After staring at me for a long moment, Phelan just shook his head with a quiet sigh. “Fine.”
“You mean that?”
“Yeah.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, leaning against some nearby shelves laden with dishes and cooking utensils. “There’s no sense in me stirring up any trouble when I need you two to be thinking logically with all the rest of them.”
I snorted humorlessly. “I’m not sure how much rational there’s going to be when it comes to parlaying with Cariocecus. You were going to kill him, remember?”
His nose wrinkled. “I was,” he admitted, “but something keep telling me that he’s going to be more useful to us alive than he would be dead.”
“Are you willing to stake our lives on that?”
“The decision’s not mine to make.” Phelan fetched down two mugs. “And that’s exactly what I told him when he asked.”
“What decision are we making about questions who’s asking?” Tala seemed impossibly cheerful given the hour as she joined us near the fire, barely glancing at the kettle of water Phelan settled over the fire. She shot me a grin as she set down a small sack of potatoes on the table she used for food prep a few feet away from the fire. Pretty soon, she’d be too rounded to use it properly.
Twins. Christ. As if it wasn’t going to be hard enough for all of us, the first ones to be born in this new world are going to be twins.
Twins born to a mother who was alone in the world except for us, her friends. Kurt, Tala’s boyfriend, had been visiting his family on the east side of the state when the world ended. Odds are that he was dead like most of the rest of the world.
All in all, Tala was handling that surprisingly well these days.
“Cariocecus,” I said, watching her face as I said it. “He made Phelan an offer.”
“He made all of us an offer. I’m just the messenger.” Phelan rescued the kettle from the fire and started brewing up two mugs of tea from herbs he plucked from his pouch.
“What did he want?” Tala asked quietly, her expression suddenly serious.
“A truce,” Phelan said. “That’s all. Peace.”
Tala snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“That was my reaction, too,” I said, stretching slightly. “But we need to be open-minded about this. It might not hurt to entertain the possibility of talking.”
“That’s certainly a different tune from the one you were singing before,” Phelan observed as he passed me one of the two mugs.
“Yeah, well,” I lied, “I thought about it and maybe it’s not as terrible of an idea as I thought.” Besides, you did say that we’d get information out of him at the very least. “Maybe I like the idea of someone else getting chewed up before things start trying to chew us up.”
Phelan smiled wryly. “That might happen, but then again, it might not.”
Of course not. We’ve apparently garnered too many enemies already—all without trying.
The curse of bloodlines and gifts we still didn’t quite understand—destinies we still couldn’t quite fathom.
I glanced at Phelan as my fingers wrapped around the warm ceramic of the mug. The knowledge he carried would be the key to our understanding. I knew that, now. I hadn’t back when I’d first met him, though I’d liked him, trusted him, almost instantly.
I hadn’t had occasion to regret it yet.
He saw me watching and frowned. “What’s the matter now? Something on my face?”
I choked on a laugh and shook my head. “No, nothing. Weren’t you going to get Thom?”
“You were fairly keen on me not rounding up your husband.”
“Not to tell him I had a vision,” I said. “But to talk about this? You’d better get him.”
“By this, I’m guessing you mean the Cariocecus thing,” Tala said.
“That would be it.” I stretched again and took a long, slow sip of tea. I could catch undercurrents of mint and spices I couldn’t identify. Whatever it was, it was hot and soothing. “I’d rather have the chance to mull it over with him before we talk to anyone else about it.”
Tala smiled. “You just want to present a united front.”
“Maybe.” I grinned back. “Are you saying that’d be a bad idea?”
“Not all all.”
Phelan’s nose wrinkled. “I’m going to walk away before I hear more of this brewing plot than I want to.”
“You do that, Phelan.” I smirked as I nodded sagely. “You go and do that.”
