If she’d conscripted anyone other than Auri into the archaeological dig that was sifting through the attic’s contents, she might have been annoyed with discovering her ‘assistant’ lounging on a trunk and not buried up to his eyeballs in donatable antiquities. But, since it was her dearest Aurelius, Amory couldn’t manage so much as a reprimanding eyebrow raise as she approached him.
Were Amory the type of person who was brutally honest with herself she would acknowledge that she hadn’t truly needed the help. At her age, with her blood purity, she could lift the heaviest of clutter without breaking a sweat. It was little more than a lousy ruse to spend more time with her most treasured friend, the man who hadn’t been born her brother, and was much more dear to her than the word could articulate. Fortunately enough, the last thing that Amory was, was honest. Least of all with herself.
Tome relinquished into her possession, Auri fell back into a more comfortable position. From the corner of her eye she could see a smile similar to hers surface onto the male’s lips, and the sight of it made the warmth in her rib cage burn that much brighter. If she wasn’t so caught up in the memory of their time in France those centuries ago, she might have marveled at the honor it was to be on the inside of those impossibly tall walls he’d built around himself. There were precious few with whom he deigned to smile so freely.
Gods, there wasn’t a thing she wouldn’t do for him or his happiness.
“Werewolves,” Amory muttered with a headshake and an eyeroll. “They do have a talent for getting themselves into all kinds of trouble, do they not? Oh, while we’re on the topic… we haven’t heard much from the Corbeau’s since then, have we?” With a lifespan as impossible as theirs, it was an effortless thing to let decades and centuries pass without communication between covens. A decade could pass unnoticed. If it was a good few decades, a century could just as easily slip by. Which was likely why they were such an unhurried lot.
Distantly, thoughtfully, Amory commented, “With Arran in his eighth century and Eva well into six, I was considering reaching out to the other covens about their unmated Primes.” Incisors pinched down own her bottom lip and she thumped her fingers on the tome’s spine as she considered the wisdom in arranging such a thing for either of her spirited children.
Knowing the both of them, they wouldn’t take to the idea without conflict. Her children rather enjoyed their independence. More than love, apparently. Gods, what was she to do with them?
A resolute sigh served as prelude to the confession of, “I say that as though my standards for any future beaus of theirs aren’t downright unachievable.” The tome was set down and she shrugged, an absent shake of her head dismissing the idea of arranged matings or betrothals. “Let’s not fool ourselves, Auri. I wouldn’t know what to do with an empty nest anyway, would I?”
Talk of daguerreotypes chased away her worries about her children’s love lives. “A map,” Amory parroted with a sage nod, hands back to her hips as they both eyed the maze the attic had become over the centuries. “Bran’s a rather avid cartographer, is he not? Perhaps we can recruit his talents.” The edge of her mouth curled a bit with the thought. A legitimate map for their attic. How positively preposterous, and equally delightful. When she saw Bran next she’d demand it.
Amory’s attention was pulled back onto Auri when the male unfolded himself from the trunk with a folded mess of fabric in hand. Absently she corrected his guess, “Late 18th century, actually,” before shaking her head.
“Just this,” repeated Amory incredulously when Auri flapped the fabric loose to reveal a cloud of duest and a patchwork tapestry in an intricate design. She recognized it immediately, and fought the smirk that surfaced to her expression in favor of a aghast stare; as if she couldn’t believe the male would ever consider pawning off such an ‘heirloom’. “Do you not recognize the masterpiece you hold aloft and offer up so unceremoniously, oh beloved brother mine?”
With a wave at the thing between them, Amory reminded him –likely needlessly, “You recall that quaint early American tradition of quilt making, don’t you? Where the young women of the time were expected to have made a certain number of quilts for a number of occasions to prove herself fit to run a household… or whatever silly massageinistic idea was circulating at the time.” Amory rolled her eyes in a silent ‘humans, I’ll never understand them,’ before further explaining, “Lana and I were tickled by the absurdity of the logic and took up the practice in a most unbecoming fashion. A woman with a sense of humor was such a crude thing back then, wasn’t it? Anyway, this quilt was stitched for Lana’s accent into Elder. After all, how fit could she possibly be to run a house without a single quilt to her name?”
Amusement huffed out of her before Amory cocked her head to the side, staring mildly at the tapestry’s pattern in stitch-work. “I suppose that since it was made in jest we can stand to part with the thing.” Her nod was final. If the quilt had any true value it wouldn’t have gathered so much dust up here in the attic. There was no use in holding onto the thing.
“Indeed,” she agreed with a quiet smile, a laugh alight in her gaze as she regarded the tall male. “Generous of them to pass these down to us.” Amory took the quilt from Auri’s hold and began to refold it more delicately than it had been the first time. It was set down atop of the trunk he’d vacated as Auri mentioned having spotted promising looking boxes nearer to the front of the building. She nodded, remembering how some of the boxes had been labeled.
“Doilies, I think. Lots of doilies. Oh and the porcelain dolls we stuck up here because they were making Hades uncomfortable.” As a brilliant idea came to mind, Amory grabbed hold of Auri’s arm and gave it a squeeze, grinning the suggestion, “What do you say we take them down to our room and stack them on the bed for him to find?”
Amory’s musing on werewolves and their propensity for getting into trouble earned her a raised eyebrow from Aurelius, an unvoiced and we don’t? lingering between them for a moment before he let his attention be pulled along to other things by Amory’s train of thought. He was more than happy to let the eddies and flows of her mind carry him along behind her, had spent so long learning the intricacies of the older vampire’s mind that he felt arguably more comfortable drawn into her thought process than following his brain down all sorts of rabbit holes.
“No, no, it’s been a while. A handful of decades at least, maybe we should check in at some point.” With the longevity of vampire covens, and the geographic distance between them, a few decades silence was to be expected. Auri didn’t think they’d officially spoken in at least a few years before the Corbeau’s had reached out to them for help with their territorial dispute, but they’d made a trip out of it anyway. They were on friendly, if rather nonchalant, terms.
Looking off where the horizon would be if their world wasn’t just exposed beams, sloping ceilings and boxes, Amory’s voice was distantly thoughtful. Auri was perfectly content to watch her think, holding his tongue until she shook her head, putting the book down. His response, when it came, was dryly amused, quietly teasing, “Of course you would, you’d just have to go back to mothering me.”
His humor, such as it was, was replaced with sincerity, and he sketched out a small shrug, “That’s assuming your two would leave, though, spouses or not. It seems to me your nest seems safely filled for the time being, Ori. Eva, maybe, I could see setting out into the world for a while, and if she were to go I imagine Arran would follow, but they’re devoted to you and Hadrian. They’d always come back.” The same could be said for him, really. Amory and Hadrian seemingly had a talent for inspiring utter loyalty. “As for looking for matches, if your standards don’t weed everyone out, there’s Hadrian’s and mine to follow, so I can’t say I’m entirely optimistic for anyone’s chances.” For everyone’s sanity they’d likely all be better off letting things be. Amory and Hadrian were almost astoundingly good together, a lucky match if Auri had ever seen one, but the same could not be counted on to happen again. Arran and Eva deserved the best of the world, but Auri was willing to bet if they were to find mates it would be on their own terms. The Mordecais had raised their children to be strong willed, after all.
The curl of Amory’s lips was as good as a promise that soon poor Brandyn would be strong armed into spending more time than he ever had in the attic, papers in hand. Aurelius would have to apologize for putting the idea in Amory’s head. Though he had to admit that the idea of a map for the attic was pleasantly amusing. “I’m not sure he has any experience in the realm of plotting out terrains quite like this, so it would really be doing him a favor.”
His back half-turned to Amory, she didn’t see the flash of his smile broadening as she corrected his haphazard dating of the quilted tapestry he was unfolding. When his attention slid back to his sister in all but blood, his brow furrowed slightly at her expression of abject shock that he’d so much as hold the fabric in front of her like this. That he was entirely certain the indignation was all for effect didn’t mean that he didn’t blink down at the quilt again once more as he cast back through his memory once again to try to remember if it was significant. It’d all been a joke, and Lana seemed to have found the whole process of making the thing, chipped away at while a handful of members of the coven would lounge about and talk, funny. He looked at her again, blinked once more. “Not really, no.” Playing along when it came to Amory was second nature. Also, though he would readily admit he probably couldn’t do any better, he wasn’t sure he’d call Lana’s quilt a masterpiece.
“We could ask Lana, anyway.” He shifted his hands, wiggling the quilt and sending out another puff of dust for no particular reason beyond the fact that he could. “And to think, only a few decades later I didn’t have to make any quilts at all. Even though the human women were still hard at work.” Humans were baffling and interesting, but often close-minded and fearful. They all knew that in any number of ways. They were different by virtue of being another species, but plenty of them had features to set them apart even further.
Amory took the quilt from Auri, folding it with much more care than he would likely have put into the task, and he let out a quiet huff of a laugh, the coopting of an exhale. As much as humans feared the unknown to the point of occasional violence, they were generally ready and willing to accept the easy answer to suspicious things. Roseville had accepted the long lives of many of its residents through a delicate balance of fictitious family lines and careful distance.
And then, as Amory’s response turned into a mention of porcelain dolls, Auri’s lips pulled up into a smile, that tugged broader into a grin that for all its rarity of appearance was bright and amused. He wrapped his free hand around her hand where it lay on his arm, squeezing it in turn for a moment as he smiled. “I say that we hardly have any choice in the matter. There’s a reason we had to keep those dolls and this is it.” He dropped his hand, grin lessening into a speculative smirk as he headed off in the direction of the boxes in question, taking a few steps with his hand open behind him to pull Amory along. He glanced over his shoulder. “We’ll have to give the one that blinks a good spot- they’re not nearly as disconcerting as he seems to think, but that one is a bit creepy.”
