Nine
NINE
I put JJ to sleep in my bed, and while Toby started making a bouquet for his mother in the sunroom, I asked my cottage if it could help me locate any books or journals that had to do with burning up a rift.
When I checked my grandfather’s office, there was nothing on his desk. I then checked the library, again without success, which was surprising. The library looked tiny but was actually huge. The cottage held handwritten journals by all the guardians of Corvus dating back to those who had first awoken the land. There were also books on metallurgy, root work, candle making, animal husbandry, astronomy, and endless volumes of poetry. There were books on hexes, bestiaries, classifications of fae, every holy book in existence with no religion excluded, every pantheon of gods and goddesses, and of course, my grandmother’s romance novels that had all seen better days. Any text that came to mind, the cottage probably had a copy. Several guardians over the years had thought that perhaps selling off a few of the rare, out-of-print classics might be a nice way to bring in some extra needed cash before Corvus had become completely self-sustaining. The fact that all the volumes remained told me that nothing in print ever brought into the cottage had left. It was the same for the diaries of my ancestors. People could read them on Corvus, but they would never be permitted to leave. I understood. It was knowledge that the next in line might desperately need.
“Like me,” I said out loud to the cottage. “I need to know if there’s anything on sealing up a rift.”
Nothing moved around me, there were no sounds, no creaks, bumps, sliding, or anything falling off any shelves.
Returning to my grandfather’s study, I sat at his desk and pulled his last journal, simply to remind myself how he organized them. A page flipped open on its own, and I read: Xander has a friend, and this one’s going to stick. She needs him as much as he needs her.
“You’re a sap, old man,” I told him and was instantly surrounded by the scents of leather, cedar, and cardamom.
“It smells good in here,” Toby told me, coming in.
“Yes, it does,” I agreed. “And though I like reminders about my friends, I would appreciate it if anyone could answer my questions.”
When I turned to Toby, I noticed him squinting. “What?”
“When you make your voice like that, all sarcastic like Mom does when she’s mad, the cottage doesn’t like it.”
I sighed deeply. “Well, it would be nice if I could get some help.”
“Yeah, but you live here, so don’t you think it would help you if it could?”
Cold air ran over my skin then, making me shiver. “I’m sorry,” I said into the ether. This was, of course, why the cottage liked Lorne better. Why when he asked for things, they appeared. “Though I really do need help.”
“Maybe what you’re asking is something you already know,” Toby said wisely.
After a moment, I nodded. “You’re right. It could very well be.”
My grandfather’s scent was back then, which said he’d led me to his study, to the entry about Amanda, which translated to her son and the truth coming out of his mouth. Meaning, what Thero had said about the rift was all there was.
Smaller rifts were patrolled, as the nymphs had done. Larger ones, that deities could move through, needed guardians. The rift on Corvus could never be sealed. It was too big. The small ones, as Thero had explained, could be burned up if used by something of immense power. It was a one-way trip. So yes, whatever had come through was powerful, but even with that, it was not a god. My lord Arawn could not come through a sliver rift. Even trying would have combusted it, fried it right up. Originally, my friend Declan, when he was still fae and not human yet, had come through that exact rift. Others who had attacked me, other members of the fae, wolves, a sorceress, had come through one at a time. Which meant that whatever had come through was stronger than all of them. Thero had said other , and now I had to determine what that was.
“I might need to go on a field trip,” I told Toby.
“Me and JJ can come with you,” he suggested, hopeful.
“I’ll think about it.”
“That means no. You always say you’re going to think about it when you mean no.”
He really did know me.
JJ woke up twenty minutes later, dying for blueberry muffins simply because. I understood. Sometimes I had cravings as well.
“I have a question,” JJ began. “This morning at the restaurant the waitress said that I should have oatmeal for breakfast because it would stick to my ribs. What does that even mean?”
“I’ve heard that before too,” Toby commented. “But it doesn’t make any sense. Food would have to get out of your stomach and enter your bloodstream, and that sounds bad.”
“It sounds like the waitress didn’t know what she was talking about,” I assured them.
They both looked at me skeptically.
“Let’s make muffins and have cheese and bread and grapes and cherries.”
Toby’s eyes got huge. “You have cherries?” he asked excitedly.
“Of course I have cherries for you. Mr. Wingate makes sure I always have some because he knows you love them.”
He gave a little whoop of joy that made JJ giggle, and dashed to the refrigerator. The shout of happiness when he found them where they always were made me smile. The warm breeze weaving through the kitchen let me know that my cottage enjoyed the little boy’s mirth as well. I knew it loved both kids, given how often things like colored pencils and magnifying glasses, step ladders and blocks showed up out of the blue.
“Thank you for loving them,” I whispered, and lo and behold, some of Troy’s lavender honey that I had been missing for a couple of days was carried to the table with the cherries.
“Can we have biscuits with honey too?” JJ asked me.
“Of course you can.” I went to grab what I needed for those.
A little after five, the three of us were feasting when Amanda returned with Lorne. He greeted the cottage warmly and then crossed the floor to me. I got a quick kiss, and then he went directly to the bedroom to change. Amanda came into the kitchen and immediately asked JJ to smear some honey on a biscuit for her.
“I’ll make it really good for you, Mom.”
She smiled as she watched her baby, and then Toby presented her with her lavender, eucalyptus, sage, and daisy bouquet.
“Oh, sweetheart, I love it.”
He beamed with pride.
Once Lorne reappeared, he walked over and went to one knee by Toby’s chair. When Toby turned and hugged him, I saw how Amanda was looking at the man I loved, like she was terribly fond of him as well. So many people grabbed Toby because he was gentle and quiet, but Lorne always let the child make the decision to embrace or not.
Amanda’s youngest was next, and when Lorne went to the other side of the table, he repeated his movement, taking a knee, and JJ flung themself at Lorne the same way they did with their father and me, knowing that we were more than happy to receive hugs however JJ was in the mood to give them. Other people in their life, their grandfather, Eddie’s dad, as well as Eddie’s brothers, sisters, and their husbands, all told JJ to slow down, be careful, and take it easy. And then they wondered why JJ shook hands now. Yet another reason that Amanda was not enamored of her husband’s family.
“Nice of you to kill dinner for me,” she grumbled, looking at the spread.
“We’re eating broccoli.” JJ showed her, dipping a floret into homemade ranch dressing.
“And carrots and baby tomatoes,” Toby chimed in as he speared one with his fork.
“This little feast makes zero sense,” she told me. “But I don’t care. You guys keep eating, watch something on your tablet, and the grown-ups are going to talk for a bit.”
“May I have a biscuit with honey too?” Lorne asked JJ.
“Yes, you can. I’ll make it for you, Uncle Lorne.”
“Thank you, buddy.”
As I had always been Uncle Xan, and now Lorne lived with me, of course he’d become Uncle Lorne very quickly. Since he had a niece who already called him the same thing, he was good with it.
The three of us went over to the couch and leaned around the coffee table as JJ delivered biscuits with honey on dessert plates with cloth napkins. Toby was right behind his sibling with two glasses of mint iced tea, one for his mother and one for his uncle. Moments later, I got a glass of ice water with berries in it that we’d made earlier.
“The service in this establishment is excellent,” Lorne commented as the kids left, laughing because he was so funny.
“It certainly is,” Amanda agreed, taking a bite. “If I live to be a thousand, my biscuits will never be as fluffy or flaky as yours.”
I waggled my eyebrows for her.
“It really is your magic because I have your recipe and follow it to the letter.”
Lorne chuckled. “I’ve seen him make biscuits, and there’s no to the letter about them. Things just get thrown in.”
“Maybe that’s it. I need to be more haphazard about it.”
I glanced from one to the other. “Are you kidding? Enough with the biscuits. Tell me all the news already.”
They shared a look then, and neither spoke.
“Seriously?”
Lorne said, “The ME concluded that Kathy fell off something high, she’s thinking a ladder, even though they didn’t find one, because the injuries she sustained are consistent with a fall from a height of at least ten feet.”
“A fall?”
He nodded.
“But you said her neck was?—”
“Yeah, I know. But it turns out, it can also read as a fall.”
“And the arson inspector?”
“The second she saw Kathy’s wet specimens from her store, she concluded the fire was caused by the ethanol.”
I looked from him to Amanda and back again. “So the ME has ruled this an accidental death. No murder, no foul play.”
“Correct.”
“And the arson inspector said no arson—which, I must say, I didn’t think so either—but still, no murder, no arson in Osprey on your watch, so…that’s great.”
Amanda smacked the back of my head.
“Ow,” I whined loudly, then lowered my voice so as not to alert the kids their mother was throwing hands. “What the hell?”
“Kathy Hayes was murdered,” Lorne snapped at me. “And the ME did her job and concluded that she wasn’t, based on what whoever killed her made it look like.”
“Yes. Which is great for us.”
“How is that great?” Amanda asked me, sounding exasperated.
Originally, I’d thought to keep from Amanda everything that went on last autumn. Her worrying more than she already did as a mother didn’t seem fair. But what also wasn’t fair was keeping parts of my life from her. Lorne and I needed more of a support system than each other. We needed someone who knew everything, and there was only one person to choose, and that was Amanda. Up to a point.
The part about me being a branded witch and my lord Arawn didn’t need to be shared, but everything else, like the fact that Corvus could and would defend itself, that I told her. Only to be outdone in that moment by my grandfather, who, it turned out, had told her years ago that he didn’t simply talk to the land, but communed with it. Literally.
I’d been a bit disappointed as I’d imagined her face when I told her.
“Well, if you wait so long to share big news, you run the risk of someone else spoiling it,” she’d stated, her expression quite haughty. “Next time spit it out, man.”
And then I’d wanted to smack her. Hard.
But what was great now was that she felt even better about leaving her kids with me if, heaven forbid, anything ever happened to her and Eddie. Because I was their singular godparent, the only person Amanda had named in her will, and Eddie had agreed. But now she liked Lorne too, as did Eddie, and she knew Corvus would keep the kids safe as well.
“Are you listening to Lorne?” Amanda snapped at me.
“Yes, but neither of you is listening to me. What I’m saying is, without murder and arson hanging over us, we can now give our full attention to finding whatever it is that killed Kathy.”
They were both quiet, looking at me.
“I bet when you briefed the mayor, she was thrilled,” I said to Lorne.
“Well, of course she was thrilled. In her mind, there was no murder in her town.”
“Even though there’s been two.”
“Two?” Amanda asked me.
“I need to tell you what happened to a friend of mine.”
“Okay.”
Once I was done, Amanda raised her hand.
“Knock it off.”
“I thought nymphs wore short togas and hung out with goats who play flutes.”
“See?” Lorne said pointedly. “I’m not the only one.”
Before he’d met Nott, he’d thought the same thing.
“That’s one version,” I explained to my friend. “And those are satyrs, not goats.”
“Which is so very important to point out,” Amanda said sarcastically.
“Anyway, the truth of the matter is that most nymphs are hunters who cross planes to do so and are quite formidable.”
“Got it,” Amanda replied, rolling with the new knowledge. Once you believed in magic, as she had for years, and in witches and mages and land that could be communed with, acceptance of other truths was not far behind. “Go on.”
I told her what happened to Nott and about something coming through the rift and destroying it in the process.
She gave that some thought. “And she said it was something other than the things she normally deals with.”
“Correct.”
“Which are?”
“Every kind of fae you can imagine.”
“Well, I can’t imagine much because I don’t know many, but what about a magic user? Like a witch or a mage. Would the rift burn up over that?”
“No, because others like that have come through.”
“And we know it’s obviously evil, or it wouldn’t have killed your friend,” she concluded, looking at me. “Yes?”
“That’s a reasonable assumption.”
“So then what do you think it is? Could it be something like that warlock who wanted to come into our world through the portal on Corvus?”
I couldn’t tell Amanda about gods and goddesses. That was forbidden to discuss with the mundane, or non-magical humans. Lorne had a pass because he was my mate. So I’d told her what I could and changed the mountain god Threun into a warlock. “I don’t think whatever this is has those kinds of magical powers. Maybe it doesn’t have any at all.”
“But you don’t know for certain.”
“I don’t. Not until I see it.”
“Let’s put a pin in that,” Amanda said, sounding distracted.
“You have a thought.”
“What? No,” she rushed out, shaking her head. “No, no.”
“Yes,” I insisted. “I know you.”
She glanced at Lorne, then back to me. “It’s stupid.”
“Or not,” Lorne prodded her. “Spit it out.”
Her lips pressed together tightly.
“Amanda,” I snapped at her. “There are only so many things it could be. We’ve ruled out the fae, and it’s doubtful it’s any kind of shape-shifter or vampire because either one of those would have reasoned with Nott. Also, from what my grandfather said, when he conversed with those here on Corvus, neither needed a rift to visit him.”
“Your grandfather met a vampire?” she whispered.
“Focus.”
She coughed softly. “Sorry,” she rushed out. “But you know, vampires are my jam.”
“Stop,” I warned her, smiling, appreciating the moment of levity. “Go ahead and say what you think it could be.”
“But it’s dumb.”
“Nothing’s dumb at the moment.”
She grimaced instead of answering.
“Could it be a demon?” Lorne asked, eyes on my face.
“What?”
“Yes,” Amanda blurted out. “That’s what I thought too.”
“A demon?” I looked at him raking his fingers nervously through his thick hair, and then at her biting her bottom lip. “What exactly are you talking about when you use that word?”
“First, is hell one of the realms that can access our world through a rift?” Lorne asked.
“Yes,” I replied, without telling them how I knew. I couldn’t bring up the fact that Arawn hunted demons that had escaped from that plane and entered our world. I could tell Lorne later, but not in front of Amanda. “But they don’t just come through rifts. There have been demons coming and going from this plane since forever. Think about all the stories.”
“True. But there are also different kinds of demons, aren’t there? I mean, I’m thinking about them in a fire-and-brimstone, Judeo-Christian kind of way since that’s how I was raised, but that’s not the only kind there are.”
“Absolutely,” I agreed.
“All right, so at the moment to keep us from going down some random rabbit hole of identifying precisely what kind of demon we’re dealing with, let’s use the word demon as a catchall for any malevolent being wanting to do us harm.”
“Yes. Good. Let’s go with that,” I confirmed.
“Does your faith even have demons?” Lorne asked me.
I shook my head. “Not as a pagan…no. I was raised to revere nature, the seasons, and the wheel of the year.”
“But?” he asked, squinting at me, reading my face, having heard the pause in my voice.
“But my family are witches as well, so of course, all my life, I’ve heard about demons.”
“In what way?”
“In the way that you said, that there are malevolent beings that want to do humankind harm.”
“Okay,” Lorne said, exhaling sharply.
“What’s wrong?”
“To me, a demon is scarier than anything else.”
“Same,” Amanda chimed in.
“Because you were both raised with that fire-and-brimstone idea that you were talking about,” I reminded him. “To me a demon is an evil entity that has to be banished and so, as a guardian, it’s my job to figure out how.”
Lorne took hold of my hand. “Well, your friend the nymph said what came through was very powerful.”
“And that’s the part that concerns me,” I confessed, before turning to Amanda. “What made you think demon?”
“Evil, strong, and not anything like the fae, you said. It came through the rift and burned it up, so it’s not something that normally goes back and forth.”
It sounded quite logical when she laid out the facts like that.
“There’s nothing more evil than a demon,” Lorne told me. “You’re talking to an altar boy here. Demons I get.”
“I learn something new about you every day.”
“Yeah, well, you talk to dirt, so…” He shrugged. “Maybe don’t judge.”
“No judgment at all,” I assured him, smiling.
“Okay, so assuming that’s what it is,” Lorne began, “then the demon came through the rift and found Nott, and the first thing it did was kill her. Why?”
“What do you mean why? It was defending itself. Nott immediately attacked because she knew whatever it was, it wasn’t supposed to be on our plane, and since she was there to guard the passageway—it had to go.”
“Okay, so Nott attacked the demon, but you said it didn’t just kill her, that it pulled her apart. And Thero’s assumption was that it wanted information from her.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of information?” Amanda asked.
“We don’t know.”
“But we sort of do,” Lorne countered, “because again, the first thing the demon did when it walked into Osprey was kill Nott. And sure, she attacked it first, but still, the demon saw her as an immediate threat, which was correct, and so dispatched her.”
“But also,” I breathed out, “as they were fighting, the demon had to find out if there were any more like her, things that would hunt and kill it if possible.”
“Yes, so then she probably tried to scare it. I would have,” Lorne rasped. “It was her job to kill it and, barring that, to make it go away.”
“Right. At which point, knowing that the rift burned up behind it, knowing it couldn’t go back the way it came, she did the only thing she could and tried to frighten it into running.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Seems reasonable to me.”
“What does?” Amanda asked.
“That Nott told the demon there were witches in town that could kill it,” Lorne told her. “It’s really smart especially when you consider what she was probably going through at the moment. I mean right up to the end; she was trying to protect the people of this town.”
“It sounds like she was really smart and really brave,” Amanda sighed. “With her last bit of strength, she did the absolute best she could do. I wish you had a way of contacting her friend again so you could tell her that Nott was brave to the end. She didn’t confess anything.”
“This is all supposition on our part,” I stated, though it felt like the truth in my gut.
“No. Think about it logically. After killing Nott, the demon hid for a bit before checking around town for witches.”
“Then why attack Kathy?” Amanda asked. “She wasn’t magic.”
“But the demon didn’t know that,” Lorne explained to her. “All it knew was that there were signs that led it right to her on practically every bench in town.”
“And after it found her store, it was pretty easy to follow her home,” Amanda picked up the thread. “Then in the process of killing her, it figured out that she wasn’t magic at all and therefore a zero threat.”
“Yep.” Lorne shrugged. “And though the demon had to have been feeling pretty confident at that point—I mean, I would be—still, it had to be sure.”
“Because even though it killed Nott, it couldn’t have been easy. Thero said she didn’t go quietly. So it started looking again, hunting for its next target, saw Aurora Moon’s posters, found her store, and did the same thing. It followed?—”
“You’re forgetting the bees,” Amanda interrupted me.
“What?”
“You’re forgetting about the bees. Before Kathy, it killed the bees. That’s the order of events.”
“You think a demon took time out to kill bees?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?” I asked her.
“Because demons can’t abide bees.”
“Demons can’t abide bees? Do you hear how ridiculous you sound?”
Amanda was undeterred. “In the Bible, bees represent abundance, all that land-of-milk-and-honey business, purity-and-goodness stuff. So bees are going to utterly enrage a demon who does not, normally, share space with them.”
“You’re back to making this demon into a specific kind,” I apprised her.
“Fine. Maybe it killed the bees because they’re pollinators and it wanted to disturb the food cycle and kill the town that way. I don’t know why the demon did it, but it did.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lorne told her. “But since I don’t know for sure, I can’t refute it either. For now, we pin the dead bees on the demon.”
“Plus,” Amanda continued, “there are a lot of missing cats around town, and I know this because my kids keep pointing it out to me.”
“Yeah, that was mentioned to me earlier as well.”
“And, as you well know, because your grandfather told us…” She trailed off, eyeing me, waiting for me to catch up.
“Oh, that’s right.” I smiled at her. “Cats ward off all evil spirits.”
“Yep. So a demon would try and kill as many as possible because having one in your house would keep the demon out.”
“That’s probably what was happening with Argos last night,” Lorne reminded me.
“What happened to Argos?” Amanda asked, glancing at the cat now sitting beside JJ on their chair, being fed cheese and bacon crumbles that Amanda had brought over the last time she was here. She was certain Lorne would want that on his salad.
“He found me and Xan in town last night and stuck to us like glue until we got home.”
“Well, sometimes I see him outside our house,” Amanda told me. “Like he’s checking up on us, but you should probably keep him inside for now, Xan. If there’s a demon skulking about, you don’t want him to get hurt.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” I asked her.
“Why would I be afraid? My house is warded, my home, my kids, and my husband are protected, and if something really scary were to happen, I would bring my family here and you would keep us safe.”
I nodded, choked up suddenly, her faith in me so very heartening.
She tilted her head, smiling at me. “We’ll be all right. We just have to figure out what to do to— Oh,” she gasped. “I’m so stupid.”
“What?”
“I never connected the dots with Argos.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re a witch, and Argos is your familiar.”
He was not. Not at all. But he was something the demon understood to be magical, and so last night, before going to see Lynette, it must have had Argos in its sights. My cat knew that, which was the whole reason he was looking for me. That was why Argos was changing his color and shape—to shake the demon. But what Argos didn’t realize was that the demon could sense what he was, and no amount of shifting his outer appearance would fool it.
“And now the demon knows about you because Argos led it right to you,” Amanda concluded. “He didn’t mean to, but he was scared and went to you for comfort and protection, and when he did, the demon saw you at Kathy’s house.”
“And followed us right home to Corvus,” Lorne said with a sigh.
“That’s a horrible thought.”
“It probably followed us to Aurora Moon’s, I mean, Lynette Fornell’s house too.”
“Why were you at Lynette’s house?” Amanda asked.
As Lorne filled her in, I thought about what the demon would have seen my fiancé and I do.
“Hello,” Amanda snapped, flicking me on the forehead.
“Ow,” I complained, scowling at her. “I hate it when you do that.”
“Well, pay attention.”
“Clearly, the demon knows you’re the real deal,” Lorne said. “And maybe it even followed us back afterward and tried to get onto Corvus.”
“But it realized it couldn’t,” Amanda stated, “so now it’s lying in wait. Once you step foot off the property, it’ll attack you.”
“That’s great,” I told her.
Amanda shuddered, and her face scrunched up.
“No,” I cautioned her. “Worrying won’t help. I need your brain.”
She quickly used the tips of her fingers to wipe under each eye. “Fine. My brain is ready.”
“What’s our next step?” Lorne asked.
“Consult an expert,” Amanda answered immediately and with conviction. “That’s what I do in business when I need answers.”
“And who would that be?”
“I think,” Amanda began, “since both you and I are thinking of a specific kind of demon, we start there.”
Lorne took a breath. “Okay, then Xan and I need to talk to Father Dennis, and you need to take your kids home.”
“What? No. I’ll call Eddie and tell him I have to come home and then?—”
“Stop,” I said softly. “You know you can’t come with us. You must take care of your people first, before anything else.”
She looked so sad. “I don’t want to lose either of you.”
“No one’s losing anybody. We’re gonna figure this out,” I promised her.
“You better.”
We had to pack up the muffins for JJ and the biscuits for Toby, and I put them on one of my grandmother’s platters and covered it with a cloth napkin. After they both hugged Argos, Lorne and I walked the three of them to Amanda’s car.
“I bet real demon hunters don’t pause for muffins,” Amanda pointed out, speaking to me under her breath.
“I just wanna stay home tomorrow, watch TV, and smell bread baking all day,” Lorne announced grouchily as he hugged the kids.
“Maybe make Uncle Lorne some sourdough,” JJ told me. “That’s his favorite.”
JJ knew that because they noticed everything.
I leaned into the car, kissed Amanda’s forehead, and she put her hand on my cheek. “You’ll call me after you speak to Father Dennis.”
“I will.”
“Let Uncle Xan go, Mom,” Toby said, laughing. “You’ll see him tomorrow.”
I really hoped she would.