Hot, fresh and on time :) Many, many thanks to you wonderful people who commented on the last part - thank you to the gorgeous girltype, the quixotic Queen of Slayers, the brilliant Bex Drake (We'll see ;) Evil either way, though!), the yummy yukatalamia and the most excellent Elentiriel. May chocolate and kittens shower down on you!

I'd love to hear what you think - any thoughts, comments or criticisms you have are very much welcome.

Next part coming up by October 24th...

Lyrics come from Sting (beautiful song. Until the Sugabaes murdered it. Horribly.) I hope you enjoy!

Ripples Part Twelve

He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn’t play for the money he wins
He doesn’t play for respect.

This was his guilty secret: sweat trickling down his back as he stared at the phone. So often when he spoke about the Furies, he was flippant and cool. Inside, he was always anything but. He had not entirely escaped – obligation tied him to them still, and now he was entwining himself with them once again.

And worse, taking a friend with him.

Riose began with Nightfire, because he anticipated the endless warfare of conversation with Blue Malefici; barbs, concessions, danger.

So when the phone was answered, and that aloof, precise voice said, “Orage,” he was steeling himself.

“I need-” he began, and got no further.

“I assume this is about Delphine Thetis, and that pesky blood-oath she wants to get rid of.”

Thrown, he stammered out, “It...it is.”

“The answer is yes. I’ll even offer my home as the meeting place.” Amusement crept into his voice. “The Furies haven’t heard a request like this in a hundred years, and haven’t ever agreed to one. Let’s see if your mermaid can make history.”

“What do you get out of it?” he asked.

“Entertainment, of course,” Blue said, and put down the phone.

---

Next came the Grieving Fury. He half-expected her to treat him with formality – he’d heard she kept the two aspects of her life separate, as he himself had tried to do, but Chatoya Irkil exchanged small talk and pleasantries before she gently prompted him. “I assume this isn’t a social call.”

“No. I’m calling on behalf of a friend.”

“The same friend I healed at The Chill? Delphine Thetis?”

“Yeah.”

“The same friend who has Aspen digging through the archives to find out about blood-oath?”

“Uh...yes.”

She sighed. “I can guess why you’re calling. She wants to meet us.”

“As soon as possible. Blue’s offered his house.” He paused then added, “I think he’s looking forward to it.”

“I’m sure he is.” She sounded grim. “All right, Riose. I’ll hear her out. If I was going to be married to Poseidon Ivan, I’d probably do the same, especially after what he did to her.”

This was new. “What did he do?”

Silence. “Nothing pleasant, Riose,” she said. “I didn’t realise you didn’t know.”

“Phi never told me.”

“And you didn’t look at her file?”

“She’s my friend!” he snapped, indignant.

Her laugh was soft and startled. “What a cynic I’ve become. But not so cynical that I won’t hear her out. I can’t promise I’ll help her, Riose, but I’ll listen to what she has to say, and I’ll judge her fairly.”

“That’s more than enough,” he assured her.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, and she too hung up, leaving him feeling hopeful.

---

He left Therese until last, knowing she would not accept anything less than his presence. Their relationship was a strange one, dual-sided as a coin. On the one side was his sister, always teasing him, pushing him, guiding him where she thought it necessary. On the other sat the Viper Fury, imperious, complex and contrary. And dangerous. Very dangerous. She moved from one to the other with terpsichorean swiftness, so he was never sure where he stood with her.

It was the Viper Fury who let him in, scorn gleaming in her black eyes, a meaningless smile on her lips.

“Sit down,” she said, fitting deed to words. “It’s been a while.”

“You were busy,” he pointed out, hearing the accusation.

She tilted her head. “Never too busy for family, even little brothers who don’t call.”

He bared his fangs at her, as he had when he was young and loved to try and scare her with his ferocious faces. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“So you are. But - call me a cynic - I don’t think it’s a social visit. What brings you to my door?”

“Delphine Thetis,” he answered.

Her eyes narrowed. “The pod girl. What does she want with the Furies? Or has someone finally told her the truth about her parents?”

Another puzzling allusion. He was almost beginning to wish he had read Phi’s file. But he couldn’t profess ignorance in front of Therese, so he feigned indifference.

“That old story? No. She wants to break a blood-oath her family made.”

Interest sparked in her face. “Does she indeed. Do all your friends want to be human, Riose?”

You would see it that way. “She doesn’t want to be human. She just doesn’t want to marry Don Ivan.”

“Hmm. She’s thinking with her heart and not her head then,” Therese remarked. “If she put her mind to it, she could make him her puppet, an ego like his. Still, I can’t fault her courage.” Her eyes fixed him, intense. “Or yours.”

Mine…? “What do you mean?” he said cautiously.

“It’s about time you stopped toying with that girl, don’t you think? Celia Slone, that’s her name. Not hard to find out, Riose.” Throaty, slow, she let the implicit threat dangle. “You don’t feed from her, you treat her like an equal, and you let her know about us. People have begun to wonder whether she should be alive.”

Heat rushed up his body, mixed with the chill of fear. “She’s just a friend.”

“She’s human, little brother. They weren’t made to survive our world.”

“I know,” Riose answered, meeting her eyes – so dark, so much older than her years, familiar and alien at once. And gentler than they used to be. “You’ve told me often enough. I got the message a long time ago.”

“And chose to ignore it,” she commented. There was no anger there, only a kind of weariness. “She will break, you know, one way or another – and you’ll have only yourself to blame. Hope she forgives you, because I doubt you’ll ever be able to forgive yourself.”

He doubted she realised that bitterness laced her voice, faint, but discernible to one who knew her so well.

There had been a human boy, years ago who had intrigued his sister. She had hunted him and played with him, as was her way, and then something had happened between them – something that had left scars on her, invisible, deep, wrenching. She never talked about him, nor was it easy to define exactly how she had changed – Riose could only say that she lived her life as if in the boy’s shadow, which stretched long and black across time, thrown by whatever sunset he’d vanished in.

Is that why you speak to me of forgiveness? Are we so alike, still searching, still hoping?

“I’ll protect her,” he said, only hearing the insult – as you did not – when it was too late, when the words were splattered across the air.

But her mouth merely drooped into a sad curl. “If you mean that, Riose, leave her be. It will spare you both, I promise.”

“Why do you care?” he demanded, truculent. Who was she to tell him how to live? He was tired of hiding from his friends. “She’s nothing to do with you.”

“She’s someone you love,” she said, her voice neutral, careful. “And I may not like it but...I do understand.”

Riose stared, astonished by the confession. “Do you?” he blurted.

Her feline smile held mockery. “Perhaps I too know something of love, even if it is only for a little brother who doesn’t know any better. But be careful, Riose. You’re not as tough as that arrogant brat who got himself admitted to Nightfire all those years ago.”

“I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

“You wouldn’t.” She surveyed him and then said, “Ask me what you came here to ask.”

“Will you help Phi?” he said, hearing the plea in his voice.

“Yes. But tell your siren she had better sing for her life. Nothing less will do.”

All emotion was gone from her. Her eyes were vast and deep as an underground lake, and he had no doubt she meant it.

He didn’t mean to, but the question escaped. “What about Celia?”

“She’s your concern. I have no interest in her, but I can’t speak for others.”

He opened his mouth – and she cut him off with a single glance.

“Go away, Riose. You have what you wanted. Go back to your life – and try not to ruin it.”

He went.

---

Phi walked down to the lake that night as she had every night before. It was her bolthole, her sanctuary. Yet now, coming to it on the wings of Iry’s revelation, it took a new and sinister light that made her stomach turn to think of it.

She could find no peace. The old funeral rite echoed bitterly in her mind – she knew just what the waters brought back to her on the foam of every wave – and even the slap of the swell seemed mockery.

Why was she even here? There were no answers, only all these old, hidden truths circling with the relentless patience of vultures.

And then she felt his presence, and understood exactly why she had come.

“I didn’t know if you’d come back,” Phi said, and silently, the words flowered inside her like orchids to hang, vibrant, new, astonishing.

But I hoped.

---

Zeke stepped from the shadows. “Neither did I.”

“Were you here then, too?” she asked. Her voice was low and quiet but held an edge of wariness, as if she was expecting an answer she didn’t want to hear. “Did you know?”

“Know what?”

Her tone eased. “About my grandparents.”

“Did...something happen to them?”

Whether it was laughter or gasp, the noise she made was outraged. “You could say that. The pod drowned them because my parents didn’t do what they were supposed to.” She shuddered violently. “They held them under the water and when they were dead, they left the bodies floating there like they were...debris. Like they didn’t matter.”

He was an intruder, more truly than he had been when she was just a voice around which he wrapped his dreams, layer on layer.

“I’ll leave you alone,” he said.

She whipped around, her eyes dark, imploring, one hand stretched out to him. And her voice was throaty and poignant, striking him hard.

“Don’t go.”

In those two words, he heard an echo of all those requiems that she had poured forth to the night sky.

“I don’t want to be alone here,” she said quietly. Her smile was crooked and sad. “It’s the only place where I can be...me. No one needs me to be strong or to pretend not be afraid. I don’t have to be the dutiful daughter, or that I don’t care what the pod say behind my back.”

“I’m sorry,” Zeke whispered, knowing it was inadequate. It couldn’t erase the cruelty of what she had learned, or ease her grief or her anger.

And both emotions boiled at the margins of his mind - he could feel her still, as he had been able to when he rescued her from the pit. That was new, and a little frightening - somewhere in the core of him, she rippled like water disturbed by a thrown stone, delicate and ever-changing. He didn’t understand why it was: only that he knew her heart as if it beat against his own.

“Sorry,” she said, the word acid on the air. “I’ve heard that a lot. They’re all so sorry about what happened. But here it is, happening again. Another blood-oath made to be broken. Another girl drawn to the boy with fire in his eyes.”

His world went quite still, quite silent. “Me?”

“You,” she said. “My friends think you’re dangerous. They’re probably right. But I don’t think you’re a danger to me.”

He opened his mouth to tell her the truth – and felt the first knot of pain, furled beneath his ribs as Avy’s vow took hold. He changed his warning to a neutral, “Why not?”

“Don’t you know?”

Zeke could only look at her blankly. “Know what?”

“I thought about it. Why you came to listen to me every night. Why I kept coming back here - why I came tonight. And it seems so obvious now.”

“What does?”

Phi blinked. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said with something close to amusement. “You’re my soulmate.”

---

“What are they doing?” Finn elbowed him. “I can’t make out anything.”

“Just talking, I think,” reported Riose from the reassuringly thick undergrowth. Part of him knew that this was underhanded, and that Phi would murder the pair of them if she had any idea they were watching her.

“Huh. Bet that won’t last.” The witch squinted out in the darkness. “Are they lying down? Oh my god! Is she-”

“That’s a tree, Finn,” he sighed. “They’re over there.”

“Over where?”

He silently cursed his friend’s complete lack of night vision. “Never mind. Just believe me when I say nothing nefarious is going on.”

“Good. I don’t trust that guy.”

Riose refrained from pointing out that Finn didn’t trust anyone with a Y chromosome who showed the faintest trace of interest in his female friends. Besides, he agreed. Whatever this Zeke was, power wafted from him like smoke, a constant low-level presence. “Keep it down. If she hears us, we’re dead meat.”

“Sorry.” The lull didn’t last. “You think he’s really her soulmate?”

He hesitated. He’d mulled over it, discussed it with Jo while they waited outside Iry’s house, and something she’d said had stayed with him.

“He’s dangerous,” she’d agreed with a little nod. “But so what? We all are. And when I walked in...there was this atmosphere between them. Something happened.”

“But what?” he’d said idly.

Her eyes narrowed, and then she said slowly, “Intimacy of a kind that scares the hell out of me, darling. The way they looked at each other, no one and nothing else existed in the world. It was empty except for him and her and whatever they saw in each other. And Phi wasn’t the slightest bit afraid.”

Now, as Riose watched this girl, this friend, this utterly unknown creature who was still so unafraid, he answered, “I think so.”

Finn swore. “Then he’d better not hurt her.”

“Not on our watch.”

Both of them knew it meant late nights, lies, hours spent scratched and itching in the prickly undergrowth. Until they were sure Phi was as safe as she could be, though, this was the only option-

A hand pinched his neck so hard he had to muffle a yelp.

Oh, no.

“Boys, boys,” came the amused chiding of Jo from where she was sat on a groaning Finn’s back. “I thought we might find you here.”

It was Celia causing him severe pain and equally severe regret at getting caught. “I knew you weren’t going to drop this stupid idea,” she hissed in his ear. “I’ve seen that look on your face a million times.”

“Acute agony?” The soft smell of her was maddening, spicy and exotic as Scherezade. It brought his predatory urges rising to the surface and he stamped down on them firmly.

“No, your road to hell look.”

“My what now?”

“It’s the one where you’re thinking ‘it’s for the best’ even when you know the rest of us would disagree,” Jo explained helpfully.

“Acute agony comes later, when you’ve done the stupid deed and been caught,” Celia resumed, digging her nails into his skin to drive the point home. “Phi does not need you two lumps to look after her.”

Finn managed to raise his head from the dirt to say, “She’s snuggling up to the supernatural equivalent of lighter fluid. I’d say she really does.”

“Really?” demanded Celia, her voice a low, harsh hiss. “You think you have the right to make those decisions for her? Then what makes you so different from her parents, idiot? What makes you any different from Don Ivan?”

And he couldn’t answer. Neither of them could, because Celia had struck it true.

“You can’t live her life for her. You can’t keep her safe. And there is no way in hell you can know her own heart better than she does.”

When Celia let go of him, Riose turned to face her with an apology stuttering on his lips, but the grimness of her face, the pale shards of her glittering eyes made him reconsider. She was too angry to take it as anything but an affront.

Finn, however, had not gleaned such wisdom. “It isn’t her heart that bothers me. It’s his. What does she know about him?”

“More than you or I, darling, if he is her soulmate.” Jo might have let him up but she looked like she was seriously considering squishing him again. “Let it be.”

“But-”

She grabbed his hair and twisted. Finn winced.

“It wasn’t a suggestion,” Jo purred.

He ceded at last, muttering, “I just don’t want her hurt.”

She sighed, and her fingers tangled in his hair briefly, tender, comforting. “None of us do. But it’s her choice.”

Celia had lost her ire, but her face was no less bleak and when she spoke: her words had the clarity of a diviner parting time to glimpse the future. “You’ve seen what happens when you only live for other people, Finn. You’ve seen her mother.”

That shut him up as nothing else could. “All right,” he said gruffly. “Let’s get out of here.”

---

Phi had expected a multitude of reactions. Disbelief had not been on the list.

“That’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“How can I have a soulmate?” he demanded. “I was made, not born.”

“So were the mer,” she said levelly. “Do you think Ryar would have made anything soulless?”

A sudden smile sprang to his mouth, and she was surprised by how glad she was to catch a glimpse of the boy who’d flirted with her at the lake. “She wouldn’t know how. And it would explain a lot.” He paused, and his face took on a soft, tentative quality. “I guess after so long, I just assumed I’d always be alone. It’s hard to believe...a soulmate...you...me...us, you know?”

Yes. If it were true, there was an ‘us’, a shapeless entity composed of words and touches and emotions, some twisting, churning lightning thing that held the promise of joy and grief in equal measure.

I might love him. I might loathe him. And either way, I’m scared.

But she held out her hand, ignoring the butterflies that swept around her stomach, and dropped all the shields that she kept around her mind. Somehow she even managed to sound flippant. “Well, there’s an easy way to find out.”

As they stood there, fire and water, she realised just how much she wanted it to be so – to know that she was not alone, had never truly been alone in all those nights when the waters absorbed her tears and her voice, that he had been waiting as she had; hoping, yearning, not understanding that the gap in her heart was shaped to fit him. It subsumed her fear, it kept her steadfast in the silent night.

And then he took her hand-

She was awash in sensation, gasping, astonished. Knowing it was true was no substitute for this – for warm white light that dazzled her like a desert sun; of heat that swept over her with tidal inevitability, and then...

Him. She could put no better word to it than that. She was two, bisected: she was the girl stood at the water’s edge gripping his hand so tight that the pain impinged – barely - on the edge of this place, and she was elsewhere, surrounded by everything he was, almost overwhelmed by it. Beside a silver sea which might have been water and might have been fire, she stared at him, and was amazed.

He blazed in this other place, the true fire that he hid under a human shell. It was a shell, she realised, an empty thing that could only throw out a feeble echo of what he truly was.

His hair was a pale gold that she thought shifted in unseen winds before she realised it was fire; his skin glowed as if with the deep heat of metal in a forge, and beyond it all in this place that was not a place, his power. Only now, feeling the force of some apocalyptic inferno held back solely by his choice – his control – did she understand just how little she had grasped of his strength.

He could have blasted her to ash with a touch. And equally, he could burn her up inch by precious inch, and turn the lake to steam, the trees to charcoal at the same instant without needing to think about it. She knew now why they had named him angel, djinni, devil.

You said you were fire and I didn’t realise what you meant. I thought it was a metaphor, but it isn’t.

I understand now.

Fear rose in her – and then she looked into his eyes, and saw they were unchanged, and full of awe and utterly open to her.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, and she knew it for a vow, fierce, intent. “I promise.”

He could not lie – not here, not to her.

After the last few days, she expected to be cynical and aloof, to bar her heart against any more pain. And yet she found herself half-smiling, feeling as if she had something true to pit against the disappointment and the lies.

“I believe you,” she said.

And back in that colder, duller world, she let go of his hand – and he was just a boy again, with fire and wonder simmering in his eyes.

“You really are my soulmate, aren’t you?” he whispered.

No, not just a boy. Not now.

“Yes,” she said, and left that other word unspoken, a small, bright ache filling that gap in her heart which had waited for him so long and so patiently.

Mine.

---

The silence existed between them like a pool then as they sat by the lake, quiet, not entirely comfortable but not hostile: merely waiting. He wanted to look at his hands, to see if the imprint of her glowed on them like a brand; he wondered if she knew what she looked like in that other place, if she knew what she looked like in this one.

Zeke wanted to touch her again, to feel her presence like a boundless sea of grey and turquoise and dark, swirling blue, meeting him and matching him in some way that he couldn’t define.

“What happens now?” he said.

“Now?” Her hair ruffled in the breeze, and they were close enough that strands brushed his cheek and shoulder. It was a dreadful distraction, but a welcome one.

“Now we know.”

“What do you want to happen?”

It was a guarded question, and for all that he knew she was his soulmate, he had not ventured into the depths of her soul, and he wouldn’t until he was invited. Those were her secrets to keep, her trust to be earned.

And what of your secrets? whispered a treacherous voice. Not by word or thought or deed.

There has to be a way round it, he thought. I just have to find it. I need time, and that I can have with her.

He met her eyes, turned to thunderclouds by the night sky, churning, turbulent, fierce. And beautiful, as he had always thought of her and not known it.

“I want to come back tomorrow and see you again,” he said, linking his hands around his legs so she wouldn’t see them shake. “And the day after that, and the day after that. I want to have all the conversations we would have had if I hadn’t been too shy to talk to you. Well. The conversations that don’t involve calling me a pervert or a stalker, that is.”

She inclined her head, eyelashes tilted, coy, a half-smile on her mouth. “I guess that depends how many times you saw me naked.”

“Just the once. And I didn’t mean to. Not that it wasn’t, you know, a nice sight...”

“Nice?”

The arch curl in her voice released tension he hadn’t realised he felt. They were playing again, as they had been when they were two strangers by the lake. “Obviously when I say nice, I mean amazing.”

“Damn right you do.”

He grinned, made bold. “So will you meet me again?”

“I think I might,” she agreed, but under the flippancy there was a weight to the words that thrilled him. “Provided you promise not do anything to besmirch my reputation.”

“Are you sure you want me to promise that?”

Her eyes were smoky and unreadable, but her voice had a note of laughter. “For now. Until I know you better.”

He held up a hand like a Boy Scout swearing an oath. “No besmirching without your express permission, until you know me better.”

“Good enough.” She leaned forward, and for the first time he caught a glimpse of hunger in her eyes, an echo of his own desire in the bow of her arms propping her on the ground, in the space she stole between them. “Tell me something about you I don’t know.”

“But...that’s everything,” he pointed out.

Her eyes danced. “Zeke, I’m getting to know you better.”

Oh. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Something...no one else knows.”

He hesitated, not because he didn’t know what to tell her but because it was hard to break a lifetime of silence, of keeping his thoughts within fortifications, deeply buried because the only opinion he was required to hold was whatever Avy ordered. The first word was a release and every one after was saturated with guilty pleasure.

“I’m scared of spiders,” he confessed.

“What? Really?”

She was smiling, and he couldn’t help but smile back because it was so stupid. “Really. It’s something about the way they move – their legs, they just scuttle. I used to incinerate them, back in dragon times, but then one day I flashfried a spider that turned out to be a courtier sneaking away from an affair. Now I don’t dare in case I wind up with another naked man rolling around on my floor.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re a big fiery demon, and you’re unmanned by bitty things with eight legs.”

“Some of them are not bitty!” he said indignantly. “And have you seen how many eyes they have? It’s like there’s dozen of tiny minds watching you.”

She snorted and it turned into full-blown chortling. “That…that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.”

“Well, let’s hear something better then, Miss Congeniality,” he challenged. “Tell me something about you I don’t know.”

She fell silent, and he could see she was making a decision. At last, she said in a voice soft as the whisper of breaking waves, “The first song I ever heard was ‘Beyond The Sea’. I could sing along to it before I learned to talk properly. My dad used to play it to me every night. He won’t play it anymore.”

Sadness twisted her mouth, and she seemed reduced, curled in like a flower against the frost.

Meaning to comfort, he reached for her, just to brush the back of her hand, but she reached for him too and suddenly their fingers twisted together, and she was clutching him so tight her nails bit into his skin. The soulmate link whirred into life, and he caught her sorrow, and with it, a welter of fragmented thoughts: two people dancing in a warm room, massive to a child’s eyes...it was a sad song, really, a love song – and he didn’t play it because of someone...

She let go and Zeke thought she would vanish into the night, the brief, dizzying intimacy too much. She was poised for flight, muscles tense as if all that held her was her stare searching his face.

“I’m scared too,” he said softly. It was true. What lay before them was immense, an intimacy that knew no impediment and no end. It was entirely possible to lose your own identity beneath the onslaught of a soulmate link if you were not strong enough. He had seen it happen: it was not some benign force of destiny - it was an urge primal and violent, spawning hatred as easily as love, terror as easily as wonder. To surrender to it required tremendous hope.

He had thought all his hope lost; he had been wrong. It had burst forth like the genie from the lamp, laying forth wishes and dreams.

She gave no answer – but then he felt her fingers, fumbling for his.

And into the darkness, Phi whispered, “Tell me something about you I don’t know.”

Everything I can, he thought as he unravelled his heart in front of her, a boy and girl holding hands by the lake. Everything I am.

I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds make money for this art
But that’s not the shape of my heart

---

So - how was it for you?