Damsel Under Stress

by Shanna Swendson

  We ordered a pizza for dinner and ate in front of the fire, Owen tossing Loony the occasional bite of meat as he briefed me on the upcoming holiday. “I know I make them sound terrifying, but James and Gloria really aren’t that bad. They’ll be nice to you. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. I did tell you they dress for dinner, though, didn’t I?” I nodded. “And they don’t believe in hanging around the house in your pajamas. They’re fully dressed before they leave their bedroom.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said, omitting the fact that Rod had already briefed me on that detail. “Y’all don’t have any weird traditions I need to know about, do you?”

  “Nothing I can think of, but then I don’t know what you might think of as weird.” I knew if our positions were reversed, my brothers would be likely to invent traditions to put him through and make him think were a normal part of our holidays, but somehow I doubted his foster parents would do anything like that.

  When I couldn’t delay getting home anymore, he insisted on walking me to my door, in case the sidewalks decided to swallow me. I was late getting to bed after wrapping up my packing. I doubted I’d get much sleep, anyway, what with my nervousness about the next day and the likelihood I’d end up reliving the day’s adventures.

  Sure enough, as soon as I tried to shut my eyes, I was right back on that ice rink, enjoying the blissful moment when I felt like I was living a scene from a favorite romantic Christmas movie and then reliving the sudden terror of plunging through the ice. The memory was vividly painful, and as it flashed before my eyes, I could swear I recalled a hint of silvery sparkles in the air just before I fell.

  I sat bolt upright in bed, shouting, “Ethelinda!” Fortunately, my roommates were out of town so I didn’t have to explain that. I wanted to bang my head against the wall in frustration at it having taken so long to dawn on me. It was the kind of semi-disastrous thing she might try, given what I’d seen from her at the tavern the other night. To give her credit, it had worked, in a way. Me falling through the ice had given Owen the chance to play both rescuer and comforter, and we’d had some quality snuggling time in the aftermath.

  On the other hand, it could have been dangerous for both of us, and what was the deal with setting up a situation where I became a victim and he had to rescue me? Besides, hadn’t I told her I didn’t want her interfering?

  I was tempted to get out the locket and call her so I could give her a piece of my mind, but I didn’t know if she worked nights, and it would be just like her to answer my summons while I was at Owen’s foster parents’ home. No, it was best to leave her out of this until after the holiday. In the meantime, I’d keep my eyes peeled for any signs of silvery sparkles.

  Late the next morning, after a train ride during which Owen grew more and more jittery, we stepped off the train onto a platform in a bare-bones station that consisted of little more than cement platforms on either side of the tracks. Owen carried our bags down a flight of steps, then paused to look around. In a parking lot across the street, someone standing by a car waved. Owen nodded and headed over.

  The car was a Volvo wagon, several years old but in mint condition, without so much as a door ding. Beside it stood a tall, slender man wearing a dark hat and coat. He looked like the Hollywood stereotype of the perfect, proper English butler, the kind who runs the household and keeps his clueless employer out of trouble. Owen hadn’t mentioned servants, but I shouldn’t have been surprised, as rich as these people supposedly were.

  But then Owen reached him and the man shook his hand fondly. It looked like that was as close to a hug as this man ever got. Up close, I could see that he was quite old, with pale, watery blue eyes and skin that looked almost translucent with age.

  “Katie, I’d like you to meet James Eaton,” Owen said. “James, this is my friend and colleague, Katie Chandler.”

  James gave me a smile that was warm and genuine, even if it wasn’t all that broad. His face looked like it might shatter if he tried a broad grin. He clasped my hand in both of his own and said, “I’m pleased you could join us for the holiday, Katie.” He had a clipped Yankee accent with perfect enunciation.

  “Thank you so much for having me,” I replied, trying and failing to fight my own accent. So far, this man didn’t seem to be a monster, and either he was fully human or a being that looked human because I didn’t see anything odd.

  James turned to Owen. “I hope you don’t mind driving,” he said. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Not at all,” Owen replied. “Let me get our bags loaded.” James handed him the keys, and he put our bags in the back of the car. While he did that, James opened the door to the backseat and got inside. Owen opened the front passenger door for me, then once I was inside, he went around to the driver’s side, where he had to adjust the seat before starting the car.

  The road from the station into town was so steep I thought I’d have to get out and help push the car up it. It was a good thing there was no ice or there would have been no way to get up that hill. The buildings that lined the road were stair-stepped into the hill, which gave them a quaint appearance. The town itself looked like something out of a storybook, complete with the fairy fluttering down the sidewalk with shopping bags over her arm. Gnomes tended the grounds in front of the gothic town hall, looking very much like those in that store window we’d seen the day before.

  “You’ve got quite the magical population here,” I remarked. “Or is it this way in all the towns in this part of the world?”

  “This particular village was settled by magical folk,” James said. “Almost everyone in town is magical or somehow associated with magic.”

  I tried not to gawk as we drove through the village center, turned onto a major road, and then turned again to go up yet another steep hill. Most of the homes seemed to be fairly old and fairly large, on spacious, well-groomed lots dotted with mature trees. Owen turned onto a side street, then into a driveway, whose wrought-iron gates swung open at our approach.

  The Eatons’ home looked like one of those elaborate gingerbread houses hotel pastry chefs do for display during the holidays. It was an ornate Victorian built from warm brown brick, with lots of peaks, eaves, chimneys, and green-painted woodwork. The icing of snow on the roof added to the gingerbread effect. All it was missing was a row of gumdrops along the roof ridges. “Oh, what a wonderful house,” I said in awe.

  “Yes, it is quite the Victorian pile of bricks,” James said. “And in case you were wondering, we’re not the original owners.” I turned just in time to catch the twinkle in his eye, and I couldn’t help but smile back. I decided that I liked him.

  Owen pulled into a detached garage that looked like it once must have been a carriage house. It was perfectly neat and organized rather than being the repository for junk that garages tend to be. That was my first sense of what I might be getting into. James’s relative friendliness and good humor had lulled me into complacency, but anyone who kept a garage neat enough that you could have a party in there was someone to be reckoned with.

  My next hint that this wasn’t going to be anything like my visits home came when we went around to the front door to enter the house. Back home, we always came in through the kitchen. Our front door may have gone years without being opened. The entry foyer of this house was wide and floored with dark, polished wood overlaid with an antique Oriental rug. An equally polished staircase with an intricately carved banister twisted its way from the back of the foyer up to the next floor. James took off his hat, revealing a thinning shock of white hair, then took my coat and hat from me as Owen took care of his own coat in a closet under the stairs.

  There was a snuffling sound, and soon a black Lab came into the foyer from an adjacent room. It breathed as though it was running full speed, but moved at a snail’s pace, its tail wagging feebly. The white around its muzzle indicated that in dog years it was about as old as James was. The dog made a painfully slow beeline to Owen, who moved to meet it
halfway, then knelt and scratched its head fondly. “So you do remember me, Arawn,” he said.

  James sniffed. “Of course he remembers you. When you leave he’ll stare out the front window for a couple of days like he’s hoping you’ll come back. You spoiled him when he was a puppy.” It was the first hint of the disapproval Owen had mentioned when he told me about his strained relationship with his foster parents, but I thought James’s tone was more fond than critical. Judging by what I knew about how long dogs like that lived—I’d had one very much like Arawn when I was growing up—this one must have been a puppy around the time Owen was in his late teens, maybe just before he went off to college.

  The dog finished greeting Owen and came over to investigate me. Even if I managed to screw up with Owen’s foster parents, I was pretty sure I could make a good impression on his dog. I bent and patted his head the way my old Lab used to like. This one increased the speed of his tail wagging, which I took as a sign of approval.

  Then a voice rang in from another room. “James? Are you back from the station already?”

  Both James and Owen automatically snapped to attention. Even the dog moved into the position you’d expect him to assume if you shouted, “Sit!” and faced in the direction from which the voice had come. I started to get a sense of why Owen was so nervous.

  Eight

  “W e’ve just arrived,” James called out, then he said more quietly to us, “This way.” Owen followed him, looking like he was heading to his own execution, and the dog trotted faithfully at Owen’s heels. I grabbed the tin of homemade cookies I’d brought as a hostess gift from my bag, then brought up the rear, feeling more than a bit nervous, myself. I’d seen Owen in all kinds of scary situations, including an all-out magical battle involving monsters out of my worst nightmares, and I’d never seen him look this anxious.

  The woman who stood waiting in the parlor was certainly formidable. She looked like the kind of character Katharine Hepburn played in her later years—the crusty, sharp-tongued, aristocratic octogenarian who turned out to have a warm, gooey center. It remained to be seen how gooey this woman was inside. She was tall—almost as tall as Owen, even with the shrinkage and slight stoop of age—and angular, with almost no hint of softness anywhere on her body. She had the kind of white hair that looks like it once was red, pulled up in a tight bun on top of her head, and her blue eyes were so sharp and piercing that I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find that one of her powers was X-ray vision.

  She swept those all-seeing eyes past each of us. I got the sense she was collecting data to analyze later. The whole time, she stood totally still. If it hadn’t been for her eyes, I might have thought she was carved from granite. Or maybe ice.

  But then she suddenly melted as her face softened into a smile. She stepped forward, took Owen by the shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek. He looked like he might faint at any moment, while James did the kind of double take Bob Hope built a career on. Even the dog made a funny little “whuh?” sound.

  Just as abruptly, her eyes focused on me. It took every ounce of will I had not to step backward. “You must be Katie,” she said, clipping her words brusquely.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said, fighting off the urge to curtsy. “Thank you so much for having me.” I thrust my tin of cookies toward her and tried to keep my hands from visibly shaking. “These are for you.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” she said as she took the tin from me. “And thank you.” I wished I could tell if her tone was particularly frosty or if that was the way she always talked. I’d felt warmer right after I fell through the ice than I did with her looking at me like that. She turned back to Owen and softened again. “Did you have a good trip?”

  “It—it was fine.” He darted a glance at his foster father, and the two of them exchanged baffled looks.

  She didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she pointedly ignored it. “You’ll want to get settled in. Lunch will be in half an hour.” Then she swept out of the room, and Owen gestured with a twitch of his head that we should follow her. Out in the foyer, he picked up our bags and had to hurry to catch up with Gloria, who was halfway up the stairs. Arawn settled himself at the foot of the stairs. I had to step over him to run up after Gloria and Owen. I now knew where Owen had learned his rapid walking pace.

  “Katie, you’ll be in the blue guest room,” Gloria said as I reached the top of the stairs. Without waiting for me to respond, she turned to the right and led me down a short hallway to a room that overlooked the front lawn. “You have your own bathroom through that door. Towels are laid out for you. There are empty hangers in the closet, and you may use the top drawer of the bureau. Let me know if there’s anything you need.” I was still opening my mouth to respond when she left the room. Owen set my bag down in front of the bureau and then followed her. I could hear her voice in the hallway, sounding softer and gentler now, as she said to him, “You’ll be in your old room, of course. I have it ready for you.”

  The room I’d been assigned was furnished in delicate, feminine antiques, with pale blue floral wallpaper, white lace curtains, and a blue-and-white quilt on the four-poster bed. Because I had a feeling Gloria would check, I unpacked my bag and arranged everything as neatly as possible. Then I freshened up a bit to make myself presentable for lunch.

  It was still about fifteen minutes before the appointed lunchtime, so I left the room in search of Owen. His room turned out to be almost directly across the hall from mine, and I noticed that the hallway floorboards creaked loudly. I doubted it would be a factor in this visit, but any nighttime crossing of the hallway would require great caution. We had a similar squeaky spot in our house back home, so I was used to treading carefully.

  Owen’s room looked less like a showplace out of a bed-and-breakfast in a travel magazine and more like a room someone had actually lived in. There was a twin bed shoved into a corner. Most of the walls in the room were covered in bookcases, some of them with trophies lined up on top of them. Several books were already scattered on the bed and on the floor by the bed. Sometimes I suspected books automatically jumped off the shelf whenever Owen entered a room.

  Owen sat on the bed, looking at two of the books as though he was cross-referencing something. His overnight bag stood open on the floor in front of the closet, a shirt hanging halfway out of it, like he’d been sidetracked while unpacking.

  I tapped lightly on the door frame, and his head snapped up guiltily. Then he saw me and relaxed. “Oh, I thought for a second you might be Gloria. I guess I’d better finish unpacking.”

  He got up to get back to work, and I took his spot on the bed. I glanced at the books he’d been reading, but neither was in English. From inside the closet he said, “I’d tell you not to worry about Gloria because she’s not always this way, but it wouldn’t be true.”

  I knew I should tell him that there had been nothing to worry about, but that wasn’t true, either. Instead I said, “It seemed like she gave you a bit of a shock.”

  “A big shock. She may have kissed me one other time in my life, but I can’t think of a specific incident.” He came back out into the room, his face stark white. “Oh God, you don’t think she’s dying, do you?”

  As old as Gloria seemed to be, that probably wasn’t entirely out of the question, but the idea here was to reassure him. “I’m sure it’s nothing. You said things were better at Thanksgiving.”

  He sat heavily on the bed, a necktie hanging from one hand. “Maybe that’s when she got the diagnosis.”

  “Or maybe it’s what I said after Thanksgiving, that she knows how to deal with you now that you’re an adult.”

  “You don’t know how weird this is.”

  “I got the picture when James looked like he thought she’d lost it. And if he thinks this is odd, then surely there’s not something seriously wrong with her. He’d know, wouldn’t he?”

  Some of the color returned to his face. “That’s true. She might not tell him everything that’s going
on, but she doesn’t drive, so he’d be the one taking her to any doctor’s appointments.” He glanced down at the necktie he held, as if just realizing that he’d let himself be sidetracked again.

  While he returned to the closet to finish unpacking, I decided to distract him. “Your dog seems like a real sweetie.”

  “Yeah, we got him not long before I left home, when he was only a few weeks old. James is right, I did spoil him then, and they were stuck with a very attention-hungry puppy when I left.”

  “He’s a Lab. He would have been attention-hungry no matter what you did. But he does seem a lot smarter than the dog I had. Cletus was as dumb as a box of rocks.”

  He came back out into the room, grinning, and sat beside me on the bed. “Cletus? Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Remember, I am from Texas, and that name really fit that dog.”

  Still grinning, he stood and extended a hand to me. “Want the grand tour before lunch?”

  I took his hand and let him pull me to my feet. He led me, still holding my hand, out into the hallway and toward the stairs. “Over on that end of the house is James and Gloria’s room and the other guest room,” he explained. Arawn perked up and started wagging his tail when he saw us coming down the stairs. “You’ve already seen the parlor.” At the bottom of the stairs, the dog joined us as we went to the back of the house. “And this is James’s study.” The study door was open, and I saw that James was in there, reading by the fireplace. The room looked a lot like Owen’s office, cluttered with books and papers.

  James looked up at us. “Ah, you’re all settled in, then?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He addressed Owen, a slight twinkle in his eye. “I trust everything was the way you left it at Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t let her put away those books because I had a feeling you were onto something.”