Her body suddenly exploded out of the little wooden box I had made into a toad bed and I barely caught her before she fell off the table. I carried her to my bed.
“Warn me first, huh?”
“I didn’t know if…I could.” She winced. “Hurts…”
“You’ve been comatose for several days.” I poured a cup of water for her now and lifted her head as I put it to her lips. “You need to drink and eat.” She looked pallid and skinny, the days of unconsciousness sucking the life right out of her before my eyes, and all I wanted was to restore that life.
Some water trickled down her chin. She tried to wipe it off but her arm had no strength. It fell back beside her head. “Where am I? Who are you?”
“Bevan. I’m a familiar, like you. This is my home. You came here a week ago.”
“I did?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You were escaping your master. You don’t remember?”
She paused. “I guess I do remember.”
“You don’t have to talk about it,” I said. “It’s okay. You can pretend to forget while you’re here.”
She gave me a tiny, grateful smile. “My warlock never…hurt me or anything. He doesn’t even like me very much. Just so you know.”
I one hundred percent doubted this, even if the hurt was just psychological.
“Well, you need to recover,” I said. “So don’t worry about anything. Let your body heal.”
The only trouble with that plan?
Those covenants. I had already seen Piers Nicolescu force Chester back to his side.
“Bevan…” Her hand suddenly patted my own hand. “You’ve been taking care of me?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re a familiar…”
“Yes. This is Etherium, my home. You were a Sinistral familiar, but you’ve come here to restart your life. You just need to get your strength back.”
“Your house is lovely,” she said.
“Thanks. I am pretty proud of it. My witch works on historical houses for a living, so every time I see something in a house I like, I conjure it up in my own house. The fireplace is from a Tudor bungalow and the stained glass was from a Baltimore row house.”
“How long can I stay here?” She looked at me with hopeful big brown eyes.
If I cleaned her up, she wouldn’t be bad looking, I thought. I wouldn’t mind…
My brain fuzzed, hitting the brakes. I was not going to clean her up. And I definitely wasn’t going to do more than that either. I was very happy in my role as a familiar, and traditional familiars didn’t get involved. We shouldn’t even really have a sex drive, it seemed to me, because new familiars were born alongside witches, not because familiars had to procreate to continue their race. There was no biological imperative. And yet…
I cleared my throat. “Let me whip up some dumplings. I have vegetable broth kept warm for you to eat when you woke up, but you could use some substance.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Just Bevan.”
Flour, eggs, baking powder, a dash of dried herbs and salt…the dumplings went in the pot and cooked within seconds. Jenny was watching me from her bed, still looking too weak and pained to move, but her eyes were bright.
“I can sit up,” she said, planting her palms on the bed and trying to muster up any strength to move her arms.
I narrowed my eyes. “No. I really don’t think so.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll bolster your head with some pillows and let’s just get the soup in you. Sitting up is a task for later.”
She gave me what was, objectively, the sweetest little smile anyone had ever given. “I just don’t like being helpless. When I feel better I could—I could keep house for you, maybe?”
“I don’t think I need a housekeeper.” I paused. “One day at a time.”
“I make wonderful pastries,” she said. “It’s sort of my specialty.”
“Pastries, huh?”
“Mm-hmm. All kinds. Strawberry shortcake, flan, key lime pie, linzertorte…”
“Linzertorte…we used to have that when we were kids…” Who knew a toad would be such a temptress.
I carefully filled a spoon and put it to her lips. This was not the way I usually spent my time. I was just glad she had survived the ordeal. The poultices must have helped after all, which meant I had saved her life. Not to sound arrogant about it. It felt strange to save someone’s life, like I had a certain responsibility now. I couldn’t just let her wander off into Etherium
“It smells nice here,” she murmured. “Like herbs.”
“That’s because I’ve been making healing potions to help you.”
“Healing! How exciting! Could you show me? I know how to cook and clean already so I’d guess it’s not that hard. Then I could heal you if you were ever hurt.”
You’re not staying here anyway, I thought.
My head just nodded like an idiot. “It’s easy to do. But I never get hurt.”
“I never get hurt either,” she said, like she was trying to convince me of her usefulness.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“I just think it seems wonderful to have one’s own house and garden with a fire and make potions.”
“You don’t have your own home? Not in Sinistral? That would be unusual. Most familiars have their own home in the magical realm. And it’s just there waiting for us when we’re born. We conjure it out of our heads. Humans have to build their houses and sometimes they have to leave home and they don’t even have a place to call their own. My witch has basically been homeless. It’s depressing, for someone who loves homes so much, that she doesn’t feel like she can settle down anywhere. Sometimes I wish she’d call me for help a little more often than she does.”
“A good familiar is like a home,” Jenny said. “Some witches think familiars belong in the home. Not in Sinistral.”
“Ah, so your warlock just never liked you to leave?”
“No…”
“So he put you to work making pastries?”
“Something like that…”
Her dress was a ruffled plaid, old-fashioned even for a witch, and with her long brown locks and bangs, she reminded me of the old dolls some of Helena’s sisters played with. She was certainly around my own age but I wasn’t sure her warlock had given her much exposure to other women. She seemed stunted in childhood. And he didn’t let her go to Sinistral.
In a way, it made perfect sense to me now. Familiars helped their witch or warlock through thick and thin, balancing them out, helping them through all the growing pains of childhood. If some part of her warlock clung to childhood, then she would have a hard time growing up herself. Maybe she wasn’t abused physically, but trapped, forced to play house. And it seemed she would rather play house with me.
‘Play house’…could I think of a term for that without such naughty connotations? It was not a bad vision to think of her sweeping my stoop and making tarts and tortes and everything else. A garden toad would make for a good companion if I wanted a quiet life. What if children followed? Just because I didn’t need to produce children didn’t mean it couldn’t happen, and then I would be pulled away from Helena.
The way Jenny looked at me made me wonder if I was handsome, and this sort of vanity had never crossed my mind before.
I swallowed.
Helping cute girls…real dangerous games you’re playing here, Bevan…
Chapter Twenty-Two
Helena
Living room? Check! With this team, we knocked that shit out. The walls were now white and airy, and we painted the ceiling too, and added two efficient ceiling fans. The orange carpet was now a dark, warm hardwood floor. (“Do you ever put in ‘softwood’ floor?” Gaston asked me. “No? Then you could just say ‘wood floor’.” I realized whenever I talked about him when he wasn’t around I was also starting to give him an exaggerated, snooty French accent.)
Kitchen? Check! The new cabinets looked s
o great that no one minded that they were our second choice. The wooden countertops were harmonious with the new wooden floors. I couldn’t wait to see this whole space with some wicker peacock chairs and glass and chrome plant stands. Billie was keeping the huge sofa that fit the sunken living room and reupholstering it in a cheerful, low-key 60s yellow, just like Tom Atomic.
We were really busting out the bedrooms and bathrooms now, and Jake and Byron were framing out the guest house.
“I just heard Kiersten and Caleb’s truck go driving off. Want to go spy?” Billie asked.
“You know I want to!”
We scurried down the sidewalk and went to peek in all the windows of the other house.
We didn’t like what we saw.
“Hmm,” I said. “They tore out the wall in the living room around the fireplace. That really opened it up…”
“Oh, yeah. I like that new mantelpiece too. That’s a nice fireplace. It’s big enough you could make spells in it.”
“Yeah. It is small cauldron size…I can’t tell what they’re doing with the kitchen yet…”
Billie moved on to a side window. “Gosh, they’re putting in some really cute Italian tiles in the bathroom…”
“Where?”
“See? Most of ‘em are still in boxes but there’s a few on the floor there like samples. I really like those. I bet they weren’t cheap either.”
“Well, they live around here, I bet they have the hookup,” I said. “And maybe they’re doing something with the master…adding a walk-in closet?”
“Kiersten never does a house without leaving a walk-in closet in her wake, does she?”
We dashed back out of sight before we could get caught looking interested, since they probably just left for lunch.
“It’s a close contest,” I said. “They’re good.”
“Well, it’s not a real contest. There aren’t prizes,” Billie said.
“Oh, yes there is. Bragging rights. The best prize there is. Just think how insufferable we could be every time we see Kiersten and Caleb forever after if we bested them on profit right here in California?”
“That would be pretty delicious,” Billie said. “Although what would make me really happy would be to sell Greenwood Manor so I don’t have to worry about it anymore! Is your Realtor doing anything about it?”
“Oh…yes. We had some viewings last week…”
“But you still haven’t heard anything? What’s it gonna take? Damn.”
“I’m okay with waiting for just the right buyer,” I said. “I’m still not that happy with the couple who bought Lockwood House. The wife was so annoying. I shudder to think what she’s done to the place. I’m kinda glad those faeries didn’t buy Greenwood Manor either.”
Billie tilted her head. “You’re not a Capricorn, are you?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I can tell, because you’re not that great at making money.”
I sighed. “Money isn’t everything.”
My phone rang as we were walking back. I thought it might be Hester, my Realtor, because it wouldn’t be the first time I was talking about someone and then they called, but when I took out my phone it said ‘Mother’.
“You call your mama ‘Mother’?”
“Don’t look at my phone! It’s what…she prefers.” I really didn’t want to answer the phone as the only thing I could think was that this was my official, “You are disowned” call. I braced myself. I really shouldn’t care. It’s my mom. I disappointed her, but she disappointed me too. So there.
“I—I better take this,” I said, rushing ahead of Billie so that she couldn’t overhear an unpleasant and private conversation.
“Helena! Oh, thank god you picked up.” My mother sounded short of breath. “Helena, I know what you did.”
“I know what you’re going to say. I am aware that I’m on the shit list with Harris now. I don’t care. It needed to be done.”
“No…no…I—I sort of agree with you, dear.”
“Whut.”
“Well, the rumors of the missing familiars has been spreading around the world very quickly. I already knew you were up to something odd. So I sent my familiar to see if Bevan was doing anything suspicious. She saw that he was basically running a shelter for familiars so she just fell in with the crowd and pretended to be one of them. She was very impressed with your familiar and moved by his kindness. And she was appalled at the conditions some of the familiars were dealing with as she spoke to them…” My mother swallowed. “To be honest, it was one of the few times that she has spoken to me so frankly since we were children and it had an effect on me. She said that Bevan’s charitable efforts were in the fine tradition of the best of our ancestors. But I do want to know what exactly you have done.”
I wish I didn’t care about my mother’s opinions, but I couldn’t help a surge of pride. I had grown up with those stories about ‘the best of our ancestors’. We rarely heard about all the terrible things our royal ancestors got up to unless we pulled books off the shelves, but our parents always reminded us about the princesses who personally nursed wounded soldiers or rode bravely into battles alongside their men, so that I used to think that I was descended from heroic, fairy tale characters.
“Well, we broke the walls between the worlds,” I said. “That’s really it. I found out they didn’t used to exist a thousand years ago, and it was Ethereal wizards who decided to put up gates around their world and decide who was worthy of being Ethereal. Harris and I both have Sinistrals in our lives that we love. It didn’t seem right to me. Plus, it all started because of a dirty trick.”
“How do you know what happened a thousand years ago? We hardly have any records from back then.”
I gave her a quick recap, even as I worried I was telling her too much. I didn’t really know if I could trust my mom. She did some pretty awful things to us growing up. Her punishments were harsh and her judgments were swift. But she was never one for tricks and I didn’t think she would call me just to turn around and put my life in danger.
She took a deep breath. “Helena, I am genuinely concerned that your cousin might try to kill you.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I said.
“Are you ready to stand up to him?”
“I hope so. We have a lot of familiars as our allies now.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Mom said. “Your father just heard that Piers has been hunting through the store rooms of the Ethereal Library in London and he’s been finding the covenants that bound familiars to their masters. Based on what you told me, I think he will reconfigure the spells and force every familiar back to their master, cutting off your allies. Then he will come for you and this spell of yours. But in my opinion, it is unacceptable for my daughter to lose to a cousin. You need to stop him before he comes to you.”
“He already had one of the covenants. He forced his own familiar back to his side. Remember Chester?”
“The sugar glider?” Mom laughed.
“Mom, don’t laugh. Jeez, it’s no wonder Piers became a psychopath when everyone made fun of his familiar. You’re all part of the problem.”
“Oh, please, a real man can handle a little teasing,” Mom said.
I rest my case, I thought, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. At least she was willing to tell me what was going on in the wizard world. “So he’s at the Ethereal Library in London?”
“Yes,” she said. “You won’t be welcome there, so be careful. I always told you children to finish what you start.”
That was definitely what I liked about my mother. She didn’t tell me not to go. She didn’t even ask me if I was going. She just assumed that I would follow through.
The only problem: did I want to drop this project, fly to London, and meet Piers on his own turf? Was that even a good idea whatsoever?
If I don’t stop him, all those poor familiars will have to go back to their masters…
But if I do go, I’m putting us in way more danger than if
we just stayed here under the shelter of a protection spell…and no one is up for that sort of fight except Byron. I can’t even tell Jake, Jasper and Graham. I would have to go to London without even saying goodbye.
And there was a good chance I might never come home.
“Damnit…” I knew what a brave, honorable heroine would do, but I never asked to be that brave or that honorable. I just wanted to put in a good day’s work. It wasn’t fair that I had to die just because other wizards were cruel to their familiars.
“You okay, Hel?” Billie called, walking up the sidewalk at a leisurely pace behind me. “Are you off the phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Is everything good with your ‘mother’?”
“It’s…fine, I guess. I just want some lunch and then I’ll get back to the, uh, closet hardware I was installing.” But it also sounded so meaningless right now that I could hardly remember what I was doing.
Damnit, damnit, damnit.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bevan
“This is how I make the poultice. We separate the roots from the leaves. The roots are boiled. The leaves get pulverized raw.” I dumped a handful in a mortar and pestle as Jenny watched my every move.
She sniffed the pulp. “They smell so nice.”
“You think so? They’re pretty bitter.”
“I just like how fresh green things smell.”
“You are a garden toad,” I said.
“And you’re a sky creature. That must be so fun.”
“It’s extremely fun. Maybe you could fly with me if you trust me to hold you in my toes.”
She shook her head quickly. “I don’t think I do.”
“Ah, well. Your loss, then.”
“No one wants to see a splatted toad!”
“I wouldn’t splat you. Do I look like a man who would let something happen to my passenger?”
She studied my face like she was seriously considering it and then shook her head. “But still…no.”
I liked the way her hair was messy and always falling in her eyes. I liked her long lashes. And was it even right for a toad to have such clear skin in human form? She was just too pale. I think she might have had naturally olive-hued coloring, prone to a tan in the garden sunshine, but instead she looked like she had never seen the sun in her life. When she’s well enough to move, I’ll get her out as much as possible.
Phantom of the Library Page 15
