Robin leaped off the bed. She told him, “There’s no reason for you to come along just because I’ve got insomnia. You should stay and rest.”
Instead of taking her up on her suggestion, he went over to stand by the door. He was moving better too, she saw, so she shrugged and opened the door for him. Together they went quietly down the stairs.
Business in the pub was winding down. She found Maggie washing glasses. The other woman greeted her with more reserve than she had earlier. Sophie regretted that, but she didn’t blame her. She said, “I’m going for a drive. How would you like for me to come back in?”
Maggie told her, “We lock up the front of the building where the liquor is, but you can come in the back entrance. We’ll be up late for a private gathering.” She eyed Sophie curiously. “You won’t find anything open. Town’s all closed up this time of night.”
“That’s all right. The countryside is beautiful, and I’m never going to sleep anyway.”
Besides, curiosity was eating her alive. Sophie turned to go, Robin at her heels. She let the puck leap into the Mini first, then she climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Here goes nothing,” she muttered, reaching for the ignition.
The car started perfectly. The GPS worked as well, the fucking fucker. Annoyed but not surprised, she smacked it with the back of her hand, double-checked her directions, then pulled out of the lot.
Within a few moments, she had left the streetlights of Westmarch behind and plunged into deep countryside. Overhead, the moon was full and gorgeous in a midnight blue, clear sky, and the stars were so bright and seemed so close Sophie felt like she could pluck them out of the sky.
The roads she drove were narrow and winding, and clusters of trees and hedges threw deep, almost impenetrable shadows, so she drove slowly. The land was alive with such aged magic, after a few moments she felt drunk on it. She rolled down the windows to let a fitful breeze gust into the car. Beside her in the passenger seat, Robin sat still, his eyes glistening in the dim dashboard lights.
As they drew closer, she could feel it, the broken crossover passageway. Then stone pillars emerged from the darkness, outlined by the car’s headlights. They had once supported iron gates that blocked the drive to the house, but as she turned gently onto the gravel drive, she saw that the gates now leaned against the pillars, overgrown with ivy.
The sound of tires crunching on the gravel seemed very loud in the dense quiet. The grass on either side of the driveway looked freshly mowed, while a deep, unkempt forest bordered the green lawn. After she had turned into the drive, a small cottage came into view. That would be the gatekeeper’s house, her home for the next three months.
She could explore that tomorrow. She went farther, about a hundred yards or so, and as she drove around a bend past a clump of trees, the house came into view.
The house. The family albatross.
In the full moonlight, the massive manor house was a hulking, shadowed mystery. She let the car drift to a stop, then turned off the engine and stepped out, holding the door for Robin to follow. To her senses, the house felt steeped with all the magnificent, shattered magic of the crossover passageway.
Studying the roof, she counted. There seemed to be five gables at first, but then, just as it had when she had studied the photograph, her vision shifted and there were seven. She laughed softly, as she felt herself doing the most foolish thing she had done in years.
She fell in love with the albatross. Right there, in the moonlight, she fell in love with what had to be the most useless piece of real estate in the United Kingdom.
One of the things she had packed for her trip was a compact Maglite that fit easily into her purse. She pulled it out now to shine light on the ground as she picked her way along the broken flagstone path to the wide front doors. They were thick and sturdy, made of oak and bound with iron. Surprised that the flashlight worked so close to the building, she wondered if that meant she would be able to take photos from inside.
She had brought the keys to both the gatekeeper’s house and the manor, but she didn’t bother to pull out the manor house’s ancient key. Instead, she clicked off the Maglite, tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans, and placed both flattened hands on the oak doors to see what the house had to say for itself.
Intense darkness settled around her as she stood in the house’s shadow. For long moments she lost herself, tracing the shards of the crossover magic. So much magic. She could immerse herself completely in it, like plunging into the deep part of a pool.
There it was, the part she had been searching for that was slightly off. When she had seen the photos, she had wondered, but now she knew for a certainty.
“You’re going to be mine,” she whispered to the house.
But even she had her limits. Trying to enter this place was not something to be done in the middle of the night. She would wait until tomorrow to see if she was right.
As she mentally hugged herself with glee, a voice spoke behind her. A deep, slightly accented, unfortunately familiar voice.
Nikolas said, “It’s not wise to wander this countryside during a full moon.”
Her heart knocked against her ribs like a wild creature trying to break free of a cage. Whirling, she put the oak and iron doors to her back as she stared at the tall, imposing figure standing a few yards away. He was a shadow within a shadow, an intense, midnight star of magic more Powerful than all the magic of the land around her.
She clenched her hands, grateful she had prepared both defensive and offensive spells this time instead of feeling naked and defenseless as the day she was born. “What are you doing here?”
Her cold furious intent came out breathless and shaken.
“Following you.” The black shadow strode toward her. “What in hell possessed you to come out to this gods forsaken place in the middle of the night?”
I was too curious. I have such a burning need to feel a part of something, to own my own space of ground even if it’s a haunted and hollow place, that I couldn’t wait for tomorrow.
All the truthful words were tangled and too revealing. She swallowed hard and snapped, “What I do or don’t do is none of your damn business. Stop walking.”
“You make no sense. Why on earth should I stop walking?” The black shadow still moved toward her with some unknown purposeful intent.
It unsettled her so much she dug out the Maglite, clicked it on and aimed it at his face.
What she saw startled her so badly she dropped the flashlight. “Jesus Christ.”
As Nikolas reached her, he bent to pick up the flashlight. He said coldly, “I assume that means you have the ability to see what the moonshadow reveals.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she whispered, staring at him.
For a moment when she had first laid eyes on him, she had seen the predatory eyes of a leopard looking back at her. Then the leopard was gone, and in its place stood a tall knight in chain mail, his black cloak falling to the ankles of tall boots.
It was Nikolas, and yet not Nikolas. He had the same terrible, immortal beauty, the same eyes, the same mouth, but his hair wasn’t cut short. It fell to his broad shoulders, and his expression was stamped with clear, implacable determination.
Then that image was gone too, and the real Nikolas stood before her, leaner, harder and darker. He was dressed in the same black pants and shirt he had worn at the pub. The folds of the dark cloth shifted as he moved, catching the strong streak of illumination from the flashlight in the intense shadows and hinting at the powerful body it sheathed.
“No?” In the slanted light that he pointed away from them, his expression was stony, while his dark eyes glittered like onyx. “Then tell me, what did you see that frightened you so?”
“I wasn’t frightened,” she said frankly, knocked out of her outrage at finding him here. She paused, for some reason reluctant to describe the knight that she had seen. “I was startled. I think I saw a flash of a leopard.
Are you part Wyr?”
“Yes. And Elven. And Dark Fae.” His voice was icy, bored. “Why, do you find me monstrous now?”
“Of course not!” she snapped. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“Because many do. The enemy we fight wants to exterminate us for our mixed race.”
“Then they’re stupid. I’m not stupid.” She held out her hand for the flashlight. “What did the—what did you call it?—the moonshadow have to do with my seeing that?”
“This land is steeped in so much magic that you don’t understand, history that you don’t know, and dangers you don’t comprehend.”
“Just because I don’t know something doesn’t mean I can’t learn it,” she pointed out acerbically. “Bigotry and racism are flaws. Withholding information because you think you know better is a flaw. Ignorance isn’t a flaw.”
He handed the flashlight to her, and she turned it off, plunging them both into deep darkness. After a moment, he said, “Standing in a shadow cast by the moon reveals a person’s true nature to those with the ability to see it.”
His true nature, leopard, knight, and prince. She was still shaken and awed in spite of herself. Busily she ran around inside her head, stamping out all the sneaky pieces of awe she could find.
“So what exactly does that mean?” she asked. “What do you see when you look at me?”
“Just as you see the Wyr in me, I see the Djinn in you.”
* * *
Earlier in the pub, Nikolas had been glad when Sophie had walked off in a huff. It meant he could concentrate on eating the rest of his meal in peace and enjoy the rare chance of relaxing with Gawain.
The beef stew was excellent. He finished his meal in a few bites. As he wiped the corners of his mouth, Gawain muttered, “I know we can’t be responsible for everybody we run into, but sometimes that sits ill in my belly. That girl is going to get herself killed.”
“She’s not a girl,” Nikolas said. “As she pointed out earlier, she’s a woman fully capable of making her own decisions, no matter how imbecilic they may be. And let’s be accurate. Robin is the one who will get her killed. He should have stayed with us instead of going with her. If we’re right, and the Queen had been holding him prisoner, she’ll be looking for him. And he will lead her right to Sophie.”
“Agh.” Gawain ran big hands through his hair. “I want to strangle her with my bare hands.”
Nikolas knew Gawain wasn’t referring to Sophie. He finished his Guinness. “As good as it’s been to sit with you for a while, we need to split up.”
“Aye, I know.” Gawain looked down at the back of his hand. He said softly, “It’s a good spell, a good technique.”
“Yes, it is. I’ll give her that.” After a moment’s hesitation, Nikolas told him, “You go on. I’m going to stay.”
A look of relief crossed the other man’s face. “You’ll watch over her?”
“I’m certainly going to watch her, at least for a while.” His tone was dry as he rephrased what Gawain had said in a small but important way. “Maybe I can talk to her again and convince her to send the puck with me. Or maybe I can talk to Robin again and convince him to leave her.”
Gawain blew out a breath. “If you want, I can be the one to stay and watch over them.”
“No.” His response was so swift and decisive the other man paused to stare at him. “I’ll be the one to do it.”
If Gawain stayed to do the job, he would be too nice about it. He might hesitate if he had to make a difficult decision, whereas Nikolas had lost the nice part of himself a long time ago.
Besides, he didn’t want the other man around Sophie, watching her, possibly even spending time with her. That was his to do, no one else’s. He frowned, caught by the unusual thought.
“I don’t know, man. She didn’t react so well to you,” Gawain pointed out. “And to be honest, you didn’t react so well to her either. She responded better to me.”
“We’re worried about her feelings now?” Nikolas narrowed his eyes and gave the other man a hard look. “I don’t think so. I’m the one who needs to stay. She saw a vision with me in it, and there’s something that connected us together strongly enough so that I saw her too. Some other kind of magic. She said her vision was complete now that we’d met, but I don’t know that I believe her. Besides, she might have more skills that would be useful to us.” He paused. “It would also come in handy if she would teach one of us the technique she used to cast the temporary null spell she painted on your hand.”
“I’m not going to argue with that,” Gawain said. He stood, and Nikolas followed suit to haul him into a hard hug. “You want me to update the others?”
“You can if you want. There’s not much to tell them yet.”
Gawain squeezed his arm. “Look after yourself, Nik.”
“You do the same.”
As he watched, Gawain spat on the back of his hand and rubbed it on his napkin. Within seconds, the null spell evaporated. The witch had been true to her word.
Gawain strode out, and Nikolas stayed just long enough to pay the bill, then he too left and studied the outside of the building until he found the window of Sophie’s room. Settling his back against the trunk of a tree, he watched until her light went dark. A few moments later, she left the pub.
Now, facing her in the shadow of the cursed house, he was glad she had turned off the flashlight. His night vision adjusted quickly until he could see almost as well as if it were daylight.
Except it wasn’t daylight. The moon’s magic spilled all around them, and in the privacy of the relative darkness, he was able to stare his full at the female who stood in front of him.
She was magnificent. In the truth revealed by the moonshadow, her eyes gleamed brilliant like diamonds, and an unseen wind played in her dark hair. The angles of her face blended harmoniously into a strong, feminine whole. The effect was softened by the generous curves of her mouth. Silver runes shone on her hands and arms, gleaming with magic spells overlaid upon spells.
She was an enchantress, dangerous and Powerful, and for the first time since they had met in the flesh, he fully acknowledged she was her own force to be reckoned with.
When he named her as part Djinn, she stared at him. “No one has ever been able to tell me what I was before. I had to find it out for myself.”
“Did you?” He found that he was intrigued, while his attention lingered on the shining spells on her arms. They made her look both elegant and barbaric at once. “How did you discover your nature, if no one was able to tell you? Didn’t your family know?”
“When I was five, I was adopted into a family of witches. It wasn’t a good experience, and I left home when I was eighteen. But I had plenty of training while I lived with them, and I already knew there was something odd about me when I left. Something not quite human.”
“Did that bother your adopted family?”
She snorted. “When I was younger, I liked to blame how they treated me on that unknown part of me, but the truth was, they were just predatory jerks. They trained their children in witchcraft to work in the family business. I was very magical and not quite theirs, so I was expected to work harder than everyone else to justify my place. They made their affection conditional on how well I did, and I never quite measured up. I was never quite good enough, so I always had to keep working harder and harder. They made a good profit off me for a while until I was old enough to understand what they were doing and choose a better life for myself.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That is a subtle kind of cruelty, especially to a child who doesn’t have the defenses and filters that an adult has.”
“Yes.” She turned away from the house and picked her way carefully along the flagstone path back to the Mini, and he strode along beside her. “Anyway, I left home as soon as I could, and I traveled from demesne to demesne and talked to the most knowledgeable people I could find in each place. When I reached the Demonkind demesne in Houston, I found my answer with
the Djinn. I stayed with them for a while and learned what I could, then I made my way west and spent a few years with my teacher in Nevada before getting the consultant job in LA. So there you have it—twenty-nine years encapsulated in a few sentences.”
“For you to carry Djinn magic, the Djinn in your past must have fallen into flesh and mated with your human ancestor.”
“That’s my understanding.”
From what little Nikolas knew, the rare Djinn who fell into flesh were typically not fertile or able to bear children. He murmured, “You are a very rare occurrence, Sophie Ross.”
“I’ve been called less flattering things. ‘Anomaly,’ ‘abnormality.’ Personally, I like ‘statistical outlier’ the best.” Several yards from the car, she swung around to confront him. “I don’t like being followed. What are you doing here?”
He smiled to himself. She had drawn him out of the shadow of the house, into the open clearing where she could see more clearly. If he wasn’t careful, he might end up liking this almost-human female.
“Earlier you said that now we’ve met, we’re done. I don’t believe you,” he told her. Then he switched to telepathy. And Robin is going to get you killed. If he escaped from the one who was holding him prisoner, she’s going to come after him.
Isabeau, you mean? she said. The Fae Queen of the Light Court is going to come here, to me?
He clenched his teeth and gave her a dark look.
She laughed, and the wind picked up the sound, carrying it across the open space. The wind loved her, Nikolas noted. He barely felt the breeze in passing, but it played with her hair constantly.
She told him, Did you think I wouldn’t notice when you said “Queen” earlier, or I wouldn’t put two and two together? I read a few things before I came, so I’m not quite as ignorant as you might think. Your enemy is the Light Court. I’m guessing that makes you a member of the Dark Court, and probably one of high standing, but I’m not going to make any assumptions—from what I’ve heard and read about her, I’m guessing Isabeau has a talent for making enemies.