Red Blood (Series of Blood Book 2) by Emma Hamm (best short books to read .TXT) 📕

worn oak wood floors fairly glowed they were so clean. Lyra looked down at her heels and refused to give into the compulsion. The shoes remained on. Bones could be damned, and his floors could be scuffed.

Sunlight beamed through a skylight and illuminated the room. Pale yellow walls set off the abstract artwork that decorated them and the tastefully aged furniture. Hand blown glass lamps shed even more light that sparkled in her eyes.

Grumbling noises echoed behind her as the two men turned.

“You have no right to be meddling with my contracts.” Bones silky voice made her skin crawl.

“Contracts? That is what you are concerned with? Her well being is more important than a contract.” Wolfgang sounded appalled.

“Those little pieces of paper are our bread and butter, as you well know. Or have you been buried for too long to remember what it is to be a Lord?”

“I don’t have the patience to argue with you today, Bones.”

“Well that’s just too bad. We’re going to argue. Particularly about that bullshit you pulled when I had her in the swamp.”

“You were going to drown her!” Wolfgang exclaimed as he shuffled his way towards Lyra.

“I was going to do no such thing! The portal was but feet from her when you decided to intervene.”

Lyra tried to tune the two of them out. She was vividly remembering sitting on the leather couch she could see in the living room. Bones made the most incredible bourbon and blackberry pie. She couldn’t piece together these memories with the hatred she had lived upon.

They were soft memories. She didn’t remember anything here being soft. She remembered being a bodyguard. She remembered training in the basement with Bones blackening her eyes day after day. She remembered the anger the training had made her feel. Above all else, she remembered the pain when he had transferred all the magic she had requested into her.

Lyra wasn’t certain why she had blocked out the times when things had been good here. They had laughed and played card games into the wee hours of morning. Not just her and Bones but the other people he had gathered like wildflowers from far off fields.

Freedom had not been part of her life here. But it wasn’t a prison. Yet, somehow, she had made it out to be so in her mind.

A dark hand curled around her jaw and turned her face towards rich mocha eyes.

“Welcome home,” Bones said.

“I didn’t remember it like this,” she murmured.

“You were a teenager. Angry at the world, and therefore me by extension.”

“I remember this place as a cell.”

“Of course it was.” Bones laughed as he walked past them. “As a child, having seen the ugliest parts of the world, any place would have felt too small for you. And then to give you all that power… You were a cyclone contained in a mason jar.”

She supposed that was as accurate a description as anyone could make for her. Troubled by memories she had suppressed, Lyra wandered into the living room with the two men. It was as warm as she now remembered it.

Leather furniture was strewn atop an oriental rug. The centerpiece was a large fireplace created by riverstones that stretched to the ceiling. She wandered over to run her hands along the rocks. A mantel piece of aged wood held antique masks and jars of magical light.

How had she forgotten this place? This warm place filled with earthtones and bright walls should have stuck out in her memory. Instead, she had chosen to forget all the good things. She had painted him out to be a monster and this his cave.

Lyra was nearly struck dumb with the realization that she had spent so many years in anger and hatred of this man. She had expended so much energy in despising him while she had forgotten that he used to brush her hair at night because she was bad at untangling the snarls.

“Am I horribly ungrateful?” Lyra croaked.

She heard the creak of leather as Bones settled himself down in his favorite chair. He had once told her that it was the perfect vantage point to see if anyone was walking into the room. He could protect all of them easier if he saw an intruder before they saw him.

A soft clink of glass meant Bones had pulled out his snifter of scotch. The faint alcoholic scent made another page of her memory flip over. That was how he smelled, like hot cocoa and the finest scotch.

“No, you are not ungrateful. You are selfish and arrogant. But not ungrateful.”

He raised the glass towards her in a toast when she turned towards him. A rueful smile twisted his lips as he tossed the entirety of the drink down his throat.

“You’d tell me that was a waste,” she chided him.

“And if you wasted my hundred year old scotch, you would deserve the scolding.”

“It’s strange to be back here.” Lyra walked over to seat herself next to Wolfgang. The couch was comfortable enough to ease an ache in her back she hadn’t realized was there. Sinking deep into the cushions, she sighed. “It’s like I never left.”

“Well you did. My greatest creation left without even saying goodbye.”

“You did not create me, Bones.”

“Oh did I not?” He tsked. The bones in his hair seemed to move of their own accord to crack at her. “I trained you myself. I provided you with all the power a Siren should have had, and I saw your physical body through the pain. I healed you every night until you came back to us. So tell me: How I did not create you?”

She had no words to answer that. Lyra had spent the last ten years thinking she had done everything she could to become this person. It was difficult to admit that it might not have entirely been on her own.

So instead of answering as an adult, she simply shrugged.

Bones bared his teeth at her. “It appears you did not change. You are just as much