Alerich woke up to wintery sunlight filtering in through the gauze curtains and his grandmother’s lady’s maid, Odette, rapping on his door, her pretty, polite voice carrying through it. “Breakfast is served.” Alerich rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. Odette’s presence meant his grandmother, Hildreth, was here. And if Hildreth was here it would be non-stop wedding talk for the next two weeks.
He wondered if there was a trellis outside the window. Was it sturdy? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d escaped out a window and wouldn’t be his first trellis climb, but he was a big man and preferred to not have another one break halfway through his descent.
He sighed and pushed up onto his elbows and then swung his legs off the bed to take a sitting position. It would be no use. His grandmother had a tracking spell on him, much like the one she had on Elspeth. He could feel it, a subliminal tingling at the back of his neck. Hildreth would be able to find him no matter where he ran. He stood and hooked his thumbs into his red boxer briefs and slid them off over his hips, tossing them to the foot of the bed, and made his naked way to the en suite bathroom. A quick shower was in order, then.
After his shower Alerich went in search of breakfast, wearing a clean pair of black jeans and a red cotton button-down shirt with the top two buttons undone, his longish, black hair still damp. The house was large, but not so large that he could not find the dining room in short order. Even still, he was the last one to breakfast and his grandmother’s gunmetal blue eyes narrowed slightly with disapproval as he entered. Bloody wonderful.
“I’m glad to see you have finally decided to join us, Alerich.” Hildreth’s tone was arid, her clipped Dutch accent still present even after decades of living in Britain, and her crisp white hair was pulled up into some complicated coiffure of Odette’s doing.
Quiet conversation around the table stopped for a moment, all eyes on Alerich. His blood ran cold at the shifting sight of the demon, sitting in what passed for its human form near his father’s end of the table eating roasted bone marrow. Today, it seemed to prefer to be mostly male, and his form was something close to stable, though even as he watched it changed subtly.
Arariel.