Gavin's Big Date, Page 2

affairs anymore. You gave up that right when you walked away from the House of Dakron and our father.”

  Not boyfriend-girlfriend, then. That was good, but on the other hand, brother and sister drama? Yeah, I'm sure you can imagine how much I did not want to be on the receiving end of that guy's fist. I edged away from Arla.

  "You're a beautiful woman and I'm sure we would have had fun and all but I think I'm going to call it a night," I said. "I've got work in a few hours."

  Arla shot her brother a poisonous glare, and then turned her huge, seductive eyes my way.

  "Gavin, wait," she said with just a dash of vulnerability. "I need your help. You don't know what's at risk for me if you go."

  Remember what I said about all of this being my fault? I'm a sucker for a smoking hot woman on a bridge pleading for my help, I guess. I stopped walking and slumped my shoulders in resignation. She smiled. She knew she had me.

  "What do you need me to do?" I asked.

  She started to reply, but was interrupted by a mean right hook to the back of the head. Agamedes raised his fist for another one.

  "I can't let you do this, sister."

  I swear, even the rain seemed to stop for a moment in surprise. I’d like to say that I took that momentary distraction to run for my fucking life, or even that I jumped in like a heroic dope to defend her. Nope. I stood there with my mouth hanging open, watching a giant Swedish guy pummel his sister. She didn’t stay down for long, though.

  He had just landed a third concussion-worthy blow to her face when her right arm shot up and her hand caught his fist before he could get in a fourth. She used his downward momentum to flip him over her, and the concrete cracked where he fell. In a blink, the tables had turned and she descended on him like a leather clad storm cloud.

  “What you’re doing will destroy the very fabric of our people!” I heard Agamedes shout between grunts and feints. Arla snarled and broke off a piece of steel guard rail. She swung it like a club at his legs.

  “No, but starving to death on a malfunctioning space station will. Is that what you want for us? To die up there in the freezing void? Is that how the mighty war prince goes out?”

  “Of course not! But I’ll be thrice damned if my line is tainted because my stupid baby sister decided to get mixed up in an old crone’s blood magic!”

  Blood magic? Space stations? I thought this was about thrill rides. And possibly sex. As I watched the siblings try to murder each other with bits of bridge, it dawned on me that out of the three of us, I was going to be the one having the least amount of fun in the end. That, and I realized their accents didn’t sound exactly Swedish, either.

  “Wait,” I interrupted. Amazingly enough, they both froze mid-swing to stare at me. They seemed to be surprised I was even still around. “Are we talking about my blood, here? Or could maybe pig’s blood do, instead? I could probably get sheep’s blood from a butcher or something. I mean that’s way more common for rituals, right?”

  “Sheep?” Agamedes asked, at the same time his sister drew a knife from her jacket and plunged it into his neck.

  She wept over him as he gasped and flailed and finally lay still. She was still weeping when she stood up and joined me by the railing, the blood dripping from her hands in the rain, running down the street.

  “What was all that about your people and blood magic?” I asked, numb. Too numb to care if I sounded ridiculous.

  “We’ve been lost a long time,” Arla said. She sounded tired. “Our father was the leader of the First House and it was his responsibility to find a place for us to settle. There’s only a few dozen of us left now, though. We’ve been drifting for too long. Your home is the only one we stand a chance on.”

  “So... why not just land somewhere quietly and integrate?”

  “It’s not so simple as that,” she said. “And anyway, trying to hide among you would have made things far worse, probably. In the end, most voted with my--with Agamedes to try to press on. Maybe try to burrow beneath the surface of the red planet next door until we could develop surface structures. The crones told me we could take this planet, though, if I was able to secure a willing blood sacrifice to fuel their ritual.”

  “And that’s me,” I finished for her.

  “Yeah. That’s you.”

  We looked at each other quietly for a moment. Over the mountains in the east, the sun was beginning to lighten the rainclouds. Just enough light to see the shimmering patches like scales where her jaw met her neck. Enough to see that the blood running down the street was not red. Her amethyst eyes were not unkind as she took my hand.

  “I need you to jump, Gavin. Just one little step behind you. Will you do this for me?”

  What could I say to that? What had my life mattered, until this point? The only creature I had ever been personally responsible for was a tabby cat. I leaned in and kissed her hard, marveling at how like us she tasted, how much like a human woman she smelled and felt. And yet, there was unmistakably something other in the way her breath mixed with mine, the slight cooing that came from somewhere below her throat that no human vocal chords could replicate.

  It was so cold out that I didn’t even feel her knife, at first, when she sliced through my abdomen. It only burned on the way down, when the wind whipped around me. Then there was the surprising force of water, and nothing.

  I would not be found for a long time. Long after the emergency sirens had started up. Long after the crones’ blood magic had done its insidious work. Long after Arla had declared this land the new sovereign territory of the House of Dakron.

  I told you this was all my fault.