Into the Tiger's Hour

Chapter Two

Every morning was a rush created entirely by two people, punctuated by comments from the third and fourth who sat at the glass-topped table. Ax had never been calm when he felt there was a task that needs to be handled right away, and getting Iris to school was one of those particular tasks that took all of his attention. Iris, empathetic as she was, always caught Ax's anxiety and ended up flying about the kitchen and breakfast room, dashing back to the stairs and returning sheepishly every time the item she was certain she'd forgotten was pointed out to her.

Neither Jonas nor Betre interfered with the flurry of activity, one sipping his morning cappuccino without lifting his gaze from the paper, the other watching as Iris gulped down the breakfast Ax put together, grabbed her belongings and said her farewells. There was always a chorus of response to the teenager's cheerfully called goodbyes and then peace reigned in the penthouse of Brandenburg's Ebony Towers. Betre would leave shortly after, heading to the offices of Fostering Dreams, Inc. Ax would hover in the kitchen for another quarter hour, fussing over each dish as if it were priceless china. Jonas would finish his coffee and head to Our Lady of Mercy, the city's oldest Catholic church.

Quiet would fall, uninterrupted throughout the day--save on Wednesdays when the cleaning staff arrived for their weekly blitz--and was broken only when Ax trudged up from his basement forge shortly before three o'clock in the afternoon. It was he who was responsible for greeting Iris when she came home from school, for getting a snack ready and sitting with her through the initial homework, the TV shows that were watched before dinner. By six, Betre and Jonas would return with the meal, carried out from Le Chat Noir, and they would sit to eat together as a family.

There were few dishes to wash afterwards, but those were Iris's responsibility, and she tended them while dancing in the kitchen to the music cranked from the iPod dock on the counter. Afterwards, there was leisurely time to converse, to play a game of chess or Candyland (an eternal favorite) and watch a movie. Bedtime was strict; no later than ten, Iris was dutifully kissed and sent to her bedroom with the understanding that she had half an hour before lights had to be out.

Comforting, familiar routine, and one that no one in the house expected would be broken. There was structure to life in the penthouse, and it had been so rigid for so long that it seemed impossible it would be shattered by something as simple as a single packet of letters falling out of a closet.

~~

Tiptoeing, Iris Foster stretched, reaching high overhead for the narrow black box sitting on the top shelf in the hall closet.

Her assignment was going to be overdue if she didn't finish it this weekend, and her father was out of town, apologetically called away to attend a meeting regarding the donation Fostering Dreams, Inc. had made to the art museum in Willington, West Virginia. She'd not thought to ask him questions before he'd left the previous day, so preoccupied with the chemistry test she'd studied for, and finding the assignment sheet in her backpack had caused a moment of sheer temper. Throwing her notebook across the living room had earned her nothing but a bored look from Betre, one of the two men that she considered family and had helped raise her.

"Rather than being a brat," he'd commented smoothly, turning another page of Voltaire, "You could go to the hall closet and find the black box with Jonas's old journal. Everything about your adoption is recorded there. He was quite meticulous."

Ax, still down in his forge, was not available to get the box down for her, and one simply didn't ask Betre to do things that didn't involve well-dressed outings. So Iris continued stretching, holding onto the coat bar and scratching the box's side with her nails while muttering under her breath.

She was tall for a seventeen year old; slender and well-shaped, with long limbs and the sweet curves of a bud vase. The promise of maturity was already showing in the lines of her face, but there was a delicacy to her features that would never be wholly lost. Large, pale blue eyes were shaded by long, platinum blonde lashes, a shade darker than the hair that tumbled down her back. Iris had always wanted to dye her hair, to cover the milky iridescence that was too pale to be a true blonde, but she knew better than to suggest it.