Arabesque: A Wings Companion

Chapter Fifteen

"I'm proud of you," Tamani said-and he was. It took strong fibers to admit you'd done something wrong. Even more to admit it without offering any justification or excuse. And if Rowen wasn't entirely anxious to hold the little one afterward, well, human babies were quite messy; even Tamani had to admit that.

Rowen stepped out of the elevator, still jumping over that tiny crack as if afraid she might slip through the half-centimeter opening, and they made their way into the apartment.

Tamani was exhausted; though the sun was barely setting, the evening rays casting a pinkish glow across the furniture, all he wanted to do was fall into bed, or even the couch, and sleep.

"I'm going to Orick tomorrow," he said, tossing his car keys into a dish by the door.

"Orick? But-you just got back."

Tamani hesitated. He knew he needed to tell her, but his impulse as an uncle was to protect his niece. His niece who, in his eyes, would always be the frightened five-year-old he and Laurel had rescued a decade ago in Avalon. The day she became an orphan. "Um," he said, caught in minor indecision, "Technically I never left."

"What do you mean, you never left? You certainly weren't here."

"No, but I didn't leave town. I've been at the shore."

She blinked. "Staying there? Living there?"

He could practically see what he was imagining; one of the urban campers that were as much a fixture of California's beaches as the sand and the palm trees. But "living" was hardly what he's been doing. He'd spent every waking moment looking for signs of the sea fae. He'd ranged as far north and south as the abductions-and bodies-had appeared, entirely without success. That woman they took hadn't even washed ashore yet. The human news media was still talking about her as a missing person rather than a murder. Tamani knew better.

His impulse was to continue searching, but the salted air had seeped into Tamani's skin and worn down his stamina so badly he simply couldn't stay another day. Especially not when he hadn't seen Laurel in ten days. Not when he hadn't talked to their sprout in just as long. It felt almost like when he'd been serving as sentry to Laurel during high school and could only observe her from afar on an irregular basis. He thought he'd left those days behind forever. Being separated from her was a dagger in his chest; a wound only she could close.

"Sort of," he said when he realized Rowen was waiting in silence for an answer. "Investigating." He straightened. "Point is, I'm going back to Orick tomorrow, back to Avalon, and I think you should come with me."

"I can't," she said casually, dropping her rucksack. "I have practice tomorrow with my partner. But maybe next time. Send Grandmother my love."

Rowen started to turn, but Tamani stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. "I didn't mean for a visit."

She studied him with glittering eyes. Hard eyes. An expression she'd never used with him before. "You want me to leave permanently?"

"Permanent sounds so ... permanent," Tamani said lamely, feeling his weariness catching up with him.

"It does, fancy that."

"I'm ... dealing with something dangerous," Tamani confessed. "And I would feel better if you were farther away from it."

"Something so dangerous that this is the first I've heard of it?"

"Threats like this aren't the kind to give a lot of warning." Tam remembered what the Oracle had said, that the entire city, and after them, the entire world, was in jeopardy. "If Laurel were here, I'd be sending her to Orick. And I'm going to have to increase the guard, there, anyway."