Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives

I came out of my room with my glasses on.

Aisha was in the hallway. Standing with a careful stillness, managing her own nerves the whole time and hoping nobody noticed.

Her husband obviously noticed.

She fell into step beside me.

"How long has he been waiting," I said.

"About twenty minutes." A pause. "He asked where you were. I told him you needed a few minutes. He said fine and sat down."

"That’s it?"

"He also asked if there was tea."

I processed this.

"Did anyone make it."

"Liliana made it. I wasn’t going to argue with her about it."

Right, I thought. The man who cratered a city block this morning was sitting in the living room with tea. This was simply what my life was now.

.....

I stepped in.

Vanir was in the armchair. Younger-looking than the cathedral had suggested. Without the fog and the rubble around him, the Corps uniform worn with the ease of someone who had stopped noticing it years ago. The tea was in his hand. He looked up when I entered with that fast, comprehensive sweep..... the kind trained into someone who reads a room before they finish walking into it.

The room had others in it. Mephistopheles against the far wall, arms folded. Liliana on the couch with the composed, watchful look she used when she was paying very close attention and didn’t want anyone to know. Victor had positioned himself in the kitchen doorway..... maximum distance, plausible deniability about whether he was actually present.

Vanir’s gaze moved across the scene. It landed on Aisha briefly..... that small ease in his posture, the specific quality of someone confirming the thing they had actually come for.

Then it came back to me.

I pulled a chair and sat down across from him.

The man who looked at me and said take him, I thought. To Eva. Like I wasn’t worth addressing.

I didn’t say that.

.....

He got to it without ceremony. He was not a man who enjoyed preamble.

He acknowledged the morning plainly. The cathedral. Austin. His Corps’ presence on English soil had already generated noise through the channels he monitored. The political fallout was moving faster than I might expect.

"The Association is going to move quickly," Vanir said. "What happened this morning gave them an incident. They’ll use it."

"To do what."

"Call a meeting. Probably invoke the ceasefire framework. Formally." He took a sip of tea. "Which means they’ll want you there. In person. Sooner than whatever timeline they originally proposed."

This isn’t over, I thought. The meeting isn’t optional anymore.

"How soon," I said.

Vanir set the cup down. "Days. Not weeks."

.....

Vanir looked at Aisha properly for the first time since we’d sat down. Not the confirming glance from before. Something more direct.

"You’re alright," he said.

Aisha, standing slightly behind me with her arms folded, met his gaze.

"Yes," she said.

"Good."

He looked back at me. His expression had shifted slightly..... not the Commander, not the flustered version Eleanor’s visit had produced. The person that sat underneath both of those.

"She’s family," he said. Plainly. "I don’t explain past that."

I looked at him. I thought about a lot of things very quickly..... Aisha walking into Austin’s cathedral with a spear, Aisha’s hands pressing holy light into my shoulder and the sting of it, Aisha’s voice through the door twenty minutes ago, slightly less level than she’d wanted it to be.

"I know the feeling," I said.

Something moved in his expression. The specific shift of someone updating an estimate they had already formed.

.....

He raised the thing that needed raising.

Austin.

He stated it the way he stated everything..... as information that needed to be accounted for. Crow had taken him before the finishing blow could land. Vanir didn’t dwell on it.

"He’s survived worse," Vanir said. "He’ll resurface. When he does it’ll be through Azazel’s network, which means....." he paused. "The problem doesn’t stay in England."

"It follows me home," I said.

Vanir looked at me. "Yes."

Not unkindly. Just accurate.

.....

The conversation had found a rhythm. He was direct but not aggressive. I had been matching his register..... practical, measured, giving as much as I took. It had gone better than either of us probably expected.

Then there was a pause between topics.

He had been looking at me throughout the conversation with the general attentiveness of someone who processes information visually. A Duke’s perception..... not passive, actively cataloguing. I was used to people looking at me. I had been wearing the glasses since I got dressed. The glasses Alicia gave me. The ones built to suppress the divine eye effect on humans.

Vanir was not human.

Mid-pause, his gaze settled. Not on my face generally. On my eyes specifically. Through the glasses. The way a supernatural with Duke-level perception could look through a suppression tool built for ordinary people without particularly trying.

The conversation didn’t stop immediately. He finished the thought he was on. But his next sentence was shorter. A beat late. The specific quality of a man whose processing had split..... one thread still running the conversation, another thread running something else entirely, something that had arrived unexpectedly and was demanding attention.

He set the teacup down.

He looked at me with the expression of someone who had just run a calculation they didn’t expect to run and arrived at a result they didn’t have an existing category for.

Not alarmed. Not afraid. The careful, precise expression of a man who was 300 years old..... not ancient, but old enough to have read things, heard things, to know certain signatures when they appeared in front of him..... encountering something that shouldn’t exist in a living person’s face.

"Valerian Aísē," he said.

His voice had changed slightly. Still level. But carrying something it hadn’t been carrying two minutes ago.

He looked at the glasses for exactly one second. Then back at the eyes behind them.

"Your eyes....."

He stopped there.

The room was very quiet.

Aisha, behind me, had gone still, her own divine perception was catching something.

Vanir said nothing further.