Ever After (Rachel Morgan)

flickering on him.
    From the cot, not a sound escaped, but I didn’t care if Al was listening. “But they are here,” I said softly, grasping his arm so he would look at me. “Trent. They are.”
    Trent shook his head even as he met my eyes. “I thought you might say that. If it was up to me, I’d choose the hard path with the easy ending, not the easy path with the hard end.”
    I drew back. “What do you mean, it’s not up to you?”
    Taking a last drink, Trent set his empty glass on the windowsill. Exhaling, he scrubbed his face with a hand, hesitating to look at his five perfect fingers. “What would you choose?”
    The fervent emotion in his gaze as his eyes met mine scared me. “Me?”
    “I want you to decide,” he said, looking a little unsteady. “Not because it impacts your species, but because I want you there with me.”
    My heart pounded. I didn’t know what he meant. He wanted me there with him?
    Stumbling slightly, he went to sit on the raised hearth, snagging a new bottle on the way. “If you make the decision, you have to be there to help me with the fallout,” he said, working the corkscrew with a professional flair. “Either they die naturally, or I continue the cure and the twenty-year battle to hide them until they can defend themselves.”
    The cork came out with a pop, and he looked at his glass, halfway across the room on the sill.
    Shocked, I stared at him. He wanted me to decide? He wanted me . . . to make a decision that he would have to live by?
    Giving up, he drank right from the bottle. “I don’t want to be alone anymore, Rachel,” he said. “And if you make the choice, you have to help me see it through.”
    “I want them to live,” I said softly, and he slumped, his disgust obvious when his bottle clinked against the floor. “What, you asked my opinion, and that’s it. You’re not going back now that it wasn’t anything you wanted to hear.”
    “No.” Trent eyed me sourly. “It would be easier the other way.”
    Smirking, I crossed the room and sat down beside him. Taking the bottle he handed me, I poured a swallow in my glass. “If it was easy—”
    “Everyone would do it,” he finished, clinking his bottle to my glass and downing a swig.
    “What about Ellasbeth?” I said, my expansive mood hesitating.
    Trent didn’t look at me. “What about her?”
    I thought of the distasteful woman, on a plane to the West Coast right now, but she’d be back, worming her way into elven politics. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting married to her?”
    Drawing away, he looked sideways at me. The fire was warm on our backs, and his focus was starting to go distant. “This is a business arrangement. Nothing more.”
    “Well, that’s what I thought,” I said quickly, and from behind the curtain, Al started to snore. “But she doesn’t like me.”
    “So?”
    I thought about that for a moment. “You are drunk,” I said as he tried to get the bottle to balance on the rim of its base.
    His eyes came to mine. “I am not,” he said, and I caught it as it began to tip. “But I will be before the night ends.”
    I took another sip, actually tasting it this time. I’d have a migraine in about an hour, but I didn’t care. “You know, the last time we shared a bottle, you wiped the top off,” Trent said.
    “Red pop?” I guessed, smiling at a memory, and he nodded.
    “You remember. Are the rings gone?”
    I swung the bottle between my knees, and my gaze slid to Al snoring behind the curtain. “Al and I destroyed them,” I said. “Melted them so they couldn’t be reinvoked. You have a problem with that?”
    Trent shook his head and reached for the bottle. “No. It was nice being able to reach your thoughts, though. You have nice thoughts.”
    A smile curved my lips up, and I leaned away so I could see him better. “You are drunk.”
    “I am not drunk.” He shifted closer, and I didn’t mind. “I’m bored out of my mind.”
    I took another sip. “This is good,” I said, and he acknowledged it gracefully. “I know what you mean about the quiet,” I went on. “Jenks’s kids are scattering. He’ll be down to six kids by fall. Ivy is spending most of her time with Nina. I’m starting to think about finding a new apartment somewhere with Jenks.”
    “Really?”
    I shrugged and passed the bottle to him. “I don’t know. I like it at the church, but things have changed. If I wasn’t there, Ivy might ask Nina to move in. One vampire in the