Mayfair Manor

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Standing in the door to his room, a brittle smile on his lips, Courtland murmured, “Then you’re a finer man than most of the Mayfairs before us.”
And then, quietly, “But Evie didn’t do it for you, or to avoid scandal. She’ll say she did it for the twins, and I’m sure she partially did, but really it was for herself. She couldn’t live with herself if there was the slightest chance that she was tricking you, whether you cared or not. Because if they weren’t yours, that would make her no better than her mother.” Yawning, he shook his head and stepped into the room, his fingers laid across the doorknob. “But you can ask Alistair all about that one day, when he can bear to talk about it. Lord knows Evie can’t.” As he turned, Jack’s arms shot out from the darkness and seized his collar, dragging him inside. Fumbling to shut the door, he called hastily, “Goodnight!”

For the next few hours, everyone slept pretty soundly. Michael was the first one up, roused by the distant murmur of Alistair’s alarm clock (which he hastily shut off without even a thought as to getting out of bed for school). His first coherent thought, shuffling around the kitchen making coffee, was surprise that the twins had not woken him first, crying as they usually did at the first light of dawn. With innate fatherly instincts that had not left him even after two and a half decades, he slipped quietly up the stairs and into the nursery, and then paused in the door to take in the curious sight.
Antha was still dressed from the night before, her jacket slung across the back of a chair and shoes kicked off into the floor, collapsed onto the couch beneath the window in a sleep as deep as death. Beside her on the cushions, lined up beneath the gentle drape of her arm, were Vanessa and Sebastien in their bunny and panda pajamas respectively. Pausing to chuckle silently to himself, Michael crept across the floor as the infants both began to stir, their little lips moving soundlessly and pudgy fingers flexing. He touched Antha’s shoulder once, gently, but she only roused enough to pull her arm a little more securely around her children, murmuring thickly, “---there’s no mermaids in the forest---” He gave her a moment to settle again, considering his options, before carefully extracting first Vanessa and then Sebastien from beneath her arm, depositing them back in their crib with expert hands that left them sleeping. When that was done, he took Antha’s arm and pulled it around his neck, carefully sliding his arms beneath her back and legs and lifting her up.
He tried to be as noiseless as possible entering her room, but without a free hand he closed the door a little more loudly than he meant to and was dismayed to see Cian stir. Regardless, he went to set Antha gently on her bed, ignoring further murmurs of, “---but they’re bears---” and pulling the sheets over her, affectionately tucking her in. Antha, as she had every single night of her childhood after being brought to Mayfair Manor, clumsily kicked herself free of the covers. Making wordless sounds in her sleep, she plopped over restlessly until both her head and arm rested across Cian, and then went utterly still and silent. Michael, without a sound, slipped out of the room and went into the nursery, loading Vanessa and Sebastien into their carriers and taking them down to the kitchen, setting them on the table and then returning to shuffling around the still and silent room. By the time the infants stirred, he had their breakfast prepared and fed it to them before they could cry.
“There we are, precious,” he whispered when they were done, smacking their lips contentedly as he wiped away the few drops of spilled milk from the corners of their mouth, “We don’t have to cry for mommy, do we? You just sit here with grandpa and we’ll read the newspaper together.”
To anyone who came upon him---which not surprisingly ended up being Julien some half an hour later---he looked more pleased than he had in years and years, sitting at the kitchen table in his robe with the twins before him, sipping his coffee and cheerily reading the newspaper aloud. “You’re up early,” the man commented as he went to fix his own coffee, eyeing the newspaper in his hands as if he was thinking of the best way to snatch it.
Michael, looking over his shoulder with only a flicker of surprise, smiled and replied, “The children were out terribly late last night, I thought I’d let them sleep a little more before Vanessa and Sebastien got too desperate for their mother. Though…” He paused, glancing at the babies and chuckling to himself, “Poor dear, she was passed out in the nursery with them, still dressed from last night.”
Groaning wispily, Julien asked, “And what of their night out? How many dubious reports are there this morning?”
Michael flipped through the paper, mostly for emphasis, before replying, “Nothing that I can see, not even a picture.”
“Well, thank goodness for that.” Setting his cup of coffee on the table, he peered down into the curious little faces in their carriers and offered a rare smile, murmuring with absolutely unsettling affection, “Grand-père has you to thank for your mommy behaving herself, doesn’t he?”
“Please don’t,” Michael murmured, returning to the newspaper, “It unnerves me when you’re so sweet.”
“There’s just something about grandchildren,” Julien sighed, sitting down in the chair beside Michael and sipping his coffee, “They’re so innocent. They don’t set things on fire, or push you down the stairs, or call you the devil.”
“Give them time,” Michael murmured teasingly, shooting him a twinkling glance.
“That’s not amusing.”
Giving a little chuckle, Michael mused, “I don’t remember you being so touchy about Olivier. And he was your very first grandchild.”
“It’s different,” Julien said quickly, and then struggled to find the words, “They…that is---”
Michael, in his usual omniscience, said casually without looking up from the paper, “Olivier is your descendant through a fling, while Vanessa and Sebastien are the children of the only daughter the woman you love bore you?” Julien said nothing, only glanced back towards the infants with a look suggesting he was right. “Oh, don’t look so tragic and guilty,” Michael sighed finally, loudly turning the page, “If I hadn’t forgiven you for your affair with my wife and fathering my sons, I would have let the children dispose of you a long time ago.”
Still, Julien said nothing for several moments, and then only, “Mon dieu, do all the children intend to blow off their second day of school?”
“I would assume so, judging by the time I heard them finally clattering up the stairs this morning. Liesse might, if she or whoever put her to bed remembered to set an alarm.” Which, of course, no one had. Jack had briefly considered it when he tucked her in bed, but decided it was more fun if she was around for the big announcement at breakfast.
Briefly glancing at the clock, Julien sighed irritably, “Go wake her then. She is your charge, legally speaking. And her brother, if you can.”
Obligingly, Michael rose and made his way back upstairs, quietly slipping into Rynn and Liesse’s room. He opened the curtains first---the windows all faced the west, giving only the golden glow of early morning without the direct glare of the rising sun---and then went to Rynn, gently touching his shoulder to see if he would rouse but not intending to wake him if he did not. He looked like he’d had a rough night, poor child, and Michael wouldn’t deny him his sleep. Then he went to Liesse, quietly seating himself on the edge of the bed and brushing back her hair, saying gently, “Up and at ‘em, sleeping beauty.” And then, with the softest laugh, added, “I’ll sing my morning song if you don’t, and no one wants to hear that.” When he finally saw the blue of her eyes between her heavy eyelids, he smiled gently, patting her on the top of the head. “There we are. It’s time for school, if you’re feeling up to it. I don’t think the boys are, so I’ll give you a pass if you’d like to stay home.” Downstairs in their room, the newly awakened Pierce was standing over Alistair’s bed with crossed arms and furrowed brow, looking down at the boy splayed across his bed fully-clothed, his mouth agape against the colorful bedspread and occasionally emitting the softest snores. He had not the slightest intention of waking him, just as Alistair had not the slightest intention of going to school. “Either way,” he said, leaning forward and laying a fatherly kiss on her forehead, “Come downstairs and I’ll make you something to eat. It’s not good for your complexion to sleep too much.”
When he returned downstairs, he found Pierce up and fumbling around for a coffee cup, and Malakai fast asleep with his head on the kitchen table, one hand laying limp over the side of Vanessa’s carrier as the baby curiously grasped at his fingers. Less than a minute later, Pierce knocked over the sugar container with a crash and, as expected, the infants both set instantly to wailing in alarm, not to be soothed by any of those present who crowded around them to try. (With the exception of Malakai, who was oblivious to hurricanes in his sleep.)

Antha was in the attic. She had a vague sense that it was very sudden, that she’d just been somewhere else, but for the most part was far more concerned with what was going on around her. Her hair caught in a chain, pulling painfully on her head before snapping, the hard metal edges of the radiator cutting into her very thin layer of flesh. She had an overwhelming sense of doom spawned equally from instinct and past experience, her weak muscles all tensed in preparation as she pressed herself as far as she could into the corner between the radiator and the cold wall, her bare legs pulled up into her chest and her arms closed protectively around them.
Leon was drunk. Not tipsy, drunk, and that was the worst sign of all. He said nothing for a few minutes after he’d brought the plate of food and pitcher of water, slamming it down on the floor with a clatter, only began pacing irritably across the attic floor. Antha hadn’t eaten in two days, she was starved to the point of tears, but she didn’t dare to remove herself from the niche in the corner or the protective cocoon she’d made of her limbs and hair, not until he was gone.
“Lying goddamn b***h,” he said finally, a hand sweeping angrily back through his hair before he turned and set his sharp gaze on Antha. She was nearly relieved even as she shrank back the last few millimeters into her safe place, because the sooner it began, the sooner it would be over. “Shouldn’t have ******** her to begin with---not a Mayfair, you lying, conniving demons.” Not that the name really meant anything to Antha. She knew, through the spirits and Leon’s own word, that her mother had been a Mayfair and now she was a Mayfair, but all it meant in the girl’s small world of her father and the attic was that she was part of the enemy faction. “Right, demons…that’s all they are. With their magic and manipulations. You’re marked with it, see?” Moving very suddenly, his hand closed in Antha’s tangled hair and she gave a frightened yelp, the tears already springing to her eyes from the sting of pain. Her arms scrambled beneath her to keep her upright, her bony knees scraping the rough wooden floor until they were bloody. “The devil always marks the worst ones with hair like blood. Just another demon you are, like that whore.” He let her go quickly enough that she crumpled up, trying desperately to scramble back into the corner before she could even think it, but his large, rough hands caught her about her tiny throat, pressing just hard enough that she could neither breathe nor scream. “And she thought she’d stick me with you, like a seed, that she’d trick me. She thought I’d never know where she got you, that I’d never figure out her ******** lies. But you're just one of Julien Mayfair's bastards.”
For a moment, the child’s vision wavered and she tried to give into it, to fall into sweet, oblivious darkness, but the pressure at her throat was removed abruptly and the darkness of the attic burned back into life as she gasped for air. Leon was screaming by then, and she was expecting it when the stinging blow came to the side of her face, nearly knocking her over. Instead she held her ground, desperately throwing her arms against the floor and then scrambling backwards, balling herself up against the radiator with her arms wrapped around her head, sobbing apologies she didn’t mean in the vain hope that it would make it stop. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” she screamed, bracing herself as he yanked again at her hair and the scrap of metal clasped around her wrist jerked her back, scraping back skin disfigured by years of scars. She apologized for her mother's trickery, for Julien's indiscretions, for her very existence---a litany of things she'd never had any say in, that weren't her fault, but that fell on her shoulders because her mother was dead, she couldn't pay for her sins, and she'd left Antha behind with the man she'd wronged.
When she first woke up, she wasn’t aware of it. She was still whining apologies with her eyes clenched shut for several moments before she realized there was sunlight against her eyelids and a soft mattress beneath her, someone else’s warm skin against her arm and the low pulse of a heartbeat beneath her ear.
And then, almost immediately, Antha heard a low, distant cry and forgot entirely about the dream. She popped up quickly enough that her head spun, casting a brief, groggy glance at Cian beside her and then turning in a rush to get out of bed and go soothe her children. She was less than pleased to stumble into an obstruction and immediately topple over into the floor with a crash, her legs still twisted up on the bed above her. After a split second to regain her bearings, wincing at what was surely going to turn into a bruise, she moved her leg to kick what was beneath it, hissing irritably, “Lucy!”
The girl shifted sleepily on the very edge of the bed, fumbling until she caught Antha’s leg and then contentedly wrapping her arms around it, cuddling it to her chest. “Five more minutes, mommy...” Groaning, Antha tried to wriggle herself free but the girl held on tighter, meaning that when Antha tried to withdraw her leg, Lucy came down with it in a tumbling heap with another crash and an alarmed cry. By the time Courtland ran in, freshly awakened, to see what had happened, Lucy was blinking blearily on top of Antha as the latter tried to push her off. “Mornin’, Annie.”
“Lucy, what the hell are you doing in here?”
“I don’t know,” the girl murmured, shrugging, before laying back down over Antha with her eyes closed, “Malakai put me to sleep on the couch, that’s the last thing I remember.”
Sighing, Antha let it go, instead reaching up and giving one big push that toppled the girl over and into the floor with a little whine. And then she was gone, her footsteps creaking on the stairs as she followed the sound of her children’s cries. Lucy, blinking wildly on the floor, caught sight of Cian up on the bed and gave a big, carefree smile, greeting him with, “Good morning, bitterest rival. Fabulous day, isn’t it?” before clamoring up and chasing after Antha down the stairs. Courtland, standing in the door at a loss, cast Cian one long, befuddled look before shaking his head and turning back towards his room.

Downstairs, to everyone’s great relief, Antha had taken up Sebastien in her arms with soft whispers bidding him to hush, clasping him to her chest with utmost care as she bent over and laid a reassuring kiss on the top of Vanessa’s head. “Here we are, little darling,” Michael cooed to her when she seemed displeased to be left in her carrier, gently picking her up in his arms, “Come to grandpa. There we go.” The pure, sunshiny delight in his voice was too strong for anyone not to notice, matching the pleased smile on his lips. It was hard to tell that, by all technical standards, they weren’t actually his grandchildren. Not that anyone in the family would have pointed it out, and he would probably slap them if they did.
When the infants had been lulled back into drowsiness, Antha dropped exhaustedly into a chair at the table and all at once the dream came back to her. She said nothing---she had never really talked about it, not to anyone, leaving everyone else to glean what they could from the evidence to try and figure out what had happened the first nine years of her life. But she was visibly disturbed in ways that made the others hesitant to ask about it, at least until Alistair half-stumbled into the kitchen. He went straight to Antha without hesitation, leaning over the back of her chair and winding his arms around her like he’d try and meld their bodies, his cheek resting against her shoulder. “I’ve got you now. Everything’s all right, I’ve got you.” Though Antha gave no clear recognition of the gesture, she was visibly soothed by it, a quiet sigh spilling from her lips. Alistair, with the softest laugh, murmured, “It’s a little different this way, isn’t it? With the flesh and all? Back then, you were so tiny I could wrap around you from head to toe twice over, you remember?”
Antha said nothing for a moment, but then glanced at him over her shoulder and murmured with a hint of amusement, “I know you didn’t say it like that. I don’t think we could string together an entire sentence in English, back then.”
Pleased to have soothed her, Alistair smiled and withdrew, going over to fetch two cups of coffee. When Julien had gone to fetch something from his room and Michael had stepped outside for a cigarette, he cast a sly glance at the bloody handprint on the hem of her shirt and asked, “Did he give you any trouble?”
The girl blinked for a moment as if she didn’t understand, and then following his gaze sighed in irritation. “Oh, this? I didn’t have to do a damn thing, he was so terrified when I showed up that he cut his hand open on a filing cabinet drawer. Well…he still took some convincing, but eventually he handed over the statements and deleted the article he’d been furiously typing up. I stayed until the paper hit the presses, just to be sure he didn’t change his mind the moment I left. But I did find this on his desk.” Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a crumpled sheaf of folded papers and began smoothing them out on the table.
Alistair, handing her the second cup of coffee, bent over her shoulder to look at it. “He really does have it out for Dorian, doesn’t he?”
“He had to have been following him for days and days,” Antha murmured in agreement, resting her chin in her palm as she looked over the detailed log and accompanying photos, “At this point, I’m not sure if he passionately hates him, or violently loves him. Either way, he’s crossed into dangerously obsessive waters. But here, look at this.” Pausing to take a sip of her coffee, she shuffled the papers and pointed to the last entry. “He says Dorian went into a big, run-down house out in the woods with a group of girls, but when he followed him in…nothing. It was like the whole group of them vanished off the face of the earth.”
“That’s the house from the paper, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. And look at the date. Dorian says he was only there one night, and that he came straight from there to Mayfair and Mayfair. But this is dated weeks earlier.”
“Typical fairy nonsense, I take it?” Lucy asked, creeping up behind the pair.
“If you believe the stories, yes.” Antha sighed heavily, folding the papers back up and turning the resulting square around in her fingers. “The good news is, they probably don’t want to eat or abduct him. They had the chance and they did neither, they let him go as he pleased.”
“The bad news, I take it, is the third option?” Alistair questioned, barely even trying to conceal his powerful amusement.
“Like Courtland said, we have to assume that deed was done.” While Antha sat thinking to herself and Lucy set about fetching coffee and joining them at the table, Alistair put his lips to his cup and tried to stifle the laugh that threatened to emerge. “Oh sure, laugh now,” Antha reprimanded him, but was honestly having a difficult time pretending she didn’t find it amusing herself, “But fairies don’t keep their hybrid offspring, they pawn them off on the human parent. Who’s going to be laughing then?”
“Me, probably,” Alistair answered, finally with a string of laughter.
“And me,” Lucy seconded, grinning broadly, “Dorian’s a dear, but come on…he had this coming.”
While the two of them tried to cover their growing laughter, each one incidentally spurring the other on, Antha fought a losing battle in trying not to join them, saying as seriously as she could manage, “There are going to be no less than three infants in this house in six months. Think about it, three newborns. Four, if yours and Courtland's premonitions are to be believed. And they say fairies produce in litters, can you even imagine---” It was that, her own words, which finally broke Antha. She fell into an almost mad sort of trance of laughter with the others, sinking back into the seat and throwing her hand over her face. “Oh god, can you imagine? They could outnumber us! We can hardly keep two of them happy as it is, what would we do with a whole litter of babies?”
“People would accuse of us of trying to raise an army,” Alistair said between laughs, shaking his head.
It was then that Michael entered, glancing wildly around and asking what the fuss was all about. “Oh, nothing,” Antha responded, finally calming at the first sound of Vanessa’s small, irritated cry, taking her up gingerly in her arms. Babies really were sacks of flesh, soft and warm and heavy, dead weight squirming demandingly against her shoulder. “Oh, poor darling, hush now.” Sighing at her continued fit, Antha finally gave a defeated smile and murmured, “No, silly mommy, you’re crying for daddy, aren’t you?” Leaning out the door to the hallway, a hand curled over Vanessa’s ears, she called up the stairs, “Cian, your daughter is not to be soothed this morning until she sees her daddy.” And then to Vanessa she said with insincere sympathy, “No, mommy and Grandpa Michael are poor substitutes for daddy, aren’t we?” Had she any sort of command over language, the baby would have wholeheartedly agreed. She loved and trusted her mother by instinct, but innately loved her father more. Antha, who was familiar with imprinting along gender lines, wasn't particularly hurt by it.
Michael was, but he tactfully pretended otherwise.  

[Okimiyage]

For all the alcohol that he’d consumed that night, Rynn’s sleep should have been deep and dreamless.
But no. The ghosts, implacable as always, could not give him that kind respite. Masked and robed as per custom, they sang their thin, banshee-like dirges throughout the night, in a language that even their sole remaining heir could no longer interpret.
It was better than the screaming, at least.
When he woke in the morning, Liesse was already up and dressed, her uniform blouse buttoned up primly, combing her hair with a silver backed brush at the dainty white vanity’s oversized mirror. Rynn groaned, and she swung about expectantly. “Finally. I was wondering if I’d have to throw a bucket of ice water on you or something.”
It took what seemed like an immense effort to rise into an upright sitting position, but Rynn managed it. Somebody—Cian, presumably—had taken his shoes and belt away from him before he had fallen asleep in them, and Rynn had gotten rid of the vest and very nearly made it halfway through the buttons of his own shirt before passing out. The finely starched linen was, by this point, hopelessly rumpled. Frowning, Rynn rubbed his eyes blearily and tried to focus on something besides the luridly feminine floral patterns of the comforter.
“…what happened last night?”
With that, Liesse’s expression of disapproval melted away into a beaming smile. “Oh, it was wonderful, Rynn. I think I’m in love. We danced the night away, I don’t remember the last time I’ve had such fun, and he’s a masterful pianist, he played me the most beautiful music—oh.”
She’d finally noticed Rynn’s deepening scowl.
“You meant after you left with the rest of the cousins, didn’t you?”
Smile fading, Liesse gave a flippant shrug and turned back to the mirror. “Not exactly sure. You might as well ask the cousins, they’ll know better than I. You came in late, and went to bed reeking of alcohol, I supposed you’d spilled your drink or caused a scene and the rest of them had been forced to carry you home. You certainly weren’t walking very well by that point.”
That seemed to be all she was willing to offer. Rynn waited for a moment, and then sighed. “Don’t sulk, for god’s sake. I’m sure you were the belle of the ball. I’m glad you had a good time.”
Liesse didn’t respond, but in the mirror, he saw the faintest little smile had returned to liven her lips.
As Rynn climbed out of bed, shuffling into a pair of slippers laid neatly at the side, she finally caved. “If you want the full story, I think they’re having breakfast downstairs. They made some mention of calling in sick at school today, but I thought I’d be ready—just in case Malakai wanted to attend or something.” Her hopeful gaze followed his reflection in the mirror. “You could come, too~”
Rynn turned away under the pretext of looking into the wardrobe, but also to hide the horrified expression that this suggestion had provoked. “Uh—we’ll see how I feel after breakfast. I’m—genuinely not feeling too well. I might throw up or something.”
It was Liesse’s turn now to sigh deeply. “Just a thought. I mean, it’s the second day of the semester. It really will not leave a good impression on our teachers if we all skip under some pretext of illness—“
Rynn didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. Backing towards the door with a, “Rightrightright—I’llkeepitinmindseeyoudownstairs.”—he bolted.
Liesse was sometimes capable of wielding guilt like a master chef wielded a cutting knife.
Such was his urgency to escape that he very nearly ran headfirst into Cian in the hall. His older brother was apparently just coming out of the shower; his pinstriped shirt was freshly laundered, jaw clean shaven, and his tousled curls were still damp. If that wasn’t enough of an indicator, he was still wiping his neck with one of the house’s monogrammed towels. He grinned roguishly when he saw his little bro’s rumpled state. “Hell of a night, huh?”
Rynn groaned an affirmative, and Cian dropped his towel over the smaller boy’s shoulder. “Sorry, kiddo. You’ll have to get used to them. Business gets done over drinks. You’ll learn to hold yours.”
Rynn frowned, yanked the towel off his back, and flung it back to his brother. He had the distinct impression that Cian was just barely holding in his amusement, and he wanted to know why.
“Cian,” he said, carefully. “what the hell happened last night?”
Slowly, the other man’s smile faded. “Wait, do you seriously not remember? Anything?”
“I remember the party here, and all the way up until…uh, meeting a werewolf. At the bar. And their…blood…liquor…stuff. Which was disgusting. After that, it gets fuzzy.”
Cian paused, ruminatively refolding the towel in his hands as he considered the situation. “Well, that is—hmm. You could always save yourself the embarrassment and just go back to bed now, but it’d certainly be funnier to watch the cousins fill you in—“
Suddenly, Cian stopped mid-sentence. The expression on his face was reminiscent of nothing so much as someone who had suddenly forgotten how to breathe. The towel dropped from his hands, and without so much as a ‘see you at breakfast’ he turned and strode with speed and purpose away from Rynn and in the direction of the dining room. Rynn had no idea why initially, until he cocked his ear and heard, faintly, the pathetic wail of an infant from below.
Staring in disbelief after his brother, Rynn couldn’t help but mutter, “Of all the people I never expected to develop a paternal instinct…”
But there was nothing else to do but pick up the towel and follow in Cian’s wake. As he did, he noticed that the crying had abruptly ceased. Apparently Cian’s presence was enough to solve whatever crisis had occurred. Still, Rynn couldn’t help but feel some trepidation as he crept into the kitchen, after the way Cian had responded to his missing memories from the previous night.
Luckily, Rynn entered at a time when everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere. Cradling Vanessa in his arms, Cian leaned in close to his infant daughter, speaking in a way that Rynn could only describe as cooing. A small, chubby pink hand waved earnestly towards his face, earnestly grasping a tendril of wet hair that had escaped from behind his ear, and Cian laughed with delight at this.
Rynn had never seen his brother like that before. Normally, Cian’s laughter was derived at another’s expense. Normally, his happiness was devious—if Cian’s eyes were twinkling, it meant he was up to something. This—this was something else entirely, disarmingly alien to Rynn. And at the same time, it was beautiful. The four of them together, Antha at his side, a twin in each’s arms, they could have been the poster model for an ideal family.
And Rynn didn’t know why, but it made his chest feel tight and his face feel hot and his heart ached. He never thought he’d feel jealous of Cian, if that was what this was. But now—well, who wouldn’t be jealous, seeing another person in a state of unwarranted pure bliss like that?
Still, he had to be happy for his brother. Unwarranted was the wrong word for it; Cian deserved this, every second of what little time remained with his wife. It was memories like this that would keep him going, after Antha passed on.
Finally, Cian looked up from his precious bundle; first to give Antha a kiss, carefully maneuvering so as not to disturb either of their armfuls--then, his gaze swept the room and settled on Rynn. In his head, Rynn heard the familiar tone, just barely holding back a chuckle. Didn't I warn you just to go back to bed?  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

When Cian appeared in the kitchen door, Antha was only too happy to hand Vanessa over to him. As predicted, the infant went still and quiet, her big green eyes staring up at Cian with the sort of earnest nothingness particular to babies, complacent, simply taking it all in. Antha, giving a sardonic sound that was half laugh, half sigh, and utter exhaustion, murmured, “See? Only daddy will do. We’re no substitute, Uncle Michael.” With a little teasing grin, she leaned over and kissed Cian good morning before turning back towards the table, settling her attention on Sebastien. He had been joined in the last few minutes by Amadeo, who had snuck onto the table intending to oust the little meat sack from the comfortable looking container and then jumped a foot in the air when Sebastien had proven himself a living thing by moving. After some cautious creeping forward and a little curious sniffing, the cat had decided that he was alright with the strange little creature, being warm and soft as he was, and he smelled like Antha, and so had fitted himself in the slit of space in the carrier next to the baby. Far from irritated, Sebastien seemed to enjoy the soft new pillow and the soothing thrum of the cat’s purr.
Vanessa, meanwhile, was still happily basking in her father’s presence. Her hands flexed in his shirt without much notice for a moment, until a lock of hair slipped from behind his ear and she reflexively grabbed ahold of it. For a split second she only ran it between her fingers, her eyes widening slightly as if it had startled her. And then, without any warning, the earlier tears still drying around her eyes, her lips curved into a big, toothless grin and gave a small series of small shrieks that could loosely be recognized as laughter.
Antha nearly cried. It was difficult to tell by looking at her, only Alistair knew for sure and Michael only suspected it, but for a moment she very nearly burst into tears and fell on the floor, broken beyond repair. It was getting hard to ignore how close the time was coming, how soon Nero would arrive. But she smiled in the end, watching Cian and their daughter, even if it didn't quite reach her darkened eyes.
Briefly plugging his ears against the infant's sudden sharp sounds, Alistair broke out into a little chuckle. “She’s a daddy’s girl for sure. Don’t get many of those, in this family.”
“There aren’t enough fathers for it,” Pierce mumbled, somewhat groggily, and then glancing at Antha said, “Evie, weren’t you going to go take a shower?”
“You still have reporter blood on you,” Alistair added.
“Antha Evelyn, are you tormenting the media again?” Michael asked, fighting against a little laugh.
“Only shutting them up!” Antha defended herself, pouting slightly, “You know how those bastards are, totally ruthless.”
Leaning over under the pretext of stroking Amadeo’s ears, Alistair murmured confidentially in Sebastien’s ear, “Mommy said a bad word…”
“You heard nothing,” Antha said quickly to Sebastien, leaning down to kiss his head, “And even if you did, I only said it because reporters are bad, bad people and they deserve to be called bad names.”
“Evie, go wash the blood off of you,” Alistair urged her again, shooing her towards the door and drawing Sebastien’s carrier across the table towards himself, “Before Julien comes back and sees it and starts yelling. Because then the babies are going to cry, and if they both cry then you’ll cry, and if you cry…well, Cian can more or less keep himself together, but then Courtland’s going to cry, and if---”
“And if you give a mouse a cookie, society falls apart. I get it, Airi, I’m going, I’m going.” Running a tired hand back through her hair, the girl surrendered, turning and heading for the door. That was when she finally saw Rynn, situated in the periphery of the room, and stopped cold. Alistair was reminded briefly of the night before, the look in her eyes and how the space between them had wavered, the way she had nearly rebounded straight back across it. Well it was there all over again, and she had managed to inch backwards across that space, away from him. It was there in the betrayal in her eyes, the raw, barely concealed hurt. “Morning,” she said coolly, diverting her gaze, and continued to sweep past him up the stairs.
Michael, who knew nothing, was openly shocked, staring after her and back at Rynn with concern, knitted eyebrows and all. Pierce, who knew a little, went quiet, his eyes darkening. Lucy wasn’t paying attention, instead determined to make Sebastien smile at her. And Alistair, with a rueful smile, glanced from Rynn to Cian and back again with searching eyes before giving a long, exasperated sigh and guessing, “You forgot, didn’t you?” The boy shook his head slightly, sitting forward and resting his chin in his hand. “That’s really the worst. You owe her the biggest apology of the century and you don’t even remember.”
“She sacrificed her favorite shirt cleaning up your mess,” Pierce agreed, as if he was perfectly in the loop. (In fact, he only knew the little that Courtland had drunkenly texted him before they’d left the bar, plus a few things that were only fanciful tricks of Courtland’s imagination. Or fanciful outright lies, it was really difficult to tell with Courtland.) “And her sleep. She didn’t get in until a couple of hours ago.” He only knew that because the front door had woken him, and he recognized the exhausted scrape of Antha’s dragging feet on the floor after a particularly hard night.
“More importantly,” Alistair continued, serious this time, “You owe our niece and nephew an apology. They’re the ones you sold out. And Cian, for that matter.”
Staring curiously at Alistair, Michael asked carefully, “Do I even want to know what happened?”
“Probably not.”
“I’ll take your word for it, then,” the man concluded, returning to his paper, “As long as Antha fixed everything and he apologizes for it, then it should be alright.”
“I don’t know,” Pierce murmured, “She’s not going to be easy to soothe this time. Betraying her is one thing, she can take care of herself. But her children? That’s going to be hard to come back from.”
“You did something pretty rare,” Alistair murmured, somewhat uncomfortably, casting Rynn a shifty gaze, “You really, genuinely hurt her feelings. You cut her deep.”
“I haven’t seen her actually get her feelings hurt in the five years I’ve known her,” Lucy added, giving a little dramatic shiver. “It creeps me out.”
“Antha’s strong.” This from Michael, carefully neutral. “She always has been, since she was a little girl. She didn’t exactly have an easy childhood, with all that Leon did to her.”
“That’s daddy,” Alistair sighed, with a bitter little smile and haunted eyes, “They say he was a pretty reasonable guy until mother got ahold of him. It’s funny what kind of monster a man can turn into when some lying b***h sticks him with someone else’s witch offspring.” His eyes narrowed pointedly at Rynn, emphasizing their conversation from the previous night. “But you really are the worst, forgetting everything like that” Alistair repeated, sighing this time as he sat back and crossed his arms, adopting a dramatic pout and not even pretending he wasn’t employing the seductive edge on purpose. “After the things we did…”
Pierce’s eyes lit up, narrowing excitedly at Alistair, as Lucy took on the most dead serious gleam of interest and leaned eagerly towards the boy. “Did you really?”
But Alistair dropped the façade even more quickly than he had adopted it, breaking out into a crooked grin. “No. I didn’t even try, he was too drunk.” His eyes narrowed, set unwaveringly on Rynn, smoldering with determination. He could pull off seduction as effortlessly and overpoweringly as Antha could at her very best, no one could deny that. “I want him to be in his right mind when I sway him.” Even Pierce, who was not under the full force of that gaze and only had a casual interest in men, outright shuddered and had to look away.
“Airi, leave him be,” Michael murmured in warning, never looking away from his paper. It was a usual enough scolding with the Mayfair children that he didn’t even think much of it. “Rynn isn’t used to our teasing, you’ll make him uncomfortable.”
“When did I ever say I was teasing?” Alistair shot back, utterly serious and a little indignant at the accusation, turning offended eyes on his uncle. “I’m perfectly serious, I want Rynn to be my first. He thinks he’s not interested now, but I’m awfully persuasive, and unrelentingly patient.”
That much made everyone look up, a little taken aback, with Pierce voicing their collective confusion. “Alistair, you can’t be---you’re not a virgin, are you?”
“Of course I am,” the boy scoffed, rolling his eyes, “I’ve been alive for all of, what, a month? I just mastered motor skills, Pierce.”
“You could’ve had thirty one-night stands in that time!” Pierce screeched, seemingly truly alarmed by this new information, “At least! I’ve seen you make out with at least five people, there’s absolutely no reason you should still be a virgin.”
“I’m not throwing something this important away on random barflies,” he argued quickly, “I have at least a little more respect for the institution of sex than that. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be as incorrigible as Antha or Courtland once I get it over and done with, but the first time needs to be done right.”
“It’s never ‘right’,” Pierce assured him, gravely shaking his head, “Trust me---trust all of us---it’s always an awkward, terrible mess. I’m sure even Antha and Courtland had a terrible time of it.”
Nodding in agreement, Alistair responded matter-of-factly, “Courtland fell off the bed and sprained his ankle the first time, and Evie cried for half an hour.”
Announcing himself as he strolled through the kitchen door, Armand added in amusement, “And she gave Nicolae a black eye and made him climb out the window and down from the second floor to go down the street and burn the sheets.”
“Did she really?” Lucy demanded, grinning.
“It was hilarious, he woke me up trying to shimmy down the drain pipe and I had to go help him. We took the sheets down to the park on the corner and burned them---this was back when Richard ran the house with an iron fist and Antha didn’t want him to see the blood, he would’ve raised hell and she lived in mortal terror of spankings---but anyway, he smoked half a pack of cigarettes and had an outright panic attack, crying and whining about how he didn’t know it was going to hurt her so much and he had promised her beforehand it wouldn’t. He was only fifteen, poor thing, and it was his first time, too. She wouldn’t talk to him for days after that, she just sulked. And then she stabbed him with a fork one day out of the blue and told him she didn’t care what kind of disgusting dreams he had, he was never going to do that to her again, never ever.” Still chuckling wickedly to himself, he took Michael’s hastily vacated seat and stretched out, pausing briefly to affectionately tap Sebastien’s nose. “I was going to use it in one of my books, but Antha put a knife to my throat and swore on Oncle Louis’s grave she would murder me if I tried.”
“Someone probably should,” Pierce murmured, cutting a sidelong gaze at him, “The way you plaster our secrets all over your dime store smut.”
“Romance novels!”
“Trashy novels.”
Without further acknowledging him, Armand reached over and took up Pierce’s coffee cup, upturning it over his lap. The boy bit his lip hard on a yelp, trying not to disturb the babies, jumping up and hastily grabbing a towel. “You’re lucky it cooled off or this would be war,” he hissed, turning and running back to his room already unfastening buttons.
While Armand smirked to himself, Alistair sat back and ignored the commotion, turning narrowed eyes on Rynn as if to ascertain if his memory had come back to him yet.  

[Okimiyage]

For a moment, everything was peaceful, the normal morning hubbub and coffee and Rynn could almost, almost relax, convince himself that Cian’s warning had been nothing more than harmless ribbing, and the tension had not quite gone completely out of his shoulders before—
Before Antha turned that look on him, frost rimming her gaze, and suddenly the entire room went quiet.
She didn’t give him time to return the morning salutations before she had gone, and the cousins started in on him, and Rynn found himself backing away from the table in an earnest attempt to sink into the wallpaper.
What had he done?
His cheeks had gone red as apples even before Alistair made that comment—a comment he had no idea how to respond to—and his ears started ringing, high-pitched keening, a tremulous wailing—no, singing, in that long-lost language of the ancestors—drowning out all the questions, the demanding looks of those clustered at the dining table like an accusing jury—their voices jumbling together in an overwhelming hubbub that he had no idea how to interpret, answer or escape--
Then, quite suddenly and without warning, Rynn vanished.
Without a subject to direct it at, the ire-filled discussion was abruptly ended.
Cian looked up from his treasured bundle at the silenced table, then glanced towards where their eyes directed—at the sudden lack of his little brother, who had disappeared without so much an an ‘adieu’.
“Oh,” he said carelessly. “That again.” He shrugged, careful to express his disconcern without jostling Vanessa. Then, by way of explanation: “He does that when he’s embarrassed. Deservingly so, I should think.” A little humility would be good for the boy.
Enshrouded by a rustling veil of shadows, Rynn edged out of the room.
What had he done? Pacing through the halls, Rynn did his best to put together what little he could discern of the puzzle. There had been the bar, and the lusty alpha werewolf, and he could remember the jukebox songs, the proposal, dancing, up until—no, that had been after—they had said something about reporters, the bastards, Antha’s contempt—the morning journal—
And then, in a horrible, guilty flood, it all came back. What he had said, every ill-intended, drunkenly spewed ******** wonder Antha was pissed.

The house was quiet, all but for the distant chorus of the ancestors, muffled now that he moved in their world, all but for the susurrus of hazy spectres as he climbed the stairs. He knew the halls to be empty, but he could see silhouettes out of the corners of his eyes, wherever he glanced, featureless faces turned away from him. Liesse scampered past him, red hair leaving flame-colored trails in the air as she skipped down the hall, a neatly-tied white ribbon waving within her curls. His hands trailed along the wainscoting, the ridges of solid wood reassuring beneath his fingertips, a reminder of the material realm that he had left. Somewhere in-between physical and metaphysical, he moved ghost-like through the house. He could tell where Antha had walked only by the wake she had left, the ripples of her anger making the air quaver like heat rising from a sidewalk.
He found her in her room, getting ready for the day. When he walked in, she had not quite finished changing shirts, and Rynn flushed at the sight of the flash of milky skin that he caught as her new garments dropped over her head. Even though she couldn’t see him, he averted his gaze, turning swiftly to the wall in order to preserve her modesty.
He was like that when the world shuddered, shadows clearing, and the ancestors fell once more to silence.
“I—“ I’m sorry. So easy, those scant few syllables, but they stuck in his throat.
He cleared it, as though he were about to present a speech that was not fully memorized, buying time.
His voice was small, as small as he felt.
“I behaved like an idiot last night, didn’t I?”
Rynn risked a glance behind him, then dropped his head, not quite assured enough to fully face her.
“I don’t know how to make it up to you. I—I’m not sure that I can, but…if I could take it back, I would. I’d say, or do, anything to set this right. I wish I could say that I know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t lie about something like this. I suppose—I’ve never known you to lie about anything, certainly not something important like this. I didn’t know it was important to you. I wasn’t thinking.”
His hand, which he had not realized he had clenched to his chest, dropped to his side. Rynn forced his tight-knit fist to uncurl, before he realized how his fingers were trembling.
“I suppose I don’t know you very well at all, though. Certainly not—well—enough to speak on that subject, as though I were an authority. I didn’t think anyone would take it—would take me that seriously. I was—just some drunken brat, I thought. I behaved like a brat, anyways, last night.”
It came in a whisper at first, dry with regret. “I’m sorry.”
And then he thought, no, I should face her—like a man would— and revolved on his heel, quite suddenly. In contrast, he raised his gaze slowly, afraid of what he would see on her face. Again, with courage. She deserves that much.
Setting his chin, trying to steady his voice as much as he could, even if he could still hear the crack in it: “I’m sorry. I know that's not enough, but it's the first step, isn't it?”

Downstairs, Liesse bounded into the kitchen, her morning vigor filling up the space that Rynn had vanished from. “Good morning!” the cheerful greeting rang out. She seemed not to notice the atmosphere in the room—or if she did, she was easily distracted from it by her niece and nephew. “Oh!—the darlings.” she exclaimed, moving swiftly around the table to examine them, all other distractions pushed to the far corners of her mind. Peeking over Cian’s shoulders, the aunt met the infant’s unusually piercing gaze, and squeaked in delight. “She’s awake!” Practically on tiptoes, she clutched her brother’s arm as if in order to restrain her hands. There was almost reverent awe in her voice as she murmured, “She’s beautiful.”
“Just like her mother, mm?” Cian returned, unabashed pride in his voice. He leaned in to press a gentle kiss against Vanessa’s forehead, then gave Liesse a sidelong look. Reading her expression accurately, he ventured the offer that she was clearly dying to hear. “…Do you want to hold her?”
“Yes.” The deadpan expression on Liesse’s face would have been the funniest thing to happen this morning, if Alistair hadn’t already expressed his serious intent to take Rynn’s virginity.
“‘kay.” Moving with mechanical precision, Cian hefted his daughter in his arms and transferred her with heedful grace into Liesse’s expectant hands. The hitch in her breath—and the subsequent sigh that swept out of her lungs—would have impressed even the most practiced student of theatrics. Cian made certain to keep his face in view, so as not to startle Vanessa by the sudden switch, as he moved around behind his little sister and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Like this.” Her embrace of the swaddled ‘meat sack’ was awkward at first, but Cian gently positioned her grip so as not to cause the child discomfort. His child. He still couldn’t quite get used to the idea. The twins seemed otherworldly to him, like cherubs—or, to fit in with the prior subject of conversation, changelings. Liesse was all but glowing. The smile on her face would have suited a post-Renaissance painting of the Madonna and child. Watching her, Cian couldn’t help but comment, “Don’t even think about it. If you try to run off with this one, you’ll have the whole city hunting for your skin in a fortnight.”
“—I wasn’t going to—“
“Well, you’re looking at her the way that Gollum looks at the Ring.”
“She’s absolutely precious, I can’t help it. Her powers are evidently quick to develop, and she’s already put a spell on me.”
Cian couldn’t help but laugh at that, although for all he knew about the Mayfair’s legendary talents, it might have been true. “Just as long as you promise to be a faithful thrall.” Giving her arm a reassuring squeeze, he glanced up at Alistair, who now presided over Sebastien’s carrier.
“We’re going to have to keep this one in check, else she’ll be spoiling them rotten every chance she gets.”
Not that Liesse would be the only one. The way that Antha’s little court worshipped her, it was impossible to imagine that her offspring would be shorted on their unfair share of doting.
Thoughts of school quite flooded out of her head, Liesse settled in at the dining room table alongside the rest of the family, transfixed by the child in her arms, and Cian took his place beside her.
“Now, what’s the itinerary for today?” he asked, reaching across the table for a mug of coffee. It had been prepared with intent for Rynn’s consumption—take the edge off whatever hangover he might have—but Cian figured at this point he might as well make use of the caffeine. He had nearly taken the first sip when the door bucked and flew open, and stopped Cian with his lips to the rim.
Dorian could never resist making a dramatic entrance. Blonde hair artfully mussed in a way that would have normally taken Hollywood’s finest stylists an hour to arrange, brocade dressing gown open to his navel (and only barely held at his waist by a silken, tasseled cord) Dorian threw himself against the doorframe and placed the back of his hand to his forehead in a pose that would have been right at home in a Romantic painting of a beleaguered saint. Opening one long-lashed, sky-blue eye, the man scanned the table accusingly. “Alright, you rumor-mongering knaves, out with it. Who’s been spreading gossip about me? My ears were burning like coals, so hot that they woke me up, and out of the most beautiful dream, too, and I won’t stand for being talked about in my own home while I’m not around to bask in the spotlight.” He gave them a moment’s pause, then added wistfully, “It really was the most beautiful dream, too. Buildings covered in bluebells, and the women, ah, the women…”
But the rest of the table could do without knowing that. He didn’t put it past the likes of the cousins to start listening in on his dreams.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Safely closed in her quiet room, her thick curls still dark and heavy with water, Antha was relishing the sheer relief of being clean again, reveling in the softness of her freshly laundered skirt and delicate silk undershirt. She was still slipping the last part on when Rynn’s presence was announced, equally by the quiet burn of embarrassment and discomfort and by the small sound he made. She acknowledged him at first, shirt half on, glancing disinterestedly over her shoulder mid-motion, and then went about her business again as if he wasn’t there, pulling on a new cashmere sweater and snapping the soft plastic of the tags. But by the time he was through with his hastily stuttered and stilted apology, while she sat at the vanity brushing her hair, her disinterest had turned cold again, her eyes dark and sharp. “You really don’t understand, do you?” she asked quietly, with the slightest tinge that might have almost been sympathetic, the bristles pausing midway through her tresses, “You just don’t think enough about anything to try and understand, do you Rynn?” The silverback brush made a small sound as it was set back into place, with unusual constraint, Antha’s eyes meeting Rynn’s in the mirror. “It’s not what you did. It’s never what you did. Mistakes can be always be fixed. It’s that you did it at all.” Her gaze broke, slender white fingers reaching for a hair clip as if to occupy herself, but there was a certain quiet agitation to her movements. “It’s that you went out of your way to speak against me for no reason at all. And your niece and nephew, Rynn---your own flesh and blood, what very little of it you have left---did you stop for one moment to think what you were saying directly about them? Did it occur to you for one single moment that you have their complete and utterly innocent trust, and you betrayed it? You were drunk of course, you can use that as an excuse if you want, but it doesn’t change the facts.”
Outwardly, if someone were to give her a passing glance, they might think Antha perfectly composed. It was in the smaller details, the close observations, that she was seen to be unraveling. It was the five times she put the clip in her hair and then took it out before putting it back the exact same way, the way she took up a bracelet, ran her fingers briefly across the incandescent pearls, and set it back down elsewhere. Finally, out of distractions, she stood and smoothed out the gentle black folds of her skirt for no discernible reason. “You do know me well enough, that’s the cincher in all of this. You know how seriously I take the welfare of my family, that I would never do anything to harm them, to betray them. You know better than anyone---anyone---in this world what I’m about to sacrifice to ensure their safety.” Sacrifice being the key word, and at his very hands. “And you knew about my father, about at least a little of what hell I suffered for the same thing you accused me of. You know me far, far better than that, and if you even slightly think you don’t, it’s willful ignorance. Which is worse, when you think about it.”
Managing to mostly compose herself, Antha finally turned and faced Rynn eye to eye, stepping forward until there were only a few short feet between them, though it might as well have been an ocean. “But do you want to know the real killer here?” Her eyes flashed briefly, softer than before, and it was in that split second that all of the raw hurt Alistair had mentioned showed through. Her feelings were truly, thoroughly wounded, and she didn’t really know how to handle that. “It’s that you’re still treating us like the enemy. Like something ‘other’, something foreign that caught you up and is holding you hostage. You are part of this family, Rynn. It doesn’t matter if you want to be, if you like it, or if I or anyone else likes it. It’s just a fact, as much as if you’d been born in our blood. Cian accepts it, Liesse accepts it, everyone else accepts it, except for you. Everyone else is trying their hardest, until they’re blue in the face, trying to include you, to find a system that works around all of us, trying to let you in. And you still turn on the rest of us at the slightest opportunity. You still shut us out, still snap at any attempt at familiarity, still badmouth us to anyone who will listen.” Another of those flashes, sharper this time, hurt giving way to a flicker of anger as she stared him dead in the eye and said with ruthless gravity, “You’re still standing all alone, screaming at anyone who tries to get close, only thinking about yourself.”
The partially opened door creaked, Michael loudly clearing his throat to announce himself, and Antha diverted her gaze as if she’d been caught, returning to the vanity and snatching up a string of pearls to occupy herself. But Michael, watching her with intense attention, said quietly, “Those were your mother’s.” They dropped from her hand to the floor with a clatter, as quickly as if he’d told her it was a snake, and that was what brought the spark of understanding to his wary eyes. “I see.” Pausing to lay a hand on Rynn’s shoulder, silently indicating that he should remain put, the man walked over and took a seat quietly on the foot of the bed, watching Antha as she darkly watched the pearls on the floor. “You look like her sometimes, you know,” he said after a long moment of silence, and Antha startled, turning to look at him with big, incredulous eyes, utterly offended, “Only every once in a while, when you flip your hair a certain way or the light hits you just right from the side, or when you wrinkle your nose. Good god, she used to do that whenever she was mad at me, it’s how I knew I was in the doghouse.” He laughed to himself, wistfully, as if the memory had briefly overtaken him. But then he looked back at Antha, anchored in the present, the utterly betrayed look in her eyes, and the vague hint of a sad smile on his lips turned apologetic. “But I learned not to talk about your mother to you when you were very young. You and Nicolae were always the same that way, I couldn’t say a word about her or you both would shut down and look at me with those eyes like I was doing the cruelest thing in the world.”
“Did you ever consider it might be?” she responded, very quietly, not moving.
Michael didn’t answer, just stared at her with those ever-kind, inquiring eyes, and finally asked, “Why are you so angry at Rynn? What did he do that you couldn’t brush it off, roll your eyes at him, and forget it this time?” He had at least vaguely gathered what Rynn had said, and had managed to piece together that her anger, the chord Rynn had struck, had something to do with her mother, but he couldn’t perfectly pinpoint how.
“Do I need a reason?” she demanded, almost before he’d finished, “Do I have to put up with it all the time? At some point, everyone breaks. Maybe this is it for me, maybe I’m just done.”
She moved, turning partially as if to leave, but all at once Michael’s voice rang out with unnatural sternness, calling, “Antha Evelyn Éclaire Cosette Mayfair, you sit down this instant.”
The girl froze and blanched, dropping down onto the vanity stool as if magnetized and demanding in nearly a squeak, “What are you middle-naming me for?”
“I’m not through yet, and you are going to sit and listen to me. You, too,” he said, motioning to Rynn and then the nearby loveseat with the last part, his tone still uncharacteristically strict, “Now look at me. I raised you, Antha. For ten years, I raised you with your brothers. I know you. And I knew your mother, for better or worse. She was my wife, the mother of my sons---”
“The mother of Julien’s sons!” she interrupted, nearly screaming, as if something had broken in her that had been sealed for years and years, “Julien’s sons, Julien’s daughter, mother’s lies!”
“Antha---”
“You were never in her head!” she shouted, eyes shining with furious tears as she bolted to her feet, one hand pressing hard against her temple for emphasis, “You didn’t know her! She never would have let you, because she didn’t love you! She never loved anyone from the day she was born, not her parents, or Julien, or you, or Leon! She never even loved her own goddamn children!”
While Antha’s fingers shook and then clenched, her gaze dropping to the ground as if she already regretted what she’d just said, Michael considered it, digging down to the root, and said softly, “I know, sweetheart. I know, and I’m sorry for it. But you’re not like her, Antha, you love your children more than life itself, we all know that. No one ever said---”
At the absolute end of her rope, beyond all control of herself, Antha took the bait, still looking intently at Michael but pointing at Rynn, breaking down and screaming hysterically, “He did! He said it! He sat there and accused me of being just like her!”
Michael, his brow furrowed and eyes dark with sympathy, tried to defend him, murmuring gently, “He didn’t mean it, Antha.”
“Do you know how Leon found out I was Julien’s?” she yelled, and there was a particularly unstable edge to her voice to match the wet droplets on her lashes, “She told him! He didn’t want to marry her, so she trapped him by telling him we were his and then when she knew she was going to die, when she knew I was going to be all alone with him, his legal property, she told him I wasn’t actually his! Because even on her deathbed, she didn’t care! She didn’t love us! She left Alistair to die of neglect and me to face a decade of torture because she couldn’t find in herself to give a damn about her own children!” It was about this time that Michael held his hands up in something like surrender and Antha went abruptly quiet, her eyes gone wide like she’d just realized that she’d briefly lost complete control of herself. She took a split second to touch her cheeks, not entirely surprised to find them wet, and then slid her fingers up into her hair, clenching the foremost tresses and pressing her palms into her eyes until all she could see was dizzying spots of color in a sea of darkness. “What are my children going to think of me, Uncle Michael? My mother lied about my real father because she didn’t love me, she didn’t care about me. There’s no way to stop people from talking, from saying Cian isn’t Vanessa and Sebastien’s real father. If they’re saying the same things about me as they did about her, and I’m dead like her, what are my children going to think?”
“No, no, no,” he whispered hastily, jumping to his feet and going over to fold her tightly in his arms, “It’s not the same, Antha. It’s not the same at all. You’re nothing like Mary Beth, not one bit. Look at me.” Prying her hands off of her eyes, he took her chin and forced her to look at his eyes, saying very intently, “You’ve done everything you can for your children, because you love them so intensely. We all know that, and so will they. And Cian is even less like Leon than you are your mother. The rest of the world can question it but we know he’s their father, and he’s going to be a wonderful father at that. None of it’s the same, Antha, none of it. Of all things, don’t you worry that this is going to be even slightly similar.”
For several moments Antha said nothing, only taking deep breaths to stop the small, sharp sobs until she had control of herself again, gently shaking herself free of Michael and turning away, one hand on her forehead and the other at her waist, trying to regain her composure. When she did finally speak it was quiet, voice low and faintly astonished. “I haven’t admitted that out loud in nearly twenty years.” A shuddering breath passed through her lips, head tilted back, and finally she seemed to have a grip on herself again. “It’s kind of sad when you think about it, really. She wanted to love something, to at least know what it felt like, but she just didn’t have it in her. She was too selfish.” Turning, she bent over and picked up the strand of pearls on the floor, quietly turning the around in her fingers. “She actually thought she loved me, just for a brief moment, right before she died. But she didn’t. It was self-satisfaction…pride that she had created something like me, a demi-god, and a proper heir to the family. She was so intensely pleased with her success that she mistook it for love in her last moments. And then, with the very last breath she ever took, she recognized it for what it really was.” The girl stood, her pale fingers going to the clasp of the necklace and fastening it around her neck. "Isn't that pitiful?"
Hesitantly, with endless reserves of and caution and pity in his eyes, Michael asked in a murmur, “Are you alright?” But she waved she question away, shaking her head as if it didn’t even need to be asked, she was stronger than that. So he asked instead, even more cautiously, “And can you admit that maybe you overreacted towards Rynn a little?”
That seemed to be a more difficult question to respond to, but after a few moments she finally caved, nodding once and then turning her gaze on the boy in question, “He doesn’t stop for a moment to think before he does anything…but fine, you’re right, he didn’t mean any harm. He just pried open a door I’ve been desperately suppressing my entire life.” She sighed, grateful to have her wits back about her, and then suddenly stiffened, going still all over. “If you’ll excuse me,” she murmured, fingers pressing lightly to her lips, “I think all of this has actually made me physically ill.”
As she darted straight for the bathroom, the door slamming behind her, Michael released a massive sigh of relief, laying a heavy hand on Rynn’s shoulder. “Well…not good as new, perhaps, but I think you’re off the hook. And if you really want to get back in her good graces, you might try talking to her through the door to distract her.” Giving Rynn one last reassuring pat on the back, he turned and sought out a little ornate box from the bedside table, taking it up and winding a key in the back, setting it beside the door to the bathroom and opening the lid to a soft, tinkering melody.“Should I fetch your usual hair-holder?”
"No, it's fine," she responded hoarsely, voice a little weak, "I'll be fine."

Down in the kitchen, meanwhile, Alistair and Lucy had freely admitted to being the culprits, talking about Dorian behind his back, and showed precisely zero remorse for it. “It’s nothing personal,” Lucy assured him sweetly, her eyes sparkling with humor, “I’m just going to laugh myself to death if you knocked up a fairy. I mean come on.”
“But really,” Alistair interrupted, gaining control of himself and putting on his most serious face, “Now that we know your new friends were almost certainly of a less than human nature, the important question is did you sleep with any of them?”
“I’ll tell you right now,” Vittorio, who had entered moments before Dorian, said sternly, “I haven’t the vaguest idea what to do with fairy babies. Though, I’d be rather interested to learn.”
“You know Antha’s going to give you all a scolding when she gets back,” Armand mused meanwhile, looking at Vittorio in particular, “Taunting Dorian like this.”
“Let her,” Vittorio scoffed, setting his coffee cup down with an irritable clank, “She can’t keep coddling him the way she does, it’s not helping anyone.”
“She doesn’t ‘coddle’ him,” Lucy began, defending Antha, but was met immediately with a burst of laughter and various disagreements.
“Oh please!”
“The hell she doesn’t.”
“She wouldn’t let any of us get away with half the s**t he does.”
Alistair, chuckling to himself, leaned slightly towards Lucy and explained, “I think it’s because he was such a crybaby when he was little. When she first came here, back when she still hated the entire family, there was this one day when Michael took all the kids to the park, and Dorian was by himself talking to a flower. Then another kid came along and stomped on it and Dorian started crying. So Evie pushed the kid off the monkey bars and helped Dorian dig the flower up and plant it in the yard here. That’s why the garden’s so overrun with those little wild violets.” He gestured briefly at the window, beyond which the yard was half grass and half tiny wild violets, chuckling quietly to himself. “He was so sensitive, poor Dorian. Antha couldn’t even bring herself to hate him with everyone else, he was too desperately in need of someone to look out for him. So she took it upon herself, and I don’t think she’s ever actually stopped to consider that he can take care of himself now.”
Armand hummed to himself, murmuring thoughtfully, “I always thought it was because he looked so much like Nicolae. But, you know...less intense.”
“Don’t let Courtland catch you saying any of that,” Pierce murmured teasingly, lips curving in a wicked grin, “He might feel threatened as Evie’s favorite.”
“Come to think of it, whatever happened to that kid?” Armand interrupted, brow furrowing, “I remember he broke a few bones and was covered in bruises, and Antha just called him a wuss and threw a stick at him. He’s not permanently disfigured or anything, is he?”
“You might say that,” Alistair murmured, lips curling deviously as if at some private joke. A joke he told them anyways, his coffee cup poised just beneath his lips, “It was Christian Parker.”
Despite himself, Pierce burst into laughter with that little revelation, slapping his hand down on the table so hard that the entire thing shook. “That explains so much it isn’t even funny. No wonder he’s so desperate to catch up to her.”
In the following minutes, as the conversation carried on into chatter, Alistair fell unusually quiet, tensing inexplicably, his eyes flashing a few times towards the stairs. By the time anyone even noticed, he had flinched, followed immediately by the echo of Antha’s hysterical scream upstairs---“He did! He said it! He sat there and accused me of being just like her!”
Malakai woke with a start, turning confused and bleary eyes towards the door, while Armand jumped to his feet, but Alistair motioned sharply for everyone to stay where they were, murmuring as he did so, “Just let it happen. It’s for the best. Let her get it out.”
“What in the name of god did Rynn do?” Armand whispered, as if Antha could hear him up in her room, or was paying any attention at all to the rest of the house.
Pierce was quick enough to answer, likewise whispering, “He said he didn’t think Vanessa and Sebastien were Cian’s.”
But Alistair punched him on the shoulder in warning, shutting him up. “He was drunk, he hardly knew what he was saying,” the boy said sternly, cutting his eyes at his cousin, “And anyways, that’s not the issue. It’s way beyond that now. Rynn was just…a trigger. Just everyone shut up, stay where you are, and let her get it out.”
“I know you’re still practically a newborn,” Pierce muttered, rubbing the point of impact on his shoulder, “But you’ve never been so mean before.”
“Because this is important.” She needed to make peace with her fears after all, and all of those dark, unresolved clouds of hatred from her childhood. Or at least to acknowledge them, which was better than her standing method of repressing the entire subject and focusing on something else. “Ahh,” he sighed deeply at last, shaking his head, “Evie is he only person I know who can actually make herself physically ill with emotion.”
“Oh? Isn't that your department, Dorian?” Armand hummed thoughtfully, looking at the boy in question, “Isn't that the deal, Antha attacks all flower-killers on sight and dismisses all your wrongdoing, and you hold her hair when she’s sick? I have to say, she really settled for the poor end of that arrangement.”
“No, no, you’ve got it wrong,” Pierce jumped in, “Dorian was the dispenser of life-saving emetics whenever she overdosed. Holding her hair just came with the territory, I imagine. Remember? Tiny little fifteen year old Antha, half-dead, half-mad, and only speaking in Dorian Gray quotes until he got completely fed up with her and stole the rest of her drugs.”
“Riiiiiight,” Armand murmured, nodding like he’d just remembered, “We’d try to take her to the hospital and she’d kick us and go fumbling for the phone, muttering nonsense about Dorian being golden and his pretty words. Oh, what was that one line she always said…ah, ‘You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grand passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.’ Lord Henry to Dorian Gray. Chapter four, I believe.”
Pierce grinned, raising his coffee cup and then tapping it on the table. “Cheers, Dorian. No one can ever say Evie didn’t know your very soul.”  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn had been red with guilt when he walked in the room, before Antha began her merciless vivisection of his character.

By the time that she was done with it, he was pale as a sheet, and his nails were digging brutally into his palm, and his fists were shaking with anger.
The various accoutrements of Antha’s beauty regime, silver pots of powder and glass vials of perfume, had began to rattle faintly as she spoke, as if in response to some unseen earthquake. Even the silver-backed brush, when she set it down, clattered without cause against the polished counter.
Rynn was staring at her, jaw tight and held high, as though he wanted to strike her; his eyes had narrowed like needles, his gaze a sliver of steel. It would have been hard to explain why he was so infuriated right now: the reasons were there, in his head, tumbling around like debris caught up in a tornado—and just like in a tornado, it was impossible to simply reach in and pluck them out.

It would have scared him—how easily she had drummed that passion up in him—if he wasn’t so angry.
By all rights, he should have bowed his head and shamefully accepted her contempt, but Rynn was past the point of persuading himself to back down. There was a reason why you could describe both rage and lunacy with the word ‘mad’.
He was grinding his teeth by the time it was over, readying a venomous response that a cobra would be proud to spit—and had even opened his mouth to expel it, before Michael walked into the room.

The man’s presence was like a cool wind on a hot summer day. Rynn would have nearly sworn that he saw the curtains flutter in an impossible breeze. The pots stopped rattling, as Rynn’s attention was diverted to their audience; and Michael’s hand on his shoulder, stiff as a guard dog’s hackles, reminded the boy what he had come up here for in the first place. With great reluctance, Rynn forced himself to untense, swallow the hateful litany that he had been preparing, and step back. But he kept his gaze hard, and his mouth flat with the bitterness that he would not release for Michael to witness, as the older man moved past him and went about conducting the business of calming Antha.
The air in the room seemed to simmer, and for the first time—watching Antha, and the way she looked at the pearl strand like it had bitten her—Rynn began to gather, through the haze of his subsiding anger, that maybe this wasn’t entirely about him.
The Calais were clannish, but not like the Mayfairs. They had been too secluded. The wives and husbands brought into the house had to be of witching blood, of course, but they had been sought out by the ancestors like some kind of occult matchmaking service, and usually imported from distant countries. Rynn’s mother had been Irish, for example; Erin had even been able to recall snatches of the lilting lullabies that she had sang to guide her babes to sleep.
But husbands and wives were for breeding. Whether Aleric had loved Faye or not, whether he was faithful to her or expected the same in return, Rynn would never know. Aedan had certainly discovered more than enough guidance, in the tattered remnants of their archives, on how any half-human bastards fostered by the bloodline were to be dealt with. The ancestors ate them. An anomaly like Antha would have never survived her first year. And—perhaps—that was kinder than to endure years of abuse, but Rynn had never thought about it before.
It was when he was looking at Antha’s face, as she stared at those pearls, that Rynn began to wonder if he had been wrong not to.

He took the seat that Michael indicated, and crossed his legs, and tried to steady his emotions as Antha and Michael began to talk. It didn’t work very well. He couldn’t stop himself from paying attention, and the air in the room had begun to quake again, building and building until Antha started screaming, and Rynn’s bowed head jerked upright, glaring with indignation. The anger was set to start boiling again, but he bit his lip and thought, I will at least hear her out.
He owed that much.
There wasn’t much left to hear, though; after that, it wasn’t long until she dashed into the bathroom, and the sound of retching emanated from within.
Rynn felt himself exhaling with a breath he hadn’t realized that he’d been holding until now. Somehow, dealing with Antha prompted a tension from within him that even the ancestors were incapable of summoning.
“I don’t know if I should.” he said quietly, in response to Michael’s suggestion.
Now that Antha was gone from the room, there was a sort of—peace—that seemed to possess him, like the calm after a storm, or the hollowed resignation that followed a terrible bout of crying.
“She’s right, you know. I said something horrible, and I—I didn’t think about it in the slightest, it was just what I wondered, what I…I suppose I thought everybody wondered. You can’t tell me the city doesn’t gossip about that sort of thing. I haven’t…I never thought about the gossip columns, or the grapevine, or the ‘rumor mill’—whatever you want to call it…when I lived at Llyr’s Court. Hardly knew they existed, really. I never even considered the idea that someone would be interested in our private affairs last night. I guess—” and here, a hollow little chuckle, “—that’s the difference between our families. When you live in isolation for generations, nobody cares what you get up to.”
He looked up at Michael, then, and was ashamed at how his voice cracked, dry and heartless as he attempted to make it. “I don’t think she would want to hear from me right now.”

“I don’t think anything I could say would fix this.”
“And—she’s right, you know. Even after all this time, all the kindness that they’ve shown me, I still can’t think of myself as part of your family. It’s so different from what I thought that meant. It’s what Liesse always wanted. It’s what Cian sought out in the city, I think, when he couldn’t stand to sleep in that lonely, rotting corpse of a manor house any longer.”
“But I always thought of myself as its keeper. A guardian for all of the dead that slept within our grounds. Our—our graveyard of a garden.” Then again, that bleak laugh, and the barest twitch of a smile. “I was proud of it. I spent my life—all that I can remember of it—being so proud of how I could take care of the family, how important that it was to revere our ancestors, how important I was by association. Because I was taking care of them, the legion who had all sacrificed themselves in the hopes of making our family great.
And now, it’s all done with. There’s no more family. To think that the line should end like this—unless, I don’t know—unless I spawn some poor child of my own, all that’s left is—Cian, and now Vanessa, and Sebastien. Even Cian has forsaken the old ways, he abandoned them long ago, but I’m—still—haunted by them. That’s why I can’t be a Mayfair. That’s why—I wished that Cian’s children weren’t his, that they, at least, could end the cycle.”

Rynn’s head dropped, and he felt his eyes grow hot. He refused to raise his hands, to wipe away the scalding tears, and so they fell instead, and he tried to pretend that they had not.

“I failed them. I know that now. And that’s why I keep clinging to the idea that somehow, maybe, I could set things right. All that was entrusted to me, I’ve ruined. And I won’t—I Ican’t accept that.”
“Otherwise, my life has been meaningless. And I might as well join the rest of them, in the gardens.”

His head jerked up, his eyes shining wetly in the light.
“I’m sorry. I know that’s what’s expected of me, but letting myself be—adopted—to let myself be absorbed by the rest of your family—that means giving up on everything that I thought I was always intended to protect. I know you must think I’m just being stubborn, or selfish, but it’s more than that. To me, at least, it’s my duty. They haven’t given up on me yet. I can’t give up on them. Even for all the kindness that Antha—that all of you—have shown me.”

“I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me. I crossed a boundary, last night, a boundary that I didn’t understand or even realize existed. It was different for us.”
His head had dropped again, with despair, but jerked up again suddenly, and his gaze fell demandingly on Michael.
“But you know her. You know how to set this right? Right?”
And it was hard to ignore, even to Rynn’s own ear, the desperation in his demand.

Below—
Dorian sighed, abandoned his dramatic pose, and joined the rest of his kin at the dining table.
“Would you honestly expect less of me?” he demanded, settling into his seat with an ungraceful thunk, and clatter of silverware. His gaze crossed artlessly from Lucy, with a flash of passion, to Alistar. “If Titania herself came to me tonight, could I refuse such a vision?”
He picked up a fork, spearing a sausage from the plate directly to his left with remorseless aplomb, and bit into it with relish.
“Anyways, I don’t know. If they were fairies, well—I’m not the first human who’s found it impossible to resist their glamour.”
Dorian shrugged.
“If worst comes to worst, then at least the changeling we’re saddled with will be in excellent company.”
It was easy for him to joke about it. Dorian had never been the serious type, except when it came to poetry…and after all, even to this moment, he didn’t really believe it to be true. It was a mad romp of a party, probably he’d been riddled with drugs, and dismissing the possibility was far more pleasant than admitting to it.
Cracking a rakish grin, he threw his eye about the table, settling only briefly on the infant that Liesse still coddled. He was all set to settle back into his chair, when above came the shout:
“He did it!”
The whole table practically jumped with the communal stiffening that occurred, but Dorian only laughed.
“Someone’s in high spirits this morning.”
Cian rubbed his eyes, and shifted his chair back in preparation to stand. The infants were beginning to fuss. Crossing to Sebastian’s carrier, he leant over his child. “Shh. Shh. Your mother’s had a rough night, poor thing.”
Liesse, completely intent upon her armful of blankets, raised her head for only a moment.
“You know, for all of his charms, Rynn can be astonishingly stupid sometimes. I hope you’ll forgive him for that.”
Dorian chuckled, and held the end of the sausage to his lips as though it were the cigarette that he was in desperate need of. “We’ve all be there, darling.”
He was talking about himself, of course, but it certainly applied.
"Love is a curse."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

For a moment, Michael just stopped and looked at Rynn. Just looked at him, curiously, trying to process the sudden desperation in his voice. And then, without warning, Michael chuckled, sweeping a hand back over his face, and reached out to affectionately ruffle the boy’s hair. “My god, do you have any idea how much you remind me of Antha when she first came here?” He laughed, shaking his head, eyes clouded with memories. “No…Antha was worse. All she ever did was sulk and glare. Oh, she hated us. We couldn’t blame her of course, Leon and the ghosts in her attic had turned her so thoroughly against us. We were the enemy. We were evil incarnate, a nest of snakes. And she was only a child, technically, but Antha’s never really been a child. She was too intelligent, she’d been through too much. But the cousins…oh, they never change.” Another laugh, mingled this time with a sigh as if there was no help for it. “They pushed her constantly. They smothered her with attempts at affection, with a desperate need for her to accept them, to love them back. And Antha, she…she tried to push them down the stairs, she shoved their faces in the sandbox, she threw rocks at them, she kicked them in the shins and ran away. She didn’t have a single social skill to speak of, she’d only ever talked with ghosts. She---” He paused, glancing furtively at the closed bathroom door, and then whispered so he wouldn’t be overheard, a secretive smile on his lips, “She was such a little b***h. It’s terrible to say, but it’s true. She attacked everyone, broke everything, hissed constantly about how she hated us, and she spent all of her time plotting her escape.”
Again that little fond, nostalgic chuckle, his eyes shifting as he tried to recall something specific. “She loved Malakai, of course---she loved him dearly and fiercely---but it was always silent, always passive. I guess the first time she ever showed any affection to anyone, it was Dorian. He was a couple of years older than her, but he was just the worst crybaby. Everything set him off. And one day a little boy at the park started stomping on a little wildflower he was talking to, laughing while Dorian started crying. Antha was sitting beside me on the bench with her arms crossed, glaring at everything, sulking fiercely. But she watched it happen, and then she got the most peculiar look on her face that I couldn’t place. And she got up, and she went over to the monkey bars, which was odd because Antha did not play on the playground, or anything childish like that, and she went right up to that little boy and she shoved him straight down to the ground. He was hurt and crying but she just climbed down, looked at him, picked up a stick and threw it at him. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes then…like that little boy had offended her, like he had taken something of hers and hurt it and she had to send him a warning, she had to protect it. And then she went over to Dorian and she didn’t say anything---he was just looking at her with wide, wet eyes, astonished---and she started digging out the roots of the flower to transplant it. He never left her alone after that, he followed her everywhere, all the time. He snuck into her bed at night with his little stuffed teddy bear and his threadbare blanket and she’d physically throw him into the floor in the morning. She yelled at him constantly to leave her alone and go away, that he was getting on her nerves, but the moment anything made him cry---and something was always making Dorian cry---she attacked it on sight. She’d leave the room yelling that she hated him and then Courtland would tease him and he’d start crying and Antha would dart back in the room blindly striking anything within Dorian’s immediate vicinity. And that’s what you remind me of.” He smiled, as kindly as ever, brushing Rynn’s hair back out of his face. “You remind me of Antha back in those days. That’s why I’m not worried about you, because I know the cousins can poke and prod at you and not do any good, but one of these days, you’re going to want to protect someone in this family from something that hurt them. It’s just in your nature, like it’s in Antha’s. You’re going to want to protect them, and you’ll hate it, but that’s when you know that they’ve caught you, that you love the family back.
“And as for Antha---” He went back over to the bedside table, picking up a crystal water glass and putting it in Rynn’s hands. “She’ll love you forever if you get her some water right now. Just fill it up from the sink. And try not to worry so much.” Michael smiled, planting a kiss on the top of Rynn’s head like any other affectionate father. “Antha loves you dearly, even if she won’t admit it outright. There’s nothing you could do that she wouldn’t forgive you for---nothing you would do, at any rate.” Another of those smiles, secretive this time, looking at Rynn like he knew him better than Rynn knew himself, and whispering, “Because you won’t admit it either, but you love Antha, too, and you wouldn’t actually hurt her. Not by choice. Now---” Putting a hand of the small of his back, he opened the door and gently pushed Rynn inside, closing the door behind him, and then quietly left.
Antha was leaning back against the claw-footed tub, her legs folded beneath her, fingers pressed to her temple, eyes closed as she focused wholly on trying to breathe evenly. Her sweater was cast off on the side of the sink, the silk and lace of the chemise that had been beneath it a few shades whiter than her pale skin. She looked up when the door opened, and for several full moments she completely forgot that she had ever been mad at Rynn, focusing instead on the glass in his hand, her own stretching demandingly out for it. She waited patiently while the faucet turned, water trickling, until the glass was set in her hand and she grasped it greedily, first rinsing her mouth out and then taking cautious sips. Finally, sated, she sat back again, the glass clasped in her slender fingers, her head against the porcelain, eyes closed.
It had been a few minutes by this point, and she was only just truly realizing that it was Rynn in the quiet space with her, the bright and airy cell of white tiles, metal fixtures, wispy white curtains, and an entire wall of glass panes. It was moments more before she spoke, in a lilting whisper like she hardly knew she was saying anything at all. “Usually it’s Uncle Michael or Dorian. They’ve always been the ones taking care of me when I’m sick.” She paused, lightly clearing her throat, then took another sip of water and quietly sat the glass down on the tiles beside her. “Or half-dead from drugs and alcohol, in Dorian’s case. It happened a lot more than you would think, at least twice a month.”
Sighing in relief, glad the whole ordeal was over, Antha opened her eyes---her eyes again, sharp and clear and intelligent---and narrowed them up at Rynn. She didn’t saying anything, not yet, but rather reached out and, without warning, grabbed Rynn’s hand and yanked him down beside her. “I should really bash your face in for what you said,” she murmured, without any particular feeling behind it, and then repeated what she heard so often, “You’re lucky you’re pretty, otherwise I might.” She yanked him an inch or two closer, almost idly, and then abruptly dropped her head on his shoulder. It wasn’t particularly affectionate, as gestures went. It was more that he was convenient, softer than the porcelain tub, and she was terribly tired. And also, she supposed, that she didn’t want facing each other to be an option with her next murmured words. “I hated Dorian as much as the rest of them,” she confessed softly, echoing very faintly in the silent room beneath the gentle drip of the various faucets, “I hated everyone. I hated everything. I probably hated Dorian more than a lot of them, because he was always loud and crying and it got on my nerves. But…” A car passed by the house outside, unheard, but the morning sun bounced off of the windshield and through the leaves, shattering on the windowpanes behind them as dazzling gleams of golden light. “But he was mine. I hated him and I didn’t give a damn about our blood, but he still belonged to me, he was still my responsibility. When I saw that kid stomping on his flower, Dorian crying, I just snapped. That boy had hurt something important to me. And every time after that, even though he annoyed me more than ever, whenever something made Dorian cry, I retaliated against it. It didn’t make any sense at all, not even to me, but I just had to protect him.”
Her arms folded, wrapping slightly around herself for warmth, or comfort, or maybe just instinct. “I’d never loved anything before, except for Alistair, so I didn’t know that I loved Dorian. I loved all of them, the entire lot of loud idiots, even while I still wanted to kill them and run away. I even loved the horrible traitor, the great enemy, Julien.” She went briefly stiff, as if her very flesh was revolting against what she’d just uttered, reaching over and pinching Rynn’s arm as she muttered sharply, “And if you ever tell a soul I said that, I really will murder you.” She’d never admitted it before, not once in her entire life. Even if she’d wanted to, who would she have said it to? The cousins would have felt betrayed, and she couldn’t let Julien have the satisfaction of knowing. “I didn’t even like Cian at first. He was just some mute, drunk witch boy who’d helped you try to kill me and I’d had desperate grievance sex with in the library because you’d hurt my feelings. And suddenly, just like with the cousins back then, I was bound to him. Even worse, I had to trust him with my children for the rest of their lives. Honestly…I tried to scare him off.” Her shoulders moved slightly, her chest rising and falling with what would have been a laugh except she didn’t make a sound. “I threw him in the deep end. I damn near threatened him. But he didn’t budge. He outright revolted against the idea of giving up his children, he stopped drinking, he started talking, he did everything he thought he was supposed to do. And then one day he came home with a cut on his cheek, a cut you’d given him, and I wanted to rip you to pieces before I’d even thought about it. That was how I knew I loved him, after the fact, because anything that hurt him had to be destroyed. And he was the one who stopped me from doing it. He said you’d been led astray, that you were mad with grief, but you could still be saved. He looked at me with the most earnest, intent look I’ve ever seen in his eyes and made me promise I’d do everything I could to try and bring you back to your senses, that I wouldn’t kill you unless you left me with no other choice.” She shifted slightly, her head turning so her chin rested on his shoulder, looking him in the eye. “He really, really loves you, you know. You don’t give him enough credit for that.”
Sighing, like it was none of her business (but really, when had that ever stopped her?), she turned her head again and laid her cheek back against his shoulder, murmuring again, “It was different with Vanessa and Sebastien. When Stefan said I was pregnant I was…shocked, and confounded, and terrified, but in the course of a single heartbeat, I loved them so intensely I could barely stand it. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, I sure as hell didn’t know there were two of them, and I didn’t even know if I could find a way to save them in time, but I loved them with every fiber of my being, and I knew it immediately.”
Antha did laugh then, very quietly, at herself, and whispered, “I have no idea why I’m telling you all this.”
And then, as if she’d just thought of it, raised her head and turned to look at him, and instead said impetuously, “I’m really pissed at you, you know that? And not because you were drunk and acted like a fool, or because you won’t let the ancestors wither away like you should. It’s because I was right before, even if I said it a little harshly. It’s because you’re worse than me when I was nine and practically brainwashed. You love us, you massive idiot. You’re not a Mayfair---you’ll probably never be a Mayfair, even if you marry one, you’re too firmly a Calais. You’ll always be Calais. But family’s not about the name and the duties and the blood. You love us and you’re stuck with us. That’s family. Even if you don’t call it that, the facts are the same.” Her hand went briefly across the back of his head, like she’d smack Courtland or Pierce any time they were being idiots, cutting him a glance that called him such without actually saying the word. And then she put her hand in his, ordering with an odd hint of a request, “Help me up, I’m exhausted and starving.”

Back in the kitchen, the cousins had (begrudgingly) decided to spare Dorian and were deciding instead how they would feed themselves, as Jacob had the day off and not one of them had ever cooked food in their lives.
“There’s the leftovers from the party,” Armand suggested, peering into the refrigerator.
“I can work a microwave,” Pierce piped up, as if it were a skill to be proud of.
“I wanted an omelet,” Lucy pouted, folding her arms on the table and laying her chin on them.
Alistair, busy making more coffee on the other side of the counter, gave a little chuckle. “I’m sure you could convince someone to give the oven a go. Just don’t whatever comes out to be edible.”
It was a challenge Pierce was prepared to take up for the object of his affections, rolling his sleeves up to his elbows. “How badly can you really screw up eggs?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Alistair laughed, and then stopped as he was struck by the most powerful sense of déjà vu. He had no idea of what at first, only that it inexplicably felt like people were moving around behind the counter with him. Then came the distant clang of kitchenware, packages shuffling, voices arguing, and he realized he was seeing Courtland’s premonition firsthand, Vanessa and Sebastien nearly grown, milling around him in their school uniforms. The former was scraping colorful lumps out of a pan and trying to put them on a plate so that they at least somewhat looked like an omelet, the latter inspecting discarded eggshells that had crumbled to pieces, suspicious that some of the pieces might have ended up in the pan.
And then Alistair was confused, because Courtland had seen them take a tray and head off to Cian’s room. But now they stayed, Vanessa taking two plates of her creation and turning towards the counter, putting one in front of Adair and the other in front of Ciel. Sebastien had a plate in his hands too, looking down at it with a carefully neutral face, trying to will himself to take a bite. Adair’s eyes were wide, frightened, his fork prodding suspiciously at the mess of eggs and toppings.
It’s only eggs, how bad can it be? she demanded, urging them to try it before she took Cian his plate.
It’s, umm… Sebastien, ever-faithful, took the plunge, taking a cautious bite. His face stiffened, teeth moving very slowly and then swallowing long before it was properly chewed. It’s interesting.
Adair, determined not to offend the love of his life, had likewise taken a bite but been unable to stop himself from spitting it back out when an eggshell had crunched in his teeth, mixing with the slime of egg that had not been cooked all the way. Only Ciel, as blank-faced as ever, was eating very normally, as if nothing was amiss. Shell, you’re making us look bad, the boy hissed, cutting him a venomous gaze with his mismatched eyes. But Ciel shrugged once, still eating.
The entire image flashed very suddenly, Vanessa and Sebastien heading up the stairs with Cian’s tray, Adair laughing to himself at the kitchen table, and Ciel nowhere in sight. And then it went back again, the boys at the counter, the twins behind it, and Alistair realized he was looking at one of those endless possibilities Antha was always warning about. Premonitions showed the most prominent possibilities of the future; this one was unsettled, for whatever reason, it was equally likely that it could go either way. But where was Ciel? He was terribly concerned about that without perfectly knowing why. If Ciel was in one version of the scene and not in the other, didn’t that mean that the difference was his existence? How was something like a boy’s life so in question?
In the Ciel-version of the premonition, Vanessa gave a big, self-satisfied smile, prancing around the counter so that her curly pigtails flounced around her shoulders, the red ribbons in her hair fluttering, and threw her arms dramatically around Ciel’s neck, showering him with affectionate kisses. And you two said it wouldn’t be edible, she scoffed, pulling Ciel tight to her chest with her arms around him and laying her head over his, lovingly petting his multi-colored curls. And then Alistair’s heart stopped, her next, endlessly affectionate words ringing sharply in his ears. I disown both of you. All I need is my darling baby brother.
Back in the present, Alistair’s coffee cup fell from his fingers and shattered on the tiles. He hardly noticed, he was staring into nothing, mouth agape, heart pounding in horror while the cousins exclaimed their shock, the twins beginning to fuss. He didn’t notice any of it. He turned in a daze, murmuring some half-hearted apology and excusing himself, slipping into the hallway and running to the back of the house, slipping noiselessly into the back bathroom and then bounding up the stairs with a little box in his hands, all the way to Antha and Cian’s room where he banged once on the bathroom door and then threw it open. Antha, having just gotten to her feet, looked at him, thoroughly startled. She had almost gotten a word out when he ran up to her, frantically shoving the little box in her hands. “Take it,” he said, as direly as if his life depended on it.
“Airi, what---”
“Take it,” he repeated desperately, eyes wild and intense, pressing the pregnancy test more firmly into her hands, “Take it now.”  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn stared at the cut-crystal glass as Michael closed his hands around it. He looked like he was trying to make up his mind about something. Then, after a moment, he turned red-rimmed eyes up at the older man, blinked, and swiftly—without giving him time to back away—threw his arms around Michael in an awkward embrace. It was possibly the shortest hug that anyone had ever been forced into. Although it lasted only an instant, Rynn backed away like he’d been caught in the middle of an illicit liaison, his pale cheeks bright. Before he turned to enter the door, Michael’s reassuring hand on his spine—he straightened, bit his lip briefly, and gave the quiet acknowledgement for all that the other had done here.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t look to see Michael’s expression, afraid that if he paused for even a moment, his nerve would break. Instead, he focused his attention on the slim figure that was still draped across the tiled floor within, and stepped through.
The glass seemed to take an eternity to fill. For a long moment, there was only the agreeable interlude of water trickling from the faucet, before Rynn knelt next to Antha and handed over the drink.
He took a deep breath, trying to think of the words to start off with, but he didn’t have to. Antha spoke first, as casually as though the past fifteen minutes hadn’t occurred at all.
That was part of her charm, Rynn supposed. Sitting here with her, in the small room—small for Mayfair standards, at least—it was hard to remember why, only minutes before, he’d been ready to rip the hair out of her scalp. Thinking of his own emotional upheaval, Rynn could only feel grateful—in a shameful, small kind of way—that Michael had been there to intercede. He didn’t know what stupid things he might have said, or done, in the heat of the moment, and he didn’t want to imagine.
When she rested her hand on his shoulder, surprisingly, the boy didn’t tense, as he was so often wont to do at the slightest touch. The air came out of him in a sigh that fluttered his hair away from his face, and he met Antha’s eyes without reserve, his own hazel gaze taking in her disheveled state.
He had a feeling that she was being, in this rare instance, utterly unguarded with him, in a way that he hadn’t recognized since—well, since he’d been caught up alongside the girl, within her own dream of Nero.
He let her speak until the word petered out of her, certain that, if he interrupted, he’d break whatever spell of truce that had been cast by Michael before he entered the room.
But when she asked—a question that was more a demand than anything, but ended with ‘you know?’, and that was all the excuse Rynn needed—his reply was a wan little smile, a hmph that bore the faintest resemblance to a laugh. “I know. You have all the right in the world to be.”
Taking the empty glass from her hand, Rynn stood to place it on the counter, and allowed his height to provide the easy counter-support that her weight demanded. When she was on his feet once more, well, that’s when things became difficult again. Now it was his turn to fill up the silence.
He’d already apologized. It made no sense repeat it, over and over again. But what she’d said before had to be addressed.
“It’s not that I think of you as my enemy, Antha. Not you, or anyone else in this house. It’s true, I didn’t like it here at first. I was angry—more at myself than any of the rest of you, really. If I’d been in your situation, I can’t say that I would have acted any differently than you did, when we met.” No, that wasn’t true. He couldn’t help but chuckle, humorlessly, as he admitted: “Well, I might have tried to kill you. I didn’t know you at the time. You’re right about me. I don’t think things through, and—for most of my life, all I did think about was myself, my own concerns, what I wanted. The rest of the world was just—puppets.” He paused, chewed on his lower lip. Then, “I’m trying to change. I want to—not just for myself, but for Cian, Liesse, Sebastien and Vanessa, Michael, and all the cousins, all the rest of them, and the kindness you’ve shown me, and—for you, I suppose. I owe it to you to be better, not to be just— such a downer, a freeloading dredge…The spoiled brat you all think I am, and I’ll admit it, now, I was.”
I thought I was all grown up, before. I thought I had it figured out, what it means to be an ‘adult’. In reality, I’ve got a long way to go. But I’m not going to keep living like this. I won’t just—throw away everything that you’ve given to me, like it’s nothing. I don’t think I could anymore, really, not if I wanted to live with myself.”
Her hand still rested on the back of his head; without thinking, he reached up, curling his fingers around her wrist gently, just enough to hold her in place.
“I’ll admit, there was a moment there, when you were—telling me what you really think of me, and all I wanted to do was fling an ashtray at your head and storm off back to Llyr’s Court, to sulk like a little kid. It would have been the stupidest thing I could have done, I think, but that’s how I am—when I’m roused—stupid.It’s hard to control myself, these days, because you’re right about something else, too. I’m not sure when it happened, but I care, now. And it was easy to be restrained, and logical, and cold, when I didn’t. I thought that was part of being grown up, too.”
Rynn took a deep breath, glancing sideways so as not to meet her eyes. He watched their reflection in the mirror for a while; Antha’s thin arm extended to him, the mass of curls that did not quite hide her expression. “I still have a ways to go, and I can’t promise that it’ll happen overnight. But I’d really be an idiot to stop now. So—I know an apology isn’t going to fix this, but I hope you can accept, at least, a guarantee that it won’t happen again.”
There it was—the crack in his mask, the serious expression broken by the wry, crooked little smile that it looked like he had learned from Cian. “I messed up in Llyr’s Court. But if what’s happened here, for Cian, or Liesse, if that’s proof of anything, it’s that everyone gets a second chance. I don’t want to waste mine.”

Downstairs, Dorian found himself rather put out to no longer be the center of attention. As nonchalantly as he played off the events of the past months, someone should have been concerned for his sake. Folks didn’t get kidnapped by fairies every day, for chrissakes.
Would serve them all right if a changeling showed up on their doorstep, after all.
Refusing to give them the satisfaction of seeing him pout, however, the young Adonis joined the others in the kitchen. Cian was (wisely) doing his part by handing out aprons to the enterprising culinary students, while Liesse was forced to watch (with an expression alternating between amusement and fearful anticipation) the endeavors of the prospective chefs, jiggling Vanessa all the while.
Someone had already cracked an egg on the floor in the scuffle that had occurred during the process of obtaining their respective ingredients. Dorian was the first to absent-mindedly step in it, responding with a gut-wrenching eurrgh. “Gods—dammit—Look, can’t we just order pizza or something? We’ll put sausage on it. That’s a breakfast food. This is already a ruinous mess—”
Whirling around, Cian pointed a threatening spatula at the other. “You’re missing the point, entirely. It has to be home-made. With love. And secret ingredients.”
Liesse, wrinkling her nose, added: “And who eats pizza for breakfast, anyways?”
Cian tried not to look at her. His expression would have given everything away. His gaze seemed to indicate that he’d noticed something very interesting on the ceiling. “Well…sometimes, when you’ve been up ’til practically dawn, and ordered pizza to sober up but there’s still some left—or if the hotel room doesn’t have a kitchen…I mean…”
Liesse tilted her head quizzically. Cian quickly finished with a, “Nevermind.”
Noticing that the egg yolk had mysteriously made its way onto the hem of his dressing gown, Dorian groaned again. “Look, I was going to offer to help, but it’s clear that this is going to be a complete fiasco and I’d like to be entirely above suspicion when the authorities come to investigate the poisoning—”
He had more to say, but his audience was distracted immediately by the sound of breaking ceramics. “See? A total mess.” Dorian announced, triumphantly. Nobody was paying attention, and Dorian’s mood immediately fell. Someone as pretty as he was shouldn’t have to fight for attention, ever.
Liesse’s bundle began to squirm, even as she did her best to contain, with no small effort, the baby’s struggling limbs. “Alistair? What’s the matter?”
He didn’t seem to hear her; or if he did, something far more dire seemed to demand his immediate attention. Escaping from the room, the boy left the mob to stare after him in perplexed concern.
Trading Liesse a roll of paper towels for his child, Cian began the process of soothing the fretful infant, frowning after his brother-in-law’s route of exit. He’d never seen Alistair flustered like that.
He’d have wondered what had gotten into the boy, but the answer was obvious as soon as he thought about it. Dorian seemed to be on the same train of thought. Snagging a paper towel and rubbing down his foot quickly, the man glanced around the kitchen with poorly-disguised cheerfulness. “Well. Since it looks like you’re all busy cooking, perhaps I’ll go check up on Antha. Poor thing’s had a rough morning. Cian, play daddy for the moment, we’ll let you know when it’s safe for the children.” It was less the order than it was Dorian’s presumptuous tone which elicited an indignant “—Hey—“ from the ‘daddy’ in question, but it fell on deaf ears. Sailing out of the kitchen (the yolk on his robe leaving a trail of yellow dribble behind him) Dorian sped out into the hall and began navigating towards Antha’s bedroom.
With a sigh, Cian glanced around the kitchen, still patting Vanessa’s blanketed back as he held her against his shoulder. “Is someone going to intercept him, or should we just wait to interrupt until we hear screaming again?”

Upstairs, Rynn found the moment with Antha abruptly disturbed by a wild-eyed Alistair.
Well, perhaps ‘wild’ wasn’t the right way to describe it. He couldn’t tell whether it was excitement or fear in the eyes of Antha’s brother, but whatever it was, by the way he thrust the little package at his sister, it was urgent.
Then Rynn noticed the label on the box, and his own eyes grew round. “Oh. Um. Er. I’ll—er—I’ll give you a moment.”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Antha didn’t move for several moments. She didn’t speak. She just stared at the little box, eyes wide as saucers, lips parted like she was just plum out of words. And then she looked at Alistair, and a moment passed between them, his premonition passing into her head. He gave it to Rynn too, lest the other boy think he was crazy for the sudden idea. And then, still without a word, Alistair took Rynn by the shoulder and went back into the bedroom, the bathroom door closing behind them, and locked the door to the hallway against anyone who came to see what the fuss was all about.
Alistair was muttering to himself for the first minute, first vocalizing his thought that he should sit down, then ordering Rynn to sit, then ordering them both to stand again, turning and pacing across the floor. He was adamant that Rynn couldn’t leave, and that no one else could be allowed to come in.
At two minutes he threw the bathroom door back open, not the slightest bit surprised to find Antha pacing anxiously back and forth across the tiles, the test developing by the sink. “What kind of stupid test did Tori get that takes three minutes,” she muttered irritably, stopping and glancing over at it.
“You can’t tell yourself?” Alistair asked quietly, making vague gestures at her abdomen, “You can’t look down in the cells and see if it’s there or not?”
“Vanessa and Sebastien were born a month ago, so if I am pregnant again, it would be only three weeks along. Even if I could positively identify fetal cells, I’d be looking for a handful of them in a goddamned ocean of blood and tissue cells.” She said that, but…
Antha knew. She’d known the moment her twin had put the possibility out there. She’d never even considered the possibility of it before, it had never occurred to her, but she was certain of it now. Alistair was no less certain, for different reasons. Ciel had Antha’s eyes, rendered in blue like a crystalline sky. He had bits and pieces of her fitted vaguely in his pretty face, his long neck and slender fingers. Courtland had noticed it, that quiet familiarity, but hadn’t been able to place it. But Alistair had, the boy was made of Antha and Cian, he had their elements.
Antha was still nervously pacing, Alistair watching her silently, when her phone chimed on the counter and she turned on her heel like a spinning top, darting over to the counter to look down at the test, and gave a shuddering breath of, “For the love of all that is holy, dear god, no... ”
Alistair took his answer from that, as surely as if he’d seen the little blue plus sign himself, turning and taking Antha’s place pacing across the floor, fingers pressed together in thought. His sister turned to look at him, eyes big and astonished, muttering quietly as soon as the words came to her mind, “It can’t be done. I know I said that with Vanessa and Sebastien, but this time it really can’t. It took three months with them and the only way we all survived was sheer dumb luck. And I couldn’t do it again, not so soon, I haven’t even recovered from the last time. And Nero---he could be here in a week. He could be here tomorrow, for all we know. There is really, truly not enough time.”
“There’s a way,” Alistair said certainly, eyes racing with his thoughts, “There has to be. He wouldn’t have made it into any kind of premonition if there wasn’t. We just have to find it. Now let’s think about this rationally---” He wheeled around, facing his sister, putting up his hands half motioning towards her and said seriously, thinking out loud, “God wants this baby to live, Evie. Not in that stupid pro-life way, I mean he specifically wants this baby to live. It’s the only way to explain it. Courtland had a premonition about him, a very specific one, and then I had two very specific premonitions about him. I thought the first one was about Sebastien, or Rynn in a way, but I realize now it was about Ciel. Some higher power wanted us to figure it out in time to save him.” He began to pace again as he spoke, for about five seconds, before turning back and looking intently at Antha, dead serious. “This kid is chosen by the goddamn gods, Evie, we’re going to find a way to save him.”
“I don’t know why you’re trying to convince me, like I’m going to argue with you for a moment,” Antha murmured, fingers trembling against her stomach, “I just have no idea how it’s possible. I looked and looked when I first got pregnant, and I only found the one solution. If that won’t work this time---”
“Antha.” Alistair went up to her, taking up both of her hands and squeezing them in his, like a prayer. “Look at me. We are going to find a way. You have power second only to the gods and an entire hospital at your disposal. You’re a scientist---even better, you’re a mad scientist, just this side of completely out of control. You are goddamned Victor Frankenstein with unlimited access to electricity. This is happening. We’re going to find a way.”
Shaking her hands free of him, nodding in agreement---acquiescence, really, because she was still too stunned to think about it as seriously as he was---a thought seemed to occur to the girl. She went to the door, intently inspecting the room, making sure no one was listening at the door, and then rounded raptly on Rynn. “You cannot tell a soul about this,” she said, as deadly serious as she had ever been, “Really Rynn, on your life, you cannot tell a single soul. Not even Liesse, and especially not Cian. In the very likely event that nothing works, no one can ever know about this. They’re already losing me, I can’t add Ciel to that. I absolutely cannot let Cian find out that his child died with me.” She froze, looking for a moment like she was going to be sick again. Instead she turned, going to rifle around in one of the drawers, muttering to herself, “I need a cigarette.”
“Evie!”
“I am practically made out of vampire blood, Airi,” she hissed, hastily moving the pack behind her back and out of reach as he grabbed for it, “I could smoke an entire bag of crystal meth right now and it would burn up in my blood before it ever reached him, now just let me goddamn have this. ”
He surrendered in the end, begrudgingly, watching her as she sat on the edge of the tub and pushed open one of the full-length windows. Her fingers were still trembling as she struck the lighter, the other hand grasping ineptly at the butterfly comb in her hair, letting her heavy curls tumble loose again. He just watched for a moment, lost in thought, idly staring at those glossy tendrils, red as blood, stirring in the breeze. And then, as if it had just struck him as terribly odd, asked, “Why do you have cigarettes stashed in your bathroom cabinet?”
Her eyes flickered in his direction, putting the cigarette briefly to her lips before tapping the tub beside her. “Sometimes, with the things Cian and I do in here, there just needs to be cigarettes in reaching distance.”
Alistair sighed, rolling his eyes at his sister and muttering, “How did none of us ever think of this as a possibility? It’s a slow day if you and Cian only do it twice, of course you got knocked right back up.”
Unexpectedly, briefly delirious with relief to have the dark cloud of dread lifted, Antha laughed. “Shut up and be glad it’s only one this time. We’re twins, our brothers are twins, Vanessa and Sebastien are twins, their aunt and uncle are twins…at some point, someone in this line is going to end up with triplets, or worse. Just thank your lucky stars Ciel comes alone.” That brought out a low breath of revelation from her, looking down at her stomach as her hand automatically laid across it. “I named you for your eyes, didn’t I?” she whispered, hardly aware she was making a sound, “Your eyes and Oncle Louis. Ciel was his middle name.”
Meanwhile, Alistair was biting his lip, deep in thought, staring at her. “What about the way you grew me out? Reaching in and forcing the cells to rapidly multiply. We could at least---”
But Antha was already shaking her head. “You were already fully formed, and Ciel is all stem cells. I can’t assign stem cells, no one can, they have to do it themselves. If I went in and multiplied them, he’d be…well, nothing. Just a six-pound mass of blank cells.”
“What about Marguerite?” he tried next, without missing a beat, “The method you used for Vanessa and Sebastien, you got it from her, right? Maybe she has something else.”
“Little bits and pieces of ideas,” Antha answered, “I’ve already heard it all and there might be something in it, but it would take forever to make something of it and we have precisely no time. Whatever we’re going to do, it needs to be done in the next few days.”
It was then, while Alistair was regrouping, coming up with another plan, that a fourth figure appeared in the room. It was barely even recognizable as Marguerite, who almost exclusively showed herself as she had died, a twisted and filthy old hag. But this version of her, before madness had claimed her utterly, was young and pretty and clean, in corset and petticoats, a lace shawl threaded through her arms, her raven hair like Spanish moss down her back. “Your mother came to me about this once,” she purred thoughtfully, drifting like a proper ghost across the room, “Didn’t I ever tell you that?”
Antha was on her feet immediately, eyes narrowed threateningly. “No, you absolutely did not.”
“Oh yes,” the woman said, in a lilting melody, before her true and innate madness manifested itself in the following giggle that bubbled from her lips, “For you two. She knew she was going to die, poor, pretty Mary Beth. But she didn’t know when.” She walked as she spoke, truly now rather than floating, lifting her silken skirts away from her pale, bare feet. “Laurent gave her such a talking-to. She couldn’t just simply die, without producing an heir.” The ghost stilled, turning dark-lashed eyes at the twins that were poisonously green, a sickly color, bearing the kind of quiet, unhinged innocence of someone who had been mad since the day they were born. “She had the same sort of idea as you, when she was pregnant with you. But she didn’t have your magic. She was such a pitiful excuse for a witch, it made me absolutely ill. I would’ve smothered her in her cradle if our bloodlines hadn’t depended on her.”
“Grandmère!” Antha hissed sharply, bringing the ghost back around to the point.
“Hm? Ah, bien, that’s right. She asked if I had devised some method of keeping fetuses alive outside of the womb, or transferring them, or something to that effect. Which was a ridiculous idea, and I told her so. She was always such a very stupid little girl. I told Eden she should have had another daughter, we were doomed if we were left in Mary Beth’s hands.”
“Grandmère!”
“Ah, oui, oui, the point. Whatever was I saying? Oh yes.” He hands fluttered inexplicably in the air, the crazed ghost giving an airy laugh of amusement while Alistair and Antha stood exasperated. It was hard enough just trying to listen to Marguerite, getting information out of her was an absolute nightmare. “You know I kept all of my notes in my laboratory. I showed her where they were and she took the relevant ones.”
“Took them where, exactly…?”
“To her decrepit manor in the swamp, of course. I never saw her again after that, but Petyr---sweet Petyr, I see him sometimes in the aether. You should really bring his bones back here, Antha Evelyn, to be with us.”
“Marguerite, I swear to god, I will exorcise you out of this house so fast---”
“Hm? Oh yes, the notes. Petyr says she was working on something, but she kept it all hidden away. That dour Swedish professor of hers, the one she left the Talamascan for, she thought he’d run off if he knew she was going to die. Petyr seemed to think he was always one good opportunity away from bolting as it was, he despised Mary Beth and he really despised magic.”
But the twins weren’t paying attention anymore. They had turned towards each other and were thinking aloud between themselves. “So it has to be hidden somewhere in that house---”
“---somewhere we’ve never thought to look, or been able to---”
“---she didn’t have the magic to hide it that way, it has to just be tucked away somewhere---”
“---we might actually have to tear up the very floorboards if we want to find it---”
So Marguerite, as if she’d forgotten the entire point of her presence altogether, turned instead to Rynn with her sharp, mad grin in her pale, pretty face, touching her icy ghost fingers to his cheek. “What a pretty thing Antha Evelyn has found…ahh, and you have the grave all about you. It’s intoxicating. Tell me, mon petite, when you die, are you opposed to dissection?”
“Grandmère!”Antha groaned, stepping forward and casting her hands through the ghost like she could clear her away the same as she could smoke, “No one is dissecting Rynn, leave him be.” The ghost did vanish then, just like smoke, and Antha sighed and just looked at Rynn, at a loss.
And then, quietly, she held up her hand between them, her fingers curled except for the pinky, extended out towards him. “Promise me, Rynn. Promise you won’t tell anyone.” No threats this time, no dagger and no blood oaths. Just that one little finger held out towards him and her terribly earnest eyes.  

[Okimiyage]

While Alistair paced, Rynn stood as stiff and still as a mannequin, staring at the door. It was partially so that he didn’t have to look at the other boy. He still hadn’t forgotten Alistair’s joke downstairs—that was all it was, after all, Rynn had already convinced himself of this—but he wasn’t quite sure how to play it off, now. Enduring a joke at his own expense, even a good-natured one, had never been one of Rynn’s strong suits. Especially not one like…that.
Still, Alistair seemed too distracted to bring it up, and Rynn would have been the first to actively encourage a change of topic if he had. The results of Antha’s test were miles more important than a bit of teenage sexual angst, after all.
Still, this was…private, wasn’t it? He shouldn’t be here. This was Cian’s place to stand, reassuring her in his role of confident husband and father. It was that thought that made Rynn hang back, uncomfortably, once the bathroom door opened again and Alistair rushed in. Hovering at the threshold, Rynn’s brow creased at the frantic exchange between the twins. He wasn’t surprised by the test—if the ordinarily collected Alistair had been panicked enough to burst on the two of them like he had, the premonition must’ve hit the boy like a damn brick—but he was surprised by their reaction.
Seeing Antha flustered was…unnerving, to say the least. With Alistair thrown into the mix, it was downright terrifying. Rynn had absolutely no question in his mind as to why Antha didn’t want the rest of the household knowing: he could just imagine the cousins stampeding through the city like a herd of spooked cattle…
So when Antha rounded on him, demanding his silence, she heard no objections. Raising both hands to his chest, palm-out, the boy backed up a step. “Hey, hey, hey. Remember, it was only a second ago that you decided you weren’t mad at me anymore. I’m not eager to piss you off again.” Pausing, Rynn coughed to clear his voice of its jovial tone. The light-hearted approach didn’t seem to be working in this situation. “You have my solemn oath. I won’t breathe a word of it.”
He bit his lip briefly, and and then, with a sharp sigh, threw in his two cents. “Even if I disagree with your decision not to inform Cian. He’s supposed to be your partner, Antha, he’s not as fragile as you think, but it’ll just trouble everyone in the house if you disappear without so much as an excuse—”
Nobody was listening. Antha was as absorbed in her child as if the developing fetus was a novel, and Rynn could practically hear the gears grinding behind Alistair’s thoughtful expression. The Calais scion harrumphed with irritation.
“Antha, even if you did find a way to speed up the process, you obviously can’t grow the child in your own body. You said it yourself, you’ve barely recovered from the twins.” He didn’t need to say the rest of what he was thinking; Antha already knew what she was risking. If she tried, and failed, she wouldn’t just be killing the baby. There was a very real possibility that she could die in the process; even if she didn’t, she’d be severely weakened. All of their efforts would simply result in making Nero’s job that much easier.
But telling her that wouldn’t make her change her mind. Ciel was nothing more than a cluster of cells at this moment, but already it was plain that she was head over heels for him.
Watching her smoke, Rynn nearly missed the formation of their fourth conspirator. There was little to herald Marguerite’s appearance; a thin, faint whine like a bow sliding across a single violin string, and then Rynn caught sight of a smoky wisp of black hair out of the corner of his eye.
Ah, one of the elder Mayfairs. He could only surmise it was the ‘Marguerite’ that Alistair had spoken of; who else would appear at the mention of that name as if summoned?
The prettiness of her features, her long hair and shapely limbs, would have ordinarily marked her as a great beauty for her time. She glided across the floor as smoothly as a ballroom dancer, making her small feet evident beneath her lifted skirts. Rynn was simultaneously charmed and repulsed. He’d met many of the ancestors in his lifetime, but few had retained such personality. Most seemed content to speak only as part of the ever-singing night choir, robed and masked as was customary. Occasionally, when Rynn had met them in isolation, traces of their old personalities would surface in the forms of riddles or scraps of poetry. It could be said that some of them, without speaking a single word, exuded an aura of gentility, whereas others—such as Marguerite, for all of her prettiness—most definitely did not. It was something in the eyes; too bright, too large, darting around at each in turn as if she hoped to arouse some dramatic display of passion from her prospective audience. No wonder she had kept a laboratory in life. Rynn couldn’t help but think that every phrase she uttered was calculated to frustrate her subjects.
He was half-surprised when she made him the subject of her attention, however. Her touch prompted the only response Rynn could imagine that she had not expected: a faint, winsome smile. And an answer, in a flash of the ceremony which was used to anchor every Calais spirit to their ancestral home—a glimpse of the heart as it was carved from a cadaver, lifted from the chest to shine dimly in the flickering circle of candlelight. Every Calais was immortalized by ‘dissection’, as Marguerite had crudely called it. It was considered a right, if not an honor, that was only revoked by the grossest of misconduct.
When she vanished, Rynn turned the winsome smile on Antha with a guilty shrug. “Sorry. I shouldn’t encourage her, should I?”
Linking their fingers together, he leaned in and kissed the back of her knuckle, like a knight might kiss the hand of his queen. “And like I said, don’t worry. It’s a promise.”
Lifting his head, he jerked his head to the side, indicating the space where Marguerite had been. “If anyone, it’s her you might do better to worry about.”
Straightening, and releasing Antha's little finger from his hook around it, Rynn glanced towards the fluttering white curtains that framed the window. "So, this swamp house--when are we going, then?" It didn't need to be mentioned that Rynn was damned if he was going to allow Antha and Alistair to go romping off on a quest for ghostly artifacts without him, especially since he already had been granted reprieve from his academic duties for the day.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Antha gave a brief sigh of something like relief when their fingers were locked, leaning her forehead against Rynn’s. And then, as if something had caught her attention, opened and narrowed her eyes, suddenly studying him like she had never looked at him properly before. “You’re taller than me…” she murmured, followed by the faintest wisp of a laugh, “You’ve grown. You were the same height as me when we met.” Teenage boys did that, she supposed. But it was so strange, realizing suddenly that she had to look up to Rynn, even just a little.
This was going to make it terribly hard to call him a child anymore, even when he deserved it.
Off to the side, as Antha and Rynn swore pinky promises like children, cross your heart and hope to die, Alistair was pacing again, thinking. “We have to take him out of you, that’s all there is to it,” he was murmuring, ostensibly to Antha, turning and narrowing his gaze at her, “What do you think, Evie? What are his chances removed from you?”
“Best case scenario?” Her eyebrows knitted, eyes flickering darkly as she ran through all the scenarios in her mind, rapidly totaling up numbers. “Say our mother found…something, anything, to help the process along. In that case, the best possible chance would probably be around fifty percent. But realistically? Putting him in an incubator during the first trimester, setting Vittorio and the team of literal witch doctors I brought in to work on him, would set his chance of survival at around fifteen percent. As far as a transplant, it’s never been done. As far as science is concerned, it can’t be done. Once the embryo attaches, taking it away from the mother is nearly instant death. Theoretically---” She said the word very pointedly, cutting her eyes at Alistair as she emphasized it, before he got too carried away. “---if there was some way of removing an embryo from the placenta without damaging it, and a surrogate was found of very particular health similar to the first mother’s, who was within a few days of the same gestation period, the embryos could be switched out. Theoretically. And even then, the chances of carrying the baby to term would be something like seven or eight percent.”
“So…” His mind was still working furiously, still grasping desperately at the vaguest notion.
“So even if we pull a miracle out of thin air, his chances are terribly slim. It’s better than dying with me, but…well, you can understand why I wouldn’t want everyone else to know. Why give them something only to have it snatched away before it’s ever in their hands? That’s just needless mourning heaped onto what I imagine will be considerable grief as it is. And if he does survive, it will be a pleasant surprise. I’ll be six to eight months in my grave by then, I think everyone will be ready for some good news about then.”
“Evie, I wish you wouldn’t talk that way,” Alistair murmured, flashing her dark eyes.
“Pretending it isn’t going to happen won’t stop it, Airi,” the girl sighed in response, “I’ll be dead before these next three weeks are up, the eve of our twentieth birthday. That’s all there is to it. I’ve made out my will, I’ve split up my empire…though, I suppose I’ll have to revise my will now. Poor Lawrence won’t know what to make of it.” And then, as if the thought had just struck her, eyes round and an amused lilt to her voice, asked, “In all good conscience, can I really leave Cian with three infants all under a year old? They’ll run him absolutely ragged, the poor darling.” But she sighed and shrugged as if there was no help for it, crossing her arms and turning, pacing again across the floor as she tried to put her mind back to the matter at hand.
But it was no use…her mind was on Ciel. Such a terribly, terribly pretty child, with the brightest, bluest eyes. He didn’t seem like much trouble, with his soft demeanor and very few words. But, well, he was going to be a little rockstar, wasn’t he? No, he was going to be endless trouble for Cian, no matter how well-behaved he was. Pretty musicians were always trouble.
“We’re supposed to go to Satis House this evening anyways,” she said at length, her hand sweeping back through her hair, “It’s still early, we’ll wait a couple of hours. The last thing I want is goddamned questions.” With that, she turned and left again, lost in thought, and had hardly gotten out the door before she ran headlong into Dorian with a minor shriek of surprise. “Mon dieu, darling, you scared the living daylights out of me,” she sighed, lashing the back of her hand against his shoulder, “What are you doing lurking around in the hallway?” She didn’t wait for an answer, her ears instead pricking on a low, garbled whine that threatened to turn into tears, and ran without question towards the kitchen.
Alistair, meanwhile, had hung behind while she wandered out in a daze, catching Rynn by his sleeve and cocking his head. He had his usual terribly earnest eyes, completely unguarded. “I wasn’t joking, by the way,” he said, casually enough. And then his eyes narrowed, with their earlier particular smolder that he and Antha had in common, “Somehow, someday, I’m going to seduce you. You don’t have to know how to react to it---you don’t have to react at all if you don’t want to---you just need to know that it’s going to happen.” He flashed his usual sugary sweet smile, as innocent and charming as could be. “I’m not one of the cousins, I’m not going to ambush you in a dark corner one night. So you can relax.” Chuckling to himself, he pressed a chaste kiss to Rynn’s cheek and followed after Antha, just in time to see her vanish down the stairs. “Dorian, you have egg on you,” he commented, pointing at the hem of his robe, “Very unusual. I hardly dare to ask.” Though, by the gleam in his eye and the tone of his voice, the actual question was clear. Did he dare to ask what his cousin had overheard?

Downstairs meanwhile, the moment Dorian left, Armand had turned to his cousins and thrown his hands on the table, announcing direly, “Something’s got to give. We can’t have two of them in the house. One royal brat I can handle, I expect it, but two of them is unacceptable. Neither of them is going to change, Dorian is Antha’s little golden boy and Rynn is, well, Rynn.” He took one deep breath, letting it out again in a heavy sigh, and continued as if he’d just made up his mind, he was resigned to his decision, unwavering. “Alright, we’re going to have to kill one of them. It’s the only way we’re going to keep our sanity. What do you say, should we make them draw straws?”
“No one is getting sacrificed by lottery,” Michael said, strolling back into the room already sighing at the conversation, “Or any other means, for what it’s worth.” While Armand sulked at his idea being shot down, Michael stepped behind the counter and very nearly broke his neck, slipping on spilled egg. “Dear lord,” he groaned, shaking his head, “You spoiled rich children. Alright, get out.” He shooed them, pointing firmly at the table, “Get away from the appliances. I can make up something, just get away from the stove.” And then, ruefully as he gathered up the loose unbroken eggs, retrieving a skillet and setting it on the stove, “This is my fault, really. I neglected to teach any of you any survival skills. If we went broke tomorrow, you would all die of starvation.”
“How’s Evie?” Malakai asked meanwhile, as soon as his father had fallen quiet for even a moment.
“Oh.” The man chuckled lightly, giving a dismissive gesture of his hand. “Poor child, she’s so tired. But she’ll be alright. Skin like iron, that girl.”
“I meant---”
But Antha’s steps were already sounding on the stairs, just as Sebastien started to fuss, and everyone present fell silent, clamming up until they could suss out her mood. “Oh no, hush, precious,” she murmured to the baby, bouncing him on her shoulder and running a gentle hand on his back, “It’s alright, mommy’s back.” His tone fell, but the hiccupping and whining did not, threatening to burst back into a fit at any moment. “Alright, let’s see, where were we?” she murmured to him, eyes rolling back as she tried to think.
Malakai, still groggy and rubbing his eyes, muttered the low reminder, “Uncle James.”
“Ah, that’s right.” Taking the warmed bottle that Michael handed her, the other going to Cian for Vanessa, Antha settled her son in her arms, his eyes lighting up at the sight of food, arms waving wildly in anticipation. “So your great-great-great grandfather James fell in love with his childhood friend, George Monohan. They weren’t even supposed to be friends, because George was of very low class, but they’d been inseparable for over a decade. So when James confessed his love, George distanced himself and James spiraled out of control.” The other Mayfairs all fell quiet, listening intently to the soft lilt of Antha’s voice and the low sizzle of Michael’s cooking in the background. “After a little while, George admitted that he loved James too, but the family that had taken him and his mother under their patronage had arranged his marriage to their daughter, so there was no way they could be together, even if it wasn’t totally socially unacceptable. This was the turn of the century, mind you. Now they did run away together, but it was only for five days. George was far too honorable to break his commitment and let either of them throw their lives away for love. So they were together for five blissful days, and then they came back and never, ever saw each other again. According to the family maid, Uncle James spent the entire night before and morning of George’s wedding furiously opening up fortunes from a Chinese shrine downtown, trying to gather the courage to stop the wedding. But they were all very bad fortunes, so George went through with the wedding as planned and Uncle James stayed at home and drank for the next thirty years straight. So I guess the moral of the story---” She did pause then, thoughtfully pursing her lips as Sebastien blissfully slurped down his breakfast, with only his gaze trained on his mother to prove he knew she was speaking. “---is that if you love someone and they love you and anyone tries to keep you apart for any ridiculous reason, you kidnap them and never, ever let them go.”
At the table, Vittorio sat his cup down with an irritable clatter, demanding brusquely, “Antha, what the hell are you teaching your infant son?”
“It’s hard for a Mayfair out there, Tori,” Antha responded defensively, as if she’d been waiting to be reprimanded, “You have to take what happiness you can when you can. And sometimes, when you love someone, you just have to kidnap them.”
“But Antha,” Armand interrupted, fingers laced and eyes dreamy, “You’re completely forgetting the ending. It’s just a tragedy when you leave out the ending.”
“Oh, that’s right. So when George died, he left behind one grandson, Darcy Monohan. When Darcy was twenty-two, he was commissioned as the architect to renovate the city library, of which Uncle James was the overseer. It was while he was doing that that he met James’s granddaughter, Eden, and they fell madly in love. So that’s the story of how James and George’s grandchildren, your great-grandparents, were married, and how mommy ended up with the wedding ring Uncle James gave to George Monohan for his bride, who in turn gave it to their grandson, who gave it to Eden, who gave it to Julien, and then grandpa Michael stole it and gave it to daddy, who gave it to me. And if you ever want to know all the tragic details, your Uncle Armand wrote an entire book about it.” Another pause, setting the empty bottle aside and wiping a drop of milk from the baby’s smacking lips as she seemed to think the better of it. “But you should never read your Uncle Armand’s books, they’re all gratuitous smut.”
“Well at least that’s an appropriate lesson,” Vittorio muttered, rolling his eyes.
“Oh, screw all of you,” Armand hissed, crossing his arms and slinking back in his seat, “I’m one of the top romance writers in the world, but do any of you give me any credit? No. It’s not like any of you have done a damn thing in your lives.”
Not quite willing to let that pass, Antha quirked an eyebrow and said, very matter-of-fact, “I built the world’s greatest hospital from scratch, a business empire that makes about a billion dollars annually, and I made two entire living people.”
“Evie’s pretty impressive,” Pierce agreed, nodding and eyeing Armand like he was mad to underestimate her.
“And you’ve got nine years on me, old man.”
Armand just pouted, glaring up at Antha as she tried to lull her son to sleep. “When did you get to be such a know-it-all? You used to be so cute.”
“Armand,” the girl said sharply in warning.
But he smirked tauntingly, turning to Lucy. “Do you know she used to say she was going to marry me when she grew up? She made me take her to school in the morning and she’d hold my hand the whole way, and all the other little girls would wait at the school gate and call me Prince Charming, and Antha would glare at them and tell them I was going to marry her one day. She was so adorable. But then she went and grew up and---ow!” Antha, having handed Sebastien over to Malakai, made a great point of stomping on Armand’s foot and was now glaring threateningly at him, arms crossed. “Well it’s the truth! You were every bit as bad as Belle is with Malakai. No, scratch that, you were worse, because you were always going to get your way, come hell or high water.” Glancing again at Lucy, like he still hadn’t learned his lesson, he added, “I would bring girls over sometimes when Antha first came here, but she scared every last one of them off and no one would date me after that. The last time, I only left her alone with Antha for three minutes and suddenly she was bolting out the door screaming bloody murder, and Antha just came and tugged on my sleeve and demanded a story.”
While Lucy slipped back in her seat, laughing until there were tears in her eyes, Antha narrowed her eyes at her cousin, taunting him in a childish hiss, “I told her you lured girls into the gardening shed and took out their hearts with your bare hands, and I made Marguerite confirm it. I probably could have skipped the first part and just introduced her to the crazed ghost, but I wanted to make sure you’d never get a date again.”
Sighing, Armand turned his gaze on Cian and warned him flatly, “Never try to make your wife jealous. She goes absolutely psycho.”
“Utterly,” Antha agreed, without an ounce of remorse.
“If that ain’t the damned truth.” Courtland entered already snickering to himself, less than half dressed in plaid boxers, his white-blonde curls mussed into a wild cloud, “But let’s be fair here…she’ll go psycho over just about anything.”
“I resent that.”
“Resent it all you want Evie, the truth will set you free.” The boy grinned from ear to ear, leaning against the counter and picking a piece of mushroom out of the container, popping it in his mouth.
“You are in an unusually good mood this morning,” Vittorio commented, eyeing him suspiciously, “I don’t trust it. And I really wish you would put some clothes on, but that’s a different issue.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he responded, with that same wide grin stretched unabashedly across his face, like he had some glorious secret he was keeping all for himself, “The sun’s shining, birds are chirping, there are kittens in the world…”
“Oh my god,” Pierce burst out suddenly, leaning forward and glancing between Courtland and Antha, “She really did it, didn’t she? She’s killed Rynn and left Alistair to hide the body.”
Not surprisingly, he got slapped in the back of the head for that, Antha rolling her eyes at him. “Why on earth would I kill Rynn?”
“But you---!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Pierce. I didn’t even kill him when he was trying to kill me. And why would I kill my own protégé? Honestly, I don’t know where you get these idiotic notions of yours.”
Sitting back in his seat, the boy tried to fight the irritated twitch at the corner of his eye, unable to say anything further.
“By the way, Tori,” Courtland continued, as calmly and cheerfully as before, picking ingredients out of the various containers on the counter as he spoke, “I’m very sorry to steal your thunder and all, but I’m getting married tomorrow.”
The entire kitchen fell silent at that, even Michael turning from the stove with a curiously quirked eyebrow. Jack began ambling in during the silence, but paused and tried to slink away again, only to have his arm seized by Courtland and get dragged back in.
“I’m sorry, when was this decided?” Vittorio demanded, breaking the deathly silence, “Who in the name of god agreed to marry you?” Still grinning cheerily, Courtland threw an arm pointedly around Jack’s shoulders, pulling him close. Simultaneously, Lucy and Pierce burst into laughter, the former falling straight out of her seat and convulsing on the floor, kicking her legs and clutching her stomach. “You have got to be kidding me.” He shook his head, seized by shock. “Julien is going to kill the both of you.”
“Well he’ll have to do it by tomorrow,” Courtland replied without a care in the world, “Because we’re getting married tomorrow. My mind is made up, it would take an act of god or Antha to stop me.”
Holding up a hand for silence, trying to think, Vittorio changed tactics. “Why tomorrow? That’s very sudden.”
But Courtland shrugged, like it was a small matter. “It’s Saturday, the weather’s supposed to be nice, we need the extra time to get the paperwork done before Adair is born, no one will have the time to plan any schemes to stop us…and besides, Antha has to be my best man.”
Cutting her eyes at him, the girl murmured, “How many anatomy classes did you skip, Court?”
“Best woman, then,” he scoffed, rolling his eyes, “Whatever. The point is, I’m not getting married if you’re not going to be the best man-slash-woman. Are you going to take that away from Jackie, Evie? You saw him last night, he was begging me to marry him.”
Eyes going wide, Jack protested, “I was not---”
“Down on his knees, begging me. You can’t take that away from him Evie, it’s just too cruel. He’ll probably die if he can’t marry me.”
“The hell I will!” Jack protested, stomping his foot, “Just try me, Courtland Alois, and see which one of us breaks down first.”
While Jack shuffled around muttering irritably to himself, slamming shut cabinets, Pierce pouted and demanded, “Why aren’t I the best man? Did you even consider your choices here?”
“Ah, Pierce,” Courtland sighed, chuckling condescendingly, “Look, you seem like a great kid and all, but the cool kids are talking here. Maybe one day, if you blow up a few boats with me looking for absinthe, or pick the lock of a holding cell with me, then maybe---maybe---you can be the best man at my third wedding. That’s when I marry a supermodel.”
“You make a lot of those jokes…” Malakai noted in a low murmur, but went ignored.
“But for now,” Courtland concluded, standing beside Antha, “No one else can ever, ever be my best man, because Evie is my bestie.” Not even glancing at each other, their hands simultaneously came up and clapped between them, as easily as if they’d been rehearsing high-fiving blind for years. They could’ve, for all anyone knew, no one would put it past them.
Jack, idly going through the motions of making coffee, reminded Pierce, “You should’ve known better, there’s no coming between Antha and Courtland. Cian and I can’t even do that, you don’t stand a chance.”
“What about you, Jack?” Pierce asked, changing tactics, “Can I be your best man?”
“Maid of honor,” Courtland corrected him, smirking.
Jack only rolled his eyes at his cousin---no, fiancé, strange as it was to even think it. “I was going to ask Lawrence. He is my brother.”
Pierce just pouted further. “You’re already marrying one of your brothers, isn’t that enough?”
“Hey!” Courtland barked sharply, throwing his hands down on the table and leaning threateningly towards Pierce, “Don’t make this weird.”
“You’re getting married,” Antha pointed out, humming thoughtfully, “Was there ever any chance of it not being weird?”
“Alright, pot,” the boy shouted, throwing up his hands, “I get it, I’m black. Whatever.”
But Antha just rolled her eyes, sighing as she dropped gracefully into Cian’s lap, “You’re a dork, that’s what you are.”  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn blinked, then glanced around as if he had just now noticed his improved vantage point.
She was right. It would be a little odd if Rynn hadn’t gained an inch or two in all this time, he supposed, especially with his genetics; his father had seemed an imposing giant when Rynn had known him, towering above his children at 6’4”.
Still, next to the other Mayfair adults, Rynn hadn’t noticed. His growth spurts had been the last thing on his mind, when they were so many other growing pains to occupy it.
Brushing an errant strand of hair behind his ear, Rynn rejoined the twins in Antha’s bedroom.
Antha had always seemed so good at coming up with solutions, but in this case it seemed that she had resigned herself to her fate. Alistair was playing the optimist, but it would have been foolish to refer to it as anything other than playing: a foil to his sister’s despair.
'Despair' gave it the wrong sort of gravity, though, didn't it? Antha was already discussing the amendments to her will as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Witches.
Rynn chewed his lip apprehensively, settling with his back against one of the pillars of the grand canopy bed. “Cian would manage. He has a talent for survival.” Glancing between the two redheads in the room, he added, “But assuming we do find a surrogate solution, and the child survives, adding him to the will now…well, it’ll call attention to the fact that a heir has been born months after the death—or disappearance—of his mother. How will we explain it to the outsiders?”
He didn’t honestly expect any ideas now. They had some time to think about it, after all; and Antha had already opened the door.
Dorian, hearing the key turn, had scuttled back from the door. It wasn’t at all elegant to fall into a room after listening at the lock for so long, after all. Readjusting his dressing gown, he cleared his throat and gave Antha a sunny, guile-less grin as she swept by him, without waiting for his answer. Sidling after her, the smile faded as Dorian cast the open door a long, thoughtful look over his shoulder. He hadn’t heard the whole conversation, but what he had caught gave him pause. Despite adopting the role of an easy-going aesthete, with nothing on his mind beyond his flowers and women and poetry, Dorian was no fool. Something was up, and he was damned if he was going to wait around like the rest of the audience downstairs for it to be revealed.
In the room, the Calais boy’s face had turned as red as a beet. He seemed to have an uncanny aptitude for blushing, these days. It wasn’t enough that Alistair had been out to unsettle him downstairs, but now he had divested Rynn of the only excuse the boy had been able to come up with to avoid taking him seriously. Rynn swallowed hard, clearing his throat of the nervous lump that was stuck in it. “That’s what I’m worried about.” he muttered, as Alistair left his side. If it was one of the cousins, drunk or high, cornering him after one of their infamous binges, Rynn wouldn’t have to take it seriously; just another Mayfair expressing their affinity for the amorous arts. But the way that Alistair looked at him just now made the hairs on the back of Rynn’s neck stand up, and he wasn’t certain why. Rynn hated that kind of uncertainty.
Exiting the bedroom, Rynn glanced down at the small pool of yolk on the threshold. His eyes followed the trail Dorian’s robe had left, as he scampered after Antha, and the boy heaved a sigh. “Honestly.”

Below, Cian was momentarily distracted from the squirmy armful in his care by Armand’s plotting. Glancing up casually, he gave the cousin fair warning. “You know, royal brat though he may be, I think I might be honor-bound to avenge him if anything happens to my little brother. You might want to plan out of ear-shot next time; I might consider forgiving you, but—“ “I’d be your mortal enemy,” Liesse finished, with no small degree of satisfaction. “Cian might not want to beat you up, but I’d make him.” She gave her brother an expectant look. After a moment, the new father sighed and gave a helpless little shrug that indicated, at least to some degree, his consent. “Really, though, I’ve already got enough on my plate. At least for the children’s sake, try to contain yourselves. We wouldn’t want to set a poor example for them would we?”
All thoughts of familial intrigue were dismissed, however, as Michael arrived on the scene, scandalized by the mess that the rest of the family had managed to construct in the span of a few minutes. Cian settled at the table again, and was groping desperately for the coffee that was just out of his reach, when Antha entered the room. (Liesse, with a slightly wicked look in her eyes, took a sip before she handed it his way—a sip that left her nose wrinkling with the bitterness of the beverage. She’d stick to tea for the foreseeable future.)
Cian’s eyes, over the brim of the mug, followed Antha as she crossed to comfort their son. Her recital of the family history was light-hearted enough, but he could tell something was off.
His wife was an excellent actress, yet there was something in the set of her shoulders, and the tension that she held back within them, that was unmistakeable.
Still, he wasn’t possessed of such poor manners (or some would say, insanity) as to press her on the issue at the breakfast table in front of the cousins. “Nothing wrong with a little smut,” he murmured, addressing the topic at hand, and tried to avoid the sharp glance that Liesse, the quintessential romantic, threw his way in response.
“I think their story is charming.”
“One way to look at it,” came the mumbled rebuttal. Then, as she lightly knocked her palm against the back of her head, “—hey. Think of the baby! I need all the brain cells I can hold on to, jeez.”
Releasing one hand from Vanessa, and adjusting her in his lap, Cian rubbed the back of his head and cast his sister a mournful glance.
Liesse had already scooted into place across the table, placing her hands primly in her lap. When she caught him looking, she only raised her head and sniffed dramatically.
Cian slumped back in his chair. “You’re getting as bad as your brother.”
Liesse didn’t seem to consider this an insult. Cian considered acting appalled, briefly, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort just to tease her. The way she’d been carrying on with her new beau (to the delight of the entire household) she was overdue more than her fair share of it.
As Cian smoothed back the curls from his daughter’s forehead, peeping out of her blanket, he affirmed Armands warning with an absent-minded mhmm.
There was something incredibly attractive about ‘psycho’, though, wasn’t there? After you spent enough time with the Mayfairs, it started to seem practically normal. Even Liesse was getting into the groove of things well enough, if the ordinarily demure girl’s impetuous behavior was anything to go by.
Then, out of the blue, a phrase caught his sister’s attention, and her head turned quick as an axe blow, sending the white ribbon in her curls fluttering.
“Married? Tomorrow? You can’t! There’s no time to prepare! Who’s going to notify the florist? You need rings, and—and someone to play the wedding march, and we’ll have to send out invitations, and—and what about a venue?“
Cian was surprised she didn’t knock over the table, such was the energy that Liesse was immediately infused with. He couldn’t help but grin secretively at his daughter—a smile that was, unexpectedly, returned by the infant. There had to be a word for this, the warm fuzzy glow of fatherhood, but Cian didn’t know what it was. All that he knew was that nothing mattered quite so much as the well-being of his children, now; not Courtland’s scandalous wedding plans, nor Rynn’s ill-timed comments of the previous night, only—well—Antha’s current state of mind was difficult to ignore, but there would be time to address that later.

Dorian had taken the time on his way downstairs to change out of his dressing-gown; arriving now, in a slim-fitting grey jacket (a pattern of subtly glossy arabesques woven into the fabric) and a black shirt beneath, he slid into an empty seat at the table and reached into his pockets. His hand came forth with a fistful of silver rings, which he began applying to his fingers one by one as he caught up on the conversation.
Dorian would be lying if he tried to pretend he wasn't jealous. Was everyone getting married these days?
Pretty soon, he'd have to track down that orgy of elves and force one of them to be his fiancee, if he wanted to keep up.
Chiming in, he admonished Courtland: "Really, darling, I know how poor you are at planning events, but I was hoping for a bit more of a challenge, here." His eyes flicked over to Antha, and he pointed a pewter-cuffed finger at her accusingly. "Especially after this one dropped the ball. We were supposed to host at least a week of parties before and after her induction into monogamous captivity, and instead--well, you let us all down. Courtland should have obliged at least that much. I need those parties, where else am I supposed to meet gorgeous women of a caliber equivalent to my own?"  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

While Liesse panicked over the suddenness of Courtland’s decision, the cousins watched her with amusement. She wasn’t used to his incorrigible rashness yet. Malakai, for his part, had his chin in his palm, groggy but looking up at her with the same amused expression and something else in his eyes. Something soft and warm and sparkly that the cousins absolutely could not let pass without teasing him about it.
Armand, suddenly grinning, announced, “You know, I think I’m going to take up poetry. Do you want to hear my first piece?” Not waiting, he cleared his throat and recited, “Roses are red, violets are blue, Malakai’s in love, and we totally knew.”
While Malakai folded his arms on the table and buried his burning cheeks in his sleeves, the rest of the room fell to snickering. All but Antha, who cut Armand a sharp glare and murmured, “Trite. You have no ear for rhymes.”
Meanwhile, to Liesse’s sudden outcry of concerns, Courtland had just laughed, throwing an arm around her thin shoulders and kissing her cheek. “Who do you think you’re talking to here?” While Jack handed him his coffee, Courtland paced around the table, counting off on his fingers. “******** the whole ‘big wedding’ thing, it’ll just be family. We’ll have the ceremony here, in the yard. There’s already a goddamn wedding arch in the shed.” Antha’s eyes went slightly wide, stealing a guilty sidelong glance at Cian. It was going to be an unpleasant surprise when they found that Antha and Cian had broken it the night they’d gotten engaged. “We can’t have a Catholic wedding, for obvious reasons, but Lionel is a justice of the peace, he can do it.”
“Seriously?” Pierce growled, folding his arms and narrowing his eyes, “You’re getting my dad involved in this? I’ve managed to avoid him for five years and you’re just bringing him over here, just like that? Antha, isn’t he banned from the main house? Use your authority!” But the girl shrugged and said nothing. She preferred to keep Courtland as happy as possible until he discovered the broken rungs and figured out the culprits.
“Anyway,” Courtland continued, “All we really have to do is hire musicians, order a truckload of alcohol, and go pick out the rings. We can do all of that today.”
“I still cannot wrap my head around this,” Vittorio muttered, massaging his temples, “I can’t imagine the two of you married. Is monogamy even in your vocabulary?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Courtland interrupted hastily, holding his hands up, “No one ever said anything about monogamy. Right, Jack?”
“What are you trying to do to me, Vittorio?” the boy demanded, “Do you want him to tear me apart? It’s not physically possible for a single person to handle Courtland’s sex drive all on their own.”
“Modern marriage!” Courtland cheered with real enthusiasm, throwing his hands above his head in triumph, and then continued when Vittorio gave him a dark look, “We’re getting gay married Tori, what goddamn part of this is traditional? And this is the 21st century, tradition is dead. Even Evie told Cian he didn’t have to be monogamous when they got married.”
“Eh?” Settled comfortably in her husband’s lap, laying back against his chest, the girl’s brows knitted briefly before her eyes lit up with recognition, “Oh, that. No, I changed my mind about that. He’s mine and if he touches another person, I will murder him.”
While Courtland sighed his disappointment, Armand smirked and took up the morning paper, murmuring, “There’s the Antha we know and love.”
Antha ignored them, instead tending to her fussing daughter in a low purr, “Don’t worry, precious, daddy has good survival instincts. He’d never make me have to kill him.”
Alistair, pausing as he passed his sister by, bent to whisper in the infant’s ear, “It’s Uncle Rynn who has the bad survival instincts.”
“Oh my god, whatever,” Courtland burst out, groaning with all the self-important impatience of a teenager, “Can we focus here guys? This is my day and I demand your goddamn attention.”
“Tomorrow is your day, Court. And don’t fall for it, it’s not easy. Everyone’s always staring at you, and fussing over every little thing, and they all want to talk your ear off, and you can’t eat a damn thing all day because someone always stops you to congratulate you, and then everyone is belting you with rice, and I’m just going to stop now because my PTSD is flaring up.” Shuddering once, violently, Antha turned and clutched Cian’s shirt in her fingers, burying her face in the crook of his neck.
“However it plays out,” Courtland sighed, “It’s happening. Tomorrow. Everyone get over it and be ******** happy for us. And I swear to god, Dorian, shut up about the parties, you’re still in hot water from your last one.” Scoffing slightly, he added, “Who are you supposed to meet anyways? The only people of your caliber are toddlers throwing temper tantrums.”
“Face it, if you ever do get married, your only choices are gold-diggers and terribly old women subconsciously desperate for a spoiled child that they’re too old to have,” Pierce snickered.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Antha rolled her eyes and chastised them. “Oh shut up, he’s no worse than either of you.”
“Dorian is a thousand times worse than either of them,” Armand murmured.
“Hardly!”
“You just refuse to see it. You coddle him.”
“I do not!” Antha protested, seemingly bewildered, and then looking around at the various sets of eyes narrowing judgmentally at her yelled, “What?!”
“One day,” Armand sighed, turning his gaze instead on Dorian, since Antha refused to see reason, “When Antha’s not around to stand between you and the consequences of your actions, you’re going to find a very cold, cruel world waiting for you.”
“You know Julien’s itching to cut you off,” Pierce murmured, and for all of his teasing seemed to be genuinely concerned about his cousin, “That’s going to fall under his and Uncle Barclay’s jurisdiction, and Barclay isn’t going to go any easier on you than Julien.”
But Antha cut them off, handing Vanessa back to Cian and returning to her feet, waving the subject away, “Stop it, all of you. It won’t be as bad as all that.” Verbally at least, they kept their predictions to themselves, but cast each other doubtful glances.
Clearing his throat, Courtland delivered the good news. “But I will have a bachelor party tonight. Since my best man is a chick, Pierce, you’re in charge.”
“Ha!” the boy exclaimed triumphantly, narrowing his eyes gleefully at Antha.
“No chicks,” Courtland directed Pierce firmly, “And no kids.” He grinned, turning and planting an apologetic kiss on Rynn’s cheek, and then Alistair’s. “They always lose their heads over the scantily clad women and tequila. That goes for your brother, too. He always manages to just pop up at these things…”
“Harem of strippers, oil tanker full of tequila. Got it.”
“Evie.” Suddenly brightening up, Courtland turned his absolute sweetest, most charming smile on Antha, batting his eyelashes over pleading eyes, “Can Cian come and play with us?” The girl narrowed her eyes, seemingly conflicted and utterly suspicious. “It’s just watching almost-naked ladies.”
“You are not helping your case here,” Jack hissed in his ear with a little nudge of his elbow.
“No one will molest him, I promise,” he continued, lacing his hands together and outright begging, “Please? Cian has to be at the stag party. He never even got one, Evie!”
Sighing and folding her arms, Antha relented, groaning, “Fine. But if a single one of you locks him in a room with a drunk stripper, so help me god---”
“We won’t!” Courtland hastily assured her, giddy with excitement, “I promise, nothing over the line.”
Truth be told, though it didn’t show, Antha was relieved. There’d be no one around to question what she was up to at Satis House, Courtland would take everyone but Rynn and Alistair. And Liesse, but she would be far less trouble than the cousins.
“Are we sure we should let Dorian come along?” Jack purred teasingly, pinching the boy’s cheeks, “He’s in enough of a mess as it is, we should really protect him from himself---aah!”
Before she could even stop herself, Antha had kicked Jack’s chair over and watched him spill into the floor, whining to himself. While everyone else just looked at her, like she had proven their point beyond a shadow of a doubt, she went on the defensive, hissing irritably, “It’s been ten goddamn years, it’s an automatic reaction at this point. Get over it.” Stepping over Jack, she muttered, “It’s your fault really, you know better.”
For a moment Jack just sulked, sitting quietly on the floor until Antha left the room with Lucy on her heels, and then in a flash threw himself at Dorian, knocking his legs out from under him, pinning him on the ground with one arm and holding a handful of bacon over his face with the other. “I hold in my hand the destructive end of your complexion,” he announced, and was oddly menacing about it, “Do you see all this grease? Your skin will never recover.”
“Jack,” Courtland said lowly in warning, standing over him with his hands on his hips, “As funny as it would be, I refuse to marry you with a black eye.”
“But it would be sooooo worth it,” the boy hissed, at which point he was physically hauled up by his collar. “You never let me do anything I want to do!” he cried when he was standing, throwing the bacon back on the plate in a fit and crossing his arms, for all the world like a child throwing a tantrum.
“That’s not true,” Courtland argued gently, smoothing back his hair and trying to soothe him, “Just the other night, remember, when you wanted to---”
The room erupted into a clatter, the cousins all rising abruptly from their seats and beginning to leave. “Don’t want to hear this,” Armand said flatly, “Too much information, guys.”
But Courtland rolled his eyes and turned to yell at them, “******** you guys, I was talking about breaking into the zoo! We fed fish to the penguins!” And then suddenly sulking, added, “I wanted to swim with them, but Jack called Antha and she was all ‘Don’t be ******** stupid, that water’s freezing, you’ll get pneumonia and die, blah, blah, blah…’ Then she got all mad that the phone woke Cian up and said if we came home reeking of fish, she’d make us scrub the floors…it was really a buzzkill.”
“There were chunks of ice in that water,” Jack argued, their roles reversing, “Big ones. As big as my head. You were going to die, I had to call her. She’s the only one that can talk any sense into your thick head.”
“I had warm, dry clothes waiting!”
“You were trying to jump into sub-zero water naked to hang out with penguins that clearly did not want us on their turf!”
Sulking, Courtland threw up his hands and stalked out of the room in a fuss. Armand, clucking his tongue, turned and narrowed his gaze at Jack. “That. That’s what you’re pledging the rest of your life to.”
But the boy shrugged, sighing and tilting his head, arms folded. “It sucks, but what am I going to do? I love the dumbass basket case.”
In the background, meanwhile, the doorbell had rung and Antha and Lucy had rushed to answer it, the indistinguishable murmur of their voices sounding at the door. At about the time Courtland stormed out, the girls both rushed back into the kitchen as Michael hauled an armful of boxes up the stairs. “Airi, there’s a delivery for you. I left it by the door.” While the boy cheered and ran into the hallway, Antha reclaimed Vanessa from her father, eyes bright, murmuring, “And mommy got a whole box of pretty dresses for you in the mail.”
“Annie, how do I even…” Lucy whined, Sebastien laid across her hands at arm’s length, “How does this thing work, do I just…?”
Sighing, Malakai rose and adjusted the baby in Lucy's arms. “Just put your arm here like this…make sure to hold his head…”
“Babies are super awkward…” she murmured, holding him uncertainly against her shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah,” Antha groaned, flitting towards the stairs, “Just get up here. If my son isn’t in a tiny sweater embroidered with duckies in five minutes, I will throw such a fit.”
“She is really scary about those babies…” Pierce murmured, watching her vanish up the stairs.
“Leave them be,” Armand said, folding up his newspaper and moving to the fridge, “You know how Antha and Lucy get when they’re together. Let them gang up on Vanessa and Sebastien, better them than us.” And then, turning and narrowing searching eyes, asked, “Where’s Malakai?”
Pierce scoffed, grinning and pointing up the stairs, “Like he was going to miss playing dress-up with the twins.”
“Courtland!” Jack called, “The chicks are gone, we’re about to plan the stag party!”
He came running down the stairs seconds later, already screaming, “Real absinthe or I’ll punch all of you!”

While the men sat in the kitchen, plotting the finer points of the night’s entertainment, the girls, Malakai, and Alistair had convened in the nursery, an open box of new baby clothes on the floor, sorting through them and picking which ones to try on the twins first. Alistair sat on the loveseat by the window, watching his sister in her silk and pearls and diamond hairpins, sitting on the floor with her children on blankets in front of her, absolutely gushing over the tiny coats and little chiffon dresses. Lucy was taking them all out of the box in a thrilled rush, suggesting the order in which they should be tried on and then casting them aside. Malakai was going behind her and picking them back up, adjusting them on tiny hangers that he hooked on the side of the crib for the time being.
And then, in what was becoming a little too familiar of a sensation, the world shifted and Alistair was not perfectly in the moment anymore. He could still see his siblings, Lucy, and the babies, still watched them move about, but they were muted, foggy. Distant.
“I hate that coat.”
He was not entirely surprised when he looked over to find a figure suddenly seated beside him, sitting back against the cushions with one arm draped across the back of the loveseat, one ankle resting on the other knee. “I mean I get it, it’s adorable, but I’m intensely intrigued by my fingers right now and I can’t get them to my mouth in that coat.”
“It makes your mother happy.” It struck him, briefly, how outrageously odd the this situation was. He didn’t know how or why it was happening, he could barely comprehend it, but he pressed on naturally, without thinking about it. “Besides, do you really think you’ll remember any of this?”
“Probably not,” he admitted demurely, reaching into the pocket of his blazer and pulling out a pack of cigarettes. Alistair very nearly snapped at him to put it out, for the babies’ sake, but then stopped and realized how ridiculous that was. Sebastien, as if he knew, gave a low, velvety chuckle, lighting the cigarette and then staring down at himself, watching his mother happily dressing him. “Do you want to know my very first memory?”
“Tell me.”
He took a long drag, lifting his gaze to the door and something very far beyond it. The gold flecks in his eyes gleamed in the sunlight, glitter in a sea of emerald, his long, dark lashes briefly fluttering. “I was two, almost three, and dad took us to the park. We’d gone to the doctor that day. I don’t remember it, per se, but I know it happened. I know everyone was worried because Ciel was eighteen months old and he should’ve been talking. But he’d never said a word. I know dad was worried---he always worried about us a little too much, not exactly overbearing, but we were all that was left of mom and he was terrified of losing us the same way, I suppose. Anyway, we were on the playground, and dad was nearby on the benches talking to Grandpa Michael. Ciel was sitting in the sand, making handprints, and Vanessa was getting ready to go down the slide. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, Ciel looks up and points at the sand at the bottom of the slide and says, clear as day, ‘snake’. So Vanessa and I stop and peer down at the sand but we don’t see anything. But Ciel, this little, tiny thing that can barely toddle around, he’s looking at us so seriously. He’s got those huge, clear blue eyes and he’s just looking at us like he knows everything, like the entire universe is at his beck and call.” The boy paused, taking a drag of his cigarette as the corner of his lips twisted into a curious smile. “And then the sand moved and this scaly black and brown coil started slithering out of it. Vanessa screamed bloody murder and dad came and grabbed us all up in a panic and Grandpa Michael grabbed a shovel and killed the snake. And the whole time, Ciel’s just…playing in the sand. Because he already knew, and he wasn’t afraid of it. Me and V and even the grown-ups, we were all terrified out of our wits, but Ciel…” His breath came out in a long, rolling sigh with a hint of a laugh, sliding back in his seat. The medallion against his neck stirred against his sweater, the Mayfair crest gleaming in the light before it flipped over and displayed the Calais crest. “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t even know what it means, not yet, but…he’s special, that one. He just looks out at the universe and it gives him answers.”
“So what you’re saying is we have to save him, no matter what. Am I right?”
“Partly.” Another of those mysterious half-smiles, idly casting the remains of his cigarette into a candy dish and raking a hand back through his glossy brown hair. He had a way of moving, just like his mother, every shift of his form languid and elegant, purposeful, like a hypnotic dance. It was hard not to watch him. “Time has always opened up for her,” he said after several thoughtful moments in silence, gesturing at Antha, “Little tears in the universe just for her, because she has the power to change things. And then, suddenly, she turned her back on it. She closed herself off from time yet unfolded. She doesn’t realize it, of course, it wasn’t a conscious decision, she just…”
“Can’t face the future,” Alistair murmured, sitting forward with his hands clasped between his knees, staring thoughtfully at his sister. “It can’t be easy, facing your imminent death.”
“She tuned out because she’s focusing on the present. I don’t blame her for that, no one could. But the universe is still screaming at her, and it’s getting frantic.”
“Screaming so loudly that instead of Antha, it’s spilling over onto me,” he guessed at last. It made odd but perfect sense.
“Ciel has to live,” Sebastien concluded, “I can’t say why exactly, for what purpose, but he has to.”
“Any ideas how we might go about that? Because I’ll be honest, we’re drawing blanks over here.”
The boy laughed, quietly, still watching his mother as she dressed the small, squirming version of himself. “Afraid not. Let’s be fair here, I spent a large portion of the morning trying to eat my own toes. I don’t know much of anything. I’m just a reflection, a conglomerate of facts that nothing will ever change---my personality, my looks, a scattered handful of memories---that time drew out of the void and reflected over an early version of myself.” In the following brief pause, the boy turned to look at his uncle for the first time, with Antha’s keen eyes. “Stop and think about that for a moment. I mean I’m there.” He gestured with a flicker of his graceful fingers at the little, squirming body on the floor. “And I’m here, wherever this is, and I’m elsewhere at the same time. Somehow, one of those little loopholes in time, the ones that give us premonitions, has opened and stretched my very essence, my soul, from that little newborn body on the floor down there, and from a point sixteen years away from this moment, and brought them together in the middle to make me. I am me, but at the same time I’m not that baby, and I’m not that boy in the future. I’m a shade made of their parts but completely separate from both of them.” His eyes narrowed, gleaming oddly, and then he said something that was so thoroughly like his mother that Alistair was completely lost for words. “Isn’t that ******** crazy? Can you even imagine the possibilities if this could be done at will, cloning bits and pieces of the soul from different points in time to make something new?”
Alistair said nothing for several moments, just staring at the boy and the all too familiar gleam in his eyes. It was the same gleam Antha got when she talked about experiments, about new and terrifying ways to use magic, or about something that was so completely out of the realm of possibility that the thought of it consumed her. Oh, he was his mother’s son, alright. Blowing out a little sigh, he finally got back around to the point. “What exactly is the universe warning us about, then? We already knew about Ciel, we got the warning and we’re doing our best, but if you didn’t come with a solution, then why are you here now at all?”
“I wish I could say with any certainty. However, the specifics are beyond me.” He sighed and stood, walking over to where the others were on the floor and looking down at himself. “But I’ll tell you this much,” he murmured at length, his tone gone startlingly serious, “We’re on the verge of something monumental here. Something that’s only ever happened once in the entire course of human history.”
And just like that, Alistair was on edge, eyes narrowing as he stared at his nephew. “What’s that?”
“A void,” he said quietly, without glancing up, “A drop-off in the course of time and nothing beyond it. A world where anything is as likely to happen as anything else, where nothing is predestined, where fate is completely and utterly obliterated. It sounds…trivial, I’m sure, but think of how many little coincidences govern any matter of success. Fate rules us, Uncle Airi. It puts us where we need to be, with the right tools and right circumstances, to fulfill our destiny, and so the world keeps spinning. But in a world without fate, without a single predestined moment…well, it’s anarchy.” With another little rolling sigh, he turned and faced his uncle, sliding his hands demurely into his pockets. “You’ve got years left, but not many of them. Not many at all. You’ll know the moment when it comes, when everything erupts into chaos and the world loses its axis, you’ll feel it. After that…well, it’s anyone’s guess. All I can say is that you and Uncle Rynn have a very long, difficult road ahead of you in complete darkness.”
Alistair didn’t have time to ask any questions after that. One moment he was staring at Sebastien---thinking again in the back of his head what a remarkable resemblance he had to Rynn---and then the boy was gone and voices were talking around him. Disturbed, he sat in silence for several moments, trying to calm his breathing. At length, glancing at the group on the floor, he murmured, “Try another coat, Evie.”
She glanced up at him, all big, curious eyes that seemed to pierce straight through him. “Are you alright, Airi?”
He smiled, unconvincing as it was, and rose to his feet. “I’m fine. But if you’ll excuse me.” He slipped into the hall before anyone could protest, running a hand back through his hair, and then the moment he had gotten himself under control, went looking for Rynn.  

[Okimiyage]

Liesse colored hard. For a moment, she thought about not responding.
The words roiled inside her like a building eruption.
Well? What about it? What if he likes me, so? I like him. You can tease us about it like—like a bunch of kids, but we don’t care!
But then Courtland threw his arm around her, and her outburst sizzle into momentarily contained silence.
She could have slapped Lucy for the look on Malakai’s face, but that would have been just as immature as the poem.
Seething as she was, it was simple to ignore the guilty glance exchanged between Cian and Antha at mention of the wedding arch.
Cian gave a helpless little shrug against Antha’s back. They’d have to live with it. If nothing else, he was sure they could hide the damage with a garland of flowers or something.
Anyways, with the way that this wedding was turning out—at least, the way it was being planned—a broken arch would be the least of their worries. They’d be lucky if they could force Courtland into a suit, the way he was going. And someone just had to give him caffeine with it…
Still, he couldn’t help but notice Liesse’s…well, jealousy. Poor girl. It’d been too much excitement for her in these past few months. Everyone was getting hitched, and her in her bloom of youth, just started courting. He could tell that she would be amongst the front runners in the fight to catch the wedding bouquet.
While Cian idly stroked his wife’s hair, soothing her from the aforementioned ‘PTSD’—hah—Dorian crossed his arms in an agitated fashion, and harrumphed.
“I’ll have you know that I’ve half the city vying for my attentions. I don’t have to settle for keeping it in the family like you two. Can’t settle, honestly. Monogamy is a four-letter word, by my definition.”
Wrapping his robe firmly around his waist, Dorian lifted his nose to the ceiling and turned his back on his audience. “Frankly, I feel due an apology. That is, if you want any of us in attendance.”
Flopping down at the table, he added, “And Antha doesn’t coddle me. She simply recognizes my sensitivity…Unlike the rest of you oafs.”
He didn’t deign to comment on the subject of his inheritance. It hit too close to home to even consider. Honestly, Dorian couldn’t imagine his life without the reassurance of the Mayfair’s backing. It was too dreadful to consider. What would they cut him off for, anyways? His drug habits? His philandering? As if the rest of the cousins weren’t just as bad, if not more so.
But he knew how much the others in the family would love to see his downfall. It was almost for that sole reason that Dorian was determined to keep his winning streak going. Gods knew—unlike his namesake—Dorian couldn’t rely on his youth and good looks forever.
Rynn’s eyes, glumly focused on ‘anything except Alistair’, narrowed briefly at the kiss that Courtland planted on his cheek. “Look, I’ve learned my lesson. You don’t have to rub it in, anymore.”
Cian gave a short bark of laughter at that, almost startling the children. Before their wee faces could screw up into a tantrum, though, he was soothing away the frown lines with his thumb, shushing their tears.
As they quieted, he gave a deep sigh of relief.
“I suppose a night out couldn’t hurt. I just don’t want to leave you—“ he nodded towards Antha, “—with both of them at once. I know you could manage just fine, but the stress wouldn’t do you any favors…besides, they’re not nearly to the point of sleeping through the night, and you need your rest.”
“Pish posh,” announced Liesse. “You both need a night off, to my mind. We handled the last one just fine, after all.”
Rynn’s cheeks heated, and he glanced to the side. Admittedly, Antha had been all night repairing the damage from the ‘last one’…
“And Cian would have to be a blind idiot to try anything. Do you think with a wife this gorgeous he’s honestly going to be tempted by any painted jezebel?—besides, we’ve already confirmed that Antha would kill him. And he likes his pups far too well to leave them fatherless.” Liesse finished, with some satisfaction.
Dorian wailed as he was attacked by the bacon, and his tormented cries echoed through the hall as the foyer doorbell sounded.
Liesse was momentarily distracted by the boxes of dresses which Antha left to retrieve, diving into the pile with what could only be described as a squeak of joy. “The little shoes. Oh, their feet are so tiny, aren’t they? Please let me help, Cian. Please.”
Cian all too willingly gave up Vanessa to his younger sister. She’d played with dolls far more than he had, and was very nearly a pro at the art of fastening minuscule buckles and buttons.
Settling on the stairs with another of his deep sighs, which were practically becoming a trademark at this point, he propped his chin up in his hands and watch Malakai and Liesse go at it. They were already far more proficient parents than he was. He had to wonder what it’d be like, watching them raise children of their own.
Of course, perhaps that was jumping the gun a bit. But Cian was optimistic, unlike Rynn…who, he noticed, had disappeared after the rest of the crew shortly after Antha’s departure.
It was hard to hide it from this many people, whenever you were up to something. Still, Cian had to trust his wife. It would have driven him crazy if he hadn’t had complete faith in her, but he didn’t have time to waste on ‘crazy’ right now.

Rynn wandered the halls, following the hollow whispers of ghosts. For all its exquisite chandeliers and antique gas-light candelabras, the house was just as shadowy as the catacombs of the ancestors. Bright laughter bubbled up from beneath the floorboards—the sound of those merry-makers in the nursery, no doubt. Rynn brushed it aside, moving through the shades that strung themselves like cobwebs in his path.
Then, abruptly, he sensed something different in the house. It had the feel of the dead, but there was something…different about this. A glow. Rynn touched his chest, briefly, feeling the unfamiliar surge of hope within it. Without warning, he changed his course, doubling back on the stairs towards the nursery.
Despite his vehement opposition to the merging of the families, he had to admit that he was still…protective of his young niece and nephew. To find something like this within their quarters caused him a certain amount of unease. It was up to him to protect him, even though this…presence didn’t seem exactly threatening.
As he reached for the handle of the door, the world twitched. Without warning, he found his hand atop anthers—a thin hand, the tendons standing out like wires on a marionette, a wrist sheathed in long black sleeves.
When he looked up, he saw a sight he had never expected to see outside of the labyrinth—a mask, a lion’s maw, the unearthly glow of spirit within its eyes. His mouth opened in wordless silence, a gasp that found no air.
The lion rumbled, and he could hear words within its purr.
They had found him.
Focusing, the floor began to tremor, the walls shake in a way that Rynn was quite certain that nobody besides himself could feel. The world felt like it was tearing itself apart—but without the rip of space and time that Rynn was expecting, the monochromatic tones of his environment melted away into color, and he found himself panting hard, his hand still on the handle—
which shook, as it had done within his dream of the house, and sent his heart racing—
Rynn’s immediate instinct was to clutch at the handle, to prevent whatever it was on the other side from getting out, before he realized the foolishness of his own actions, and released his grasp.
And on the other side, in lieu of the nightmare that he could not help but half-expect, was Alistair.
It was very nearly worse. If Rynn’s heart had been racing before, now it was on nitro.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

“Can’t settle...” Jack snorted a laugh, rolling his eyes and then landing them squarely on Dorian. “By which you mean you’re too in love with yourself to ever properly love another person.”
Sighing, Courtland yanked his fiancée into a seat, murmuring, “What’s with you today?”
“He thinks he can spend all his time elsewhere and then just pop up, with a mountain of trouble at his heels, being an insulting, self-centered little brat, and we’re just going to let him do it? ******** that.” Looking back at him with arms crossed, he said, dead serious, “He doesn’t give a ******** about us, why should give a damn if he gets cut off and dies in the street?”
“Alright, love,” Courtland soothed him, laying a hand on his head and idly stroking his hair, “Settle down. Let it go. You’re going to be a bride tomorrow, do you want a face full of wrinkles? They won’t match your dress at all.”
“We’ve been over my feelings on wedding dresses until I’m blue in the face. Not happening, Court.”
“Alright, let me be frank here,” Armand cut in finally, leaning forward with his hands on the table, “I’m not like you lecherous degenerates, the idea of a bachelor party is more than one degree off from a normal night in my book, and I’m rather looking forward to it. So can we please get to it?”
“Agreed!” Courtland shouted, running out of the room and back with a bottle of scotch. “Shots first, strip clubs later.”
“It’s nine in the morning, Court...”
“I said shots, now everybody drink!”

Upstairs, when her dire need to see her children all dressed up in pretty new clothes had been sated, Antha followed her twin out into the hallway, though she turned and bypassed the library. With Vanessa tucked into her arms, she sat down on the stairs beside Cian, pressing his legs together and laying their infant daughter down in his lap. The infant cooed momentarily before continuing to fuss in confusion with the unfamiliar crinoline ruffles of her new dress.
“I never played with dolls when I was a child,” Antha murmured as she watched her daughter, dropping her cheek on Cian’s shoulder as naturally as if she’d been doing it for years, “I was nine before I ever got one---Oncle Louis gave it to me, and it was very pretty. But I refused to do anything as childish as playing with dolls, and I especially refused to let the boys see me doing something so girly. They were like little savage animals---Jack once ran around in a loincloth and war paint for two straight weeks, for heaven’s sake---it was survival of the fittest in this house.” With a little whine of dissatisfaction, the baby swiped at the little pink bow in her wispy hair (Lucy’s doing) and Antha chuckled, disentangling it from a tiny curl. “There’s a lot less sport in dressing dolls, I imagine. They don’t flail around in rebellion, whining and fussing and throwing off bows. Dolls won’t absolutely die of embarrassment in thirteen years when Grandpa Michael pulls out the five thousand pictures he took and shows them to all of their little friends.”
While she was smiling down at her daughter, still fussing at the tactile change, Antha whispered suddenly, “Please don’t ask.” She knew Cian at least well enough to know that he was suspicious, and there was no point in pretending she didn’t. Instead she addressed it in the gentlest whisper, still watching Vanessa as if to pretend she wasn’t saying a word of it. “If you ask me, I’ll have to lie. And I don’t want to do that.”
A moment passed in silence, only Vanessa’s small coos and the shouting of the boys from behind the walls. Quietly, Antha lifted her head and laid a brief kiss on Cian’s lips, flashing a little reassuring smile as if nothing was the matter, he shouldn’t worry about it. “Uncle Michael and Malakai have agreed to babysit tonight. I have to go to Satis House to discuss this demon of Vikteren’s. Though…” She gave a little laugh beneath her breath. “My cousins are hardly known for their restraint where a good time is involved. I daresay I’ll be home long before you stumble in.” Pressing her forehead to his, a little self-depreciative smirk flitting across her lips, she murmured in a low purr, “No rest for the wicked.”
Laying a gentle kiss in her daughter’s curls, she turned to face Cian again, briefly taking on a thoughtful expression that quickly turned mischievous. “But here’s something interesting,” she said, gaze flickering suggestively up the stairs, “Your little brother and my little brother have mysteriously vanished together. It could be any number of relatively innocent things, I suppose, but I have a favorite theory concerning the matter.” Saying no more, she laughed and returned up the stairs.
As she vanished, Jack stuck his head in the hallway, looking around until his eyes narrowed in on Cian with a little grin. “We’re making battle plans,” he said in a dangerous purr, and then gesturing up the stairs, “Hand the chick over to the other girls and children and come help before Courtland gets us all drunk.”

Alistair had found himself briefly surprised to open the door and find Rynn on the other side of it, no better off than if he’d had a run-in with a hostile ghost. Glancing behind him to be sure that no one was paying them any attention, he seized Rynn’s arm and dragged him into the library, visibly disturbed. “I can’t even begin to process the sort of peculiar things going on lately,” he groaned, shutting the door behind them and crossing to the windows, “We’ll get to that look on your face in a minute. First---” He explained what had happened in the nursery, word for word, recounting every minute detail. He stressed the boy’s parting warning in particular, the ‘long, difficult road in complete darkness’ he had specifically singled out for the two of them. And then, pacing in front of the windows, ran his hands back through his hair and murmured, “God, he was so like Antha. He looked so much like you, but it was like talking to her.”
With a sigh, he turned and went over to the couch against the wall, flopping down on it as if all the energy had been sucked out of him. “It makes sense when I think about it, in an odd way. There’s never been any shortage of premonitions in this family, we always see things. But, now that I think about it…there’s nothing between Antha’s death and sixteen years from now. It’s just a dark spot. That’s very, very strange, don’t you think?” But considering the entire situation---this vague threat of something probably happening sometime years in the future was making his head spin. So instead, shaking his head, he looked up at Rynn and said, more casually. “Alright, now you. You saw something. What happened?”
Before Rynn could answer, the door suddenly swung open and Alistair found himself looking up at his sister as if he’d been caught somehow. Which was unfortunate in that, only knowing what she could see, Antha misinterpreted the situation. She looked once at her brother, splayed on the couch looking guilty, then up at Rynn, blinking her eyes wide with surprise, and then abruptly turned and began closing the door behind her. “Evie, no!” her brother hissed, springing up and across the armrest to stop the door and grab her around the waist, dragging her inside, “It’s not even what it looks like, get back here!”
“Hey!” she protested, shaking off his arms and laying a hand across her abdomen, brow furrowed irritably as she shut the door behind her, “Be careful, this is delicate business. You can’t just throw me around.”
“It’s not actually that delicate…”
“No, perhaps not,” she sighed, “But I can’t be too careful. I’m not exactly in optimum condition over here. Including the early birds in there---” She gestured at the nursery. “---who very nearly tore me apart, if you will recall, this is my tenth child altogether, Airi.”
Leaning over the armrest, his chin on his hands, the boy gave a low murmur of awe. “You’re like a legit person factory, Evie.”
“Oh hush, it was Courtland’s doing. I completely and utterly surrendered and gave up all hope after the particularly disastrous fourth attempt, but he doesn’t take well to failure.” Truth be told, she had resigned her family to damnation following her fourth child, rather than suffer it again. That was the one that haunted her, and Courtland. Tristan, the little deformed creature that had survived birth and another half an agonizing hour before dying in her arms. There had been no saving him to begin with---it wouldn’t have been kind of them even if they could’ve, he would’ve had such a pitiful excuse for a life---but that was hardly a comfort to his mother. The entirety of her family wasn’t worth watching another child of her own flesh suffer and die as he had, not in her mind. Courtland’s grieving had taken a drastically different course; he had been determined that it shouldn’t be in vain, that he and Antha should make at least one child that lived so that the other half dozen had not been for nothing. But all they’d made was more death and finally even Courtland had suffered all he could possibly bear.
Sighing, the girl walked over and dropped onto the other end of the couch. “So, Rynn---” Settling into business mode, her eyes narrowed and legs crossed, her expression serious. “---how are your demons looking lately? That is what you were talking about when I came in, is it not?”
Sighing, Alistair murmured, “So you knew when you came in?”
Eyes sparkling, she laughed through a little mischievous smile. “I was really hoping to find the two of you in a more compromising position. You disappointed me, the least I could do was tease you.” And then, eyes narrowing, she added, “Besides, you know I’m the only one in this house allowed to have secrets. Whatever you two are hiding---” If she’d had any doubt, the way Alistair’s mind had shut up like steel was a direct confirmation. “---I’m going to find out. You might as well confess and save yourselves the trouble.”
“It’s in your best interest,” Alistair murmured, clearly unsettled and not making eye contact. He didn’t feel right telling her. As hard as it already was for her facing her death, leaving them at the mercy of the world without her protection, he couldn’t give her a confirmation that something this enormous and puzzling was waiting for them years after she was gone. She would worry herself sick and there was nothing she could do. “Besides, it’s not a pressing matter. Let’s focus on Rynn instead. You know we can’t leave him alone with his issues, he’s like wet paper against them.”
“Fair enough,” Antha sighed, temporarily caving and turning her attention back on Rynn, “Alright, what’s the matter? Is the Calais legacy rearing its ugly head again? Because honestly, your ancestors have tested my goddamn patience for the last time.”