Chapter 37
John
The jet hit the landing strip, sending the plates and trays sliding forward as the plane braked. Austin caught a tray headed for Jessie’s lap, but another slid onto the floor, scattering truffles.
Tristan bent and scooped up the truffles trying to roll down the aisle. “Five second rule.” He popped one into his mouth and dropped the rest into his empty pocket. The other pocket was already filled with a different kind of chocolate. The guy was like Willy Wonka.
A glass fell over in the back. Other trays were grabbed and John—who everyone was now calling Aljoe because they thought Edgar’s logic was hilarious—looked at all the snacks in utter bewilderment.
Why would anyone think all this food, littering every square inch of available space, was a good idea? Past mistakes or no, this was beyond rationality.
Then again, wasn’t that the very nature of Jessie’s crew? No rules. No logic. It was just pure chaos. No pack would ever survive run like this.
The mind-boggling thing was that it worked. And honestly, it worked really well. John was pure astonishment.
“I really do need to tell Mr. Tom that this is all way too much,” Jessie whispered to Austin. John assumed Mr. Tom couldn’t hear. The butler was sitting a few seats back without a table to monitor. That couldn’t have been by coincidence.
Ulric leaned across the aisle. “Yes, you do. It’s one thing being covered in a mountain of cheese and another eating the stale leftovers from these flights. One I can tolerate. The rest I guilt-eat so as not to waste, and I am not a fan.”
“Would you have the miss go hungry?” Mr. Tom asked Ulric with a sniff, who’d been too loud by far.
Ulric’s eyebrows pinched together, and he centered himself back in his seat.
John, sitting across from him, grinned. The whole group was honestly hilarious. He couldn’t remember ever laughing so much in his life. Or seeing such powerful shifters being so expressive.
Mind-boggling, all of this. He felt like he’d stepped through into a different realm where everything was upside-down.
They disembarked from the plane and headed toward passenger and cargo vans, not unlike what Evan had sent for them in the cairn.
The land here was much different, though, tucked into the Sierra foothills in California.
The air was dry, the sun warm, and a few puffy white clouds scudded through the blue sky.
Green trees crept up the mountains in the distance, the height far less than John had grown used to.
Unlike when heading to the cairn, here no one dallied. Everyone helped the attendants grab luggage, and they walked briskly to the transportation. Everyone was happy to be home.
A wave of nervousness rolled through John as he followed. He kept his unease at being in a new place and possibly his new home tucked in tight.
“Hey.” Aurora drifted in beside him. Trust her to read him when no one else could. Except for maybe Miss-Nothing Sue. “I meant to ask you. How did Edgar come to have that little whale you’re making?”
Ulric and Jasper weren’t long in joining them, always ready for a laugh and to make him feel comfortable.
They really were a close-knit group. Battle would do that, and given the sort of cohesive fighting both the air and land crews exhibited in that cairn, they were well versed in fighting and working together.
That had been a level of harmony John had never seen before, and he’d thought his pack was one of the best. Talk about humble pie.
“It was on my nightstand in the cairn,” John replied as they loaded into a van.
“He was your roommate?” Ulric asked, aghast.
“No.”
“Ah.” Ulric started shaking with laughter. “And I assume your room automatically locked like everyone else’s?”
“Yes.”
Ulric shook harder. “And I also assume you didn’t confront him about it because you really didn’t want to know the particulars of why that vampire was poking around your room without a key to get in?”
“I was trying not to think about it at all, actually.”
The laughter spilled over, joined by Jasper and Aurora.
“What’s so funny?” Nessa asked, poking her head into the van with a bright smile.
They’d stayed in the cairn one additional day for the leaders to hash out a few things, and now today, Nessa was back to normal.
She was a beautiful solar flare masking the magma that caused it, radiant and dangerous at the same time. Tristan was a lucky man.
“Aljoe is learning to ignore Edgar.” Ulric filled her in about the whale.
“Ah.” She nodded and scooted over as Sebastian filed in after her, the two never far from each other. “He’s just checking things out, making sure Aljoe isn’t dangerous or a threat to Jessie or anyone else. Don’t mind him. When he clears you, he’ll go back to being his normal weird.”
“His normal weird isn’t much better,” Sebastian muttered as Sue sat in the front passenger seat. Sebastian closed the door and the van got underway.
Nessa turned in her seat to look back at John. “Did you get that whale done, though?”
John looked out the window. “No. I’ve been watching you guys, deciding if this is a good fit for me. I’m still not sure.”
Nessa shrugged, turning to face forward again.
“You need to settle wherever you feel comfortable. I regret to inform you, however, that you do fit here. With us, I mean. It’s a shock to realize you’re the type of person who would ignore an addled vampire who goes through your things and then brings you a bit of arts and crafts to finish while in a bar having drinks, but here you are.
Welcome. Sorry for your loss of sanity. It’s all downhill from here. ”
Everyone started laughing, except for Sebastian.
“It’s true, though,” Sebastian muttered. “When you start having meaningful discussions with that vampire, you’re on your way out. After that, you just hold on and hope for the best.”
Aurora put her hand on her face and leaned forward with a groan. “I’m blaming it on the hangover. I’m never drinking again.”
Everyone laughed again, and it was a wonder Edgar himself didn’t pop up from the back and invite John into the madness.
Or maybe he didn’t need to, John decided. He was already there.
Sometime later, the van turned onto a street with a sign that said No Outlet.
Houses lined the quiet street. At the end, set back on a large lot and cloaked in a strange shadow despite the sun and clear sky, sprawled a massive gothic structure, three stories high with spires and a pitched roof.
There was so much to focus on that John couldn’t focus much at all.
At the top of the house, a single light glowed in what must be an attic.
“Home again, home again.” Nessa bent to look out the windshield. “Hello, Ivy House.”
“I hope it doesn’t hold a grudge,” Sebastian murmured. “I have a lot of work to do. I don’t need it killing me the second I get into the crystal room.”
“Something you should note,” Sue said to John, “the house is sentient. Once you step on its grounds, it knows where you are, it hears you, and it has numerous ways to kill you. Also, the people connected with the house—most of Jessie’s crew—also know where you are.
The gnomes are dangerous, though we’re still not sure if they’re deadly.
They will, however, hack off something. The dolls will only kill you if you wrong Jessie or Ivy House in some way.
Those aren’t the only horrors of that house. Mind yourself.”
John felt his jaw go slack. “What?”
Jessie
John looked shellshocked, standing stock-still as everyone bustled around him, exiting vans and grabbing luggage and calling for rides to come get them. After months of being away, everyone was happy to be home. Except for John, who didn’t have one.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“I gave him a quick rundown about the house,” Sue said with a little grimace. “I should’ve probably broken it to him gently.”
Ah.
“It’s fine.” Nessa patted John’s arm. It was sweet how welcoming everyone had been, trying to help him find a place to settle. His camp in the woods had been more than a little dismal. “You’ll get used to it. It’s not as weird as it sounds. Really.”
Sebastian gave her a funny look.
“What?” she asked him. “You’re the one looking forward to working in the crystal room again.”
“That doesn’t mean the house isn’t as weird as it sounds. It is exactly as weird as it sounds, and ten times more dangerous.”
I put my hand on John’s arm to bring his focus back to me.
“Would you like something to eat or some coffee? Mr. Tom is headed in now to figure something out, though I’m sure he’ll have to go to the store.
You’re welcome to come in and relax. We have a lot of quiet sitting rooms. You’re also welcome to take a room here until you find a place to settle, if you’d like. ”
“Take the room,” Ulric said, and Jasper threw John a thumbs-up as he moved toward the house. “Mr. Tom is always making food and doing laundry and cleaning and all the things you won’t want to do yourself. It’s great.”
“Here. I’ll show you around.” I tugged John’s arm to get him moving as Austin got on the phone to check in with the shifters in town. We had a lot to catch up on.
The grass was still vibrantly green, though wild and in desperate need of mowing.
“We can’t hire normal gardeners,” I told John. “Ivy House doesn’t like strangers. She runs them off.”
“I’ll get to it post-waste,” Edgar told me as he hurried by. “Don’t you worry, Jessie. I’ll have this handled in no time.”
The tall grasses rose along the path leading to the front door. I squeezed John’s arm.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, clueing in to my nervousness immediately.
“Nothing. If you see garden shears poke out of the grass, though, run.”
As I said it, the grass up the way wiggled in an unnatural way.
“That better be a flower,” I mumbled, urging John on. “It’s fine. We’ll make it.”
A gnome’s head popped out with a wide smile and little white teeth. A gardening trowel pushed through the grass, aimed in our direction in a threatening manner.
I stopped in my tracks.
“I got it!” Cyra knocked me into John as she ran by. “I got you, you little devil!” She blasted fire at it.
It issued a high-pitched scream and ducked back into the grass. Fire blazed a path after it.
“You better run!” Cyra sprinted into the grass after it, spreading fire as she went.
“What in the—“
I yanked John forward. “Don’t talk, act!”
He didn’t delay, running after me to the front door. Before we got there, another gnome popped out, holding a weeder pike like a sword, and charged.
“Oh, crap!” I blasted it with a spell. The spell bounced off somehow and ricocheted back. “Watch out!”
I barely put up a shield in time to cover me and John. The force of the spell knocked me into him. He was off-balance, and we tumbled into the grasses at the other side.
“Go, go, go!” I scrambled to my feet.
“Hurry!” Nessa was there, yanking me to standing. “Get out of there. They’re ambushing us!”
Of all the times for Patty to have taken the long way home to visit friends. She was the only one, besides Cyra and her fire, who could make these little suckers run.
Garden shears chopped at the grass next to John’s leg. He received a nick and jerked away. Leaping to his feet, he moved so fast his limbs practically blurred.
He grabbed me and Nessa around the waist and took off running. Clearly, this alpha had some serious protective instincts, and the gnomes had just put him into survival mode.
“I got it!” Cyra erupted through burning grasses to fire-bomb the place we’d just vacated. “C’mere, you little bastards.”
We reached the porch at a sprint. John half-dropped Nessa, making her stagger to the side, so he could grab the door handle. He turned and pushed to run inside. The door acted like it was unlocked, but did not open, and he slammed into the hard surface. Ivy House was messing with him.
I overrode her, feeling her laughter, and made the door swing open. Fire raged behind me, and I let it. Ivy House could handle that. She’s the one that kept hiding the gnomes from my detection. I needed to find a way to override that, too.
The cool interior greeted me like a long-lost friend. I sighed in relief, but the moment was short-lived.
“Damn it, Ivy House!”
Dolls teetered down the steps wearing horrible plastic smiles. “Mama,” one repeated, over and over.
“What in all that is holy—?” John uttered behind me.
The mural on the arch changed to a lion running through the countryside, chased by an army of gnomes and dolls.
“That’s not funny.” I frowned at it and directed John to the large sitting room on the right. “She’s just messing with you.”
“She?”
“The house. Don’t show a reaction, and she’ll get bored.”
“Probably not,” Ivy House said.
I rolled my eyes. “We can get you a room at the hotel or try to find a room someone is renting in town. We’re low on housing right now, unfortunately, but there’s bound to be something. We’re working on the housing issue, too. But we have plenty of space here.”
Fred walked in, ashen-faced and wearing a lopsided smile.
“I don’t know what was scarier, the gnome attack or the fire.
” She plopped down next to John on the couch.
“We made it, though.” She smiled at John.
“Cool house, right? There is so much cool stuff in here. Ivy House lets me wander around because I’m helping all of you.
Come on, I’ll show you some stuff. I saw you checking out the buildings in that cairn. You’ll love this. Come on.”
She plucked at his arm, and surprisingly, he slowly rose and followed her like a lost lamb.