18. Quill

CHAPTER 18

Quill

The redhead murmured her thank you, shocking me with how demure it was, and fled. She didn't seem unsteady on her feet, so she couldn't have been completely stunned by her soul manifesting in the garden, but she had looked like she was in shock. And Rider wouldn't have helped her if she'd been fine. He wasn't interested in doing anything with a woman — fae or human — and he'd never been interested in taking a mate.

The only woman he talked to was his sister, because if he got too friendly with anyone else, the Goddess, because he possessed powerful magic, would consider him a possible mate for any woman with awakened unbound mating marks, just like the redhead, whether he wanted a mate or not.

And she had all of her marks. None of her marks had shifted from her hair color to her eye color which meant she didn't have any mates yet.

Except that didn't matter for me. No matter how friendly I got, or even if she fell in love with me, the Goddess would never mate us. The odds of the Goddess even picking me as a last mate were almost non-existent since I didn't have any magic at all. It wasn't impossible, but a man without magic hadn't been mated for four hundred years and I doubted I'd be the one to change that.

Even if my current search did lead me to develop a magical ability, that didn't change the fact I might make a magicless child and there were already too many of us — and too many newborns — without the divine spark.

No, having a mate was beyond me. The best I could hope for was getting stronger and being an equal member of our command team. And right now, that meant figuring out why there were more shadows in the Gray and why they were more aggressive.

"That—" Rider growled, his gaze still locked on the path where the redhead had gone "—wasn't necessary."

"So, you are going to find her when we're done," Talon huffed. He wasn't interested in a mate either.

"Of course I'm not going after her. I've got more important things to worry about." Rider jerked his attention away from the path and glared at Talon. "But she's so disoriented, I'm not even sure she knows where she is."

A strange mix of emotions flashed over Talon's expression. He wasn't an asshole. He did care about other people, but he couldn't do what Rider did and just avoid women. They flocked to him whether he wanted their attention or not and he had to be more aggressive to get them to look somewhere else. Which was why he'd been so sharp with the redhead.

"At least she can walk," Talon said. Which was as much of a peace offering as Rider was going to get.

Rider sighed and strode to the nearby benches where we were originally supposed to meet and sat. "I'm not sure that's a good thing. The children didn't notice her condition and swarmed her."

"Most women like that," Talon said, sinking onto the bench across from him.

"Do you?" Rider shot back, pointing out that Talon was often swarmed, especially in the human realm if he wasn't careful, and didn't enjoy it at all.

Talon shrugged, his gaze sliding to the path where the redhead had disappeared. "I'm not a woman."

"And this isn't what we're here to talk about," I said, jumping in before Rider could respond.

As much as I wanted to know more about the woman and was worried she wouldn't be all right, we needed to discuss the novices before they arrived. Which was the whole reason we were meeting in the Garden tonight and not waiting until tomorrow when I was in the Gray.

"Fine," Talon huffed, jerking his attention back to Rider. "How do you want to train the novices?"

"It can't be the same as usual," I said, sitting beside him. "We've lost too many men and we can't afford to keep them out of the full rotation for the regular two seasons."

"I know," Rider replied, his expression grim.

Talon only needed four replacements for his elite unit and I only needed two, but Rider had lost a dozen of his elite guard and close to another dozen of the regular guard since the last lottery. And almost all of them were human. We had more human novices this time than we'd ever had before— Hell, we had more novices than we'd ever had before, and we didn't have nearly enough time to train them properly.

"We should be able to put the fae novices straight into a modified rotation after initial assessments," I said, "But maybe there'll be a few humans who already have decent fighting abilities."

"Not if they're like the one who just arrived," Rider said. "Sure, he managed to kill a shadow hound, but he was stupid enough to use the ring after dark."

Talon's eyes widened. "You're talking about that red-haired child who stumbled into the bathhouse covered in shadow blood? He killed a hound?"

Red hair? I'd delivered the summons to a redhead that afternoon. What were the odds Ash, the other guardsman who handed out summons, also had a redhead on his list of novices?

"Saw it with my own eyes and it was dumb luck," Rider huffed. "Dumb being the operative word."

"But that shows promise," Talon said, his expression darkening. "I know the humans think they're men at sixteen, but they're not. And he's small, even for a sixteen-year-old human male. If he managed to kill a hound, then we can work with that. He's young. He'll grow into a man soon enough."

"So, you're saying someone came through the ring after dark?" I asked, stunned.

We'd made it clear to the humans that it was suicide to come to the Gray after dark and their priests were supposed to pass that knowledge to every man in the lottery. The light created from the ring's magic was a beacon to all the shadows in the area. There was a slim chance someone could run to the Tower before he was swarmed, but that depended on how far away the shadows were, and with their increasing numbers, the odds that at least one of them was close to the ring was good. "Suicide attempt?"

"I don't think so," Talon replied. "He's… inexperienced, not stupid or suicidal."

"Yeah, and he better get experienced fast," Rider growled. "Next time we might not get so lucky and someone will get hurt. Unless of course, that idiot is Ash." Rider ran a hand over his face, already looking tired and the first rotation of training the novices hadn't even started. "I really hate when he plays the dumb ones."