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I blew her a silent kiss, and Delilah nodded, still pale, as Menolly slipped through the bookcase opening and silently shut the door behind her.
"We have to focus on what we can do now," I said, giving Delilah one last peck on the cheek. "Why don't we make up a to-do list?" One thing I'd learned when our mother died and I'd taken over running the household: attending to practical matters kept the mind from dwelling on things we couldn't change.
"Good idea." Delilah slowly picked up her fork again and bit into her pancake. "We can plan our schedule while we eat." She let out another sigh and then sniffed back her tears. "These pancakes are incredible, Iris. What did you use in them? They taste different this morning."
Iris had taken over most of the cooking since she moved in. She was far better than either one of us, and she enjoyed it more. "Oh, a splash of vanilla and some grated cinnamon. Camille, will you be needing me at the store today?"
I nodded. "Looks that way. We've got a wayward pixie to find, the third spirit seal to locate, and a Raksasa to track down." I couldn't just close up shop anymore when I felt like it—not now that we were relying on our incomes to pay our way. The OIA had given us a tidy salary, but that was in the past now. Our cover jobs had become a very real necessity, so Iris was pulling a lot of hours as my assistant there.
She grimaced. "I was hoping to get to the spring cleaning today. What do you think about hiring someone to work part time at the shop? I think Henry might accept minimum wage if you supplement his pay with free books. He usually goes for the used books, anyway."
"Henry Jeffries, you mean?" I hadn't even considered hiring someone from the outside, but it made sense. "I thought you were still avoiding him." Henry suffered a serious case of unrequited love.
"Ever since Bruce and I started dating, Henry's backed off. He's too much of a gentleman to interfere." Her eyes twinkled, a brilliant blue against her peaches-and-cream skin and golden hair. Iris was far older than me or my sisters, but she still looked in her mid-twenties, and she beguiled men in that girl-next-door way. They never seemed to care that she was barely four feet tall. A couple of months ago, she'd met Bruce O'Shea, a leprechaun with his roots in Ireland and a voice that could make any woman melt. Every time Iris invited him over, we begged him to sing to us, and he always gave in with goodwill.
"Is that fair to Henry, though?" Delilah asked. "It seems kind of mean to put him through being near you so much. I mean, he's got a crush on you, and you're dating somebody else."
"Pish. Henry fancies me, yes, but he'll survive. He loves his space stories more than anything, and I think he'd rather be at the shop any day, rather than spend time at home with that shrew of a mother he's got."
At our startled looks. Iris shrugged. "What? Just because I don't want to date him doesn't mean I don't enjoy a good conversation with him. He lives with his mother, yes. She's in her mid-eighties, and she's a mean-tempered bitch."
Delilah gasped, clapping her hand to her mouth. "Iris, that's not nice—she's old—"
"And I'm short. So what? Just because the woman's old doesn't give her the right to treat her son like a slave. He does everything for her, and she never thanks him for it. Henry told me that he can't put her in a nursing home because he doesn't have enough money to keep her there, and she refuses to sell her house. She reminds me of Grandma Buski."
Delilah and I exchanged glances. We'd heard a lot of Iris's stories about her life in Finland, but this was a new name.
"Who?" I asked.
"Grandma Buski. When I was a child and lived in the Northlands, long before I moved back to Finland and was bound to the Kuusis, my best friend took me to meet her grandmother. The Buski sprites weren't Talon-haltija like I am. They were part brownie, part something else—probably kobold or urcadines. I don't remember what, right now, but they were a handsome family. Anyway, Greta took me to see her Grandma Buski, who was a sprite of rare beauty, even in her old age."
Iris paused to take a sip of juice, then continued. "I remember she wore a brilliant crimson and cobalt dirndl dress that showed off every curve. But Grandma Buski was also a spiteful old woman. She was all brownie and had married into the Buskis. Now, you think brownie and you think helpful, cheerful, sometimes annoying but never downright vicious, right?"
Speechless, Delilah and I nodded. Iris was on a roll, and whenever she talked about the "old days," we listened. She was a natural-born storyteller.
"Well, imagine my shock then, when Greta introduced me, and that bitter old hag reached out and pinched my cheeks so hard I burst into tears. She leaned down and, with breath that smelled like tallow and suet, called me a dirt-eater—that was a terrible insult back in those days among the sprites of the Northlands. And then the old hag had the nerve to cast aspersions on my mother's fidelity."
"What did you do?" Delilah asked, her eyes wide. I repressed a smile. Having Iris around was a lot like having our mother alive again.
"Well, I hauled off and slapped her a good one. And I cursed her and told her I hoped a wolf would devour her, but that he'd probably throw her back because she was so old and tough and stringy." Iris giggled, then rolled her eyes.
Delilah giggled. "I'll bet you got in trouble for that."
Iris nodded. "You know it. By the time I got home, word had traveled ahead to my mother and father. My father put me to work in the stables for three weeks after that. And my mother made me fetch my favorite hen over to Grandma Buski as a token of apology. I never told anybody, but on the way over there, I turned Kirka free in the forest and stole a hen from a nearby farm to take in her place. I couldn't bear the thought of giving my sweet hen to such a mean old biddy."
As she finished, Iris held out her teacup. I poured us all refills out of the bone china pot. The fragrant steam from the peppermint rose to soothe my mind.
"'Henry's mother is a carbon copy of Grandma Buski," Iris finished. "Only she looks a lot like Whistler's Mother and sounds like Oscar the Grouch. Which is why the poor man never married. He told me that he was engaged once, but Mrs. Jeffries ran his fiancee off. And she's healthy as a horse—doctors expect her to live till she's in her nineties."
"No wonder Henry spends so much time at the store," I said. His life had suddenly come into much sharper focus.
"And there's another reason I won't date him. Not only does he have a mother from hell, he's far too old. I want a family, and he's around sixty-four which is younger than me in actual years, but he's a whole lot farther down the track when you talk about how long he has left. I would never allow my children to be sired by a human, let alone someone as old as he is. They'd never have a chance to get to really know him before he died."
Delilah let out a little burp and pressed her fingers to her lips. She shivered, and I knew she was thinking that she might be facing the same dilemma someday if she stayed with Chase. The same one our father had faced by marrying our mother. I decided to avoid the pitfalls of navigating that land mine of a discussion and turned back to Iris.
"You really don't think Henry would mind working at the Indigo Crescent?"
Iris nodded. "I think he'd be glad to feel useful. He's a brilliant man, if a little geeky, and retirement hasn't agreed with him much."
