Blood Kin by MARIA LIMA

Author:MARIA LIMA
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2009-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I SPRANG UP from the couch, arms instinctively crossing, my mouth gaping open like a surprised fish. Tucker and Niko both began to sputter. Rhys, bless him, remained quiet, a thoughtful look on his face.

“No. I did not just hear that,” I said and took a step back. “You absolutely can’t be saying what I just heard.”

“How, Adam—” Niko clasped Tucker’s arm, his knuckles going even paler with the grip, voice shaking with anger. “Were you one of them, then? The ones who came in the night?”

Adam’s brow furrowed as he regarded Niko. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Niko’s breath caught as he tried to speak. “When I was a child,” he said.

Tucker closed his hand over Niko’s and gave it a squeeze. The expression on Tucker’s face reminded me of the way he’d looked when a school bully had threatened me and Bea during elementary school. He’d been acting in loco parentis then, my father having gone to London on some errand of Gigi’s. I’d been all of eight years old, still coming to terms with living Above, and often frightened of others. The bully girl had demanded our lunches, homemade tacos and desserts made by Bea’s mom. Tucker had been at the school helping to organize some fall fair or something. One look from my very big brother and Little Miss Future Gangster never bothered us again. She may even have decided to become a nun. Tucker took the role of protector very seriously. And now, he was protecting Niko, too.

“Niko was in an orphanage as a small boy,” I explained, my voice hard as steel. “He only recently remembered having seen Sidhe come in the night to steal children.”

I was attempting to explain Niko’s emotions, but I had no idea how to even begin processing this information myself. Adam, Unseelie Sidhe? My mother’s people, the Seelie, might be unkind and uncaring, but the Unseelie had even less regard for humans—or unhumans. Not evil, but … a darker breed. What else did he hide from me and how did I not sense this before? How could I have been sleeping with—no, making love with—laying myself bare in so many ways to one of them? I’d suffered so much as a child in my mother’s land, living among the Seelie in the Welsh hills, underground, starved for affection, noticed only when reviled. And Adam was Unseelie, a race that made my mother’s people look sweet and benevolent. I strode over to the window, turning my back. I couldn’t look at him right now.

“You were—Niko, I—”

Reflected in the glass, I saw Adam rise and cross over to Niko to kneel at his second’s feet. He took one of Niko’s hands in his. “I am so sorry,” Adam whispered. “Nikolai, I am so …”

I turned as Adam raised a hand and cupped Niko’s face. Niko stared, eyes stony, muscles tight as he held himself utterly, perfectly still, as only the dead can. I watched in silence, holding in my own anger and feeling of betrayal.

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