by P. R. Frost
“Then let me do it for you.” I should have built up a fair amount of good karma to make up for a little white lie when I dispatched a couple dozen Sasquatch. Besides, a lie couldn’t be too bad if I told it to protect the innocent from information they wouldn’t believe and couldn’t process.
“Something will turn up.” She dismissed it all with an expansive gesture that nearly dislodged her IV. Her eyes glazed over and drifted closed.
"MoonFeather, before you drift off into the land of nod, we need to talk.”
“Hmm?” She cast me a beatific smile.
"MoonFeather.” I jostled her arm a little to get her attention. “Your friend WindScribe has come back.” I pointed to the witless lump in the corner. She’d roused enough to hum something I didn’t recognize.
"WindScribe. Such a beautiful girl. Blonde hair as light as a feather in the moonlight.” She paused long enough that I thought she’d gone to sleep.
Odd that she would describe another witch with the attributes of her own craft name. When people join Wicca, they often take a name that describes themselves better than the name their parents gave them. I’d seen MoonFeather dance nude in the moonlight. She moved as gracefully as a feather drifting in the wind.
Would she ever dance again? I hoped so.
Those gnomes had a lot to answer for.
She mumbled something I couldn’t catch. Then she swallowed deeply and stopped slurring. “I always thought you’d take the name WindScribe if you ever embraced your true calling. Your spirit is as free as the wind and you are a scribe.” Something more unintelligible. Then, “Society didn’t grant as much religious freedom in those days as they claimed. We had trouble keeping a sacred thirteen.”
MoonFeather opened her eyes and sat up abruptly. “Have you called Josh?”
“Yes. He’s in court and will be here as soon as he can. He has to clear his schedule so he can stay home and take care of you. But I think you should plan on coming to my house. So he can work.” Josh’s law practice was just starting to take off. He needed to be in the office, or the courtroom, as much as possible. He also needed to make money to keep up his health insurance premiums to cover MoonFeather and this hospital visit. Hospital administrators do not look kindly upon people without insurance.
Like WindScribe.
Besides, those little beasties had tasted MoonFeather’s blood. They’d be able to find her anywhere, in any dimension. I needed to stay close to protect her.
“Your mother is coming home.”
I groaned. “But the weather hasn’t turned yet.”
“She’s still coming home. You need to think about protecting her. Until I can devise a ritual to banish the bad guys. You’ll need help. You need an apotropaic.”
I knew that archaic word. It meant something designed to avert evil, like a gargoyle protecting a cathedral. How did she know it?
Yeah, I needed a gargoyle. A live one with a sharp and pointy weapon.
“I always need help with Mom,” I said instead. But I didn’t like the idea of my naïve and defenseless mother all the way across the yard in the guest cottage. Alone.
So much for two weeks in Mexico, or Southern California, or San Antonio . . .
With a weary sigh, I dug out my cell phone. Gollum wasn’t the first on my speed dial, but close. (That spot was reserved for Dill’s extinct cell phone. I’d never allowed myself to delete the number. Too final an admission that he was truly gone forever.) Gollum was the closest thing to a gargoyle I could think of.
I’d never seen him fight, but he knew things about demons no mortal should. He had access to more information from arcane sources he never talked about.
Come to think about it, he didn’t talk much about himself. Just myth and legends and demons. About those, he talked endlessly. And he hid behind his scholarly tinted glasses so that I couldn’t read his eyes.
Maybe he was busy, and I could just leave a voice mail.
No such luck. He answered on the first ring. “Tess, good to hear from you. Are you coming to my lecture tomorrow?” His clipped upstate New York accent sounded all too comfortable and familiar, even though I hadn’t heard from him since I left him in Seattle last November, other than a generic holiday card with a scrawled signature I could barely read.
I easily imagined him stretching his long legs and lanky frame, then folding himself into the nearest armchair and setting up camp with his laptop, his cat, and my beer.
“I don’t think I can make it.” I glared accusingly at WindScribe. If I took her with me maybe. “Um, Gollum, what’s your schedule like while you’re in New England? ”
“Actually, I’ve taken a teaching gig at your community college. Seems like your anthro prof has complications in her pregnancy and has to take to her bed for four months or so. I’m filling in.”
“Oh.” He’d be on my back step for months. He and his cat. Scrap hates cats. He’s also allergic and can’t smell evil when the cat is around. “Um, do you have an apartment yet?”
“Got a line on two but haven’t committed to either yet. I’d planned to do that this weekend and move in next week during spring break.”
“Would you like to stay in my guest cottage?” I had to grit my teeth to make the offer. But I needed his expertise in dealing with flesh-eating garden gnomes.
“What about your mom?”
“I’m moving her into the mother-in-law apartment attached to the house.” No way would I leave her alone out in the cottage, easy prey to my latest supernatural enemy.
Dill had set up an office in the house extension. I’d locked the connecting door after his death and never looked inside since. But it had three good-sized rooms, a private bath, and a kitchenette.
“I’ll meet you at the house in an hour,” he said on a chuckle.
“Where are you now?”
“Halfway between Boston and Cape Cod.”
“Like you knew I’d make the offer?”
“Like I hoped you would when you saw my smiling face.”
“House rules. You sleep in the cottage, not the armchair in my living room. You drink your own beer, eat your own food, and keep your cat out of my house and Scrap’s way. And you never, ever, under penalty of death, speak French to my mother.”
Chapter 9
In old Alchemical prints, the lion and the unicorn are frequently used to describe the opposing forces of sun and moon.
I LEFT MOONFEATHER in Josh’s loving arms a few minutes later and returned home by way of the liquor store—for empty boxes to move Mom’s things. And a bottle of single malt scotch. I had a feeling I was going to need it if Gollum was moving into the guest cottage. The scotch was for me.
WindScribe brightened enough to notice the booze. I think she wanted to start in on it the moment I set the bag in the backseat of the car.
“Not yet, kid. You’re still drugged. Can’t mix booze and pills.”
“Why not?”
I rolled my eyes at that.
“Makes for a boss trip.” She started humming something catchy about a white rabbit.
Oh, boy. I was going to have my hands full with this one.
I knew that tune. Where? The only lyrics that came to mind were filk, parodies of the original with a science fiction or fantasy twist. I spent a lot of my time at the SF/F conventions, or cons, filking. We’d sit up half the night singing the parodies, or Celtic lays, and punning ourselves to sleep.
Dill’s death had closed my throat, seemingly forever. I couldn’t even sing at the funeral of my best friend, Bob Brown, though he’d asked me to with his dying breath. Then, last autumn, I’d finally let the songs within me bubble up and out.
I could use a rousing round of filk about now.
By the time we got back to the house, WindScribe was swaying on her feet.
The moment I got her back into bed, she reached for the vial of tranquilizers. I grabbed it away from her. “Well, I guess you can have one. It’s been over four hours since I gave you a dose.” I shook
a few tablets into my hand.
The bottle seemed fuller than before. I counted. The label said thirty tablets, should be twenty-nine now. I counted thirty-three. And some of them looked suspiciously like aspirin.
“How many did you take before?” I demanded, not at all happy with my unwelcome guest or the way my life had slid downhill since . . . since last night when a Windago tried to gain entrance to my home—against the rules of hospitality.
WindScribe answered me with a snore. No wonder she was so spacey and incoherent.
Then she twitched and thrashed. “Don’t lock me under the stairs, Mama. Please don’t. I’m afraid of the dark.”
I thought about waking her from her nightmare. Then she settled down and smiled. “Pretty flowers. No darkness in Faery.”
Shaking my head, I took the pills with me and stashed them in the downstairs bathroom on my way to clean the kitchen.
I downed one small shot of the scotch while staring at the bloody mess and scrunching my nose against the stench of dead gnome and drying blood. In the movies no one had to clean up the mess. There’s no smell in the movies.
Three, no, four miniature bodies lay scattered about the breakfast nook along with blood spatters and gore. On the walls. On the table. All over the muted blue-and-brown calico café curtains and chair pads Mom and I had lovingly made when Dill and I first bought the house. I wanted eight chairs so that we could seat an entire family here to start each day.
Together.
Ruined. Both the furniture and my dreams.
I’d have to get a new table and kitchen chairs along with some new dreams. No way would I ever be able to eat at this table again.
Those garden gnomes had a lot to answer for.
“It’s just a table, lovey. Don’t cry.” Dill enfolded me with almost tangible arms. Instead of warmth and comfort, I felt cold.
An ache opened in my gut.
“If you trade in the imp and come to me, we can still have all those children together and get a new table.”
“Don’t start on me, Dill. I’m not messing with fate and death. That’s too weird, even for me. I won’t write it. I won’t write vampires either, so I certainly don’t want to live with it.”
Maybe a shot of scotch would numb my gag reflex, my anger, and my grief long enough to fill a basin with bleach water.
I was still stalling when I heard a car pull into the driveway, idling roughly before it backfired and cut off. Then a brisk knock sounded on my kitchen door.
That could only be Gollum. His rattletrap van always sounded as if it was on its last legs, held together with rubber bands and chewing gum. But it kept going, and going, and going.
Dill faded into the woodwork. Not totally gone, not totally here.
I dashed to the door. Gollum would know what to do. Despite my grumblings about him and the way he tended to invade my life, I did like the man. I trusted him.
More than I could say for Donovan Estevez, the other man almost in my life.
The grin froze on my face as I looked through the glass half of the back door. A cold knot of suspicion formed in my stomach. Followed instantly by warm relief and a need to give all my troubles to the man smiling at me on my back stoop.
“What can I do to help, L’akita?” Donovan Estevez asked the moment I opened the door. He traced the worry lines away from my eyes and mouth. His hand felt warm and inviting even without gloves on this frigid day.
More real than Dill. More alive. And sexy as hell.
“You’re a day early,” I hedged.
“Yet obviously you have need of me. Now what brings a frown to your face and makes your shoulders reach for your ears in tension, hm?” He edged closer.
I had to back up or fall into his arms.
“Donovan Estevez, why are you driving that?” I pointed over his shoulder at a mud-and-salt encrusted yellow Subaru station wagon.
I didn’t want to look at his handsome face with the high cheekbones and chiseled jaw, at his sleek black braid that hung down between his shoulder blades, at his long legs and broad shoulders. I didn’t want to feel the warmth and strength of his embrace.
Yeah, right.
His black leather jacket and tight black jeans only emphasized his fit physique, making it harder for me to hold my distance.
“Economizing,” he growled. “Had to sell the Beemer when the casino and my economic empire imploded down a demon portal.”
That about explained what happened last November.
“You’re a day early.” I closed my eyes to override the magnetic pull of his smile. My head cleared the moment I shut out the vision of his face.
I couldn’t bring myself to move aside and invite him in. Unlike Gollum, I didn’t dare trust this man. I had evidence that he had demon ancestry as well as sympathies.
I also had evidence to the contrary. Until I knew more about this enigma of a man—a mysterious and wildly handsome man—I had to keep my heart intact.
I’d lost my heart and my will to Dill. When he betrayed me by dying, I’d fallen apart. My extreme grief had left me vulnerable to the imp flu. I wasn’t sure I could survive that kind of loss again. Having his ghost around reminded me to keep my resolve to resist Donovan firm.
I dared open my eyes.
“Mind if I come in anyway?” He flashed me one of his famous grins, and my knees forgot to hold me upright. “It’s a bit brisk out here.”
“Yeah. Oh. Sorry.” I stammered something and stepped aside with a sweeping gesture.
“Help yourself to coffee.” I couldn’t help but stare at the horribleness just to the left of the door beneath the broad bay window. “I’m kind of busy at the moment.”
He muttered something in a strange language filled with clicks, pops, and hisses. “No wonder you look worried. What happened here?” he finally asked jerking his gaze away from the bloody mess to me.
He pulled me against his chest, letting me bury my head in his shoulder. At five feet two, against his nearly six feet, I didn’t reach any higher.
Faced with the task of cleaning up the gore, I chose to embrace a demon instead.
I told him, the last part of my day’s adventures, not the part about WindScribe stepping out of Neverland.
“Well, you can’t bury the bodies,” he said. “And you don’t want to burn them in your fireplace, they’ll stink up the place something horrible.”
“I figured I should leave them where they are until Gollum gets here.”
Donovan snarled something else in his demon language.
He had nothing to be jealous about, but until I knew enough to trust him implicitly, I figured I’d let the emotion simmer between the two men.
“He’ll know what to do.”
“I know what to do. We build an equinox bonfire in the backyard and burn the critters. Where’s your woodpile? ” He eyed the vastly diminished stack of split firewood beside the kitchen hearth.
“Around the corner of the house, toward the woods.” Half of which I owned. I stepped away from him. “Wait a minute. Why can’t we just wrap them in plastic bags and dump them down a deep hole?” That sounded more sanitary to me than burning the carcasses.
