Mad, Bad & Dangerous by Cat Marsters

Author:Cat Marsters [Marsters, Cat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: love_contemporary

***

He found her in her room, packing a kitbag with a few clothes and a lot of weapons. “Going somewhere?”

“Home.”

Okay. He sat down on the bed and watched. “Kett,” he said after a while. “Listen. I know you like kelfs, and your father is this great friend of theirs, but they just don’t like Nasc. Ask your cousin. They hate us.”

“What, every kelf hates every Nasc?”

“As far as I can tell, yes. They think we’re unnatural, that we mess with the natural order of things.”

“You mess with any kind of order,” Kett grumbled.

“You know what I mean. They serve humans, but they consider themselves better than animals. And we’re halfway between the two.”

“Shouldn’t that make you their equals?”

“You wanna sit down with a kelf and debate this? They cross the street to avoid us. They deliberately ignore our requests. And you saw that kelf in Nihon, it shot me-”

“You tried to pounce on it!”

“Yeah, but tell me this, if you or your friend Miho had pounced on it, would it have shot you?”

Kett just glared at him.

“They might not be violent toward humans-”

“A kelf would never hurt a human,” Kett said, as simply as if she was stating that grass was green.

“But they’d hurt a Nasc.”

“Only if provoked. Severely provoked.”

“One of them killed my mother,” Bael said-and Kett went very still for a moment.

“Impossible,” she said. “They don’t hurt-”

“Humans, yes, I know. But my mother wasn’t human, was she? She was Nasc.”

Kett folded a shirt, unfolded and refolded it, and then threw it down on the bed and stared at him.

Of course, Albhar had come up with a new theory, but Bael was having trouble believing him. Albhar wanted the shapeshifter for his own ends; if it really had killed Bael’s mother, he’d have said so years ago.

No, it had been the kelf. Bael was sure of it.

“It was serving my parents,” he said. “I never met it. I rarely spent much time with them when they were away-and they spent a lot of time away. All I knew was that my father sent word my mother had been killed in an accident. When he came home, he told me it had been their serving kelf. I believed him-hell, I’m a Nasc, kelfs have never been exactly kind to me-but no one else did.”

Kett sat down on the bed beside him and Bael reached for her hand. How could he explain this to her? She thought he had the emotional maturity of a child. Well, maybe he did, because he’d only been a child when his father had confided this bombshell news to him. And Bael had accepted, had believed, and a bond had been forged between them. The only bond they’d ever really had.

“My father and I were never close. I told you my parents were brilliant, always haring off all over the Realm, all over all the Realms, to investigate some phenomenon or other. They were both Magi, but since I didn’t demonstrate much talent they weren’t all that interested in me.

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