by Lisa Ladew
Crew nodded, then stepped backwards and put a protective arm around Dahlia. The king would no longer look her in the eyes. He motioned to the sour man next to him. “This is Lord Theobald, who has just been appointed Head of Parliament.”
Lord Theobald bowed at the waist an inch or two, then stood back, as if scrambling out of Crew’s reach. Crew didn’t even look his way, his eyes locked on the king.
King Caius took the egg from the soldier who was holding it and walked to the center of the stage as a courtier struck a great bell, sending a resounding noise out over the crowd, which quieted at once.
King Caius held the egg over his head in both hands, his voice strong and clear. “Dahlia the Clever and Crew the Strong have retrieved the basilisk egg. Show them your thanks!”
The crowd responded with a great roar, holding their arms above their heads, some throwing flowers and coins up onto the stage. The king addressed them again. “And now it is time for a celebration. Eat, drink, and be merry, for today is declared a holiday.”
The crowd erupted again and the king returned to Dahlia and Crew.
The king smiled at Crew and again avoided Dahlia’s eye. “Whatever I can do for you, name it. If it is in my power, it is yours.”
“The pendant, King Caius. That is all we need,” Dahlia said quickly.
Crew held up a hand. “And a room, somewhere private to sleep.”
The king nodded. “Of course. I will secure you a guard to the castle, and Crew, your lady can show you to your sleeping quarters. But won’t you stay and celebrate with us?”
Crew shook his head once and said, “We have other things to attend to.”
Dahlia’s cheeks heated but her imagination felt no such embarrassment. It already had Crew naked and holding her to the bed, taking care of the regret she had voiced earlier.
***
Crew got on the horse with much less fanfare the second time, but Dahlia could tell he still did not like it. As they rode slowly through the forest, a soldier ahead and a soldier behind, Crew relaxed enough to look around. He lifted his head to scent the air. Dahlia shifted in her seat to see his face.
He smiled at her and her insides melted. “This seems like a nice place to live,” he said. “I could get used to this world.”
Dahlia leaned back to give him a kiss. “I was thinking the same thing.”
By the time they reached the castle, Dahlia’s muscles were aching again, but Crew seemed limber as he jumped off and helped her down. As he stared at the castle and took in the view, she wished she had her notebook to record his reaction. The way he nodded when he viewed things he liked and the way his lips thinned when he viewed things he didn’t like. The intensity in his eyes as he gazed out over the water on the back side of the mountain. She could write entire sonnets on just the way his back stiffened and his chin jutted out when any men looked at him… or at her.
The guard led them directly into the great room, speaking softly with the soldiers already there, then motioning that Dahlia could take the clay block. Apparently the king’s instructions had been that she could have it whether the covenant broke for her or not.
Dahlia led Crew to the alcove where the clay block sat, surprised that the king hadn’t wanted to come back to see if she were able to break the covenant. He truly was a king of the people and she knew they would be sad to see him go.
Dahlia touched the block softly with one finger, having no idea if she was pure in intention or not. A high chiming noise sounded and the thing cracked in half instantly, revealing the shining pendant immediately.
Crew pulled the pieces of the block away and cast them onto the floor. “Is that what you were sent to get?”
Dahlia nodded and grasped the pendant lovingly. From the front, it looked much like the one that had left her life so many years before, but when she spun it around, a snarling dragon greeted her, its eyes purple.
“A dragon?” She could hear the surprise and upset in Crew’s voice.
“It’s not mine,” she whispered. “It’s Heather’s.”
“That’s all right, then,” he said.
She cradled the pendant in her hand and could feel the pull of worlds within it, its power apparent, even to her who had no experience with such things.
“Do you have a pocket?” Crew asked. She nodded. “I don’t think you should be holding it in your hands. It makes me nervous.”
“Okay,” she said, dropping it into the deep pocket in the folds of her dress, pressing her hand to the very bottom first to sure there were no holes. She could not lose such an important item.
She almost reached in her pocket again to pull it out and give it to Crew for safekeeping, but a voice sounded in her head.
No. It stays with you.
Chapter 29
Heather opened her eyes to darkness, frowning because it had been daytime when they’d entered Trevor’s house to retrieve the pendant from the safe. One look at the sky told her she had traveled outside of her own world, to one with almost no stars in the sky and a moon that looked to be three times the size of the sun in her world. She shivered violently and grabbed the pendant hard in both hands, focusing on it as if her life depended on it. “Take me back home, take me back home,” she demanded, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and praying that the next time she opened them, she would see Graeme’s face.
The stuttering, whooshing noise came again, and she kept her eyes squeezed shut as she felt a cold wind blowing her hair. She didn’t open her eyes again until she heard Ella’s voice. “She’s coming back. Thank goodness.”
Trevor spoke up. “That was nothing like when you went. You were there one minute, and gone the next. You didn’t slowly fade in and out like that.”
Graeme was at her side and she uttered a prayer of thanks when she finally felt his arms around her. He pulled her to face him and gazed at her, his eyes traveling from the top of her head down to her toes. “Are you ok?” She nodded, still shaken. He addressed Trevor. “It makes sense. If this pendant was made for Ella and allows her to travel between worlds, the energy patterns of her sisters could be similar enough to allow them to use it, but not in the same smooth fashion that it would afford to her.”
Graeme pulled her even closer and looked in her eyes. “Where did you go?”
Heather shook her head, still shivering. “I don’t know. Somewhere that it was nighttime.” Graeme smoothed her hair and ran his thumbs across her forehead, tracing just above her eyebrows. “Could you see anything?”
She nodded. “There was something in front of me like a house, but I didn’t pay attention, I just wanted to get back.”
“Did you sense any danger?”
She shook her head, embarrassed that she hadn’t taken a look around.
Graeme ran his thumb over first one of her eyebrows, then the other, then smoothed a hand over her hair again and massaged the back of her neck. “Tell it you want it to take both of us to the same place you just returned from.”
Heather pulled back, not sure she was willing to do so, now that she had seen what the pendant could do. “What if we get separated?”
Graeme shook his head. “I could sense you. I would’ve followed you if you hadn’t immediately started to flicker back into this world. Getting to you would not be pretty, but by my estimation, there is nowhere in this universe I could not follow you.”
Heather nodded slowly. “I’ll try, but hold on tight.” She grabbed his hand in hers, then closed her eyes and asked the pendant to take them both.
Stutter, stutter, whoosh, a great wind and even more pulling as the pendant took them both, and then Heather almost fell to the ground. Graeme caught her and pulled her upright, while staring straight ahead. Heather turned to see what he was looking at.
A woman stood there, bouncing on the balls of her feet, her hands clasped together, a huge smile on her face as her long brown hair blew with the night wind. “You came back!” she shouted, clapping her hands, then throwing her arms out to her sides and spinning a circle.
“I so hoped you would. I’ve been feeling that something great and wonderful was going to happen soon and here you are.”
Heather smiled. She seemed harmless enough, and enthusiastic. “You saw me come the first time?”
The woman shook her head. “No, but I knew you were here.”
Heather shook her head, confused. “How did you know I was here if you didn’t see me?”
The woman crooked a finger at them, motioning that they should follow her. “Come, I will show you.” She walked through the cutest handmade white picket fence Heather had ever seen, following a stone path up to a quaint but perfectly modern-looking house, not quite what Heather had expected after what Ella had said about the world she’d been transported to.
The woman turned and faced them again. Heather estimated her age to be somewhere between forty and fifty years old, but the constant smile on her face made it hard to tell. “I almost forgot my manners, my name is Deborah, but you can call me Deb, or the moon lady, if you like. That’s what my neighbors call me. They think I’m crazy.” She whirled and headed back into the house without waiting to hear their names.
Heather looked at Graeme, and his dumbfounded expression made her bite back a snicker.
Once inside, Deborah walked to the back wall of an open kitchen and stood by a patchwork quilt that seemed to be glowing. She put her ear to it. “Come here, sweetie,” she said motioning to Heather. “Come hear it.”
Heather looked at Graeme and he nodded. She caught the look he sent her. She’s not dangerous. Heather walked next to Deborah and pressed her ear to the quilt. She did hear something behind it, a sort of soft, chiming noise, like someone had run their finger around a chanting bowl and left it to vibrate.
Heather held out her hand and opened her fingers so Deborah could see what she had there. “Does whatever is making that noise look anything like this?”
Deborah stared at the pendant for a full minute, her face going white, then slowly raised the back of her hand to her forehead and slumped to the ground in a faint.
“Oh,” Heather breathed, and reached for her. Graeme stepped forward, but before either of them could reach her, Deborah rolled onto her stomach and pushed up to her feet, holding on to the wall.
“Deborah, sit down,” Heather told her, her brow furrowed.
Deborah held a hand to her head again, then moved to the brown couch against the far wall and sat down. “I’m sorry, don’t mind me, I have low blood pressure and sometimes it gets away from me. I have to admit I’ve encouraged it, though, because my late husband, McManus, God and the angels rest his soul and keep him from Satan’s roost, loved it when I fainted. It made him randy as the neighbor’s dog, and I loved that.”
Graeme snorted a surprised laugh and Heather glared at him, then burst into giggles. She tried to hide them behind her hand, then asked Deborah if she needed a glass of water.
“Oh no, dearie, you just lift that quilt up and get out what’s in the cupboard behind. I guess that’s what you came for.”
Heather nodded at Graeme and he did as Deborah asked. He brought the pendant to Heather and showed it to her. It was similar, but not the exact same as the one she had in her hand. As the two pendants came closer to each other, the pendant in Heather’s hand emitted the same noise as the one in Graeme’s. Heather looked up at him questioningly. Graeme shrugged. “I’ll get them close, but make sure you don’t touch both at the same time. I’m not sure if it will do anything to you, but I’ll pick safe before sorry.”
He moved the pendants closer together and the chiming sound intensified to a peak, and then cut off altogether just before they touched.
Heather smiled at Deborah, examining the features of her face, and wondering if what she suspected was true. Before Heather had figured out how to ask the question, Deborah smiled brightly at her. “So you’ll be taking me home now, then?”
Heather looked to Graeme nervously.
Graeme spoke to Deborah. “Where is home to you, Deborah?”
She nodded at the pendant in his hand. “Where that pendant brought me from, twenty-one years ago. I would say Earth in the twentieth century, but this world, for all its differences, is also called Earth and also in the twentieth century, twenty-first now, actually.”
Graeme nodded to Heather and whispered in her ear. “We can probably do it, but it’s up to you. I just need to know how she got hold of this pendant.”
Heather whispered back, “I think I know.”
She turned to Deborah again, but Deborah asked her own question before Heather could say a word. “Are you two together?”
Heather smiled and nodded.
“Of course you are!” Deborah clapped her hands together and shot to her feet again. “I can tell you are by the way you look at each other.” She put her hands on her hips. “If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to never let your sex life go stale. Me and my late husband, McManus, God and the angels rest his soul and keep him from Satan’s roost, always tried new things, right up until the day he died. He was much older than me, but he was a very open-minded man, just the same. Food play, foot play, bondage, role play.” She lifted up her fingers and put one out, grabbing it with the fingers on her other hand like she was going to start counting out more kinds of play, but Graeme put a hand up, stopping her, his face tight.
Heather giggled again. “Food play?” but Graeme’s eyes flashed. He didn’t want to know.
“Oh, sorry,” Deborah said. “I know, I’m wildly inappropriate. My late husband, McManus, God and the angels rest his soul and keep him from Satan’s roost, always told me so with a smile on his face. He said he loved it, though, it kept him young.”
She stood. “But you, young man, don’t need me to keep you young, so I’ll shut up now.”
Heather shot an amused glance at Graeme, then turned back to Deborah. “Deborah, do you know Dahlia?”
Deborah stared at her, then rushed around the couch to grab her into a hug as her tears began to fall.
“Dahlia is my daughter. I hoped you knew her, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Please, can you tell me how she is?”
***
Heather held on tight to Deborah as they skidded back through whatever space they had to maneuver through to get to their real world. When they arrived, Deborah was a dead weight in her arms. She laid her gently on the floor, ignoring the stunned looks on Trevor and Ella’s faces, then stood and looked around for Graeme.
Deborah opened her eyes and shot to her feet, her smile wide as she headed for Trevor and Ella to hug them both.
“Where’s Graeme?” Heather muttered, turning in a circle, looking around at the walls of Trevor’s basement. “He should have been here by now. He said he was leaving right after us.”
Worry sat heavy on her chest as she gripped the pendant in her hands. What if the other pendant had somehow stopped him from doing that dimensional-tearing thing he did?
But then he came down the stairs, his boots pounding on the wood. “Sorry, I was off by a few feet. Landed in the driveway.”
Heather breathed a sigh of relief, then turned to introduce Deborah to Ella and Trevor. “She’s Dahlia’s mom. I told her we are waiting for Dahlia to come back from the other world.” She raised her eyebrows and shook her head, indicating they shouldn’t mention that none of them knew exactly where that was.
Trevor shot a nervous look up the stairs. “Oh, that’s wonderful, Mrs. Ah-”
“Deborah, call me Deborah, or Deb, or the moon lady, if you like. That’s what my neighbors call me. They think I’m crazy.”
Trevor nodded his head slowly, his eyes big. Heather had to wonder if he’d ever had a full-blooded human in his house before. He spoke slowly to her, like maybe she didn’t speak English very well. “Deborah, perhaps we should take you to Dahlia’s house? You could wait there for her. We’ll bring her straight to you if she shows up here first, but I don’t think she will.” He looked to Ella for help.
Deborah nodded happily.
“That would be great. Fantastic. Stupendous. She’s half angel, you know.”
No one spoke. No one moved. No one breathed.
Deborah tittered and nodded, looking at the four of them in turn. “Oh, yes. Her father came to me one night dressed in Harrison Ford’s body, because between his Han Solo and Indiana Jones characters, I thought he was the sexiest man alive at that time. I told him he didn’t need to put on the mask for me, and I knew what he was underneath, but he just laughed at me and said he wanted to please me enough that I would let him make a baby with me.” Her gaze went to the ceiling and her eyes went soft. “He sounded like wind chimes when he laughed.”
Graeme turned to Heather. “I never imagined the angel would talk to them. We need to ask your mum her experience.”
Mouth still open as she stared at Deborah, it took Heather a few moments before she could respond, but when she realized what he’d said, she shook her head vehemently and flashed him a look. “No way, Graeme, you can’t imagine what she’s like. Just believe me when I tell you that, if she knows you exist, you’ll never get rid of her. She’ll literally try to live inside your shirt pocket. That’s if she doesn’t keel over with a heart attack first, at me asking her about sex with an angel.”
Ella finally managed to get her breath, looking at Trevor as she spoke. “Deborah, maybe you’d like to stay for dinner?”
Chapter 30
Crew pulled Dahlia impatiently to the stone stairs heading toward the direction she’d indicated her room was in, turning to make sure the soldiers were no longer following them. When the hallway was empty, he spun her against the wall, bracing the back of her head with his hand, and gathered her to him, breathing hotly into her mouth. “I’ve been imagining this since I first scented you inside that cave, since I first knew I’d found you again.”
Dahlia sighed and melted into him, opening herself to him completely. Good girl.
He reached his fingers around to the back of her dress, unlacing the first ties there. “Will anyone come down this hallway?”
