"I'm just pitying whatever poor males lived in that house with all of you. It must have been truly frightening at least one week out of every month."
She gaped, then laughed out loud. "Was that a joke from you?"
"Merely a frightening statement of fact."
"Yeah, right. Well, truth be told, my father did spend a lot of time at work during that time of the month and he did make sure that all our pets were males so that he wouldn't feel too terribly outnumbered. What about you? Did you have any sisters?"
He shook his head as she joined him over on the passenger side of the car and they headed toward Decatur Street. "I only had brothers."
"Whoa, just imagine if your father had married my mother, we'd have had the Brady Bunch."
He scoffed at her. "Hardly. Believe me, my family made the Borgias look like Ozzie and Harriet."
She cocked her head at him. "For a man who prides himself on being prim and proper, you certainly know a lot of pop icons."
He didn't comment.
"So how many brothers did you have?" she asked, surprising him with her quick return to their previous topic.
He started not to answer and yet it came out before he could stop himself. "Until a couple of years ago, I thought I only had four."
"What happened then?"
"I found out that Zarek was one of them, too."
Tabitha frowned at his disclosure. "You didn't know while you were alive?"
Guilt and anger tore through Valerius at her innocent question. He really should have known. Had he ever bothered to look at Zarek when they were human...
But then, he was his father's son.
"No," he said sadly, "I didn't."
"Yet you knew him?"
"He was a slave in our house."
She looked aghast. "But he was your brother?"
He nodded.
Tabitha was as confused as he'd been the night he learned the truth. "How could you not know?"
"You don't understand the world I lived in. You didn't question certain things. When my father spoke, it was truth. You didn't look at servants, and Zarek... he wasn't recognizable in those days."
Tabitha felt a wave of grief so profound that it made her ache with him. She wrapped her arm around his and gave a light squeeze.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm standing beside you so that Zarek won't whack you again with another lightning bolt. You said he wouldn't hurt innocent people, right?"
"Yes."
She smiled at him. "Call me Shield."
Valerius smiled in spite of himself as he placed a hand on her forearm. "You're such a strange woman."
"Yeah, but I'm growing on you, aren't I?"