by Zoe Chant
She looked at the portrait and thought at first that it must be the loss of his parents that he was thinking of, but then she noticed something else.
There was no gap in the crowd of boys, and there were more boys than in the portrait downstairs. The baby—Teddy—was held on his mother’s hip, just a toddler, and the rest of them stood in age order. Gus was the tallest, maybe twelve years old, and there were two younger boys between him and the twins. The gap in the portrait downstairs was the space that had belonged to Gus’s next-younger brother.
Cara reached out and touched the image of that boy; his smile looked stiff and uncertain, but Gus and Laurence each had an arm around him.
“That’s Ilie,” Gus said quietly. “Eli is his English name, but he—he’s more a Dragomir than any of us.”
“He’s not in the portrait downstairs,” Cara realized. He wasn’t one of the ones whose names he had told her when he was pointing them all out. But Mouse was his, so he had to be here somewhere.
“He is, actually,” Gus said. “Just—further away than the rest of us, so he’s hard to spot. He’s different, but I hope I can introduce the two of you someday soon. He’ll like you.”
“Will I like him?” Cara asked, and then, watching to see if it was safe to tease a little, “Am I going to think he’s handsomer than you? Is that why you’re keeping us apart?”
Gus gave a startled laugh and turned to kiss her. Cara felt her body rousing to him despite the thoroughly satisfying time they’d had on the roof.
“I don’t know, you might,” Gus said. “I’ll have to make sure you’re really attached to me before I let you see him.”
“I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled,” Cara told him.
Whatever Gus might have said to that was interrupted by a dog barking.
It sounded far away, but Gus turned his head toward the noise, and Cara was reminded again of how quiet the big house was—how empty.
“That’s Mouse,” Gus said. “We should go see what he’s gotten into.”
Cara nodded, and Gus led her downstairs and down and down again—the tower turned out to have its own staircase that let out on the far side of the porch from where they’d come out of the woods.
Mouse was sitting right there, and when they appeared he set down something he’d been carrying in his mouth. Gus leaned over and picked it up, wiping it on his pajama pants before he turned to Cara.
It was her phone—with a huge crack in the screen like a lightning strike.
“If this is yours,” Gus said, “I’ll be happy to buy you a new one.”
“I thought it was gone for good,” Cara said, switching the phone on—miraculously, despite the cracked screen, it actually lit up, showing her usual lock screen. She raised her eyes to Mouse, trying to picture how he’d gotten to wherever her phone had landed, and how he’d known to bring it to her.
“Did he—did Ilie send him to bring it back?”
Gus opened his mouth, closed it, and then nodded. “Yeah. Ilie also saw you fall and told me where to find you, actually.”
That was…a little bit weird, but also sweet. If Gus hadn’t known to come and find her she might still be sitting on that ledge under the scenic overlook. “Well, then when we do meet I probably owe him a big…”
Gus gave her a dark look and Cara grinned. “Hug. Of course.”
“Go home, Mouse,” Gus said, wrapping an arm around Cara’s waist. “And you—tell me you’ll stay?”
“I didn’t really dress for anything else,” Cara said, hooking one bare leg around Gus’s silky one, feeling the material slide against the inside of her thigh.
“Good,” Gus agreed, and that was the last thing either of them said for a while.
***
Cara woke up in the middle of the night, tucked under Gus’s arm in his enormous bed. He tried to hold on when she squirmed away.
“I’ll come back,” she whispered, “go back to sleep.”
He let her go, and she was able to visit the bathroom without him protesting.
When she was finished with that she felt restless. Instead of going back to the bed where Gus was sleeping in a loose, invitingly naked curl, she padded barefoot down the stairs.
She stopped in the empty room below, even though the open space made her more conscious of her nakedness than she’d ever been. She put her chin up and walked all the way across the room, just because she could. She was rewarded with the sight of the moon rising out the eastern windows, casting a cool light into the room.
She leaned her forehead against the glass and looked out, wondering what she was doing here.
She was pretty sure that when Gus said he wanted her to stay, he meant stay. He’d grown up surrounded by people, but they’d all gone away from him, leaving him alone in this huge house. He wanted her here. He wanted—
Cara looked around the empty room again, and it suddenly fell into place; the little cluster of lines she saw on the windowsill were only confirmation. She knelt to look closer, and sure enough, the lines were labeled in lovely cursive writing: Augustin, 2 years—Ilie, 2 years—Teodor, Radu, Sorin, Laurentiu. Childish writing had corrected that last to LAURENCE.
This empty room was the nursery. Gus’s children were meant to sleep here someday. Gus had filled up every other room of his house; he would want to fill this one too. He would want a family like the one he’d grown up in, a pack of kids to fill up this place.
Cara ran her fingers over the set of names and thought about her own family. She hadn’t lost her parents, really. She visited them twice a year, for a sweltering week in the summer and a weirdly snowless Christmas. They talked on the phone once in a while, told her about their friends and their golf trips and their life that had nothing to do with her—like once she had turned eighteen and left the house, they were finished with her. She had no one.
But she could have Gus. She could have a family here, complete with a weird brother who lived in the woods and four more scattered around the world. Mouse. Kids. A life and a future where she had people to belong to, things to keep her in one place. Something to hold her.
She felt the emptiness of the room around her all over again, and she shivered a little and wrapped her arms around herself, wanting Gus’s arms holding her more than she wanted clothes. When she turned and found him standing at the bottom of the stairs, quietly watching her, it wasn’t even a surprise.
She hurried over to him, and he hugged her tight and then swept her up into his arms.
“Back to bed?” he murmured.
Cara put her arms around her neck and rested her head on his shoulder. “Where else?”
***
Cara put on the day before’s clothes just long enough for Gus to take her down to get her car the next day. He turned out to drive a pretty basic SUV, several years old.
“What, no BMW? No…” Cara couldn’t even think of a car fancy enough.
“A car’s just a car,” Gus said, shrugging. “Uh, also the hills out here are no place for expensive cars, especially in the winter. The good cars are at the house in Monaco.”
“…Monaco,” Cara repeated. “Oh. Of course.”
Gus offered her a nervous smile, like he was the one who might be found wildly inadequate. “I almost never go there. Laurence and Teddy—Teo—mostly use that house. I like it here. This is home.”
Home. Cara nodded, and looked out the window into the woods for the couple of minutes it took to get to her car. She kept looking into the woods as she followed Gus back to the house, searching for a glimpse of Mouse—or Ilie.
But she spotted nothing but trees and Gus’s bumper, and then it was time to get dressed and go to town to buy a new cell phone. Gus drove them down to the valley in his SUV, and parked it behind a pretty old stone building that turned out to be the Town Hall, where of course Gus had a reserved parking space.
“Do you need to go to work?” Cara asked, abruptly reminded that not everyone in the world had quit their jobs and run away from their whol
e lives. Gus was the mayor here. He had responsibilities.
“Not really,” Gus said, smiling. “Work always finds me when it needs me.”
Cara quickly found out what he meant: they didn’t make it a hundred feet from Gus’s car before someone called out, “Mayor Gray!”
Gus held on firmly to Cara’s hand as he turned. “Hello, Mrs. McCullough. Everything all right at the shop?”
“The shop’s fine, dear,” said Mrs. McCullough, who was at least eighty years old and whose sharp eyes were scanning intently over Cara.
“But how are you? I don’t believe I’ve met your friend.”
Gus shot her an apologetic look and mouthed small town.
“This is Cara Linley,” Gus said. “She’s from Iowa, she’s been looking for a new place to settle down.”
“Well, dear, you can’t beat Gray’s Hollow,” Mrs. McCullough said immediately, with a blinding smile.
“And you can’t beat Mayor Gray, either.” This was followed by a wink that made Cara blush a little, even though she agreed.
“Thanks for that vote of confidence, ma’am,” Gus said, and Cara could hear him struggling not to laugh. “But I just met Cara yesterday. Let’s not rush her into anything.”
He was holding on tight to her hand as he said it, though.
Mrs. McCullough shook her head. “Your mother and father decided on each other in the time it took her to pour him a cup of coffee, young man. I don’t know why you think you need more than a day.”
Gus shot Cara another sideways look, and Cara smiled and squeezed his hand.
“I’m not going to rush the lady,” Gus insisted, turning his gaze back to Mrs. McCullough. “Let’s give her until after lunch, at least.”
“You’ve dragged your feet long enough, Mayor,” Mrs. McCullough said sternly, but she added, “lovely to meet you, dear,” to Cara before she headed back across the street to a florist’s shop.
“Sorry,” Gus said, aiming them toward a surprisingly sleek-looking electronics store for such a small town. “That… might happen again.”
It happened eight times in the time it took Cara to pick out a new phone.
No one would let her have anything but the newest, shiniest one with all the best features, but there was some debate about exactly which one was the very best. She heard four different times about Gus’s mom pouring his dad a cup of coffee and the two of them basically being engaged by the time he’d finished drinking it.
She couldn’t decide whether that made her feeling of instant connection with Gus feel more or less strange. It did explain why he seemed willing to jump to the same conclusion, though. He must have been hearing that story about his parents all his life, and he’d been waiting for some girl to come along and give him a story of his own like that.
She couldn’t figure out why it was her, but as Gus introduced her to one person after another—always proudly, always holding on firmly to her hand—she couldn’t deny that he meant it.
No one, seeing her in her clean but still geared-for-a-road-trip clothes, seemed to think there was anything strange about Gus choosing her. Not one person made even the most veiled remark about how Gus could have had someone prettier, or skinnier, or richer, or more interesting.
The whole town took one look at Gus holding her hand and seemed to decide just as quickly as Gus himself had that they belonged together. Cara didn’t know how to react to any of it, but it was nice. Really nice. Fairy tale nice.
She didn’t have to go to Monaco to feel like a princess, apparently. Gray’s Hollow was already giving her as much of that as she could handle.
She wondered if Gus would mind her trying on that tiara she’d glimpsed the day before in the treasure room.
They’d barely stepped outside the electronics store, Cara’s shiny new phone in hand, when a woman hurried up. She was a couple of inches shorter than Cara with equally soft curves, though hers were firmly contained in a pantsuit. She had dark red hair caught up in a bun and wore sunglasses against the bright morning.
“Mayor,” she said sternly.
Gus squeezed Cara’s hand and, for the first time in the parade of interruptions and introductions that had been their morning, he sighed. “Cara, Deputy Mayor Hannah Cole. I did mention that work would find me, didn’t I? Deputy Mayor, Cara Linley.”
Cara couldn’t see Hannah’s eyes behind her sunglasses, but her smile seemed warm, and her voice was genuinely apologetic as she said, “I’m so sorry, Miss Linley, I just have to steal the mayor—it’s the state Board of Ed, Gus, and the school board is trying to punt everything to you again.”
Gus sighed once more and turned to Cara with an equally apologetic look.
Cara smiled and shook her head. “It’s fine, go. I’ll just—head back to the house.”
No way was she staying in town to be interrogated without Gus.
Gus reached for his keys, ready to offer them to her, but Cara waved them away. “I’ve spent enough time driving lately. It’ll be nice to go somewhere I can walk to.”
Gus gave her a warm, startled smile at that, and leaned in to kiss her softly.
“There’s a trail, if you don’t want to walk on the road,” he said, pointing to the end of the next cross street. “There’s a sign for the turn-off to the mayor’s house, you can’t miss it.”
Cara nodded, and Gus gave her one more kiss, leaning in to whisper, “I’ll be home as soon as I can, sweetheart.”
Cara bit her lip against the giddy warmth she felt at that, and only whispered back, “I’ll be waiting for you, honey.”
Gus grinned as he straightened up, and then he turned to Hannah and said dutifully, “Lead on, Deputy.”
Cara headed away down the street Gus had indicated, and though she felt plenty of looks directed her way, none of them seemed unkind, and no one pressed her. She’d nearly reached the trail when she heard someone running up behind her. She turned to see a teenaged boy, brandishing a colorful bouquet of flowers. They weren’t roses, but a riot of brightly colored lilies and orchids, rare and exotic hothouse flowers.
“Mrs. M says, welcome to Gray’s Hollow, miss,” the boy recited shyly, holding them out to her like an offering.
Cara resisted the urge to curtsey as she took them.
“Thank you,” she said. Gus had said something about people giving the mayor presents—did that extend to the mayor’s…
Her brain went a little blank at the thought of people in town already regarding her as the mayor’s—Gus’s—wife, and yet it seemed they almost did. She pushed the thought away and sniffed at the gorgeous flowers as she started down the well-tended trail, which climbed the slope up toward Gus’s house in a series of gentle switchbacks. She’d turned twice when she heard a familiar friendly bark, and Mouse popped out of the trees.
“Why hello,” Cara said, and she did try out a curtsey on Mouse.
He danced cheerfully in front of her, darting in to be petted when she reached out a hand. After a moment he settled in at her side, and Cara laughed.
“Are you here to make sure I don’t get lost?” she asked.
Then she realized—if Mouse had come to guide her safely up to the house, it was probably because Ilie was doing the same thing, somewhere out of sight, the same way Ilie had seen her fall and found her phone for her. As she neared the next turn up the trail, Cara looked around, trying to spot the shape of someone nearby in the trees.
“Ilie?” She called as she rounded the next turn. The path went straight up here—there was a flight of stairs, with a railing, and what looked like a larger, flatter clearing at the top. Cara took a deep breath and started up them, still looking around.
“Ilie?” she tried again. “If you can hear me, I’d love to see you. Gus said he’s excited for us to meet.”
Mouse had been keeping pace, right beside her, as they climbed the stairs, but a few seconds after she finished speaking he began to bark and went tearing off to the top. It was hard to hear over the barking, but she thoug
ht she heard something up above—something big, something that stirred the branches of the trees.
Cara ran, too.
She froze at the top of the stairs, clutching the railing and her flowers like they would protect her.
There was a thing, an impossible thing, in the clearing there. Wings, she thought first, and then she thought, dragon.
Just like in stories, just like in pictures, except that this dragon was undeniably real. He loomed over her, inky black with a blue sheen where the light touched, with silvery-gray eyes. His head, at the end of a long, sinuous neck, was held level with hers, and his wings were held half-open.
Mouse was still barking. Cara tore her gaze away from the dragon and saw that Mouse was dancing around in front of him, barking and wagging his tail, exactly as if he expected to be petted.
She suddenly remembered Gus saying, Ilie is different, and Ilie is more a Dragomir than any of us.
“Dragomir,” she repeated, finally getting it. She took a shaky step forward and then another.
The dragon dropped his gaze, ducking his massive head down to nudge affectionately at Mouse. The dog promptly rolled over, wriggling around on his back and still wagging his tail. The dragon obligingly rubbed his belly.
No, not the dragon. Ilie.
“Ilie,” Cara said out loud, and the dragon looked at her again. “It’s you, isn’t it? Gus is your brother. You’re Ilie.”
I am. The dragon’s mouth didn’t move, and the voice sounded human—serious and careful, but human. She heard it perfectly clearly and she knew she wasn’t really hearing it at all.
Cara laughed, from a combination of nerves and sheer delighted fascination.
You wanted adventure, she thought. You thought you felt like a princess from a fairy tale.
Gus’s brother was a dragon. Which probably meant that Gus himself…
Cara heard a roar, far away but coming closer, and Ilie spread his wings wide as she turned to look. She heard his voice, anxious and confused. Gus? She said—
