Chapter 10 #2
You don’t know the half of it, Calvin thought.
He was sure Kieran wouldn’t mind if he told Diana that he was a shifter, but still, it wasn’t his secret to tell.
Hopefully Kieran would happily tell her himself, and then it wouldn’t be hanging over his head.
If he ended up living here in Girdwood Springs with Diana – and he certainly hoped that that would be the case – then it would be a bit awkward to be stepping around the issue for decades to come!
“Yeah, he’s had some exposure to these things,” Calvin said.
While Diana tapped a message into her phone, Calvin had a look around at their surroundings, gauging which direction they would need to go. He had a pretty good natural sense of direction, and as someone who enjoyed hiking, he was also well-versed in more scientific methods of finding his way…
It is 1.72 miles from here, at a bearing of 338.
2 degrees, said the wyvern with a haughty tilt of its head.
That is north-northwest, by the way. Return to the main path and continue along it until I tell you where to digress.
I would give you the exact coordinates, but you would not comprehend them.
… But the wyvern, of course, had the best navigational sense of all. Once it had been somewhere, it could always find its way back.
At least you’ve updated to using decimal degrees for directions, rather than minutes and seconds, he muttered. Welcome to the modern age.
Only because you struggled to comprehend the correct version, the wyvern sniffed.
“Done,” Diana said, saving Calvin from further irritation. “He’s in town at the moment, but he’ll be back at the B&B soon.”
“Great,” Calvin replied. “Should we start walking? The wyvern has very helpfully given me instructions on how to get there, so we might as well head off.”
“Of course,” Diana said, beaming. “Will you pass on my thanks to your wyvern for me? It really is quite a lovely creature.”
Calvin felt his eyebrow twitching as his wyvern preened and smirked.
Our mate is clearly the more intelligent of the two of you, it said. Not that I did not already know that, of course. It seems unfair that she is having to spend all her time with you – perhaps we should shift for a while, so that she and I can be provided with a chance to become better acquainted?
“Believe me, it’s aware of what you said,” Calvin muttered.
They proceeded toward the B&B, making their wending way through the forest, the twitters and calls of birds accompanying them. It wasn’t quite as incredibly hot as the previous day, and the coolness of the canopy took the edge off.
Still, Calvin was relieved when the B&B came into view.
“Hi there!” came Kieran’s cheerful voice, and Calvin turned to see him sticking his head out the front door, a tray loaded down with glasses and a jug balanced precariously on one hand. “Good timing! Come on in.”
They followed him through the front door and into an enormous sitting room with a vaulted ceiling, velvet couches arranged cozily around an empty fireplace. Calvin took a moment to admire the room – whoever had renovated it had done an amazing job.
“Right this way,” Kieran said, moving through the room and unlocking a door at the far wall.
Passing through the doorway, Calvin found himself in a small room – there wasn’t much here besides a booth-style table neatly ensconced within a bay window that looked out over a gorgeously green garden, plus a tiny kitchenette.
Clearly it had originally been part of the room they’d just gone through.
“This is where we go if we need a little space to ourselves while we’re working or taking a meal break, since we like to stay out of our own section of the house while we’re on the clock,” Kieran said, locking the door behind him and then sliding onto one of the seats. “We won’t be interrupted here.”
“Good thinking,” Calvin said. The last thing they needed was to have guests asking them why they were talking about solving riddles to appease forest creatures.
“Would you like some orange juice?” Kieran asked, picking up the jug. “Freshly squeezed just now.”
“That sounds fantastic,” Calvin said, and Diana chimed in with her approval.
“We just bought a fancy juicer,” Kieran said as he poured. “Cost a small fortune, but the guests seem to really like it.”
Taking a sip, Calvin nodded. “I can see why. This is amazing.”
Almost like the oranges knew the touch of a unicorn, the wyvern said snidely. Not that I would know anything about such things. I’m just a lowly wyvern, after all.
Would you lay off? Calvin retorted. I already said you were right about that! What more do you want?!
Some groveling would be nice, it muttered.
Tearing his attention away from the pointless task of arguing with the wyvern, Calvin looked across at Kieran – who was looking back and forth between Calvin and Diana, clearly dying for confirmation as to whether they were mates or not.
Diana had obviously picked up on the vibe, because she smiled at Kieran. “Yes, Calvin is my mate,” she said, taking Calvin’s free hand for a moment and giving it a quick squeeze before letting go.
A sunny smile spread across Kieran’s face.
“I knew it,” he said. “I’m really happy for both of you.”
“I’m very lucky,” Calvin said, meaning every word.
“Now that we’ve dealt with the elephant in the room,” Diana said, “should we get down to business? Calvin said that you know a friendly sprite who might be able to help us out.”
Kieran nodded, looking a little disappointed that he wouldn’t be getting any more relationship gossip at this stage.
“Sieval is a sprite who was trapped in this house for many years before Natasha and I moved in,” he began, gesturing broadly with his hand. “It was friends with my great uncle, but then it got stuck here after my great uncle passed away.”
Calvin racked his brains in an attempt to remember what little he knew about sprites. “Sprites have a connection to an object, don’t they?”
“That’s right,” Kieran said. “Sieval is bonded to a specific rock. Wherever that rock goes, Sieval goes… but Sieval itself cannot carry the rock. So once we met Sieval and heard its story, we carried the rock back to the pond where it originally lived before my uncle brought its rock here to be part of one of his collections – he was a bit of an eccentric. But they… well, I guess you could say they became friends. Of course, no one knew about Sieval to take the rock back to where my uncle found it after he died. But once Natasha and I found out about it, we made sure it got home. It’s lived there ever since. ”
“Sieval really doesn’t sound anything like the sprite that I met,” Calvin said. “Polar opposite, in fact. But I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean anything – after all, humans and shifters can have pretty different personalities as well.”
Kieran frowned. “It is pretty weird in this situation, though. Sieval always said that sprites are shy, and when I went out there this morning for a chat, it basically confirmed it was the case.”
He thought for a moment, then went on. “Still, it did say that it had heard of one sprite many years ago that was quite hot-tempered and liked to cause trouble for those few unwary travelers that encountered it. Sieval didn’t even know if this sprite lived nearby, or in an entirely different part of the world.
It did say that this other sprite was thought to live in an isolated area, though. ”
“That certainly sounds like the one I encountered,” Calvin said grimly.
“I guess it’s possible that someone picked up her object at some point without knowing what it was, and it made its way to a more populated area.
Or maybe there was even some construction work done near her home and the object was carried away offsite, along with anything else that got cleared out. ”
“And there have been a lot of minor natural disasters around here,” added Diana, who was apparently having no issues taking all of this weirdness in.
“There’ve been landslides farther up the mountain, and there was that flood in the canyon last year as well.
There are tons of ways that an object could’ve gotten moved down the mountain, if she was higher up to begin with. ”
“Or maybe she was here under our noses all along,” Kieran said. “You said that you found her pond after going down an overgrown path that looked unused – she could’ve been here for centuries, mostly cut off from human contact because the main path was just outside of her range.”
“Whatever the case,” Calvin said, “it sounds like she’s been cranky for a long time, whether she’s a local or not. Did Sieval have any advice on how we should deal with her?”
“About that…” Kieran said. “Sieval asked whether you would be able to travel to where it lives and talk face to face. I don’t think it really relished the idea of trying to relay questions back and forth via a third party.
And it doesn’t want to leave its pond if it can help it.
Sprites are very bonded to their homes.”
Calvin nodded. “Of course.” A thought occurred to him. “Would Sieval mind if Diana also came?”
“I don’t think so,” Kieran replied. “Sieval’s always made it clear that it considers any friend of ours to be a friend of theirs.”
Calvin turned to Diana. “What do you say? Would you like to add ‘meeting a sprite’ to the list of things you’ve done today?”
Diana smiled. “Sure, why not? As long as it’s the friendly one, I’m up for it.”
Calvin smiled back.
“Okay, then,” he said to Kieran. “How do we find Sieval?”