"I want to go home," I said, my voice little more than a whisper. Man and gargoyle ignored me.

  "Are we certain she's the one?" Lucan asked, examining me now as if I were some kind of specimen.

  "She's here, isn't she? By the Morrigan's own magic, no one but a Crone could even find this place, let alone summon me," Keven retorted. "Or you, for that matter."

  "True," Lucan agreed, "but still. Mistakes happen."

  A part of me bristled at being called a mistake. A greater part of me snarled at the first to shut up. I ignored both and said again, louder, "I want to go home."

  "Mind your words!" the gargoyle growled at Lucan. "The Morrigan doesn't make mistakes."

  "Fine." Lucan crossed his arms and glared at Keven. "And what if she is Crone? You said yourself you don't know what you're supposed to do with—"

  "I want," I bellowed over them, "to go home!"

  Silence dropped over the great hall, deafening in its totality. I glared first at Lucan, then Keven, then Lucan again. They stared back. I pushed myself up from the bench, twitched my flowy pant legs into place, and smoothed the front of my shirt. For a fourth time, and with as much dignity as I could muster, I repeated, "I want to go home. To my house. Now, please."

  Two heads shook as one.

  "You can't," said Keven.

  "It's not safe," said Lucan.

  "Fuck that," said I, who had never so much as spoken the word damn aloud. And with Edie’s voice cheering in my brain, I marched past Keven, grabbed hold of the handle, and pulled open the heavy oak door.

  A shrieking black form hurtled out of the dark, straight toward me.

  I barely had time to register its slitted, glowing yellow eyes and razor-sharp talons before a four-legged shape shot past me and launched itself into the air with a snarl that turned my blood to ice. Feathers and fur dropped to the ground and rolled out of the light, with a duet of screeches and snarls, punctuated by screams of pain. A massive, clawed hand grasped my shoulder and yanked me back into the cottage.

  House.

  Castle.

  Oh, hell.

  The heavy oak door slammed shut.

  The stone hand that pulled me to safety turned me this way and that, as it might have a rag doll. Which was how I felt as I stood paralyzed by the horrible sounds filtering through the door, every bone in my body about as solid as an overcooked noodle.

  "You're certain it didn't touch you?" the hand’s owner fussed for at least the fourteenth time. "Not even a feather?"

  My head flopped in a nod, also for the fourteenth time. I flinched from a shriek outside the door.

  "I’m fine," I croaked. Because apart from losing the capacity to stand on my own, I was. I might be stark raving mad, but thanks to whatever had shot past me to attack the other whatever, I would at least live to tell the tale. I swallowed a burble of hysteria. Sucked in a breath. Wrapped trembling arms around a shaking body. I had questions. So many questions.

  I shrugged off the gargoyle’s touch, relieved when I didn’t fall flat on my face as a result, and opened my mouth. But another shriek cut me off, and then—

  Silence.

  My heart lodged in my throat and, involuntarily, I stepped closer to the gargoyle’s hulking stone presence, stumbling as my feet tangled in something soft. I looked down at a pile of vaguely familiar clothing: dark pants, a white shirt—

  Lucan. My head snapped around in search of the man I’d all but forgotten. He was nowhere to be found.

  "Kev—"

  Something thudded against the door, and my intended query ended in a wheeze. The gargoyle crouched in front of me, muscles bunched and ready to spring. Heavy oak swung inward.

  A bloodied and very naked Lucan swayed on the doorstep, man-bun gone and long hair in disarray about his shoulders. He braced one hand against the doorframe. The other, he pressed against a gash in his belly.

  "It's dead," he announced, “but there were two, and one got away."

  "Damnation," muttered Keven, straightening up. "How did they find her here?”

  "I don’t know. But they'll be back." Lucan stepped into the hallway. Blood seeped between his fingers and dripped to the flagstone floor. "I'll need healing."

  "Of course." Keven turned to me. "See him into the parlor"—a clawed hand pointed at the door to the left of the staircase—"and seat him by the fire. I'll be back in a few minutes."

  "What? No! He needs to go to a hospital," I objected. "He needs stitches—and antibiotics—and there may be internal damage, and—”

  Keven's broad head shook. "You really don't know anything, do you?" the gargoyle muttered. "See him to the fire. I'll be back."

  "But—" I tried again, but Keven had already lumbered away, down the dark hallway beside the stairs. I stared after the retreating form, trying to gather my wits and sort through what had just happened—including why Lucan's clothes sat on the floor at my feet, while he stood naked and bleeding by the door. Because what I thought might have happened—what it looked like had happened—

  It just couldn’t have.

  "Milady?" a deep voice prompted.

  I didn't want to respond—and I really, really didn't want to turn around to face him again—but the man was injured. And he’d maybe had something to do with saving my life just now, although I had no idea how he fit in with what I thought I’d seen go past me into the night, and—

  I stooped and picked up his clothing, then thrust it at him. Or at least in his general direction, because I refused to look at him again in his current state. I was no prude, but neither was I comfortable with casual nudity, especially when it came packaged in the kind of muscled hardness that—injury or no injury—made a long-dormant libido sit up and take notice the way mine was doing.

  "Press that against the wound," I ordered. "It will slow the bleeding."

  The clothing left my grasp, and I marched over to the door Keven had indicated and tugged it open. The room beyond was spacious, but without the cavernous feel of the great hall. With dark wood paneling lining the walls and a fire crackling in a stone fireplace between two overstuffed couches, it felt downright cozy. Welcoming. Familiar. I shook off the last, stray thought and stood back for Lucan to precede me into the room, careful to stay out of touching distance—for all the good it did.

  I could have been blind and still been aware of the masculinity passing me. Hyper aware, because holy Mother of God, that man packed a powerful presence. And was he laughing at me?

  He stopped halfway through the door, inches away. He'd pressed the clothing bundle against his belly as directed, with the happy bonus of covering at least part of his nether region. Not that I was looking, I reminded myself.

  "I don't bite, you know," he said, amusement lacing his rumble. "At least, not unless I have to. Or unless I'm asked."

  My gaze flew to meet his, skimming powerful shoulders and the woodsy-smelling chest hair along the way. A wave of heat climbed up from my toes. "You should sit," I said, ignoring the innuendo. "Like he said."

  "He?"

  "The gargoyle."

  Lucan blanched and shot a look down the corridor—a look that could only be described as panicked. "Ssh!" he hissed. "By the Morrigan's own magic, don't let her hear you!"

  "Let who hear me?"

  "The gargoyle!"

  I blinked. "Keven is female?"

  "And extraordinarily touchy about being called male." Lucan still watched the hallway down which the gargoyle had disappeared. "She also has an impressive temper. You wouldn't want to see the last person who made that mistake."

  I tried to process this new information. "But Keven is..."

  "A male name? I know. So does she. But she insisted on choosing it. It’s a long story." He winced and clamped the clothing a little tighter against his belly. Fresh crimson bloomed through the white shirt.

  Guilt stabbed at me. He really should be off his feet. I could reconcile the idea of a female gargoyle named Keven later.

  My inner voice snorted. A walking, talking, living female gargoyle named Keven, it corrected. Who chose her own name.

  “Fine,” I said. “Then you should sit down the way she said."

  Lucan's tawny, gray-streaked head shook, and my fingers itched to straighten the tangle of hair. I put my hands behind my back.

  "Actually, she said you were to seat me," Lucan corrected, "which means you're supposed to help."

  Even though my hormones did cartwheels at the thought of offering my body as support for his very naked one, I lifted my chin and replied tartly (and wisely, I thought), "I'm quite sure you're capable."

  "Perhaps. But I did just save your life."

  I opened my mouth to argue that it had been no man who had gone past me into the night, but my gaze dropped to the clothing he held instead of wearing, and the words died on my lips. Impossible...

  Lucan chuckled and made his own way to a sofa, treating me to a well-muscled rear view. I blushed again. Dear Lord, I’d had more licentious thoughts in the past half hour than I'd had in my last twenty years of marriage—and about a man many years my junior, no less. I really needed to get my mind back on more important matters. Such as the brain tumor that might be killing me even as my imagination ran wild.

  On the other hand, if you're going to go anyway, at least you'd go happy, my less-than-helpful Edie-voice suggested.

  I told it to get stuffed and, on my way to join Lucan, grabbed a blanket that was folded over the back of the couch. I shook it out and draped it over his half-prone form. When I’d covered as much of him as I could without touching him, I turned to the fireplace, prodded the embers to life with the poker, and added a log to the flames. Then I took a seat on the edge of the opposite sofa, grasped my courage in both hands, and met his gaze. It was time for answers.

  "What was that thing outside?" I asked. “And what attacked it?”

  "Later," Keven said, stumping into the room with a bowl clamped in one hand, a steaming mug in the other, and a towel draped over one bulky shoulder. “He needs rest.”

  He—she handed the mug to Lucan, who slanted an oblique look at him—her.

  "She needs to know."

  “And she will. But not now.” Keven set the bowl on the low table between the couches.

  I leaned over to peer at the dark green mash in the bowl, wrinkling my nose at the stringent odor rising from it. "What is that?”

  "Heal-all," Keven said. "You may know it as woundwort."

  I didn't. "You're going to put that on the wound? But infection—" I fell silent under the stony gaze.

  "You have much to learn," the gargoyle said. "But for now, watch and let me work."

  Keven peeled away the blanket from Lucan, then the bloodied bundle of clothes, tsking as the wound was exposed. "How bad is it?"

  The question seemed an odd one, given the obvious severity of the injury. Lucan's cryptic, tight-lipped answer was even more so.

  "I suggest you double up on the good stuff."

  Keven nodded and stretched a heavy hand over the bowl. Eyes closed, she murmured unintelligible words. The air in the room changed. Shifted. Thickened. My gaze flicked over the wood-paneled perimeter, but I saw nothing. Only felt it as it lifted the hair on my arms and turned my breathing shallow. The bowl's contents glowed neon and bubbled thickly, spattering onto the table. I scooted back on the couch seat, as far away from it as the leather would allow.

  Keven opened her eyes. She sniffed the bowl and gave a grunt of satisfaction. "Better," she said. She scooped up a handful of the goop and turned to Lucan. "Ready?"

  Lucan nodded, his expression grim. Keven put her free hand on his shoulder and, before I could muster another objection about infection, slapped the green sludge onto his belly. Its effect was instantaneous.

  The open flesh of the wound smoked and sizzled, and Lucan's entire body convulsed as he tried to lunge to his feet. The gargoyle held him in place, her expression impassive. A snarl filled the room, deep, guttural, inhuman—and unmistakably coming from the man on the couch. A man whose body shifted and dissolved into smoke and, for the space of a single, staccato heartbeat, became...something else.

  Something other.

  Something four-legged and fur-covered and...

  At last, hysteria won.

  Wolf! I thought. He just turned into a wolf!

  And then Lucan the man returned, the amber gaze met mine, and what little remained of my normal turned inside out and upside down.

  I regarded the mug Keven held out to me for a long moment before I poked a hand from under the blanket to accept it. A faintly floral scent rose from the pale liquid within.

  "Chamomile," Keven said, her voice gruff. "For calm."

  Calm. Still laced with traces of hysteria, my inner voice (the Claire one, not the Edie one) laughed at the idea. As if.

  I sipped the herbal tea anyway, and a heavy sweetness curled over my tongue, washing away the remains of the bowl of stew Keven had insisted I eat.

  "And honey," the gargoyle added. "For shock."

  Now that, I could get on board with.

  "Thank you," I said. I sat at a rough-hewn wooden table in the center of a large kitchen, where Keven had brought me after settling Lucan into bed upstairs. Dried herbs hung from the rafters above the table, whose knife-scarred surface marked it as a well-used workspace. A wood-fired stove sat against one stone wall. A long counter ran along the length of another. Above it, a window was flanked by open shelves filled with dishes.

  Almost everything in the house was built of either stone or wood, and while steady light glowed from an iron chandelier suspended in the middle of the herbs, I had yet to see a light switch or other evidence of wiring. I gripped the mug with both hands, trying to use the heat against my palms to ground my rampant thoughts and quell the flicker of uncertainty at my core. Clinging to the cup as I did to the shreds of my sanity, I closed my eyes.

  Lights with no electrical source. An address that didn't exist. A house that was bigger on the inside than out. Winged creatures that attacked in the night. A man who shifted from human form to wolf and back again. Herbal mixtures that bubbled and smoked and healed almost on contact. A walking, talking, living gargoyle named Keven. Tea hot enough to burn my hands.

  One of those things I knew to be real. And if one was real, then the others...

  I squeezed my eyelids together, setting off tiny sparks of light behind them. "I'm not crazy, am I?" I murmured. "This—all of this—it's real, isn't it?"

  "It is." Keven's voice was quiet, too.

  "But how?" I opened my eyes to find the gargoyle shaking her head at me.

  "Not tonight, milady. There's much to tell, and you’ve had enough for one day."

  With a suddenness—and violence—that shocked me, I decided I was tired of having others direct my life. I’d been putting my own questions and concerns on hold—putting myself on hold—for as long as I could remember. I'd been the good daughter, the good wife, the good mother and neighbor and churchgoer and committee member and citizen and everything else that had been required of me, all as expected. All without asking questions.

  And where had it gotten me? A divorce from a husband who'd cheated on me, a son I’d trained not to listen to me, a level of invisibility that was downright depressing, and a life so routine that the slightest deviation from it terrified me.

  I banged the mug onto the table hard enough to slosh liquid from it. Cool air slithered across my shoulders as the blanket dropped from them.

  "No," I said. "I want to know."

  Keven reached over to tuck the blanket over my shoulders again. "You're sure?"

  Not even a little.

  "I'm sure."

  A slow incline of the wide stone head. "Very well. Ask your questions."

  Where did I even start? I studied the worn wooden tabletop. Looked at the woodstove. The chandelier. Gestured at the room in general. "The house. The gate. The address. You."

  Keven pondered for a moment, then said, "Address first. The number thirteen is the return of the divine feminine—you—to the service of the goddess Morrigan. Morrigan's Way. Thirteen is a prime number, and so it is incorruptible. It helps to protect the house. Your house."

  My—? Goddess—? My brain balked again at too much information. I took a mental breath. First things first. "How did it get into my newspaper?"

  "It was made visible to you as Crone now that you've come of age."

  "Come of age?" I laughed without humor. "I'm sixty years old!"

  Keven nodded. "Yes. The age of wisdom and power."

  There was too much to argue with in the idea, and so I waved it away with a vague sweep of my hand. "Whatever. Go on. The gate next—and you."

  "The gate is just a gate, but it can be seen only by a Crone, and it can be opened only by a pendant. Just as the address can only be revealed by a pendant."

  "And no one else can find it?" No one but a Crone.

  "Not without your will."

  Another too-big idea. "And you?"

  "I am part of the house. I look after it. I look after you. And because you have been given no knowledge...” Keven trailed off, scowling. Then she sighed. “I will teach you what I am able to."

  “Teach me what?”

  Keven sighed again, with the sound of wind whistling through a canyon. "Magic," she said. "I will teach you magic."

  That word again. It hung in the kitchen between us, as if strung up with the dried herbs above the table, silent, waiting for me to react. I stared at Keven. Keven stared back. The herbs waited some more.

  I shook my head. "No," I croaked. I cleared my throat and repeated in a firmer, albeit somewhat high-pitched, voice, "No. Magic isn't real. It's illusion. Sleight of hand. Pretend."

  “Not that kind of magic,” Keven said. “Magick with a ‘k.’ This.” She waved from side to side in a gesture that encompassed the kitchen in a house in the woods that no one else could find. “Lucan. Me. You. The ones who have come before you.”

  I clung to the mug of chamomile tea with both hands and gazed down at the sediment in its depths. No. It has to be something else, my panicked Claire-voice insisted. It has to be dementia...brain damage...anything except what she’s saying.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23