Velvet Cataclysm (Princes of the Underground 1)

Of course, Saint wasn’t human, was he?

She blinked several times and looked around her office. The image of Saint’s retreating back was superimposed on everything she saw.

Chapter Five

The first thing Christina heard, aside from a commercial for car insurance blaring on the television, was the sound of her son’s voice.

Aidan had grown like a well-watered weed for the past six months. Christina was distantly surprised to see that the top of his head reached just below Saint’s shoulders. It seemed like yesterday Saint towered over the boy like a giant would a munchkin. Aidan had grown up instead of out. She worried about his skinniness, even though she knew it was normal for boys to get that lanky, stretched appearance as adolescence loomed.

His thinness confused her all the more because she’d been flabbergasted by the amount of food the kid had been putting away for the past six months. Aidan’s voice hadn’t yet begun to crack and deepen like some of his eleven-year-old friends’ had. Still, the coming of his manhood seemed to surround Aidan like a hazy glow before a fierce dawn.

She heard Aidan scold Saint. “Why did you have to go and have a fight with her? Now she’ll never let us stay at Whitby!”

“Sorry,” Saint said in his deep, resonant rumble.

“I’ll say you are.”

Both males looked around at the sound of her voice. Given the perversity of her mood, it gratified her to see that Aidan looked nearly as furious with Saint at that moment as she did. It’d confused her in the past sometimes, how she’d never become jealous while standing at the kitchen sink, doing the dishes and watching through the window as Saint and Aidan tossed a baseball in the yard, talking in brief bursts of what appeared to be some kind of mysterious, earnest male code that she couldn’t quite break.

How could they say so little and make it look like so much?

Yeah, Saint and Aidan had always had a bond she couldn’t touch. So the bunching of Aidan’s dark brown eyebrows and accusatory stare at Saint especially gratified her at that moment.

“Mom, Saint didn’t mean it. He didn’t know what he was saying,” Aidan stated immediately upon seeing her. He stepped toward her, his hands outstretched in a soothing gesture. “Saint wants us to stay at Whitby as much as I want to stay there. I’m sure he’ll apologize for whatever he said or did.”

Christina put out her arms toward her son, hating to see the wild, desperate look in his eyes. She threw Saint an acidic look that clearly told him, this is all your fault! His expression remained stony as he returned her stare, but she saw a muscle in his jaw leap with tension. Aidan remained by his friend and hero’s side, despite Christina’s beckoning gestures.

“Come on, Aidan. We’ll go home in a while.”

“To Whitby?” Aidan asked, his handsome, thin face transforming with triumph. His aquamarine eyes—a mixture of the sea and sky combined—gleamed hopefully.

“Yes. It’s our home for now. It will be until the lease starts on the apartment in Old Town in two weeks. I’ve explained all of that to you,” Christina said neutrally.

Her son’s scowl cut right through her.

“Aww, Mom. Old Town sucks.”

“Please don’t use language like that, Aidan,” Christina said, crossing her arms below her breasts.

“Where am I going to be able to skateboard? And Scepter is going to hate being caged up in an apartment!”

Christina’s shoulders sagged. Aidan hadn’t brought up this particular detail since she’d showed him the apartment yesterday and picked up the lease from the landlord. She’d been so busy enumerating all the advantages of moving and calming Aidan’s doubts that the volatile topic of Scepter hadn’t yet come up. She glanced at Saint nervously, wishing like hell it hadn’t come up in front of his brooding, disapproving presence.

“Honey, we’ll talk about this when we get home. I have some things I still need to do here at work. Maybe you can just watch television for a while and—”

“Mom?”

Christina mentally groaned when she saw the tightening of Aidan’s focus on her. If only her son hadn’t been born with her ability to read people…

“Scepter is going to be able to come with us if we move, isn’t he?”

Christina clenched her back teeth when she saw Saint’s eyebrows go up in a wry expression, as though he couldn’t wait to hear her answer to this.

“Aidan…Scepter is half-wild. It’d be cruel to force him away from the woods at Whitby.”

“I’m not going, then,” Aidan said staunchly, crossing his arms across his thin chest in a stubborn gesture that was the mirror image of Christina’s own. “There’s no way I’m leaving Scepter.”

“We’ll