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Despite what I was feeling, I said, "I'm fine."
"Liar," he shot back quietly. I appreciated him keeping his voice down because I really didn't want to have this conversation in front of everyone. Then I would have to deal with them all asking me what was wrong, and if I was okay, and then I would have to explain myself and my crazy emotions in front of everyone, and I had had enough embarrassment for one night, thank you very much.
I nodded my head in agreement, and Quinton's eyebrows raised in surprise. I guess I was harder to deal with than I realized sometimes, and more often than not, stubborn.
Tyson started the conversation ball rolling while Quinton was still looking at me in surprise.
"After all this time, what are you doing here, Rain?" Tyson asked the older man.
I didn't like the way the conversation was starting out. It sounded almost accusatory, and I didn't think Rain had done anything wrong to be accused of. Yet. I felt he should have been given the benefit of the doubt here, but I was seeing that the guys clearly weren't thinking along the same lines as I was.
"I came to see my daughter," Rain said in a bored voice. "Why the hell else would I have shown up here? I sure didn't come to see the lot of you."
Okay, so maybe I could understand the attitude the others were throwing off, Rain seemed to be just a tad difficult to deal with. I couldn't really complain, because he'd been nothing but nice to me so far.
"How did you know to find Quint in his dreams?" Dash asked, and he eyed the man, who was most definitely my bio dad, with shrewd eyes. "How did you know he'd be receptive to you?"
"I could feel both he and Ariel looking for me," Rain said. "I have spells up to protect me while I am asleep, and I also have spells in place, inked into my skin, to keep people from being able to locate me. The spells are something my family has kept secret amongst ourselves for generations, and I don't think I know of another practitioner who could break through them."
Did he mean that his family,ourfamily, had the knowledge and the capacity to do spells that not even the Council was aware of or could handle? That was intriguing news. And would explain why the Council had no knowledge of Rain, if they weren't the lying schmucks I imagined them to be.
"Why is your family any different from the rest?" Julian asked. "I'm not trying to be a dick or condescending here, I just don't know why you think you're so special and different that your family is capable of casting spells that no one else would be capable of breaking through. Not even the Council is without fail or impenetrable. They may be more powerful than most, but they have their faults just like anyone else, even though it's highly unlikely you'd ever hear one of them admit to it."
"You sound awfully arrogant," Tyson said. "And, I guess I just don't understand why. If you are the man who wrote those letters to Vivian, and I think we are all in agreement that you are, in fact, that man and Ariel's biological father. Then, I don't understand how you can sit there and in arrogance and speak of spells that protect you that others aren't capable of like you're some big, bad witch, when you, according to those letters, have been looking for your daughter for years and hadn't, up until an hour ago, actually been in her presence." Tyson gestured across the table with his hand at where Rain sat beside me. "There you sit next to your daughter, and you are only there because she's been looking for you, and you felt her, and because Uncle Quint has been looking for you, and you felt him as well. If they hadn't been looking for you, then who knows how many more years you'd be out there without a clue as to where she was, and, yet, there you sit with all the confidence in the world. I guess, I just don't get it."
Tyson sat back in his seat with a smug smirk as he folded his arms over his chest. I imagined his long legs stretched out underneath the table, crossed at the ankles, perfectly relaxed as he was.
Rain leaned forward and placed his forearms on the table. The corner of one side of his mouth curled up in the semblance of a half-smile, a cruel half-smile. Cruel because his eyes were no longer dead, but heated, and they were blazing with fire. An inferno of rage swam in Rain's green eyes, and he aimed it all in Tyson's direction.
"You think I only just found out where she was staying?" Rain asked. He shook his head and his shaggy hair hung in front of face, covering his forehead and part of one of his eyes. If it bothered him, he didn't show it, and he didn't bother to reach up and brush it back away from his face. "I knew she and Vivian had been living with Marcus Cole. He told me so himself when I first contacted him over the summer. I was getting my affairs in order, getting everything ready, so I could take Ariel away and take care of Vivian. Marcus had assured me she was fine and safe with him at his house. Then I felt Vivian’s spirit come to me in a dream, and I knew something had gone wrong, and I had to find out what. I went to see Marcus and he told me she was gone, just gone, and he had thought she'd run off with some man richer than he was and had left Ariel behind for him to take care of. I knew this couldn't have been true, Viv would never have left my child behind, because then she'd have lost the only thing she had to bargain with when I finally caught up to her. Ariel was the only thing keeping her safe, and she and I both knew it. Something happened to her, and I’m betting it wasn't voluntary. So, tell me, boys, what happened to my dear sister, and why do I get the feeling she's no longer alive and breathing and walking the earth like any other living person? And don’t tell me it’s because I just told you her spirit came to me in dream so she had to be dead."
Rain ended his little speech, no longer wearing a half smile, but a full blown one. The swirl of angry heat had vacated his eyes, and they were back to being cold, dead things that probably gave some people the chills simply by looking into them. They didn't give me chills.
The room was as silent as the inside of a tomb, but I felt the pressure growing, their unease rising.
No one wanted to tell Rain that his sister was dead, because he was a wild card and seemed to be a bit unstable, and there was no telling how he'd react to the news. On the one hand, if we were going by his written words in the letters, he hated his sister with a passion that was just a touch frightening. On the other hand, he sat there and talked about her as if she were any other person, and not a woman who'd kidnapped his child and done horrible, unspeakable things to her.
I didn't understand him, but I knew we needed to be cautious with this topic so he didn't do something unforgivable in the eyes of my coven.
"She was hurting Ariel," Quinton said without hesitation and my head swung around so fast my hair whipped around and slapped me in the face.
"Quint-" I tried to stop him.
"She tried to drown her in the bathtub." Quinton said bluntly, and the pressure in the room grew to the point it was finally uncomfortable, and my skin prickled and my stomach tightened in knots. "We got there just in the nick of time. I pulled her off of Ariel and Julian got her out of the tub. She postured, and tried to tell us all to get out so she could go back to mistreating our girl, but we weren't about to leave her there with that beast. Julian was taking Ariel out of there when Vivian tried to attack her one last time. I blocked her way and pushed her back. Unfortunately, she slipped and fell and hit her head on the corner of the counter. She went down hard and didn't get back up again. It was an accident, and not any one of us are sorry about it."
"Quinton," I choked out. I couldn't believe he'd said all that so bluntly and in front of Rain. We weren't supposed to share that with anyone. It was our secret, all of ours to keep, and to never share with an outsider where it could eventually come back to hurt any of us. We hadn't agreed to it verbally, but it had been implied; it was one secret we were supposed to take to our graves. And Quinton had just shared with an outsider. Yeah, that outsider was my father, but none of us really knew him well enough to know if we could trust him, yet.
"What have you done?" Dash whispered in a voice that vibrated with anger. "How dare you share our secrets with another, someone who isn't us? You had no right to tell him that. No right."
"I agree with Dash," Abel said, and I only knew it was Abel because I had glanced towards the opposite end of the table when Dash had started speaking. "You should have asked the rest of us first if we were okay with him knowing before you decided to share."
"Really?" Quinton asked sarcastically, and my head snapped back around to look at him. He was leaning forward in his seat and glaring hostilely at everyone around the table, myself included. I thought about prying his hand off of my leg, but left it where it was because I didn't think it was worth fighting about, and it also let me know that he wasn't upset with me, because if he was then he wouldn't still be touching me.
"I'm the one who’s responsible for her death because I'm the one who pushed her," Quinton growled. "That shit is on me, it's all on me. If I say that I trust Rain with this information that could hurt me, then the rest of you need to trust in my judgement. I've been taking care of all of you for years now, fucking years, even before some of your parents had died, I was taking care of you. You have never questioned my judgement as much as you have in the last few months. I get it, we have Ariel now, and things are different because we have a girl. But, honestly, what the fuck? When did all of you stop believing in me or trusting me? When did that happen, I honestly want to know."
"Calm down," Damien said snidely. "Not everything is about you and you damn well know it. You're lashing out and acting like a jackass. We were all there in that basement, none of us are innocent, and we're all okay with that or we wouldn't have stuck around after Ariel ran off. But we stuck around to watch the dirt settle over her body, and not a single one of us said a word in complaint or argued about the decisions you'd made. We supported you then, and we support you now. Stop acting like you're being singled out, and stop acting like a jackass."
Several of the guys hummed in either approval or agreement and I knew things were only going to get worse and disintegrate from here on out. I had witnessed a fist fight between two of them before, and had no desire to see another one any time soon.
