Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [80]
The dogs charged him, running at full speed.
The knife jumped into his hand, almost on its own.
The first dog, an enormous pale male, lunged at him and went down on his front paws, ass in the air, tail wiggling.
What the hell?
The mob swirled around him, paws scraping dirt, noses poking him, tongues licking, drool flying in long sticky gobs. A smaller dog squealed—someone stepped on her paw.
“All right, down! Calm the hell down!” Cerise barked. “What has gotten into you?”
He reached over and petted the alpha’s giant head. Sad brown eyes looked at him with canine adoration. Dogs were simple creatures, and this one seemed to love his scent.
“That’s Cough,” Cerise told him. “He’s the idiot in charge.”
The dog sniffed his hand and licked it, depositing muddy slobber on his skin. Ugh.
“Cough, you dufus. Sorry, usually they’re more reserved. They must like you.”
“They do,” a calm female voice said from above.
A woman stood on the balcony, next to Kaldar. Tall and lean, she looked like Cerise if Cerise were twenty years older and had spent those decades in the Red Legion doing shit that kept her awake with nightmares. Where Cerise was muscle, this one was made mostly of sinew and bone. Her gaze fastened on him, focusing, measuring the distance, as if she were a raptor sizing up her prey. A sniper.
If the eyes didn’t give her away, her rifle would have. He’d seen it only once in an obscure catalog. A Remington 700 SS 5-R. A sniper rifle. Remington produced only about five hundred of those a year. The Edge was the last place William expected to see one.
“My aunt Murid,” Cerise told him.
“The man with Peva’s crossbow,” Murid said, nodding at Peva’s weapon. “The enemy of our enemy is our friend. Welcome.”
“What she said.” Kaldar swung the door open. A whiff of cooked beef floated through, reducing William’s world to a simple thought.
Food.
Cerise was already moving. William heaved the crossbow up, pushed his way through the sea of dogs, and headed up the stairs. He made it through the door in time to see her turn into a side room on the left.
“You and I are going straight.” Kaldar popped up at his side with the buttery grace of a magician. “Keep the pace now, that’s it. I think I’ll take you to the library. My sister is in there, and she’ll keep an eye on you while I go scrounge us some food. The kitchen is a madhouse this time of day, and if you go down there, there will be no end of questions. Who are you? Are you a blueblood? Are you rich? Are you, by the way?”
“No,” William said.
“Married?”
“No.”
Kaldar moved his head from side to side. “Well, one out of two isn’t bad. Rich and unmarried would be perfect, married and poor would be two strikes out, nothing good there. Poor and unmarried, I can work with that. Library it is. Besides, you’ll get to meet my sister.”
William tried to imagine a female version of Kaldar and got a mud-splattered woman with Kaldar’s face and blue stubble on her cheeks. Clearly he needed food and some shut-eye.
“This way. And we turn here through that door, and here we are.” Kaldar held the door open for him. “This way, Lord . . . What is your name, I don’t think I ever got it.”
He could not strangle Kaldar because he was Cerise’s cousin and she was fond of him. But he really wanted to. “William.”
“William it is. Please. Into the library.”
William stepped through the door. A large room stretched before him, the walls covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves and crammed with books. Soft chairs stood in the corners, a large table waited to the left, and at the opposite wall by a window, a woman sat in a chair working yarn into some sort of lacy thing with a metal hook.
She sat in a rectangle of afternoon light spilling through the window. Her hair was soft and almost gold, and the sunlight played on it, making it shine. She looked up with a small smile, the glowing hair around her head like a nimbus, and William decided she looked like