by P. R. Frost
The scotch I’d drunk for lunch threatened to come up. I had to turn my back on the nook.
“You have to burn any corpse from another dimension to make certain it’s really and truly dead. Besides, the ground is too frozen to dig.” He touched my shoulder with reassurance and affection.
I wanted to lean in to him again, let his arms enfold me and make all this horror go away. My body and my instincts craved a deeper intimacy with him.
Not until he comes clean about who and what he is, my logical brain kicked in just in time.
“But I speared them with the tines of the Celestial Blade. They are well and truly dead,” I protested, making my way toward the coffeepot on the other side of the kitchen island, a full ten feet away from the nook and the stench that had begun to rise.
“Then they probably are dead. But we have to make sure.” He followed me across the kitchen, staying far too close. I could feel the heat of his body along my back.
All too easy to lean back, just a little, and snuggle into his arms . . .
Stop that! I admonished myself even as my nipples puckered in anticipation of feeling his touch on them.
“Fine,” I snapped. “You and Gollum take care of it when he gets here. I have to clean an apartment and move Mom’s things.” I walked stiffly to the right, away from him. Away from my own stupid desires.
“I’ll call the firehouse and get a burning permit for a bonfire. Equinox. Religious purposes. They should grant it,” I continued.
“Tess . . .” He reached out to me with a fine-boned hand and his very long fingers.
I remembered seeing him at a con in California last September. He’d worn a bat costume.
I hated bats. I feared bats to the point of phobia. Illogical and unlikely, but I couldn’t overcome my panic at the merest thought of a bat touching me.
When Dill had learned of my fears, he’d made me read up on bats, learn just how harmless they were. It hadn’t helped. But I did learn that the bone structure supporting a bat’s wings were actually super elongated fingers. Donovan’s fingers weren’t that long, but they were long enough to remind me of one of the reasons I couldn’t trust him.
“Just take care of the bodies. And . . . and the table and chairs. I’ll clean up the mess later.” I stalked off toward the opposite end of the house and the attached apartment. It would be cold back there with only minimal heat all winter. I’d have to turn up the thermostat, mentally calculating the increased heating bill. Those rooms had their own furnace, a much more modern and efficient one than I had in the cellar for the rest of the house.
If Donovan followed me, and I half hoped he wouldn’t, he’d have to stay close on my heels to keep from getting lost in the maze of rooms.
My home had started as a standard New England saltbox. Three rooms down and two up, all clustered about a central chimney. I kept those rooms as my office, library, and parlor, with my bedroom and a spare upstairs.
Succeeding generations had added on to the house starting with the dining room and the attic over it that was now WindScribe’s room. The huge kitchen and breakfast nook at the opposite end of the house and the mother-in-law apartment off the dining room were the latest additions. Bathrooms were odd shapes cobbled out of old nooks or closets or attachments on the outside walls.
Donovan didn’t even trip on the odd changes in floor level. Each addition changed up or down an inch or three depending on the lay of the land.
If I didn’t look at Donovan, I could almost resist him. Damn it, I needed help fighting my own lust.
Where was Scrap? He couldn’t get close to Donovan for some mysterious reason. Still, he should be able to communicate from a distance.
“Scrap?” I whispered into the ether.
No answer.
El Stinko is here. He doesn’t smell right. I know he’s not human, but he doesn’t smell like anything I’ve ever encountered before. As long as he is near my babe, his smell and an invisible barrier keeps me at bay.
How can I protect and comfort my babe when she insists on keeping him around?
She knows this, but when he smiles at her, she falls victim to his magic. A demon glamour. It has to be that. But he doesn’t smell like a demon.
I wish she’d kick his butt back to Half Moon Lake in Washington where he belongs.
I don’t think he belongs there either.
What in the six hundred sixty-six dimensions is he? The air around him tastes almost familiar, yet totally alien at the same time.
I think I should go diving in Mum’s dump for another talisman to protect my babe, though I shudder to face the cold of Imp Haven. Freeze-dried body parts are not comfortable at all. But is Cape Cod any warmer?
Then, too, I’d have to traverse the chat room again. I wonder who’s on duty today? Maybe the faeries have posted the j’appel dragons there. Pocket-sized flying mites that they are, I can flit past them with no trouble. They are actually smaller than me. Unless someone calls them by name. Then they jump to full size in two heartbeats. Can’t get more than one full-sized dragon in the chat room at a time.
Trouble is, you never know what name a dragon is using today. It could be Hello. Or Jackknife. Or even Because. And just because he didn’t use that name yesterday doesn’t mean he’s not using it today. Gotta keep my mouth shut around these guys.
I can’t stay close to Tess while El Stinko is around, so I might as well try something useful at Imp Haven.
Chapter 10
It was once believed that the shadowed areas of the Moon were forests where the Goddess Diana hunted, and the bright areas were plains.
LOUD VOICES OUTSIDE drew me from the apartment back to the kitchen. I watched through the window of the back door as Donovan and Gollum stood on opposite sides of an unlit bonfire in the middle of the gravel drive with my round maple breakfast table upside down on top of the pile. The eight chairs and their bloodstained pads stood around the fire in a circle, inviting people to sit and toast marshmallows.
“What the hell do you think you are doing, Estevez, burning up Tess’ furniture and half her woodpile?” Gollum screamed at Donovan. He flung his long arms about wildly, his fist almost connecting with Donovan’s jaw. His silver-gilt bangs flopped into his eyes as his glasses slid down his nose. At six-feet three-and-a-half inches, he towered over Donovan’s more modest five-eleven. But I was willing to bet they weighed about the same. Gollum stood with his big feet braced and fists clenched. Not a good sign from the most nonviolent person I knew.
“Go back to your books, Smythe, and leave the real work to those who were invited,” Donovan sneered. He kicked a loose log toward the pile.
“Invited? When were you invited. I live here!”
“Where, in the root cellar?”
“No, in the guest cottage, where I can watch her back.”
“Fat chance she’d let you back into her life, let alone live here.”
They both looked toward the house. By the light dawning in their eyes, I knew they could see me standing in the window. They both puffed out their chests in high dudgeon. (I love that phrase and use it in my books whenever I can.)
The schoolteacher in me knew I should break it up. I needed both these men at the moment. Having them at each other’s throats wouldn’t help.
But a perverse imp of mischief deep inside me made me step back and watch the fireworks. The bonfire wasn’t even lit yet.
Donovan took one aggressive step closer to Gollum. “Get off this property, van Der Hoyden-Smythe, before I throw you off.”
“I’d like to see you try.” Gollum unzipped his down parka and eased his shoulders. He shifted his feet to a balanced stance, not quite an en garde, nor did it look like a standard martial arts stance. Something more esoteric. Probably just as effective.
Uh-oh. Time to intervene.
“We can’t light the fire until Allie gets here with the burn permit,” I called, descending the two steps from the mudroom to the yard. “In the meantime, I could use some he
lp taking down the soiled curtains so we can burn them, too.”
I turned back toward the kitchen, hoping the circling dogs would declare a truce before they engaged in an all out territorial battle. The alpha bitch had spoken.
I hoped.
“What’s going on, Tess?” Gollum asked the moment we all stepped into the warmth of the kitchen.
I avoided looking at the bare nook. “Grab some coffee and meet me in the parlor. It’s the warmest room in the house.”
They followed me, still keeping a substantial distance between them while trying to stay closest to me. A little hard in the narrow confines of the butler’s pantry between the kitchen and the dining room. Dill danced around all three of us, fading in and out of the woodwork to keep from having to share space with our bodies. He frowned during the entire trek.
Gollum tripped on the two-inch step down into the dining room. He flopped around but strangely did not spill a single drop of coffee from his cup.
Donovan grinned and didn’t offer to steady his balance. They stared at each other suspiciously as we passed the entrance to the apartment.
We twisted past the chaos of my office, the long room of the original saltbox. The front door of the house that faced the street stood between the office and library, but I’d sealed it for the winter. No one used it anyway since the driveway and gravel parking were closer to the kitchen door. The very steep old stairs opposite the entry led to my bedroom. I led the men to the other side of the office and into my parlor.
I checked for a sign of Scrap swinging on the spider over the fire, his favorite spot. He was still AWOL.
Finally we came to a halt in the sitting room that shared a chimney with the office and the library.
“Now isn’t this cozy. Your own private harem, Tess. Oh, do they call men a harem? If I’d known you were into polyandry, I’d have killed you before I died. Isn’t that what they call divorce Italian style?” Dill sat stiffly in a corner of the sleeper sofa. No humor lightened his quips. His eyes glowed red with anger.
Donovan peered around as if mapping an escape route. Gollum settled easily into the wingback chair closest to the fireplace and plunked his feet onto the matching ottoman. Just like I knew he would. I took the matching chair. That left Donovan with the sofa beneath the window that overlooked the side yard and a screening copse between the house and Old King Highway. He’d have to share it with Dill. Did he sense the ghost’s presence? Why else would he press himself into the arm, occupying as small a space as possible.
“Want to talk about it?” Gollum asked casually, as if he were a psychologist and I his patient.
For all I knew, he might have a psychology degree among the long list of academic letters after his name.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and told them everything from the moment WindScribe ran out of nowhere into the freezing street, stark naked. They didn’t need to know about Dill. If they stayed long enough, I was sure they’d see his ghost eventually.
And the Windago? Not now. Later. I wasn’t alone and vulnerable with these two around.
Donovan whistled through his teeth and shrank back as far as he could into the stiff cushions of the country style blue-and-cream sofa.
“What do you know?” Gollum pinned him with an accusing glare.
“That we don’t want to wait for that burn permit.” Donovan jumped to his feet and stalked back toward the kitchen. Dill followed close on his heels, as if tied to him in some way.
“Why?” I inserted myself in front of his broad frame. Too close. The heat of his emotions—anger, worry, and something else I couldn’t identify—nearly swamped my senses. I gritted my teeth and held my ground.
“Because those garden gnomes are Orculli trolls. If we don’t burn the bodies quickly, they’ll reanimate and with twice as many teeth and less sense. You’ve also got to get some bleach into the spilled blood fast to keep it from reanimating on its own.”
“And if we burn them?” Gollum had also regained his feet. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and focused his eyes on something beyond my shoulder.
A quick glance where he looked confirmed that he really gazed into another world, or deep inside himself, not on me or Donovan.
“If we do it right now, then the bodies and the spilled blood will remain dead.” Donovan pushed me aside, grabbed his leather jacket from where he’d dropped it on my desk chair and a box of matches from the mantel and stalked back the way we’d come.
The phone on my big rolltop desk chirped. I cursed and thought about ignoring it.
“Better grab that. With all that’s going on, you never know who it might be,” Gollum advised quietly.
“Yeah?” I barked into the receiver.
“Teresa Louise, I’ll forgive your rudeness this time, but only because I’m soooooo happy,” my mother crooned in her light Québécois accent. She sounded excited. Soon she’d devolve into the bastard French she had made up out of childhood memories and called a pure language but wasn’t much more than baby talk.
She didn’t need much provocation.
“Mom?” This didn’t sound like my mother, the control freak harpy who hadn’t been happy a single day since Dad left her and their three children for Bill, the love of his life.
“Yes, Teresa, your mother. Your wonderfully ecstatic mother.” She said something else in French that I couldn’t catch. I speak, read, and understand Parisian French. Mom’s dialect had little in common with it.
“Mom, what’s going on?” I crossed my eyes and tried to picture my mother ecstatic, or anything but disapproving.
“I’m getting married!”
My knees gave out. I fumbled for the rolling office chair.
Gollum guided me. “Breathe, Tess,” he whispered. “In on my count, one, two, three. Out, one, two, three. That’s good. Again. Keep breathing.”
“Who?” was all I could manage to ask. I waved Gollum off.
“The most beautiful man in the world, Tess. He’s tall. He’s dark. He’s handsome. And he loves me!”
“When did this all happen, Mom?” She’d only been in Florida three weeks. I had visions of a Latino Lothario out to marry Mom for my money. I might not have a lot of cash on hand, but my royalty checks twice a year had started looking very pleasing. And I owned the house and land, which was worth a whole lot more than it was when Dill and I bought it.
“Time means nothing when you’re in love, Teresa. You taught me that when you ran off and married Dillwyn.”
That was a first. She usually refused to acknowledge that Dill and I had even legally married. Just because we ran off to Reno for a quick and private ceremony, the same weekend we met at High Desert Con, didn’t make the union any less legal.
“Um, Mom, this doesn’t sound like you.”
“I’ve never been more me in my life!”
Now I really was worried. “When am I going to meet this man, Mom. You haven’t even told me his name.”
“Darren. His name is Darren Estevez. And we’ll be there in an hour. Your sister Cecilia is driving us home from the airport in Providence now.”
I gulped and jerked my head toward the kitchen, wishing I had a window through three rooms to the drive where Donovan Estevez lit a cleansing bonfire. Donovan Estevez who might be half demon.