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I called for Delilah and she came dashing down the stairs, carrying a sheaf of papers. “We’ve got to go. I shouldn’t be here right now.”
She gave me a quizzical look, then shrugged. “I’ll meet you at the car. I want to grab a couple cookies from the coffee shop.”
Smiling—Death Maiden or not, Delilah would forever be my younger sister—I nodded. “Just don’t take too long.”
I gathered up the books—it was time to go through them before sending them to the accountant—and then headed out the door, after thanking Giselle for keeping such a good watch on the shop. I climbed in the car and waited, watching the snow lazily fall on the ground. Too much, I whispered to myself. Too much worry, too much to face, too much to lose.
And then Delilah jumped in, warm cookies in her hands, and we took off for home, bathed in the wash of the fresh-fallen snow.
“Who do you think it was?” she asked on the way, handing me a cookie.
I waved away the sweet. For once, I didn’t have much of an appetite. “I think . . . I think it was someone connected with Hyto. Remember, Trytian said he was traveling with a snow monkey.”
“Fuck.” Delilah leaned back in her seat, nibbling on the chocolate chip cookie. “They know where the shop is, then.”
“Can you imagine what a dragon could do to my shop? To the restaurant? To all the people there?” Visions of screaming customers, caught afire from dragon’s breath, raced through my head. Hyto wasn’t just Smoky’s father. He was a terrifying dragon—easily capable of destroying everything I’d worked to build up, along with any number of innocents. And he wouldn’t care—FBHs were dust specks to him. And I was the thorn in his side.
“What are you going to do?” Delilah’s voice dropped, and I realized she’d suddenly grasped the severity of what could happen.
“I don’t know. Should I close the shop for now? Stacia killed Henry because of me. And she was leading a targeted campaign. What a crazed dragon might do . . . I can’t even think about it.”
I carefully navigated around a car stuck on the road. The streets were beginning to ice over with a thick layer of compacted snow beneath the glaze that was forming now that the temperature was dropping again. Though the traffic had melted off a layer of the snow during the day, now that it was afternoon the runoff would begin to freeze into black ice. Seattle drivers had no clue how to drive in the winter—and I was right there along with them. Except my reflexes were better than the average FBH’s.
By the time we neared the house, we were reduced to twenty miles per hour to avoid sliding into a ditch. I finally turned into our drive with a sigh of relief. Home glistened like a welcome scene out of a Thomas Kinkade painting.
As we scurried toward the house, slogging through the snow to the porch—which someone had shoveled clean, though it was starting to pile up again—the chill of the air caught me. The temperature was dropping fast and would likely hit the low twenties tonight. That would make for a lovely commute tomorrow.
“If it’s this cold now, I dread to see what it’s going to be like tonight.”
Delilah nodded. “I wish Menolly would skip driving her Jag and just go for a nice long walk to the Wayfarer—the cold wouldn’t bother her.”
“That might be a good idea. She wouldn’t really hurt herself much in a crash—at least not most crashes—but she could hurt someone else without meaning to.” As I opened the door, the bustle of the day hit us full force.
Trillian was setting the table for a late lunch. Iris and Rozurial were cooking up a huge pot of spaghetti and meatballs. Smoky was stomping in from the back porch, and I caught sight of the snow shovel as he hung it back up on its nail.
Shade was in the living room, coaxing a fire in the new woodstove we’d bought to help keep heating costs down. He blew lightly on the crumpled newspaper beneath the tinder, and it caught from the sparks that flew off his breath.
“Shamas at work?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, he has the day shift this week, though he may sleep there if the roads are too bad.” As he stood, Delilah moved to him and he enfolded her in his arms, kissing her deeply, rubbing his hand up and down her back. They belonged together, as if they’d known each other all their lives. Even from the outside, I could feel the bond that had woven between the two.
The doorbell rang and I went to answer. It was Bruce, Iris’s boyfriend. He motioned for me to come out on the porch. Shivering, I followed him.
“What’s up? Why don’t you come in?”
He smiled, then pulled out something from his pocket. He looked like a young man barely in his thirties—right around Iris’s relative age. I wasn’t sure how the aging process worked among sprites and leprechauns, but I knew both were far, far older than me in chronological years—hundreds of years older. His tousled brunette hair was curly, reaching his shoulders, and his eyes sparkled with the purest blue—matching Iris’s own. He actually looked a lot like Roz, only without the dangerous edge. Bruce and Iris made a striking couple.
“I wanted to ask your opinion about something,” he said, holding out a box. “Do you think she’ll like this?”
I flipped it open. There, against the velvet cushion, rested a platinum band with a sparkling mixed-cut blue sapphire that had to be at least a full carat. On either side nestled half-carat diamond baguettes.
Gasping, I shook my head. “Oh, Bruce. She’ll love this. This is . . . this is beautiful.” I glanced at him. “So are you going to officially ask her today?”
He blushed. “Aye, my sweet. It’s time I did it proper. And she is free now, to accept. She called me last night and we talked long and deep. She told me what happened. I know her dark secrets. She told me if I wanted to walk, she wouldna blame me. She did kill her fiancé, after all. But the gods work as they will, and I would expect my lass to follow the will of her Lady and rid the world of evil. She did the right thing.”
I bit my lip. “Iris will want to stay here. Are you willing to move onto our land? We can help you build a home all your own—we have plenty of room here. Seven acres’ worth.”
“I would move to the moon, should that be where my Iris wanted to live.” And when he smiled at me, I felt like the sun had come out. No wonder Iris was taken with him. Bruce O’Shea was like a welcome ray of sunshine and I could practically feel him tugging a rainbow along with him.
