Ghost Silk (Ghost Perfume, Book 2) | ✔

3 - Promise me - Part 9

I was sorry to see Jane and Ellie go, I wished they would stay. But they promised they'd return soon.

Jane lingered, though. Worried about me.

"You watch that Tia," she said. "Don't upgrade her too far. She's a good acquaintance at best. Not best friend material."

"I know that."

Ellie was already floating away, and the revenants were scowling and wanting to go. Jane laughed as she backed away in their direction.

"And set the right precedents with the hunks, since you're going to be living with them. Assert your dominance." She pointed at Michael. "Especially with him. He shouldn't always get his way."

"I'll try ..." I carefully didn't look at him.

Jackal, Astor and Ilium eyed me with weird looks on their faces.

Jane clapped her hands to get my attention. "Daddy better work for it, do you hear me?"

I must have blushed red as Ellie erupted in snickers.

"Yeah, I promise, bye!"

Jane laughed.

They flew away.

"What did you promise?" Lukas asked.

"Jane's worried I'll replace her with Tia," I said, which wasn't a lie.

We returned to the kitchen to finish making the feast, under Gabriel's direction. Heady smells filled the house from the oven in the kitchen and the grill outside.

"This is a traditional meal," he told me.

"What does traditional mean?"

"It means dead animal," Alexander said with a savage grin.

There were lamb shanks, fragrant with cumin and dripping with fat. Smaller pieces that roasted on skewers, with onion, cardamom and nutmeg.

Fried phyllo cigars, made of ground lamb with pine nuts and parsley. Crispy but so tender on the inside they could hardly hang together.

Ribeye steak, heavily charred on the outside, dripping red when it was sliced.

Goat shoulder slow-roasted and falling off the bone, with rosemary, garlic, and pomegranate molasses.

Pomegranates on their own, broken into halves to show their hundred glistening eyes.

Plates overflowing with grapes and figs and apples.

Goat cheese whipped with honey.

Rice with yellow raisins and nuts.

Bottles of wine, red, sparkling, a dark sweet red one.

We brought it all out together to the table in the courtyard. It looked like enough food for a family of twenty.

Michael laughed freely as he poured us all glasses.

"We forgot the mint lemonade, it's still inside," Gabriel said, getting up to bring it.

I pounced on his shoulder to sit him back down.

"You haven't even eaten yet."

I pressed a grape to his mouth. He parted his lips. They brushed against my fingers.

The mastiffs cried under the table for food. Lukas and I had set their food out for them earlier, but I guessed the smells of our dinner were too appetizing.

"This may be the best meal you ever made," Lukas praised Gabriel. "Although the tiny one doesn't seem to have gotten the hang yet of eating her own weight."

"I'm trying." I took a bite of lamb.

"It's all about practice," Alexander advised me.

He must have been practicing. He'd already polished off a bottle of wine, a leg of lamb and more than his share of the steak, but he didn't look like he was struggling to breathe or anything.

He looked more relaxed than I usually saw him.

When everyone was too full to sit up straight, lying back at a recline with heavy-lidded eyes, we slowly kept eating from the pomegranates and drinking from our glasses.

I was bubbling inside.

The sweet wine made a sluggish, unstable river for me to float on. The fire-lit night blurred and shook around me as I floated down the stream ...

I had to concentrate hard to pretend to the others that my feet were still on the unmoving earth. I'd accidentally blurted out to Alexander that I loved him when he passed me a pomegranate, but I was pretty sure I'd successfully passed it off as a joke.

I ate the pomegranate seeds slowly to stretch out the time. They stained my fingertips red.

"Do you remember the first day we met for real?" I asked Alexander, focusing hard to pronounce my consonants. "I saw you around before then but it was the first time we talked. You gave me a ride home from the pub. I think I cried when you dropped me at home."

Surprisingly it was Lukas who said, "Yeah. You were going to walk home. In the middle of winter, in the middle of the night. You really pushed me, Rose ..."

"You remember that?"

I accidentally crushed a few seeds in their spongy honeycomb bed. I licked the juice off my finger before it ran down the back of my hand.

For a suspended moment, four sets of eyes fell to my hand and lips.

I felt their gazes like a touch. My little boat on the sweet wine river rocked.

"You'll never have to walk alone on a winter's night again," Lukas promised quietly.

"Or come home to an empty fridge," Gabriel said. "Do you remember how your house used to be? You'll never live with an empty fridge again."

"I was pushing you away back then," I said to the pomegranate seeds. "I liked you, I was trying to seem normal."

"You never succeeded," Lukas assured me.

I giggled.

Alexander's scowl twisted his face, turning it from handsome to terrifying. "All the times you were attacked," he said, as if the attacks had been my fault. "But you'll never be trapped again."

A gentle hand carded through my hair. A doctor's hand. His knuckles brushed the side of my overheated cheek.

"I would always heal you," Michael said. His deep voice was low. "But you'll never be hurt again."

I looked down at the broken pomegranate on my plate, feeling their promises settle on me. Sunlight on cold skin.

I didn't even care if they one day broke their word. It was their desire to make me these promises in the first place. That was what counted.

I wanted to make them promises too.

I didn't know yet what they wanted or needed. They seemed to have everything, and they held their secrets close to the chest.

(Still using human shields, you eternal child?)

But everyone longed for something.

I'd find it out. Then I'd promise it to them, a hundred times over.

a/n I declare the third chapter over!

According to the version of this book that I'm rendering as a pdf, you are currently on page 115 😆