Chapter 42
The outsider had done a number on the yard as well as the house, even aside from throwing bits of Albert all over it, and had crashed into the edge of the woods at a few points.
While the trees had held up better than either the underbrush or the beginnings of Hazel’s plants, it would have probably taken redwoods or mighty oaks to bear up under the creature’s clumsy weight.
One look told her that many of the broken branches were too big for her to move alone, especially when she was still recovering, so she spent her afternoon making a pile of midsize sticks and kneeling with a pair of clippers to perform plant-based triage.
Breakfast with Maxwell had been startlingly easy, even when ideas she couldn’t mention out loud took up half her attention.
He might have sensed that; he made jokes about meals at the schools he’d gone to, which had led to an offhand discussion of college.
When Casper showed up, he’d petted the ghost dog and told Hazel about a phantom Pekingese he’d once encountered, so she’d responded with her story of settling a cat’s ghost. (“It kept knocking things off the shelves. I guess some habits die hard, as it were.”) All the conversation had stayed very light.
“You can stick around in here, if you’d like,” she’d offered afterward, but he’d shaken his head.
“Too suspicious, I fear, and my master will start recovering himself before long. Besides, I was told to keep watch—and you could use a sentry.”
Hazel hadn’t been able to disagree, so Maxwell patrolled the border of the yard while she went about trying to fix it up, keeping watch for trouble that might sneak up from another side of her.
It was worryingly nice having him as a partner.
She had no attachment to working alone on principle, but she didn’t want to start relying on the man.
The demon could call him away at any time—or make him into a danger himself.
In a vague effort to keep herself from getting too soft, she glanced around every so often to make sure that she could spot potential threats on her own and that Maxwell hadn’t suddenly vanished.
When she turned back after one of those checks, she saw a mass of blackberry vines in front of her, many of them crushed and bleeding sap.
Bramble lowered its “head” toward her, and Hazel saw that half its “eyes” were pulp.
“Oh, no,” she said softly, reaching out one hand on instinct even though she knew her touch would mean little to the dryad. “I’m so sorry. I never meant that you should try and contain… I was just thinking about Maxwell, about spies, not direct attacks. I should’ve been more specific.”
Slowly, with great care, the dryad held out one of its badly crushed vines. The lower part had come halfway off, showing green wetness that struck Hazel for the first time as a real wound. Another limb came up and gestured to her clippers.
“Oh,” she said again. “Absolutely. No problem.”
It wasn’t, really—she hadn’t been new to gardening even before she’d moved, and pruning blackberries wasn’t exactly rocket science—but the procedure was way more nerve-racking than usual.
Hazel glanced at the dryad for confirmation every time she positioned the shears and held her breath a little on each cut.
Bramble didn’t show any pain, or not in a way she could understand, just holding still until each job was done and it could hold up the next damaged part.
It kept standing there when she was finished, a little lopsided but much less mangled than it had been. “I’ll fix up the yard too,” Hazel told it. “You’ve done a lot. Go and heal—I know who was spying on me anyhow, right? I’ll be fine for a week or two.”
Although she could never be sure, she thought it watched her for a moment before shuffling off into the forest.
* * *
“I don’t have much to report,” Maxwell said into the mirror. “She’s repairing her property—it takes up a fair amount of her time and effort. I wouldn’t swear that she has no time for research, but I’d guess that she hasn’t been able to do as much as she used to.”
Technically, he spoke the truth. He left out the fact that he’d been stealing moments to read Hazel’s books and take notes, or that he’d been clarifying her previous research as much as his own experience let him. Perthrux hadn’t asked.
The demon didn’t reply. It hadn’t even made an appearance; the mirror showed one of the near-mindless minions that served it as an answering service, an eyeless blue-gray face.
Perthrux itself hadn’t spoken to Maxwell since the night its attack had failed.
He wasn’t sure whether the demon was recovering its power, planning its next move, or—
—well, his mother would have called it sulking in a human.
All of the three gave him some degree of freedom. The first possibility was inevitable, the second concerning, but Maxwell told himself that he and Hazel were doing all they could against both. He mostly believed that.
Chapman hadn’t put in an appearance either, which made Maxwell wonder whether Perthrux had finally decided the man was too much of a liability. He didn’t dare hope too hard for that much of a silver lining.
“The authorities poked around a little more,” he went on, “but most of them don’t seem inclined to look into the incident very deeply. None of them would be able to act if they did. The reporter’s audience may get ideas, but I’ve seen no signs yet.”
As he expected, he got no response. Maxwell wasn’t sure how Perthrux itself retrieved information from its servants. He suspected he didn’t want to know—and if the message ended up missing parts, he doubted that he’d mind.
* * *
Watching Brandon drive off never stopped being weird.
Conversation got easier quickly, especially with police procedure to give them both an impersonal focus, but his departure always brought up a variety of emotions.
At first, it had been the past and the present colliding.
When he left for the final time, Hazel watched with a mixture of sadness and relief.
He didn’t belong in her world, staying would have put him in danger, and she didn’t even miss him very much in her normal routine. All the same, she sat on the steps with a mild sense of melancholy as the rented Nissan turned the corner and vanished from her sight.
“Am I intruding?” Maxwell asked, rounding the corner of the house. He’d mostly taken mortal form, but his skin gleamed silver at certain angles, and Hazel could see the faint lines of sigils on his face and neck.
“No. Company would be good.”
As he took a seat beside her, he glanced over to the road. “I thought about coming to introduce myself properly,” he said, “but that might have been more trouble than it was worth. For you, that is. Perhaps for Mr. Miller as well.”
Hazel nodded. “I hadn’t told him about you. Not that I’m hiding—” She stopped before she could say what she wasn’t hiding.
They hadn’t slept together again, in either the literal or the sexual sense.
Right after the failed attack, it had been safe enough, but Maxwell could no longer be sure that the demon wouldn’t yank on his chain at an awkward moment.
Hazel agreed with the logic, which didn’t keep her from flushing when his thigh brushed against hers.
More safely in one way, more dangerously in another, she leaned against him without thinking—not because she was horny, but because having him near loosened some of the knots her spine seemed made of these days.
I’m not hiding our relationship, sure, not a big deal in theory. She was an adult, and she doubted that Maxwell was the sort to go running for the hills at the classification; they unquestionably had a relationship, even if an undefined one.
Still, the words sat in her throat like incantations, too significant to say out loud in case they damaged what fragile peace Hazel had made with her circumstances.
“I’m not trying to keep you a secret,” she went on. “But Brandon knows enough to figure out you’re part of all this. Explaining why you don’t have to deal with the police would’ve made him more uneasy.”
“Not unreasonably.”
“No.” Hazel had to smile, though wearily. “That was always part of the difficulty—he almost always has a point, he’s a good guy, and he really comes through in a crisis.”
She remembered and was surprised at how clear the memory stayed after almost two decades, how he’d sat on her dorm room bed after they’d gotten back from Planned Parenthood, matching the pairs of her socks that he’d washed and rubbing her back when the cramping got bad.
“I wouldn’t have wanted a horrible ex,” she went on. “I was really very lucky. But figuring out that what you have with a genuinely good person doesn’t work, and it won’t work…”
“Difficult, I’d imagine.”
“Yeah. Sorry. I’m getting maudlin.” Movement in the tree line caught Hazel’s eye.
It was gone when she turned her head, and probably had simply been another bird or insect, but it gave her a good excuse to look away from Maxwell for a second.
“The good news is that the police have basically closed the case. Animal control couldn’t find a suspicious bear, so they decided it probably wandered off and died of whatever it had.
Since it didn’t bite me, and I’d definitely have noticed if it had, I also don’t have to get rabies shots. ”
Maxwell grimaced. “Thank God for that. I had an absolute horror of mad dogs when I was a boy—not that we had many wandering about, you understand, but facts never stopped me.”
“It was volcanoes for me. We lived in New York. Go figure, huh?”
“Children are baffling creatures. Even the one I once was.”
A squirrel half ran, half bounced across the yard, ran up a tree, and paused midway to give some other creature a piece of its mind. Farther into the forest, a bird Hazel didn’t recognize sang a few notes before repeating itself.
“Eastern Phoebe,” said Maxwell absently. “They always look like they think they’re clever.”
“You really were—are—a bird-watcher, then?”
He nodded. “Most of what I told you was true at base. I changed a few facts to fit the situation, that was all. Deidre really did make wine—and I assume she would have been desperate to get rid of me for a few hours, if I ever had stayed with her for very long.”
It struck her suddenly how much he’d lost. Confusion, exhaustion, sex, and logistics had shoved themselves into the driver’s seat of her brain ever since she’d found out that Ligat was Maxwell and vice versa.
Hazel had thought he was human and he’s been enslaved and he’s really on my side, even recognized that he’d put himself in danger to help her, but until then she hadn’t really considered what he was human meant.
Once he’d had a sister who’d made wine and gotten exasperated.
He’d watched birds, he’d been nervous about rabid dogs for the usual weird kid reasons, and then he’d said the wrong thing to the wrong being, and it had all gone away.
Instead, he’d gotten a hundred years or so of torment serving a demon.
Hazel’s brain blanked out a little when she tried to imagine what that would have been like.
“I think I’d have liked her,” she said, and took his hand.