Dark-Adapted Eyes

Excerpt From: Dark-Adapted Eyes

“Why do you let her do this to you?” Gabriel Devlin’s voice melted into a resigned sigh and he straightened the cuffs of his shirt.

Fern always said it was a gesture that reminded her of Prince Charles. “He’s always fiddling with his cufflinks. Maybe I should buy you a pair,” she’d say. “You’d love it in Buckingham Palace. All that family silver to polish. All those possessions to rearrange.”

And Gabe would reply with some coolly-delivered sarcastic remark about it being a cold day in hell before Fern Mansfield bought anything when she seemed to believe shoplifting was more fun.

It wasn’t like she was short of money—none of them were—him, Fern or Alex. Office jobs were staid and boring and routine, but they paid the rent. Kept the wolf from the door, as the saying went.

“But not the cat,” Gabe muttered, smirking as he pulled on his jacket. He’d have preferred to have worn something a little smarter, but Fern had instructed him to dress down. “Try not to scare the peasants away.”

Now that had to be the height of hypocrisy. Fern was the scariest person he knew. A loose cannon.

But then she wasn’t, strictly speaking, a person.

He rolled his shoulders, trying to shrug off the thought of what purred away under the surface of all three of them. Really, if it was up to Gabe, he could cope with not having much to do with Fern, but her carelessness made her dangerous. She needed to be supervised. Fern had a nasty habit of skating close to the line of revealing what they really were to normal human beings. She enjoyed it, he knew. Teasing him and Alex, making them think she was going to publicly reveal herself, to openly change. That would cause trouble and trouble was messy and Gabe liked order.

And that was the only reason he put up with her. He’d agreed to accompany her tonight on her quest in a purely supervisory capacity.

Oh yeah, who are you trying to kid? Even straightening up a novel or two on his bookshelves failed to distract him from the knowledge he lied to himself. There’s more than one reason you put up with her. He was a man. Well, kind of. But he had needs. Often he hated himself for allowing her to seduce him, but it was so easy to be swept away by Fern’s energy, dangerous though it often threatened to be. Better to make a half-hearted attempt at keeping her happy than risk Fern going outside their very small pack for excitement. The problem was, it took both him and Alex to do it, and Gabe wasn’t sure they could keep her under control for very much longer.

And so he went along with it, for the sake of a quiet life that was nowhere near as quiet as he would have liked. He allowed himself to be toyed with, like a mouse in a cat’s paw. And at the same time, he helped clean up after her whenever she invited trouble in.

“Good old Gabe,” he told his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He allowed himself one last cursory—but admiring—glance before heading out. “Always taking one for the team.”

A team which, surely one day, Fern would have to acknowledge only numbered three. She never tired of her search for others like them, but Gabe knew in his heart it wouldn’t happen. In all the years they’d been ‘friends’—for want of a better word—it had been that way, and Gabe couldn’t see it changing any time soon.