked at Summer. “Is he okay?”
“He’s breathing.” Tears shimmered in her eyes. “But I don’t know what Marcus did to him. He was only trying to figure out if you were telling me the truth. He wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
Marcus’s mouth turned down in a frown. “I asked him politely to leave my head.”
“You slip into mine whenever you can,” Summer shot back.
They were going to be such a fun couple. I stared down at Marcus and lowered my voice. I was sure the Green Man could likely hear us, but Summer was back to looking after the kid she considered a brother but who totally didn’t consider her a sister. “You are not handling this well.”
“I thought I handled it perfectly,” he snarled back. “You’re the one who screwed things up.”
The look in his dark eyes was incredibly intimidating, and given what the man could do probably should have made me take a step back, but I could never be afraid of Marcus. “This is not how you should behave around your fated wife.”
“And you would know how to behave?”
I did know a little about it. “I was perfectly pleasant to Trent.”
Quinn snorted. “Yeah, you didn’t even realize he was your mate. You were way too busy fucking Marcus.”
That hadn’t been my fault.
“Kelsey is Marcus’s lover? I thought earthbound vampires couldn’t procreate.”
I winced because that had come from Summer. Yeah. We could have never told her that one. “He’s not my baby daddy. And he’s not my lover. We’re no longer involved. It was really more of a training relationship.”
“He was training you to fornicate?” Summer suddenly shook her head and her chin came up. “I don’t care about your relationships, past or present. All I care about is whether or not Dean is going to wake up.”
Marcus stood, the elegant movement of a natural predator. He was still wet, his dress shirt opaque and clinging to his chest, showing off the fact that vampires come complete with sexy six-packs they don’t have to work for. “He’ll be fine. My taking over his body left him unsettled. He will have a bad headache for an hour or so. I told him to sleep so he will avoid the worst of it. Unlike what he did with us. Would you like me to wake him?”
“Yes,” I said quickly.
“No,” Summer replied at the same time.
I could bet who was going to win that war. “Look, we all need to calm down.”
“I’m perfectly calm,” Marcus said.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I can see that. Can we take five minutes to talk about what we’re going to do now that all the bad guys have been either murdered or sucked into some hell dimension and all the yucky horse things are dead and…did you kill the horny chicks?”
Quinn looked slightly affronted. “I wouldn’t do that. It’s perfectly normal for the Gwragedd Annwn to seek a husband in such a fashion. They’re simply being held at the bottom of the lake by reeds and will be released when we leave. Marcus didn’t have to kill the each-uisge. I could have handled him. I could have set the Gwragedd Annwn on him and they would have had an excellent time, but no. Vampires never think that a problem can be solved with anything but their fangs in another creatures neck.”
I did not need to fight about battle tactics. “Everything that should be dead is dead, and now we’ve all shaken hands in each other’s heads so can we try to figure out what the hell is going on?”
“I would like to know, too,” Summer said. She’d sank down to the grass beside Dean and shifted his head onto her lap. She brushed back his blond hair. “I find it oddly coincidental that three people who know my parents show up twenty-eight years after they left…after I saw them last.”
“It hasn’t been twenty-eight years on our plane.” Quinn had dropped his scowl and was looking at Summer with paternal patience. “It’s only been thirteen, and you need to know we’ve looked for ways to find you. When we realized the truth of your birth… This was my fault. I should have understood. I knew a bit about transference boxes. I am the reason you were separated from them.”
That wasn’t exactly how I’d heard the story. Guilt is a funny thing. There was some family therapy in their future. Dang. Felix Day was getting a new client.
She looked up at Quinn, blinking in the sunlight. “They wouldn’t have left me on the Earth plane, the faeries, that is. They would have fought, and honestly, I know I needed to be in Tír na nÓg. You’re really Devinshea Quinn?”